Die Macht » have cared. No desi fan has ever mistake

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- Odell Beckham Jr. reined in some of the emotions, the exaggerated behavior, the penalties and on-field feuds. Then he did what he does best -- make big plays.A banged-up Beckham turned a short fourth-and-1 pass into a winning 66-yard catch and run with 1:24 to play Sunday as the New York Giants snapped a three-game losing streak with a stunning 27-23 victory over the hurting Baltimore Ravens (3-3).Beckham caught eight passes for a career-best 222 yards and two touchdowns despite having to leave the field in the first half with a hip pointer in carrying the Giants (3-3) to their 700th win in franchise history.I am going to go out there and play the same way every time, Beckham said of his many problems on the field this season. I dont think I played any different besides me being injured. It was the same passing. I think because I was hurt I couldnt express it as much as I wanted to.Thats debatable. After catching a 75-yard scoring pass in the third quarter, Beckham imitated a triple jumper -- playing off a line in a commercial in which he appears. He then went to the Giants sideline and smashed the kicking net with his helmet. When it flopped to the ground, he laid under it.After his winning catch, he took off his helmet and drew a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.The Ravens (3-3) got to the Giants 24 in the waning seconds, thanks to a questionable roughing-the-quarterback penalty on Joe Flacco, but the Giants broke up a pass in the end zone.The Giants were on the verge of a fourth straight loss after Terrance West scored on a 2-yard run with 2:04 to play, giving the Ravens a short-lived 23-20 lead.Wests second short touchdown run came three plays after Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie was flagged for a questionable pass interference at the New York 8.But Beckham came through on a call Eli Manning changed at the line of scrimmage. Cornerback Tavon Young either slipped or was hurt covering him.Ravens safety Eric Weddle said Beckham should not have gotten inside on the quick cross from right to left.Hey, Odell made some amazing plays, you got to credit him, Weddle said. We held him down in the first half. We had some guys go down. The guys behind them have to step up. Thats why were here. We play an aggressive style defense. We man guys up. We just didnt get it done.Beckham did.He is a playmaker, he is a game changer and he did exactly that today, said linebacker Jonathan Casillas, who stopped West on fourth-and-goal from the 1 earlier in the quarter.Flacco (26 of 48 for 307 yards) drove the Ravens to the Giants 24 in the waning seconds. But his final pass was knocked down in the end zone.Manning (32 of 46 for 403 yards) also a threw 24-yard touchdown pass to Roger Lewis Jr . Josh Brown had field goals of 21 and 31 yards, the latter set up by a 43-yard catch by Beckham.Justin Tucker kicked field goals of 23, 39 and 35 yards in Marty Mornhinwegs first game as Baltimore offensive coordinator.BYRD HONOREDBefore the game, the Giants held a moment of silence for former Jets defensive end Dennis Byrd. The 50-year-old Byrd, who walked again after being paralyzed in a game, was killed in an automobile accident Saturday. The Giants and Jets have played in the same facility for more than three decades.INJURIESThe Ravens came into the game without five starters: WR Steve Smith Sr., T Ronnie Stanley, G Marshal Yanda, Returner Devin Hester Sr. and LB C.J. Mosley. CB Jimmy Smith did not play in the second half because of a concussion.DELAYSFans were delayed getting into MetLife Stadium because of an investigation into a fatal accident that happened around 3:30 a.m. on the major road next to the facility. It was not cleared until roughly two hours before game time.NUMBERSMannings TD pass to Lewis was the 300th of his career. The win was his 100th. His 32 completions tied for the fifth-highest total of his career. He now has completed 3,846 passes, moving him past Drew Bledsoe (3,839) and into eighth place on the NFLs all-time list. Beckhams 222 yards receiving were the second most in Giants history: Del Shofner had 269 yards vs. Washington on Oct. 28, 1962.NEXT UPIn a scheduling oddity, the Ravens are back at MetLife Stadium to play the Jets next Sunday.The Giants head to London, where they will be the visitors against the Rams in an early game on Sunday, with a 9:30 a.m. EDT kickoff.---AP NFL website: www.pro32.ap.org and www.twitter.com/AP-NFL Vapormax Plus Clearance . -- Eastern Kentucky thrives off creating havoc for others. Vapormax Plus Womens Cheap . -- In a span of seven Washington Redskins offensive plays, Justin Tuck sacked Robert Griffin III four times. http://www.airmaxplusstoresale.com/air-vapormax-plus-cheap/black-discount.html . World champions Tatiana Volosozhar and Maxim Trankov of Russia won the gold medal with 237.71 points, Moore-Towers and Moscovitch followed at 208.45 and Ksenia Stolbova and Fedor Klimov of Russia were third at 187. Air Max Plus Sale . -- Ken Appleby made 32 saves for his first shutout of the season to lead the Oshawa Generals to a 2-0 win over the Belleville Bulls on Wednesday in Ontario Hockey League action. Air Max Plus 97 Cheap . Its 1987 and a Brazilian playmaker, known as Mirandinha, is being paraded around St James Park to the passionate Newcastle fans. With hindsight it isnt hard to show that the 25th of June 1983 was Day One of a new era in Indian sport. Cricket writers like channelling their inner CLR James, so that shock World Cup win was thoroughly mined for its implications. These ranged from changes within cricket ?- the rise of the limited-overs game and the decline of Test match spectatorship - to meta-cricketing consequences, such as the new political economy of cricket, dominated by the BCCI. This piece doesnt go there. It doesnt try to understand what that win means now; its a bid to reimagine what it meant then.It has been more than 30 years since Kapil Dev took the trophy from some English toff on that pavilion balcony at Lords, so its hard to just shut your eyes and taste the fizzing shock of it. Things read, things written, television reruns, YouTube videos, that endless loop of Kapil loping one way, looking another before casually catching Viv Richards skied pull, get in the way. That its a television memory to start with doesnt help; theres nothing to smell, no weather, just a bunch of us sweating in a room in Delhi, staring at a chunky TV that looks like furniture.I could have been there. I remember thinking that when Kapil grinned goofily, announced that drinks were on the house and invited everyone to join the team in its celebrations. I had been a student in England till less than a year before the final, and if I hadnt been hopeless at archival research my grant might have been extended for a third year, which would have seen me through to that World Cup summer. An Indian friend, a parasitologist on first-name terms with Trypanosoma brucei but who couldnt tell Kirti Azad from Maulana Azad, went instead. Gaiti Hasans first cricket match was a World Cup victory at Lords.She didnt even want to go. A fellow doctoral student, who bred rats and puréed their innards for usable tissue, had two tickets for the 25th. He being English and this being 1983, he was certain England would win their semi-final against India. Low delight in the disappointment of ambushed angrezes was one of the chief pleasures of 83. When Bobs heartbroken friend dropped out he needed company, so he asked Gaiti. She couldnt see the harm in it, so she went.She was the only friend of mine who was actually there at Lords, so ignorant or not, she was my representative. They took the train to London carrying sandwiches they had frugally made themselves for lunch. They didnt have seats directly behind the batsman. They sat at an angle to the action, sort of mid-off or long leg. She didnt know the names of the fielding positions. About 20 degrees to the pitch is what she said. Between innings, as they ate their sandwiches, Bob and everyone else around them thought India would lose. She registered the excitement when Kapil caught Richards out, and she thinks she saw champagne being sprayed around in the pavilion after the match. She doesnt remember much else.Nobody felt the earth move or the balance of power shift. This was the third World Cup in England and the third final to be played at Lords. It was played in whites, with a shiny red ball, through Englands long, long summer days that fit two 60-overs innings in with daylight to spare. It seemed unthinkable then that the Cups tableaus wouldnt be staged in England forever. Kapil Dev took the English ownership of the tournament so much for granted that he declared he wanted to come back with the boys and win it all over again. Continuity was everywhere; the great Sunil Gavaskar took guard against Andy Roberts, Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding and Joel Garner bareheaded. Later, when he caught Larry Gomes off Madan Lal during the chase and reduced West Indies to 66 for 5, the teams, with the match in the balance, went in for tea. Tea! The old ways lived.But they lived on as eccentric leftovers from another time. And not just in distant retrospect: later that morning Gavaskars quixotic refusal of protection seemed more daft than heroic when Marshalls wickedly fast bouncer hit Balwinder Singh Sandhu on the head. A brave No. 11, Sandhu drove the next ball off the front foot, but if it hadnt been for the helmet perched on his patka, the scorecard might have read BS Sandhu, retired dead.I had forgotten about Sandhu being hit as I had forgotten so much else about this match. The 83 final is an object lesson in how the past recedes. We keep the bits that fit the story, and the story of a cricket match is written by its end. Every desi who watched that final remembers Sandhu for that artful inswinger that bowled Greenidge even as he shouldered arms.dddddddddddd Almost no one recalls that near-death moment. I caught it in a fuzzy highlights package online. There was an English commentator, I cant tell who, tut-tutting gently about the wrongness of bouncing a tailender. It was a good bouncer, he said, but...That but has never gone away, not even now after helmets have become the norm. Theres a lethalness to cricket that gives people pause. It certainly did that June afternoon. Play stopped; Jeff Dujon walked up to Sandhu to see how he was. Sandhu leaned on his bat and affected indifference. Marshall took a moment; he stopped in his follow-through, bent over and tied his laces for a long time. Playing cricket is a mortally serious business; no one dies playing tennis.The difference between cricketing memories before television and after is that before, there wasnt a video archive to keep people honest. In the mid-60s, my father told me about the Tests he watched in England as a young man. So Duleepsinhji, slight in his billowing silk shirt, walked out to bat and Frank Woolley drove through cover and Percy Chapman fielding at slip took every catch that came his way with his bucket-like hands. He had followed the Australians around England one long-ago summer and he was full of tales. I dont know how many of them came from matches he had watched and how many from second-hand lore; I dont think he did either. When he told me those stories, they were more than 30 years old, which is roughly the distance in time between Lords 1983 and now. Except, now we have YouTube to refresh (or reconstitute) our memories.In 1983 it would have been hard to argue on the evidence of the cricket played that the tournament was a hinge moment in the history of cricket. From an Indian point of view the win wasnt a revolution, it was a heist pulled off against the odds by a mix of old lags and new bucks, more Oceans Eleven than Battleship Potemkin. If Indias great tradition was spin, the tournament marked the triumph of its little tradition, military-medium seam bowling. If we discount Kapil for a moment, Mohinder Amarnath, Sandhu, Madan Lal and Roger Binny were Indias answer to Roberts, Holding, Marshall and Garner. The only non-violent seam attack in the history of the game went up against the scariest quartet of fast bowlers assembled in one team... and won. Madan Lal took three top-order wickets in the final; Amarnath bagged two as well as the Man-of-the-Match award. In some ways the 83 win was less a harbinger of a powerful future than the fugitive triumph of a hardscrabble past.The things that foretold the future happened off camera. Like Kapils match-saving, tournament-winning hundred against Duncan Fletchers Zimbabwe: 175 runs in just 138 balls, it was clearly one of the first if not the first great limited-overs innings. There were no cameras at Tunbridge Wells because of industrial action at the BBC. There is no footage to rework or ratify lore, so we are free to imagine those six sixes and those 16 fours, that 72-ball century.The other game-changing thing that the cameras didnt catch was the Indian cricket board presidents pique at being denied two 11th-hour passes to the final for his VIP friends. Gossip had it that the MCCs arrogance so infuriated the Indian apparatchik that he moved heaven, earth and Dhirubhai Ambani to wrest the World Cup from England and bring it to India in a new avatar, the Reliance Cup. But I didnt know that then, and even if I had, I wouldnt have cared. No desi fan has ever mistaken the grievances of these thin-skinned operators with the cause of Indian cricket.When the last wicket fell - MA Holding lbw b Amarnath 6 - the thing that mattered was the look on Mohinders face as the umpires finger went up. He grinned and kept running, swerved to grab a bail and raced for the pavilion as the desi hordes invaded the ground. The camera closed in on him in mid-shot; he was smiling his Errol Flynn smile (he had a little moustache) and it was a look of serious delight. Perhaps he was thinking of his father, the great Lala, who had scored a Test fifty in that same ground in 1946; knowing père Amarnath, this would have been a tale told often to his hectored sons. Or perhaps this battling veteran saw clearly in that moment that he had transcended a chequered career and found, along with his team mates, a kind of immortality.Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in New Delhi ' ' '