The Great Game Called Cricket...

"The sheep are so thin this year," goes a joke among Eastern Cape farmers, "we can fax them to the abattoir." The jibe, like the farmers themselves, is a hardy perennial. It has to be. Without a robust sense of humour, nothing survives, much less prospers, in the Eastern Cape.

A province that bulges like a bicep along South Africa's wind-whipped south-eastern coast, beyond which lay the skeletons of so many stricken ships, is no place for the soft of heart, mind, body or soul.

Any team representing it faces critics as prosaic as they are stoic. So there will be no tears in the wake of the Warriors' implosion in the Champions League Twenty20 final at the Wanderers in Johannesburg. Besides, they'll tell each other unblinkingly down on the farm, this was no accident. On the night, the Chennai Super Kings were the better team by a margin rather greater than eight wickets. More like the 300 kilometres that separates Port Elizabeth from East London.

To Chennai, undeniably, goes the accolade of the best franchise Twenty20 team in the world. Whoever said this format of the game doesn't deliver worthy champions? Fact is, Chennai have spent the Champions League gliding to victory after victory as effortlessly as Fred and Ginger. Not for them the sweaty scramble of the close-run thing. They lost just once, to Victoria. That is if ending up on the wrong end of so dubious a yardstick as a one-over eliminator can rightfully be called losing.

Chennai's closest scrape with authentic defeat came at the hands of the same Warriors in their Port Elizabeth backyard. R Ashwin and Muttiah Muralitharan got them out of that jam, and they won by 10 runs.

The Wanderers pitch is an entirely different animal to the one that spends its lazy days stretched out in the sun at St George's Park. However, quality bowlers remain just that, whatever the surface, and Ashwin and Muralitharan were again key to Chennai's success on Sunday.

The sting of the match was drawn as early as the sixth over, when Davy Jacobs lurched into a reverse sweep off Ashwin, got it badly wrong, and was trapped smack in front having scored 32 of his 34 runs in furiously hit fours. Jacobs has carried the Warriors on his spare frame these past two weeks. He maintained a defiant, bristling presence, and was never shy to show the guts required to chase glory. But on Sunday, he needed to score twice as many runs as he did to give his men a fighting chance. That is unfair to him given that cricket is played by teams and not individuals, a point Jacobs has made himself when he has read between the lines of questions asking indirectly whether he is bigger than the side he leads.

In the Warriors' sumptuous win in their semi-final against the hitherto unbeaten South Australia Redbacks, that most certainly was not the case. Against Chennai just 24 hours later, it most certainly was. Ashwin, L Balaji and Muralitharan tied the Warriors down for 25 balls after Jacobs' dismissal. The 26th brought a dodgy boundary as Colin Ingram's thick edge off Muralitharan squirted to the ropes. But Murali laughed his wild laugh last, dismissing Mark Boucher and Justin Kreusch in the space of five deliveries to reduce the Warriors to 82 for five. Game, as they say in the comics, over.

Chennai's run chase was not unlike the last stage of the Tour de France, a ceremonial chore conducted on the Champs-Elysees during which no one challenges the man who has, in the eyes of his opponents, already won the race. So it was as Chennai whittled away at their small target, of which M Vijay and Michael Hussey scored all but 26 in a deeply blue-collar stand. Whoever said Twenty20 cricket couldn't be boring?

The fact that Jacobs tossed the new ball to Makhaya Ntini, who went for 22 runs in two bilious overs in the semi-final, seemed in itself an acceptance of an impending thrashing. You might say the Warriors went like lambs to the slaughter.

Not sure about familiarity, but success breeds contempt. Throughout this tournament the critics seemed to be waiting for Chennai to stumble so they could have the chance to turn around and say, "Look I told ya, these guys were plain lucky. Now they have been exposed". It's not so much an anti-team sentiment, but one against their captain MS Dhoni. Many admire his captaincy; some reckon he is pretty lucky.

Like most successful teams, Chennai did have their share of luck. They had just five days of preparation, but the itinerary allowed them to ease into the team with two facile wins against the two weaker teams in the competition.

In the third game Victoria almost choked but hung on to take the game to a super over where they thumped Chennai. The critics jumped in to savour that moment; 'Dhoni's luck ran out,' they said. 'He should have given Doug Bollinger that over, what a messy captaincy decision'. Some even speculated that Bollinger had stormed off to the dressing room at the end of that over and that he was not happy with the skipper. The retelling of that story had a malicious glee to it.

Dhoni, though, offered a perfectly understandable rationale to using Ashwin. "He is used to bowling in the Powerplay. He is an aggressive bowler, he has the variety and he is always ready to bowl whenever you throw the ball to him. He wants to perform; he has grown as a player over the last three IPLs."

Chennai's next game was against Warriors. There was more ammunition to the 'he is lucky' brigade. Warriors chose to play a game within a game; they needed 109 to qualify and didn't extend themselves too much to try to win the game. They seemed content chasing qualification. The critics said if Warriors had to win to qualify, they would have won the game and shoved Chennai out of the tournament. May be they would have. May be they wouldn't have. We will never know one way or the other. .

Luck certainly came their way in the next game in the semi-final against Bangalore. The pre-game talk had revolved around how Dale Steyn would harass the Chennai batsmen with his pace and bounce. He didn't bowl a single delivery as he hobbled off after suffering a concussion on the field. It was a freak event. With Steyn's exit, Bangalore had run out of gunpowder. Game over.

That evening Dhoni said Steyn could have made things tricky for his batsmen but that's not his concern. A reporter said the semi-final was boring. Dhoni's repartee, "So you think we should have run ourselves out?!" It was said with a smile.

Tonight, he was a happy man. He said his plan was to keep the spinners for the middle overs so that they could apply the squeeze, as some of Chennai's seamers weren't quick enough to use the semi-new ball effectively. It worked perfectly.

When asked for the nth time how he keeps his cool, he said, "There is a dressing room to show your emotions! As a captain, you are as good as your side. This is a very good bunch of people and as a captain you just want to channel all the energy into the same direction. The players put in great effort and frankly it feels very good to be the captain of Chennai Super Kings."

The win was extra-special too, as this will be the last time these particular players turn out for Chennai. "It was indeed a very emotional moment," Dhoni said. "It was the last game for many of us players as a team. However much you try, we can't retain all. These three years were great; we played good cricket. You develop a special bonding with each other. The dressing room atmosphere was great; not everybody could get a game but there was no ill feeling. Every one enjoyed each other's company. To end on a high feels really special."

It was a reverse sweep that changed the entire complexion of the game. Davy Jacobs had started off imperiously and catapulted Warriors to 45 in the sixth over. Then R Ashwin got one to turn quickly towards the leg stump, Jacobs went for the reverse sweep, but was trapped in front. It's a shot that he had successfully played in the previous game; the adventurous unorthodox spirit is his calling card, and he has reaped much success with that approach. But tonight it hurt his team. This can be a cruel game, sometimes.

After Jacobs fell, Muttiah Muralitharan suffocated the Warriors with his skill, and L Balaji maintained the pressure with a disciplined spell in the middle, keeping the Warriors to 128, which was never going to be enough. And it wasn't. This is the last time this group of players will turn out for Chennai, and they gave themselves a nice farewell present.

Warriors' Achilles heel is their lower order. Johan Botha bats at no 6; the batting isn't that deep. And so, the middle-order chose caution over valour and Chennai closed in. L Balaji, who grew in confidence with the Warriors' non-violent approach against him, slipped in a few quiet overs with his steady line and length stuff. Ashwin continued to tease them with his variations and Muttiah Muralitharan came on in the 10th over to harass them with his ability.

He kept his doosras to a minimum, and ripped offbreaks across at varying pace. Success came in the 14th over: Mark Boucher, who has fallen most to Muralitharan than any other bowler in his career, was bowled, and Justin Kreusch was beaten by the dip and flicked straight to midwicket.

There was a brief little moment in the 17th over when things stirred at the bull ring. "Fast cars and big shots, that's Craig Thyssen," Jacobs had said earlier in the week. Tonight Thyssen went after Balaji to pick up three boundaries - a pulled four, a delicate late steer and a muscled six over midwicket. The home supporters in the crowd started to find their voice: They chanted out "Let's go Warriors" and tried to inspire the local team but Thyssen's cameo was too late and too little to matter in the bigger scheme of things. In hindsight, Ashwell Prince's fall - he was bowled missing a slog against a full toss from Doug Bollinger- also proved critical as there was too much pressure on the middle-order.

The only chance for Warriors after that effort was take early wickets. They didn't. M Vijay and Michael Hussey shut them out of the contest with assured knocks. Both play spin well. Vijay used his feet to repeatedly drive inside out while Hussey, as ever, worked the angles. There was a brief moment at the end when Vijay and Suresh Raina fell in quick succession and you wondered, 'Hold on, do we have a twist here?' The equation jumped from a comfortable 26 from 31 deliveries to 13 from 12. However, Hussey and Dhoni calmly escorted Chennai home. A score of 128 wasn't enough to test Chennai. Jacobs' wicket was the key.

Half-way through the evening, Jacobs' blitz at the start already seemed a distant memory. As ever, he had moved around on his nimble feet and ripped shots with slaughterhouse finality. He smashed Doug Bollinger and Albie Morkel to all parts of the ground. There were his usual shuffle-and-smash shots, but there were also some skillful upper cuts and neat cover drives. Things looked so bright for Jacobs and his team in the sixth over but the lights went out very quickly.

MS Dhoni has made it to ESPNcricinfo's India all-time XI, beating record-holding wicketkeepers Syed Kirmani and Kiran More, by virtue of his superior batting. Dhoni was picked by seven members of the 11-person jury, which was unanimous in voting Sachin Tendulkar, Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and Vinoo Mankad into the XI.

The No. 5 spot divided the jury the most, and Vijay Hazare, who played only eight innings in that position (one of them in the Adelaide Test of 1948, where he made two centuries), was preferred over the likes of Gundappa Viswanath, MAK Pataudi, Dilip Vengsarkar, Mohinder Amarnath and VVS Laxman.

The opening positions are taken by Virender Sehwag (10 votes) and Gavaskar, a blend of attack and defence, while the presence of Rahul Dravid (nine votes) and Tendulkar at Nos. 3 and 4 makes India's the only batting line-up among the eight leading countries, for which ESPNcricinfo has picked all-time XIs, to have over 42,000 Test runs between the top four.

Only one bowler from India's legendary spin quartet of the 70s makes it to the XI. Offspinner Erapalli Prasanna, with 189 wickets in 49 Tests, joins Anil Kumble (nine votes), Javagal Srinath and Kapil to form the bowling line-up. Allrounder Mankad, who took 162 wickets at 32.32 with his slow left-armers, completes the spin-dominated attack.

India's XI is the only one to feature just two fast bowlers. Australia had fast-bowling allrounder Keith Miller to back Dennis Lillee and Glenn McGrath, and South Africa had Mike Procter to help Shaun Pollock and Allan Donald.

Among the notable omissions, who did not make it to the XIs of any of the jury members, were former captain Mohammad Azharuddin; Bishan Bedi, perhaps the most highly rated of the spin quartet; and wicketkeeper Farokh Engineer.

ESPNcricinfo readers were invited to vote on the shortlists and their XI matched the jury's in all but one: Laxman was the readers' choice for No. 5 instead of Hazare.

The jury included former Test players Sanjay Manjrekar and Arun Lal, former Mumbai player and coach Vasu Paranjape, sports journalists Pradeep Magazine, Ayaz Memon, R Mohan and Suresh Menon, cricket historian Ramachandra Guha and television commentator Harsha Bhogle.

Read more about the XI here.

The XI: Sunil Gavaskar, Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, Vijay Hazare, Vinoo Mankad, Kapil Dev, MS Dhoni, Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Erapalli Prasanna.

Readers' XI: Sunil Gavaskar, Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman, Vinoo Mankad, Kapil Dev, MS Dhoni, Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Erapalli Prasanna.

Nominees

Openers: Sunil Gavaskar, Vijay Merchant, Virender Sehwag, Navjot Sidhu.

Middle order: Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman, Gundappa Viswanath, Vijay Hazare, MAK Pataudi, Mohinder Amarnath, Polly Umrigar, Sourav Ganguly, CK Nayudu, Mohammad Azharuddin, Dilip Vengsarkar.

Allrounders: Kapil Dev, Dattu Phadkar, Vinoo Mankad, Manoj Prabhakar.

Wicketkeepers: Naren Tamhane, Kiran More, Syed Kirmani, Nayan Mongia, MS Dhoni.

Fast bowlers: Javagal Srinath, Kapil Dev, Zaheer Khan, Mohammad Nissar, Amar Singh.

Spinners: Anil Kumble, Bishan Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, Subhash Gupte, Bhagwath Chandrasekhar, Harbhajan Singh, Dilip Doshi, S Venkataraghavan, Vinoo Mankad.