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Sunny praise for Dwayne Smith

Immediately after the IPL ends the CEAT International Cricket Awards to honour performances throughout the year will be held in Mumbai and will bring the curtains down on what has been a riveting cricketing year. These awards are given to overseas players as well as India players.

Some overseas players have moved franchises so many times in the last several seasons that its tough to know where their loyalties lie. However being professional cricketers they go out and do the best they can.

Dwayne Smith is an example of a player who has played in different colours over the years and has invariably won them games with either bat or ball. Smith is the kind of low profile player who is happy to stay under the radar but when needed come out with a stunning performance that will make those who let him go wonder why they did that.

Most times of course it is because franchises can play only 4 players in the eleven and can have no more than 10 players in their squad.

He used the little grass and dew on the Green Park pitch in Kanpur to good effect to rattle the Kolkata team and then played a terrific innings down the order against the Bangalore team that gave their score some substance.

On the Bangalore pitch his military medium didn’t work as AB de Villers realised that his bowling was the freedom sign that he was waiting for. The Gujarat team was unable to recover after that over and AB de Villers along with Iqbal Abdullah took the team to what at one stage looked like an impossible win.

What more can one write about AB de Villers that has not been written before. He and Virat Kohli have taken batting to another stratospheric level which is unreachable for other batsmen.

When a batsman can hit the same delivery in front of the wicket and then behind the wicket, the skippers and coaches can do very little. That is what AB does and he seems to revel in making captains look stupid.

While Dhoni plays the helicopter shot to yorkers, de Villers' bat makes the same whirling movement in the follow through. He has seldom been caught off balance and is able to react even if the ball is not where he anticipated it.

Manish Pandey is a fine young prospect. KKR made the mistake of dropping him down the order in their game against the Hyderabad team and promoting a left-hander Colin Munro when there was another left hander skipper Gambhir at the crease.

Pandey has been in red hot form and when coaches ignore that and go with unproven potential then that is a recipe for disaster zone which is exactly where KKR found themselves.

Dwayne Smith for his outstanding all round deeds in the week is the CEAT International Cricketer of the Week.

Source: PMG



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