Anant Prasad

Ct 2017 Final Indvspak

2017-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

So yesterday we witnessed the most unexpected outcome of the Champions Trophy 2017 held in England. It’s Pakistan who have thumped India in the finals and have emerged out as the champion of champions. Pakistan have had a splendid turnaround in their campaign after being thrashed by India in their opening game. When Pakistan entered the tournament as the 8th ranked team(last ranked among the teams in this CT as it had only 8 teams participating) no one in their wildest of dreams gave them a chance of even making it to the knockouts. They were trolled for their batting, laughed at their fielding, had reached a CT final for the first time but most importantly they delivered when it mattered the most. After being asked to bat first by India on a fresh flat wicket they came out all guns blazing. It was Fakhar Zaman’s day with the bat. He got an early escape in the 3rd over of the innings when Bumrah got him caught behind the wicket but on a no ball. This incident was quite unsettling for Bumrah which was quite evident from his bowling thereafter. Fakhar Zaman stroked a belligerent hundred which gave his team the momentum they needed. All the other batters contributed really well in the innings with Hafeez getting a quick fifty and Imad Wasim stroking some hefty blows to take Pakistan to the score of 338 in their allotted 50 overs. They would have well scored over 350 had it not been for Bhuvneshvar Kumar’s outstanding spell of fast bowling on this flat deck. Pandya too bowled really well with both giving 44 and 53 runs respectively in their quota of 10 overs. So now India had a daunting task ahead of them with 338 to chase in this nerve wrecking, high voltage grand finale.

The kind of bowling attack Pakistan had it was never going to be easy. Mohammad Amir came out with the ball and he was breathing fire. In the very first over he sent back Rohit Sharma with a brilliant delivery that came back late after pitching and he had no idea. Soon after he dismissed Kohli which was a big setback for India. India had just started to recover from those earlier setbacks and once again Amir proved to be too good for Indian batsmen. Shikhar Dhawan also nicked one to the keeper and the score was reduced to 33/3. Yuvraj and Dhoni did try to build a partnership to get India back into the game but they failed too. Kedar Jadhav played some good shots after that before falling prey to the wrist spinner at 9. On the other hand, Pandya looked good and played some extravagant shots with good outcomes. Of all the Indian batsmen he was the only one to show some resilience against the Pakistani bowling. He attacked all the bowlers making a quick fire 76 off just 43 bows before getting out. He was runout via a terrible misunderstanding with Jadeja and it was curtains for India. With him gone the slim hope had vanished too. With other remaining wickets falling cheaply India could manage only 158 runs on the board thus coming second by 180 runs. Along with Amir, Hasan Ali also took 3 wickets in his splendid spell of bowling. He only took the last wicket of India getting out Bhuvneshvar Kumar sending the entire team and the rest of Pakistan in the cries of victory.

Ct 2017 Semifinal Indvsban

2017-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

So here I am with my second post. Being a cricket fanatic in a country where cricket is not a game but a religion is quite obvious. Had wanting to write about cricket for some time now, just couldn’t get it done till now. So yeah I’ll be discussing the 2nd semifinal of the Champions Trophy 2017 which saw the head to head contest between two Asian nations India and Bangladesh. Having earned their way into the semis both the teams looked to keep their winning momentum alive to earn a spot in the finals against Pakistan on Sunday. Talking about the conditions, it was a bit overcast with some chances of rain. Owing to the overcast conditions the toss was quite crucial, which was later won by India and they decided to bowl first probably due to the overcast conditions and the chasing trend that had been going on in this tournament. India had a really good start with the ball as they picked up two quick wickets reducing Bangladesh to 30 odd for 2 in 7 odd overs. Bangladesh looked to build their innings slowly and also thanks to some undisciplined bowling from India the Tigers built a good partnership with Tamim Iqbal and Mushfiqur Rahim at the crease. This partnership looked to take the game away from India as Bangladesh were cruising at 151/2 in 27 overs. The run rate was pretty good and the projected score seemed a bit of concern for Kohli and company. The partnership was finally broken by the part-timer Jadhav who cleaned up Tamim with a short flighted delivery. The next batsmen in Shakib could manage to score only 15 runs before falling to Jadeja by a brilliant catch from MS Dhoni behind the stumps. Just after Shakib’s departure Mushfiqur Rahim also got out after scoring a well played 61 and the score was now reduced to 179/5. This was the chance for India to pull things back and they quite grabbed it with both hands reducing Bangladesh to 229/7 at the end of 45 overs. Bangladesh didn’t lose another wicket after that and went on to score 264 in their allotted 50 overs. The target wasn’t a terrifying one but at least the opposition had something to bowl at and who knew might have proven to be a big total in a crunch, high-pressure game like this semifinal. India got off to a flier where Dhawan and Rohit both looked in solid touch. They added 87 in just 14.4 overs before Dhawan falling to opposition captain Mortaza at a well made 46. Next came in Kohli who looked to be in sweet touch right from ball one. By this time bright sunshine had covered the ground and the pitch behaved like a flat deck with absolutely nothing for the bowlers. The Bangladeshi bowlers struggled due to their lack of discipline and the flat nature of this pitch. Runs came thick and fast as both the batsmen dominated the bowlers adding a matchwinning unbeaten partnership of 178 runs which took India across the finish line with 9 wickets intact. This game proved out to be a yet another single sided contest. Great character shown by the men in blue to book their place in the final against Pakistan. So India will be taking on the arch-rivals Pakistan in the final of 2017 Champions Trophy.

Draw An Inspiration

2017-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

So here I am with my first blog post officially(have quite a few incomplete ones in the drafts though😂). So yeah achieving something, especially achieving something which you dreamt of, achieving something which has been your goal from the beginning, in other words being successful and satisfied in life takes a lot of hard work, effort, sacrifice, and courage. Not many people have it in them what it takes, but those do they are the one’s worth appraisal and ones looked forward to for inspiration. Everybody has some dreams in life which they aim to achieve whatever it takes, but not everybody has that “whatever it takes” and many people give up in the midway. Let me tell you each and every one of us has the power to dream big and have the courage, determination, the hunger to achieve those dreams, all one need is to never give up. Draw an inspiration, if not from others draw it from yourself and think of the times when the conditions were not favourable for you, where you yourself had almost given up but something in you still wanted to go on, somewhere in a little corner deep inside your heart you had the courage to achieve, you had the “thing” to go on. Life is full of hardships, there will be times when life throws you down when you least expect it but don’t give up take it as an opportunity to emerge out more stronger than you used to be. Don’t let the failures define you, wear your failures as a badge of honor and continue on the same path with utmost determination and the anger to have it done. You might deviate from the path sometimes, but don’t let those deviations be permanent, and yes don’t be stuck in your past failures, get over them continue to work hard, just put the effort even if you don’t feel like doing it anymore, just hang on there and eventually you’ll make way for yourself.

So, dream big in life and proceed towards it just keep pushing and pushing don’t hang up your boots without walking down the path because someday in the distant future when you’ll be what you’ll be, you’ll think about the road not taken when you had the chance to walk down that road, had you put some more effort that could have made all the difference. That one small effort could have defined your entire life, could have made you the one you wanted to see yourself as, could have proved to be the most game-changing decision you ever took. So, don’t give up easily without fighting for it, when the times are harder because anybody can achieve anything in life provided one has the courage to follow and continue on the path whatever obstacles may come in and do remember you have whatever it takes, you have the courage, you are the one and believe in yourself.

Now a story about two mice worth sharing(you might have heard it already but still). One day both the mice fell into a bucket of cream. The first one quickly gave up and drowned but the second one kept trying to get out of the bucket and wouldn’t quit. It struggled so harder that eventually it churned the cream into butter and crawled its way through it. So now you decide to yourself which one of these mice you want to be?

So see you guys till the next one. Will be back with the second blog post soon.

Loaders In Android Post

2017-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Networking is a really important part of building dynamic applications. When it ccomes to loading data from the internet and displaying in the app, we can do it with three most probable methods. One can be loading data directly on the UI thread(this is a quite bad practice to load data on the app and I guess we have all moved beyond loading data on the UI thread), one can be using Async Loader class which does the networking part on a different background thread. So this method of using the Async Task class comes in quite handy for our cause since it performs the action of loading data from the internet by creating a new background thread and doesn’t quite alter the working of the main UI thread, but this method also has some drawbacks which might alter the working of the application and causing it to crash. By default the device configuration changes such as rotating your whole activity(one of the main reasons it is quite critical not to keep a reference to your activity or any views). So here the Loaders comes to the rescue. The best part about Loaders is that it survives configuration changes i.e. the similar data is not loaded again and again on the change of configuration. The once loaded data is still there when the activity comes back up. Data is queued up for deliivery so you aren’t going to lose data during device configurtion changes. One more advantage of using a Loader is that it does not stays around forever. It gets automatically cleaned up when the requesting activity or the fragment is permanently destroyed. That means no lingering, unneccessary loads which is not the case of using AsynTask class.