Sports

New Delhi, March 25: Kolkata Knight Riders coach John Buchanan has dropped Sourav Ganguly as captain of the IPL team for the Twenty20 tournament to be held in South Africa from April 18 next month.

The team will have four captains, team coach John Buchanan announced on Wednesday in Kolkata.

Times Now had reported on Tuesday of a rift between the coach and the captain and that Buchanan wanted Dada to be axed as captain.

Buchanan had expressed favour of a rotating captaincy in a match.

Johannesburg, March 25: Weather and proximity to India were the decisive factors in South Africa edging past England as hosts of the Indian Premier League (IPL), which has now been shortened to five weeks starting April 18. IPL commissioner Lalit Modi and Cricket South Africa (CSA) chief Gerald Majola in a joint press conference confirmed that the second edition of the Twenty20 league, which was moved out of India because of security reasons, will be held in six venues in South Africa.

The venues include Durban, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Pretoria, Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth.

Johanesburg, March 25: The decision to move the India Premier League 2009 to South Africa was “one of the hardest decisions that the BCCI ( Board of Control for Cricket in India) has ever had to take”, Lalit Modi, chairman and commissioner of the IPL, told a press conference in Johannesburg as he jointly announced the decision with Cricket South Africa chief executive Gerald Majola.

“But I am equally confident that staging it here will be a massive success for us,” Modi said on Tuesday evening.

New South Wales, February 28: South African cricketer Jacques Kallis has become the eighth player to join Test cricket’ 10,000-run club in the first Test against Australia at Wanderers.
‘It’s really important I think,’ Kallis said after Australia made 466 and South Africa went to stumps at 3-85 in reply, including 27 from Kallis.

‘Looking back at the career when I started if someone had said that I would have got 10,000 Test runs, I would have taken that with both hands and I probably wouldn’t have believed them.

New Delhi, February 24: Sania Mirza leafrogged 12 places to be at 75th position in Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) charts while Somdev Devvarman climbed four rungs to be at 150th in the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) rankings on Monday.

Sania has made a stupendous comeback after being sidelined by a wrist injury much of last year, first winning the Australian Open mixed doubles title with compatriot Mahesh Bhupathi and then reaching the Pattaya Open final.

Christchurch, February 25: “The Rockstars of Cricket are coming,” read the banner at the AMI Stadium — three shadowy figures, set against a backdrop of orange, purple, and blue, strumming bat-shaped guitars.

New Zealand Cricket, which will earn $25 million in television rights from India’s tour, certainly didn’t hold back in selling its affluent and popular visitors.

Barbados, February 24: Andrew Flintoff has said he has no plans to pull out of the Indian Premier League in April, despite England’s concerns over the hip injury that has already forced him to miss Thursday’s fourth Test against West Indies in Barbados.

New Delhi, January 17: Greatness in any sport is not something that can be measured by numbers alone – thankfully so. But that’s not to say all statistical Greats Sachin Tendulkar & Rahul Dravid. methods of arriving at a list of all-time greats are completely valid or invalid. Rubbishing the methods used by the official ICC rankings is all very well, but could there have been a better list?