World Cup 2007

The ICC World Cup is nigh… Pundits, in the fields of both cricket and astrology, are trying predict who would win the cup.

Astrologically, Mars, 3rd house and the lord of third house govern sports. Strength of these factors and favaourable dasha and bhukti is important for the divine grace necessary for making a good sportsperson. Good placement of the lord of 6th house and planets in 6th house would ensure that the person will be able to overcome his/her enemies, i.e., competition in this case. Throughout the world and increasingly in India, success of a sportsperson is also gauged from the number of products he/she endorses – success in field brings in money from more and more advertisers. This can be seen from various dhana yogas in the chart.

Since we are talking about a career in sports, it is necessary to look at Dashamsha chart and the placement of planets, especially ascendant and 10th house lord. Vimshottari dasha periods, which denote ups and downs in career, are important for judging the form of the player during a period. We could potentially use the Vimshottari dasha periods to go to a deeper level of dashas but inaccuracy of a few minutes in recording the time of birth would make a difference of months in dasha period dates. Therefore it is the transits of planets that would most efficiently predict the performance on a given day. The transits to watch out for are that of Mars and the 3rd house lord.

Enough of theory. Can we somehow use this information to predict who would win the cricket world cup? Even though we know that cricket is a team sport, we need to take horoscopes of important players, the so called match winners, and analyse their horoscope. This is just to simplify the calculations otherwise we would need to analyse horoscope of all 11 players in a team. The horoscope of the captain is more important than the others because he decides the strategy.

It is quite a daunting task and I am definitely not that good. Predicting how an individual would fair on a given day itself is a difficult task and then to predict how a team as a whole would perform increases the scale of difficulty. As a result, predictions made by even the most experienced of astrologers go awry. I have read a lot of articles in various astrology magazines published in India and still have to find a single good logical explanation on this phenomenon. However, please understand that I am able to criticize these articles and their authors because I read them after knowing the result of the tournament and hence have the luxury of hindsight.

Towards the end, sorry for digressing, but like every cricket fan in India, I would be happy if India wins the world cup. If it cannot, the next best thing would be to just beat Pakistan. I would also be extremely happy if Sachin Tendulkar does well. There was an interesting thread in [vedic-astrology] in yahoogroups where one of the few learned persons in the group – PVR Narsimha Rao has opined that there is still a lot of fire left in Sachin. My friend Srinivas Shastri also feels that one of the semifinals that falls on Sachin’s birthday would be crucial if India manages to reach the semis and play on that day. Don’t we all remember how Sachin celebrated his birthday by demolishing Australia in Sharjah in 1998?