Sports highlights: Cricket World Twenty20 final, Paris-Roubaix, Darlington

It has been another week full of great matches and races. It was disappointing that the Wisconsin Badgers was so close to the NCAA men's basketball championship game but couldn't make it. Instead of watching the championship game, I'd rather watch the replay of the Cricket World Twenty20 final between India and West Indies. What an exciting match (maybe the NCAA game was better but I wouldn't have known)! India batted first and the West Indies bowled so well that India couldn't put up big numbers during the last few overs. However, India bowled almost as good during the bottom of the inning and shutdown West Indies' offense for the most part. West Indies was lagging for such a long period that I thought they might not be able to catch up but they eventually got the bat going and hit quite a few big ones out to win the championship.

The 2 NASCAR races at Darlington also had exciting finishes. The young Chase Elliot winning the Nationwide races two weeks in a row was kinda surprising. He restarted well and seized the opportunity to move up. On the Sprint Cup side, Kevin Harvick was simply strong from the pole but had to fight hard at the late restarts to beat Dale Jr for the Green-White-Checker finish.

Another great race of the week was the Paris-Roubaix bike race. My cycling enthusiast friend was actually right there in Paris and watched it with the local folks! Good for him! Niki Terpstra made a bold move to break away while he was still a good distance from the finish and succeeded. That was one sweet victory.
 




 

Sports highlights: F1, MotoGP, NASCAR, T20 World Cup

Many sports competitions have started their 2014 seasons finally. Formula 1 started two weekends ago in Australia, which translates to a 3:30 am start time. I was not sure if I was gonna watch but I woke up without an alarm so I guess I wanted subconsciously. And it was not a bad race. To me, the major reason NOT to watch was that the 4-time defending champ Sebastian Vettel seemed to win every race. Not this one though 'coz something was wrong with his car early on. So did Lewis Hamilton's car. That left only 3 former champs competing with the rest of the field. Still, not too much competition up front: Nico Rosberg won for Mercedes easily. The local guy Daniel Ricciardo finished behind Rosberg and got the crowd really excited (However, he was disqualified because the fuel flow exceeded the rate allowed by the rule and his team refused to change after receiving warning from the officials. The owner of his team seemed really upset when things don't go in his favor. Oh yeah, his other driver is Vettel. To be honest, it's not fair when the governing body came up with rules against your team: e.g, favoring engine power over aerodynamics, which has been Red Bull's strength, but as a spectator I don't wanna see the same guy winning all the time. Anyway, saying things like this sounds just like a cry baby) And a rookie, Kevin Magnussen, finished third (bumped up to 2nd after Ricciardo's DQ) It's too early to tell if there's more parity this new season but I'm keeping my finger crossed.

Compared to F1, NASCAR seems like it's mid-season already with 5 races in the books, one exciting finish after another. Maybe the rule change was a good thing: it made the already-competitive drivers battled even harder for the win. And the normally nothing-goes-wrong #48 team got a flat tire late in the race while leading at the Fontana race. It ended with a Green-White-Checker finish: the same Toyota driver, Kyle Busch, won on Toyota's "home track" 2 years in a row.

MotoGP just had its first race of the 2014 season at Qatar last weekend. It was a duel between the young defending champ, Marc Marquez, and the legend, Valentino Rossi, at the end.

I didn't know it's a world cup year (Cricket Twenty20 that is) until my friend told me Hong Kong defeated Bangladesh during the last first-round group match. It's kinda like Australia upsetting England in the soccer world, I guess. And the result didn't affect which team advance to the next round (the latter did) Still, a win is a win. Looking forward to watching more 2nd round group and knockout stage matches!

Last but not least, the 2014 MLB season has also started, again, in Australia (Sydney Cricket Ground) with the Dodgers vs the D-backs at 1am PDT Saturday. This time I did set an alarm just to watch it and had to endure a ~40 min of rain delay! Since I was up after the game anyway, I ended up watching the Arsenal vs Chelsea game too. However, it's too sad for me to continue after the gunners went down 0-3 (the last one involved a red card that should not have been given. And it was given to the wrong player! How bizarre!)