It is rare enough for a centrally-contracted player to make a significant contribution to his county, let alone insist on it © Getty Images

Before getting down to the serious business of congratulating them, a word of thanks to Durham for their efficient demolition of Kent in the final match, which quelled the nervous palpitations of this Yorkshire fan during the last round of matches. At the beginning of day two, with Yorkshire starting on 84-6 and looking destined for zero points, relegation had looked certain but the heroics of David Wainwright and Adil Rashid down at Hove and the lack of same from Kent at Canterbury allowed me to follow the last couple of days with equanimity.

So, all hail Durham!

If any single number other than the points total can sum up why a team won the championship, Durham’s collective bowling average for the season was 23 compared to 28 for Nottinghamshire, their nearest rivals, and about 30 or more for everyone else. (I am indebted to Paul Hyett, a statistician of my electronic acquaintance, for that observation.) Batsmen can win one-day trophies but winning in two-innings cricket requires bowlers - and Durham have certainly had bowlers.

Steve Harmison’s 60 wickets at 22 were impressive enough to earn a recall for England but his less-renowned pace partners, Mark Davies with 39 wickets at 15 and Callum Thorp with 50 at just under 20, have had better returns without grabbing the headlines. And this is a county which also has regular members of the England Lions, Graham Onions and Liam Plunkett, on its books. All of these are home-grown, so the Championship win is a massive endorsement of Durham’s system of talent identification and development, at least in pace bowling.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said about their batting, which relied heavily on long-serving imports, Michael di Venuto and captain Dale Benkenstein, or spin bowling, which was rather inadequately provided by New Zealand mediocrity Paul Wiseman. The bright spot up the order was Will Smith, who returned home after trying his luck with Notts, averaged 51.38 at No. 3, and started the wagging of tongues about future international prospects. Word is that he is likely to succeed to the captaincy now that Benkenstein has stood down.

In the end, though, this championship was Steve Harmison’s. Rob Steen’s otherwise excellent article about him turns out to have been inaccurate in one respect by attributing his failure to take a break after the ODI series to his being turbo-charged by the prospect of Stanford millions, a suggestion which keeps being cynically made without a shred of evidence in its favour but copious evidence against.

It has emerged Harmison originally asked not to even be considered for Stanford, and that his return to the one-day side was on the strict understanding that he would not be told to desert his county on the Championship run-in. He had achieved his personal target, that of getting back into the Test side, and was determined to help his main team of the season achieve their target too. It is rare enough for a centrally-contracted player to make a significant contribution to his county, let alone insist on it; doing it and covering himself and his team in historic glory seems more the stuff of epic poetry than Wisden.

I would have preferred that a modern Virgil sing of the elevation of Darren Gough to the roll of Championship-winning Yorkshire captains in his final first-class season, but he will instead extol the deeds of Stevius and his companions in ‘The Dunelmiad’. It will be a stirring tale, leaving no-one in doubt that Durham thoroughly deserved their success and our congratulations.

	Matthew Hayden uses the sweep shot as a weapon © AFP

The subcontinent used to be a graveyard for so many visiting teams but ever since the sweep shot was seen as the answer to local conditions, the game has changed significantly. Watch these next two series in India (vs Australia and England) and see how regularly the shot is used as an offensive and defensive ploy against the Indian spinners.

Australia’s recent successes against the Asian teams, especially in the subcontinent, rely heavily on their mastery of the sweep shot. Against good spinners on tracks that don’t bounce as much, their use of the sweep has probably been the biggest tactical change in the last decade.

Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist use it as weapon – not just a gentle paddle for one, they employ the shot as a boundary-seeking missile. Because they sweep on length, rather than line, their powerful physiques enable them to hit the ball well in front of square, often finding the boundary at ‘cow corner’. Phil Jacques too sweeps in front of square, almost a slog sweep. Steve Waugh’s legacy lives on.

For Ricky Ponting however, the sweep doesn’t seem to be a natural shot. He tends to paddle the ball round the corner and has been known to top edge the ball to short fine-leg. Perhaps this explains his poor results in India although his record against Sri Lanka is pretty decent. It’s their standard tactic against Muttiah Muralitharan.

The fact that they can sweep over wide midwicket (instead of the traditional sweep to backward square-leg) means that the captain has to now employ two men in the deep, possibly having to dispense with a close-in fielder or someone at square-leg to stop the easy push for a single. It is a deliberate ploy, practised endlessly and used as the preferred way to rotate strike. It is a team tactic and even the tail-enders are taught to play the shot properly.

Not that Australia have been the only team to use this against subcontinental opposition. Graham Gooch played a brilliant innings against India in the semi-final of the 1987 World Cup, sweeping Maninder Singh and Ravi Shastri to distraction in a famous victory.

	The reverse-sweep was once a novelty, not any more © AFP

Hansie Cronje used the slog sweep to great effect against Shane Warne in 1993/94 in Australia but inexplicably, the South Africans rarely used that ploy against him later. Jonty Rhodes was born with a broom in his hand but not many other South African batsmen swept Warne consistently. Perhaps the extra bounce on Australian/African pitches made it a riskier shot.

Allan Border was a great exponent of the shot but he tended to look for a single rather than the big boundary hit. England used the sweep shot against Pakistan in 2000 and again in Sri Lanka in 2001, led by Nasser Hussain who favoured that approach against the likes of Saqlain Mushtaq, Mustaq Ahmed and Murali. England won both those series, against all odds.

Indian batsmen however seem to use the shot more sparingly and more as a way to rotate strike rather than hit boundaries. Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag have had their moments when they’ve slog swept Warne and Murali out of the ground but one doesn’t tend to see it so much from great players of spin like Mohammed Azharuddin, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman. I wonder why? There must be a good reason for that. All three are very wristy players so perhaps there’s a common theme in those cases.

Left-handers seem to favour the shot more than most. Saurav Ganguly and Gautam Gamhir are good exponents of the shot. Arjuna Ranatunga, Marcus Trescothick, Brian Lara, Andy Flower and Saeed Anwar were regular subscribers to the club. Maybe this is because so many right-arm bowlers seem to be pitching the ball just outside leg stump which takes the lbw out of the equation. It will be interesting now to see if the third umpire referral system changes that bias. Perhaps more lefties will be given out lbw on video replay. It’s a tough decision for the naked eye to give out at first look.

My prediction is that this series, and England’s tour to India, will be a 'sweep-fest'. The batsmen who execute the shot best, including the reverse-sweep (which is no longer a novelty shot) will determine the course of the series. It will be fascinating to see how the bowling captain sets his field to counter a shot that covers so much territory, from wide mid-on to a very fine-leg.

	Graeme Hick bids adieu to Worcestershire © PA Photos

Another Indian season gets underway, so Samir and Fox start to quiver with anticipation while I get wistful as another English season comes to its close. As they look forward to new arrivals, I reflect on departures.

Graeme Hick has gone. One day this summer, he was dismissed cheaply and walked calmly back to the pavilion. For it not to hurt when he was out meant that it did not matter, and if it no longer mattered, it was time to step away. It was entirely his own choice to end one of the greatest county careers of all time.

Few, though, have the luxury of real choice.

Mushtaq Ahmed, the legspinning lynchpin of Sussex’s recent championship-winning sides, faced surgery and rehab to have a chance of playing again and decided retirement was less trouble. Sussex already know how badly they will miss the irreplaceable Pakistani and will do well to get an overseas player even half as influential next season.

I’m not betting against Darren Gough taking up Yorkshire’s invitation to play in next year’s Twenty20, so Derbyshire’s much lesser-known Kevin Dean is as yet the only other one committed to retirement. His legendary feat was hitting the winning runs when Derbyshire beat Australia in a thrilling three-day game in 1997, though he was actually a bowler. At the beginning of the decade he was one of the most effective bowlers in the Championship, though he was never in the frame for England: the specialist medium-pacer’s main prey is the merely adequate, a species never seen in the international highlands but still common on the world’s domestic plains. Having been injured for more of the last couple of seasons than not, he has faded out of contention and has given up the unequal struggle.

However, I suspect a few others who have been released by their counties will be unable to persuade anyone else to hire them for next season.

Surrey’s Ali Brown still holds an amazing world record, having scored 268 for them in a 50-over game. He was by far the best one-day batsman in county cricket for several years, but the selectors gave him inexplicably few chances for England. Apparently they thought him flaky and unreliable, but this only deepens the mystery about his non-selection as those were the chief characteristics of the batsmen they actually picked. Now 38, he has only played one innings of note in two years and seems a spent force. If Surrey no longer want him, it’s hard to see who else would.

Northants have released Lance Klusener and Jason Brown. ‘Zulu’ was Man of the 1999 World Cup, a time when ODI crowds round the world thrilled to his spectacular firework displays; nowadays he lights a desultory couple of roman candles and hands out some sparklers before ambling off to collect his pay. With the end of the Kolpak era in sight and an ICL connection, he seems an unattractive prospect. Brown was once thought to have a future as an England spinner, but it never came to pass and after 13 good and decent years the pitches have dried up. Nine championship wickets at a cost of 80 this season will not be much of a recommendation to a county which is bound to be less spin-friendly than the one which plays at Wantage Road.

Some younger men will also be going, having failed to make the grade and leaving no lasting mark, but all of the above have provided many memories for those who saw them play. They have my thanks and best wishes for their futures.

A couple of days ago on Different Strokes, I wrote that it would be fun to start talking about the playing of cricket again. Today, I'm going to ignore my advice and talk about cricket's political context. The recent bombing in Islamabad has forced my hand.

Folks might remember that Australia's decision to tour India had resulted in extremely loud denunciations of its "hypocrisy" in choosing to go to one country where bombs go off and making excuses to not go to another where bombs go off as well

I'd suggest the Aussies are on reasonably good ground, if what guided their decisions is their overall perception of the countries. There is a quite simple reason why teams tour India rather than Pakistan. Pakistan has been in the headlines (literally) for a very, very long time with regards to its internal political instability and violence. Think about all the things the West associates with Pakistan since 1979: Afghanistan, the mujahideen, refugee camps, military coups, the Taliban, the ISI, assassinations, the wild Northwest, fear of nuclear weapons falling into jihadi hands, Dr Khan's proliferation network, the Daniel Pearl beheading, the list goes on. And when a country is led by Army generals for a long time, it is quite difficult to remove the aura of political instability around it. Pakistan's problems have been on the West's radar for a very long time and are associated with a set of issues that the West is obsessed about. No one in the US or UK gives a hoot about the PWG in India or violence in the North-East or wherever, no matter how many Indians die. The patron of the Pakistani government, the US, has elevated and demoted Pakistan simultaneously to problem child and critical geo-political player.

And since 911, Pakistan cannot stay out of the news even if it wanted to. Pakistan's violence appears systemic, and embedded in a larger narrative about the "unstable, violent, Islamic world". India's violence appears sporadic, and discordant with a broader narrative about the rising economic superpowers of Asia. I live in the US and the constant stream of articles in the press about Pakistan's wild NorthWest, the ISI's implication in the activities of the Taliban, and the prospects of its civil government falling next year to another military coup is supplemented by articles about India's corporations going on acquisition sprees, the growth rate of the Indian economy, Snoop Dogg going to Bollywood and so on. Under these circumstances, I'm a little surprised that so many people consider the Australians utter and total hypocrites. This is the information they read about on a daily basis. Why wouldn't their perceptions of the country in question be affected?

I'm willing to bet good money that more English and Aussie backpackers have visited India than Pakistan in the last seven years. Are they also all hypocrites? Are they all also getting fat checks from the BCCI when they alight from their flights at Delhi International Airport? What guided their decisions?

The clincher is in the comparison between how the Delhi and Islamabad bombings were covered. Delhi did not even make it to the front page of the New York Times. Heck, it was hard to find any coverage on it. But the Islamabad incident went to the front page and stayed there. Why? Because this is supposed evidence of Pakistan's vulnerability to the Al-Qaeda and so on and so forth. Delhi's bombings? Oh, the usual stuff the US can't care about. I wonder if the Presidential candidates even commented on it

Pakistan's violence is of interest to the West. It imagines its interests are implicated there. This brings attention. Plenty of it, and it ensures that the country acquires a scary aura. And honestly, if folks read that in the Pakistani capital, a 600 kilo payload of high-explosive can be transported in, assembled, and then driven around in a VIP area, then,
well, what reassurance can the PCB provide to already apprehensive boards?

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Australia leaves for a much-anticipated tour of India. Awakening from a rare winter solstice, there’s a real sense of anticipation. Australian cricket fans needed this (relatively) long break from cricket to re-ignite their interest in a game that was becoming all-too-predictable because of their continued dominance for so long.

The series against the West Indies barely registered on the radar, a combination of inconvenient time zones and an almost foregone conclusion. Bangladesh registered no real interest whatsoever, once again a victim of a remote location (Darwin), football finals fever and not even the hint of a genuine contest.

The India series though is an entirely different kettle of fish (with apologies to Symonds for mentioning fish). Almost every club cricket fan I have met recently has been talking about what the make-up of the team will be and who will win. I haven’t heard this sort of excited chatter for a long time. It’s infectious. And fun.

Part of that anticipation is undoubtedly a sense of unfinished business (from both sets of supporters). The events of last summer are not yet buried and injustices, perceived or real, provide that bit of extra needle. No sense denying the obvious.

The real interest though lies in the realisation that this trophy is up for grabs. Not for a long time has Australia gone into a Test series feeling they have to fight tooth and nail to merely scrape home. Any team that no longer has the combined firepower of Warne, McGrath and Gilchrist is entitled to feel nervous. When you add Hayden’s uncertain injury status, Symonds’ absence and a inexperienced spin bowling attack against the best players of spin on Indian pitches, there is every reason for Australia to covet the underdog tag and take the pressure off themselves.

It is this sort of unknown territory that is suddenly becoming BBQ conversation in Brisbane backyards. Will our ageing (but highly credentialed) batting line up still be able to score big scores at over 4 runs per over? Will we ever find another Gilchrist at No 7? No one really expects the spinners to dominate the series but the hope is that they will be able to play their part in neutralizing the Indian batting order whilst Lee, Clarke and Johnson can reverse swing the old ball on abrasive pitches.

Australian fans also know that India too face their own demons when it comes to picking the right moment to blood youth. It’s a fascinating question to ask from afar. Will India have the guts to dispense with loyal servants like Dravid, Laxman and Ganguly in a big series like this? Or will they take the soft (safer) option of experimenting with youth at a later date when the stakes are not that high? The general consensus is that India will choose the more conservative approach and opt for the tried and tested warriors. There’s a sense that India will simply not have the courage to make wholesale changes just yet.

And why shouldn’t they? India are entitled to pick their best team to win this series. Let the future look after itself. We’re a pragmatic bunch over here and fully understand that winning this trophy is more important to India than looking too far into the future. That’s what makes these conversations so interesting….I can’t remember the last time we dissected and debated an opposition team’s selections so closely. It’s a reflection of the level of interest that is being generated.

The fact that there will be no ODI’s actually adds to the excitement I believe. It’s almost like stepping back in time. Stripping cricket back to its original roots – Test match cricket, played hard, played fair and may the best man win. No distractions, no excuses, no surrender.

It’s a reflection of India’s strength that the Border-Gavaskar Trophy is now assuming the level of status that used to be reserved for The Ashes and the Frank Worrell Trophy. This is a piece of silverware that Australia treasures.

It would be interesting to know if anyone from outside Australia, and not just India, is taking a close interest in this fascinating contest that looms. In an era of mismatches, this one shapes as a genuine 50/50 proposition. That has to be good for cricket.

Can't wait ...

It is commonplace amongst Indian commentators to trace the beginning of a particular kind of cricket mania to June 25th, 1983. I tend to agree, but only partially. My preferred date is March 3rd, 1985, when India played Australia at the MCG in the final Group A match of the Benson & Hedges World Championship of Cricket, held to commemorate the Victorian Cricket Association's Centenary. For that was the day that Indian cricket viewers first watched the live telecast of a cricket game from Australia (and since my memory isn't perfect, the first by Channel 9). And that was the day that cricket presented itself as a perfectly packaged televised spectacle, with plenty of glitter and gloss, 100 overs long, with a definite result at the end of it.

Those of us settling down on that rather chilly morning (Delhi winters sometimes packed a late punch) had little inkling of what was in store. It began innocently enough as Kapil sprinted to bowl the first delivery to Graeme Wood. As he did so, a scraping, knocking sound issued from our television sets, followed by the unmistakable sound of bat on ball. What had happened? It took us a few seconds to figure out that this was the famous "stump microphone" that we had read about. A few minutes later Robbie Kerr was gone, bowled Kapil Dev, and the sound his stumps made as they rattled was a sweet one indeed. Cricket had gone from being a game played far away on the ground to one that had a sudden, dynamic, physical immediacy. We were at the ground, in the midst of the action.

We watched the endless replays, the clarity of the images, the varied and multiple angles that covered the dismissals, and the clever graphics (prompted by Geoff Lawson's duck). We had not realized that all of this could be possibly associated with a cricket game. When India had won the World Cup in 1983, it had made cricketing success in one form of the game possible. What this Australian telecast did was make cricket into a form of entertainment that could be enjoyed by a much wider demographic; it made the far away spectacle of a game played by men in whites into a living-room tamasha of brightly attired athletic performers, displaying a perfectly tuned entertainer's sensibility. And of course, all of this on the magnificent stage of the cavernous MCG.

There were purely cricketing reasons too that day. India's 'quicks' smashed through the Aussie top-order, leaving them tottering at 4-17. Was it really possible that Indian opening bowlers could do this, in such brilliant clarity, to an opposing side? Especially one like the Australians (never mind that the Australian team that year was not particularly strong, it still held a certain fascination for Indian fans). A partial recovery saw the Aussies to 160. But with a mixture of Srikkanth-freneticism and Shastri-phlegmatism India strolled to that target. They had beaten Australia in Australia, on Australian television. The telecast magnified all of this. Our cricketers, in slo-mo, in close-up, viewed from various angles, praised to the high heavens by all these seemingly knowledgeable international cricketers whose names we had only read about, turned into demigods.

A week later, India beat Pakistan by the same comfortable margin in the final. The razzle-dazzle of the awards ceremony, the victory lap on the Audi, put the final touches to the pictures drawn for us that week. From now on, the game would always be linked with the televised spectacle, and Indian fans knew what they wanted to see on the tube.

Vulgar, tasteless and divisive. Such are the adjectives attached to the Stanford Twenty20 jamboree.

It is allegedly divisive because if the 'England XI' beat the 'Stanford All-Stars', the players who actually play will get a million bucks each and the four who sit in the dressing room will only get a quarter of a million, and those England players who only feature in the Test squad won’t get anything at all.

What a terrible prospect. There will be big differences in the income levels of the various members of the various England squads, and this will have a hugely damaging effect on team unity, or so we are told.

Things could get as dreadful as they are in the Indian team dressing room, where Sachin Tendulkar is a squillionaire and Gautam Gambhir is not. I am sure there are tensions in the Indian dressing room, and that some of the fault lines are between the seniors (mostly very rich indeed) and the juniors (not yet very rich but hoping to be so), but they do not seem to be caused by money. If you, dear reader, are in your mid-thirties, consider how many 20-year-olds you know who aren’t irritating, and then think what it must be like to be cooped up in a dressing room with a bunch of them.

But we do not need to go to India to see inequality of income. There are already vast disparities in the England dressing room, even among the centrally-contracted. Those at the bottom of the scale get about £200K from the ECB, while captain of everything Kevin Pietersen gets something more like £500K. And that’s just basic pay.

The top order get paid considerably more by their bat makers for sporting the company logo on the face of their bat than does James Anderson. There are pictures of Kevin Pietersen and Paul Collingwood on large advertising hoardings promoting exciting ranges of menswear and the like, but none featuring Matt Prior. Attaching his name to a ghost-written mid-career “autobiography” is unlikely to have left Flintoff or even Monty Panesar a poorer man, but insomniacs have yet to be afforded the opportunity to be bored silly by a similar tome featuring Alistair Cook. And so on.

Tastelessness and vulgarity seem to derive from the huge purse riding on a single game as though this was something totally new rather than a return to cricket’s origins. When Lord Frederick Beauclerk and the Duke of Devonshire competed for purses of 5,000 guineas in the 18th century, the stake was the equivalent of a million quid today. Substantial prize money for single games was commonplace until the mid-19th century, when the balance of power shifted.

No longer did the gentry have the basic assurance that the money would simply slosh around between one very rich person and another: the riff-raff professionals had become so good at the game that they would walk off with the dosh. The lower orders could not be trusted to know their place if they acquired great wealth, so the practice of offering large purses ceased, replaced by the hypocrisy of ‘shamateurism’. But really, how terrible is it that players should be able to rake in huge jackpots by winning games of cricket as well as by standing around in a studio in borrowed gear and letting the resultant photographs adorn billboards?

There will be problems caused by the influx of new money. Some players will gamble, drink or otherwise fritter both the money and their careers away, and some who miss out for unlucky reasons will no doubt get insanely jealous.

But the most plaintive predictions of the imminent collapse of civilisation seem to emanate from former players whose experience of international cricket was slight. Having ridden the gravy train in the second class carriage for a couple of suburban stops, they object to a new generation being pampered in first class on a round-the-world tour and from a position of moderate comfort presume to tell the newly rich how bitter and twisted they should feel about the newly very rich indeed.

What was that about vulgarity and tastelessness again?

	A refreshing aspect of Ajantha Mendis' bowling was that it forced cricket conversation back to playing the game © AFP

There is plenty to talk about when it comes to cricket these days: the Stanford bonanza, the Bangla exodus to the ICL, Andrew Symond's journey back from the precipice, the Australian decision to tour India despite the bomb blasts, and so on. But there isn't enough top-level international cricket being played. And quite frankly, all this talk of money, hypocrisy, authoritarian and incompetent boards, politics, and plenty of other matters not involving the direct contact of bat on ball, is enough to make me start hankering, seriously and desperately, for some good to honest international cricket. Real Soon Now. (As an Indian fan waiting for the Australians to show up, my anticipation is particularly intense).

Back in the days of Limited Media Coverage of Cricket [tm], the world seemed quite simple: there was the time that cricket was played, and there was the time it wasn't. One somehow found the means to get through those gaps as best as one could, and one dealt with the deprivation with a stiff upper lip (or a downcast one, depending on your personal style). Gaps between games were painful, and I dreaded the closing credits of television broadcasts. Cricket analysis only appeared when games were on, and the surrounding discussions were sketchy at best (or so it felt). One's anticipation was sharpened, and the limited diet of games only added to the sense of a scarce and valuable resource.

But now cricket coverage is 24/7; the administrative, political, and financial trappings of the game are quite extensive and obscure (and hence invite commentary); and thus, we are exposed to a lot of material on all that surrounds the game. While some of this is genuinely illuminative, there comes a time when I find myself thirsting for the very business that prompts all this verbiage in the first place. For this conversation, rather than magnifying the game, sometimes starts to make the game feel a bit small, a bit incidental to the business of television rights, travel permissions, player contracts, personalities, labor relations and all of the rest. And sometimes this conversation doesn't act as a filler or illuminator; sometimes it just makes me miss the simplicity of the game more.

One of the most refreshing aspects of Ajantha Mendis' debut in Test cricket was how much he forced the conversation surrounding cricket to be about playing: the different deliveries; how he was to be combated; the various minor successes against him; his tactics; all of them very good cricketing discussions to be had, and all directly relevant to the enjoyment of the game in front of us. For one brief period, the discussions about cricket were about the performances and the battles that make the game worthwhile. It was a splendid break from the Political Economy of International Cricket or The Power Relations of Post Colonial Sporting Economies or Race Relations in 21st Century Cricket or whatever.

I enjoy that sort of analysis myself and dabble a bit it in it from time to time. Indeed, our appreciation for the game can be enhanced by a consideration of the contexts it is played in, its history and its internal relations. Still, it's a game (a fact always enhanced by an actual visit to a cricket stadium), and sometimes it cries out for simplification to bare essentials, to a revealing of its basic nature and its fundamental simplicities.

As the guard in ‘Run, Lola, Run’ says at the beginning of the movie, when speaking of football: In the end, its 22 players and a ball. The rest is detail.

How much does having a memory hinder us when watching cricket? How hard is it to change your mind?

Or, to put it another way, how accurate is it to describe Jimmy Anderson as inconsistent, as some people did replying to my piece about Matthew Hoggard?

Imagine, if you will, an Andy Jameson. Without a past to live down, Jameson comes into the England team at Wellington and gets a five-fer on debut. Then he has a horrible match at Napier where he goes for plenty. A decent match at Lord’s is followed by a truly dismal performance in the first innings at Old Trafford, and then a devastating 7-43 at Trent Bridge shoots New Zealand out for 123. In the series against South Africa which follows, he has match returns of 3-114, 3-136, 4-132 and 5-127.

After nine matches this year, he has 42 wickets at just under 28 apiece. He has had a spectacular peak and a couple of nasty troughs, but generally he seems to be doing pretty decently and getting better.

If those were the only facts in evidence, would not the discovery of Jameson be lauded as one of the finds of the year, and would anyone be going on about his inconsistency?

Back here in the real world, though, Jimmy Anderson came into the England side trailing a wagonload of baggage. For four years he had been making occasional appearances when other people were injured, collecting 62 wickets in 20 matches at the depressing cost of 39. Sure, there was the odd good spell, but all too often he was off target or lacking in pace and batsmen just helped themselves to boundary after boundary from the all-you-can-eat buffet.

To me - and to most England fans, I’d guess Anderson’s bowling at Napier and the first innings at Old Trafford were not unfortunate wobbles but reversion to type. I still assumed that Hoggard would soon reclaim his spot.

It was Trent Bridge that convinced me that Anderson had supplanted Hoggard in the pecking order. Even with a favourable wind, atmosphere and pitch I could not conceive of the Hoggster delivering a spell that deadly.

As the South Africa series progressed, I was won over. By The Oval, I was no longer nervous as he prepared to bowl. In fact I had become pretty confident that the South Africans would not be getting off to a flier, and had even begun to watch the first over of a spell of his with mild optimism that it might be a very good one. Though I was usually disappointed, it showed the balance of my expectation had changed.

If I only had this year to go on, I am fairly sure that I would be a lot more enthusiastic about Anderson, but as it is I wonder whether Ryan Sidebottom should not replace him once he is fit again. At least until Trent Bridge, Sidebottom had been obviously superior as a bowler. Afterwards, though, is it attaching residual blame for his previous transgressions to doubt that he has also surpassed Sidebottom given that he basically outbowled him all summer?

The question becomes critical as soon as the next Test in Ahmedabad. Captain Pietersen is clearly keen on Harmison, Panesar and Flintoff will certainly play, and there will be an all-rounder from Nottinghamshire, though whether Broad, Swann or Patel remains unknown. That only leaves one place for Sidebottom and Anderson to fight over.

My heart tells me to pick Anderson. My head says that Sidebottom has the proven record.

I am so glad I am not a selector.

	He will be heartbroken that it’s over, but Matthew Hoggard can be proud of a worthy Test career © Getty Images

Somewhere between Hamilton and Wellington, two crew members were thrown overboard from the good ship England and told they’d have to swim for it. Steve Harmison swam strongly enough to catch up and be hauled back on board, but with the announcement that he will not be getting a central contract, Matthew Hoggard’s Test career looks over.

As a Hoggard fan I am saddened; as a Yorkshire fan, hopeful that he will think it worth carrying on to keep taking 40 or 50 championship wickets a season at 24; as an England fan, I’m delighted that the transition was timed so brilliantly. It was pretty obvious from the first few times we saw him that Jimmy Anderson would one day take over as our premier swing bowler, and the performances he’s put in this year are evidence of a baton being passed with an efficiency the Great Britain 4x100m track teams could usefully study. Just as the Hoggster runs out of steam, the lad from Burnley is off and running hard

Hoggard is the kind of sporting hero we English treasure: self-deprecating, a wholehearted trier, and not quite world-class.

The featherbeds and billiard tables which so often pass for Test pitches these days offered him little help when he used the old ball. Later on, he developed a (slightly) slower ball and some cutters, so he could be brought on in the 50th over without risking too much carnage, but before 2005 or so he could be as much liability as asset once the ball lost its shine. He was cannon fodder for the likes of Matthew Hayden (in Australia), unless bowling negatively as on the “Bore Them Out” tour of 2001-2, when Hoggy bowled as far outside off stump as Ashley Giles pitched outside leg and the whole of India snored.

After that tour, Nasser Hussain said Hoggard was a dream to captain because he was the kind of guy who would run through walls for you – he never gave up. The other great thing about him was his dependability; you always knew what you were going to get from him. He was as predictable and as reliably satisfying as the full monty breakfast in your favourite caff.

His old-ball stuff may have been mediocre (I don’t care much for the tomatoes anyway), but the meat of his bowling was with a new ball.

By his own account, he just ran up and ‘wanged’ it down the other end, but that is taking modesty too far: he is much more skilful than that implies. The deftness with which he executed the three-card trick on Hayden (in England) and Graeme Smith (anywhere) suggests that he can make a fine post-cricket living fleecing gullible punters at fairgrounds with a Find The Lady stand.

Being a new-ball specialist overseas when the Kookaburra ball is used almost everywhere bar England and India seems like an impossible task, but his two best matches were abroad.

The first was in Christchurch in 2001-2, when his opening spell, broken after three overs by close of play and after another ten by lunch on the following day, read 20-7-59-5. He came back later to mop up the tail, ending with 7 for 63. In the second innings, both sets of batsmen went gloriously wild with Thorpe and Astle scoring two of the four fastest double hundreds in Test history, but the first innings lead Hoggard had ensured with magnificent swing bowling saw England home.

‘Hoggard’s Match’ though, was Johannesburg 2005. He took a fearful clattering from Herschelle Gibbs, who was in rollicking form, but disposed of most of the rest of the top order for very little, ending the innings with 5-144 and restricting South Africa's lead to 8. A commanding 180 from Trescothick set South Africa a possibly gettable target of 325, but again it was only Gibbs who could make a fight of it. Three wickets in Hoggard’s first five overs set SA back on their heels, and his eventual career best 7-61 clinched England’s first series victory in South Africa for forty years.

When he goes to the great cricket ground in the sky, he won’t be eligible for membership of the Great Players CC, but Johannesburg will earn him an invitation to turn out for their XI as a guest for one match.

He will be heartbroken that it’s over, but Matthew Hoggard can be proud of a worthy Test career.

	Put simply, it’s hard to dislike Andrew Flintoff © Getty Images

From an Australian viewpoint, they don’t come much better than Freddie Flintoff. If the Brits were feeling particularly generous, they might even consider making him an honorary Aussie! We’d love to claim him.

Seriously though, it’s great to see the old Flintoff back in full swing. It’s not just his talent that stands out a mile - to me, Flintoff stands for everything that is good about cricket. He’s almost an Errol Flynn-type character.

Buccaneering - now there’s a word that one doesn’t often get to use in modern language but it was made for a chap like Flintoff. He’s not perfect, he gets into the odd scrape and he occasionally plays a daft shot at a crucial time. Even then, he disarms people with his slightly sheepish grin and his refusal to take life too seriously. There’s a hint of Ian Botham in him in that sense. Cricket seems to be a bit of a lark to him and his persona is infectious. Put simply, it’s hard to dislike Flintoff.

I’m not sure about other parts of the cricketing world but I get the distinct impression that Australians have a soft spot for players like him. They must, first and foremost, earn respect for their on-field skills and Freddie seems to have done that. His lion-hearted performances in the 2005 Ashes as well as some brave, lone bowling spells in the 2006-07 series makes him stand out. To a certain extent, Kevin Pietersen too is a popular figure here for similar reasons.

What makes Flintoff really stand out though is his wonderful ability to play the game “hard but fair”. It’s a term that is terribly overused and often in entirely the wrong context. Hard but fair is not about mouthing crude obscenities on the field, having a beer in the dressing room and then turning on the abuse again next morning. That’s just a winner’s definition of the term. Players like Flintoff and Brett Lee seem to have found that wonderful balance of giving nothing short of 100% with ball or bat in hand but stop short of crossing that fine line that separates competitiveness from boorishness.

Both Flintoff and Lee may have been a bit less so in their youth but that’s just part of growing up. Lance Klusener too finished his career giving the impression of someone who put cricket in perspective. In the modern game, Mike Hussey, Dwayne Bravo, Shane Bond, Kumar Sangakkara and Virender Sehwag appear to have similar sunny dispositions. It could be an elaborate disguise but one hopes not. They all seem genuinely likeable characters.

Back to Flintoff though - he just seems to exude a boyish charm that makes it difficult to dislike him, even in the middle of a hostile spell. Watching him against South Africa recently, he beat batsmen with snorting deliveries and realised the moral victory was his without having to rub it in. When he took a wicket, the celebrations seemed more inward-focused than a triumphalist humiliation of the batsman. Job done - no need to send them off with a cowardly gesture. When he smashed a boundary, he sported a cheeky grin rather than an aggressive fist in the air. It was almost like a schoolboy who’s found a dollar coin in the gutter. He’ll claim it but is almost sheepish about his good fortune.

Lee shares a lot in common with Flintoff - by all accounts, they are both popular figures, even amongst opponents. Every country has these players - genuine ‘nice guys’ who seem to still treat international cricket with that touch of irreverence. Deadly serious competitors but they just know where to draw that line. It’s too easy to focus on those who cross that line and bring the game into disrepute but with a big man like Flintoff, one can only hope that he becomes a hero to more than just British kids. In fact, sometimes, Flintoff acts like a kid himself, kicking up his heels and celebrating simple pleasures, even at his own expense.

At a time when some other notable players are battling demons, Flintoff just seems to be revelling in being back on the park again. A fit and happy Freddy is not just good for England but he’s great for cricket full stop. So long as he retires before the next Ashes.

	Matt Prior is, without doubt, the best batsman among the current candidates © Getty Images

"Pick the best keeper." Spoken by a Nottinghamshire member at yesterday’s Pro40, this mantra meant “Pick Chris Read for England”, but more generally it implies that selectors should not waste their time considering wicketkeepers’ batting.

I’ll come back to the batting, but is there an accepted definition of the best keeper?

Keeping for England, Read has not impressed me because he minimises obvious errors rather than maximising chances. He didn’t drop as many as Matt Prior (on his first go-round) but there were a few that he ought to have gone for but didn’t, thus making it look as though first slip was at fault; the new version of Prior has no such qualms.

His other main fault was one common to all England glovemen since Jack Russell – standing too far back to the quickies. This makes it easier for the keeper to take the ball routinely, but too many edges fall short of the slips who align themselves with him. If those missed edges were properly seen as keeping errors, it would concentrate keepers’ minds wonderfully.

But taking the ball is not the whole job. The keeper is the only fielder with the same privileged insight into how much movement bowlers are getting and how batsmen are shaping as the TV viewer. In “Calling the Shots”, Michael Vaughan went out of his way to praise the intelligence-gathering of Geraint Jones, the implication being that Read was a less useful spy.

The skipper manages which bowlers to use and where to place the fielders, but it is the keeper who acts as the foreman of the fielding team: it is his job to chivvy the sloppy and applaud the brilliant, to encourage the bowlers and generally exude energy and keenness. Paul Nixon in the last World Cup was the best energizer in recent years while Prior was simply an annoying loudmouth and Read was almost Trappist.

There is more to keeping than is immediately visible; even so, it is unrealistic to ignore batting unless you intend him to bat at nine or below.

The last regular England keeper to be a rabbit was George Duckworth back in 1930 – but with all-rounders like Gubby Allen, Walter Robins, Maurice Tate and Jack White in the team, you can afford a keeper who can’t bat, and England are not in that fortunate position.

Alan Knott and Godfrey Evans were superb, but they were not the best technically in their times – Bob Taylor and Keith Andrew were even more brilliant (though much less flashy) but were unlikely to deliver regular half-centuries. (Despite that, Taylor succeeded to Knott’s berth because the “keepers” who could bat could not keep to even a minimum standard for Tests.)

Tim Ambrose’s time is up. He has had ten Tests but his batting was vastly overestimated. Most batsmen mentally map the pitch as “play forward”, “back” and “hmmm”, but Ambrose’s mental map is marked “back” and “Here Be Dragonnes”, which is useless unless the bowlers are exceptionally generous.

Prior was clearly chastened by the criticism of his first run as England’s keeper. In the recent ODIs he showed marked improvement both technically and at curbing his blabbering gob. He is without doubt the best batsman amongst the current candidates, so he should be confirmed as the new(-ish) Test keeper when the India Test squad is announced – quite a turnaround, since I had previously hoped that his dropping would be permanent.

But who should be taken as the reserve?

Ideally it would be James Foster, who has overtaken Read as the best technical keeper on the circuit, but the Test leg of the tour is only one three-dayer and two Tests as against seven(!) ODIs, so it may be more sensible to take the like-for-like Phil Mustard.

Opinions, anyone?

	Will Symonds walk out on his Cricket Australia contract? © Getty Images

Will he or won’t he? Brisbane’s newspapers and airwaves seem to be full of conjecture about whether Andrew Symonds will walk away from his Cricket Australia contract or not. Public opinion is surprisingly split - a local newspaper poll had a rough 50-50 response as to whether he deserved his Darwin punishment or not.

For someone like me who works in the area of “elite athlete welfare”, the Symonds incident is all-too-common, not just in cricket and not just in Australia. It is a product of a sporting landscape that takes young people away from the things that ‘ground’ them and offers them fame and riches without necessarily checking to see if they have the support structure around them to help them deal with it.

Symonds is a classic example of someone with all the talent in the world. On the field, bat in hand or patrolling the deep, he is a powerful panther-like figure, supremely balanced. Yet, “balanced” would be the one thing that seems furthest from his life at the moment. Brisbane is a small town and for someone working in my field, the stories of lives in the balance tend to reach you weeks before it blows up in the media. It was not a closely guarded secret that Symonds was finding it difficult to reconcile the double life of being one of the most marketable athletes in the country with his own private desire to be left alone to enjoy the simple and savage pleasures of a life in the bush. He is not alone in feeling this sense of isolation.

Brian Lara faced his demons a decade ago. More recently, Marcus Trescothick and Shaun Tait have been forced out of the international game for similar reasons. Like Symonds, they are not bad men. Just confused and alienated, owing their fame, fortune and disenchantment to the same mistress.

International cricket is going to face this situation increasingly more often I fear. Australian cricket especially, just seeing the end of the first generation of ‘career cricketers’ (since the game went fully professional at first-class level in the late 1990s) is going to have to deal with young men who have made a life out of cricket but may not have a life outside of cricket. It is a poignant difference.

For three years, I helped look after the cricketers who were coming through the Centre of Excellence (formerly Cricket Academy) who were resident on campus at Griffith University. To their credit, Cricket Australia runs some excellent educational programs to help these cricketers with life skills, not just cricket ones. I witnessed many young men who realised that cricket was a precious gift and they treated it as such. There were also a small minority who treated their talent as a birthright. Cricket owed them but they never saw that it could also own them.

These young stars of the future are acutely aware of their earning potential. It is a ‘front-end loaded’ career that promises great wealth. Some of them, sadly, never grasp the complexity of the symbiotic relationship between talent, commercial success, sponsorships, media attention and ultimately, a loss of privacy.

Put simply, one cannot expect to volunteer for a life in the spotlight (note, I deliberately said “volunteer”) and then expect a life of relative anonymity whenever it suits. Any celebrity will tell you that. The minute you cash those cheques, you agree to a life as more than just an on-field gladiator. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Sponsors can be ruthless paymasters.

It is this sort of attention that threatens to end the career of a wonderful cricketer. By all accounts, Symonds just wants to be left alone to hunt pigs, catch fish and hit big sixes. Perhaps he never quite understood that life in the spotlight is not that simple. By virtue of his aura and presence, sought by advertisers and seduced by managers, Symonds is now public property. He is not the first sports star to resent that. He won’t be the last.

The word on the streets of Brisbane is that this is no ransom note or false alarm. His confusion is genuine and his anger at being dropped from the Australian team is very real. No one knows whether he will walk away or return to thrill us again. He’s a special talent and will be a loss to the game. He needs a good friend whom he trusts to remind him that there will always be plenty of fish in the sea but his career needn’t sink to the bottom of the ocean just yet.

	Bradman has been a legend to me for over 40 years, since I started reading Wisden at age 10 or 11 © Getty Images

On Wednesday last week, August 27th, our Cricinfo ‘handler’ Avi sent us four ‘Different Strokers’ a message asking “No Bradman tributes?”, and reading in full “I must say I’m a little surprised.” Fox has now admirably filled the gap, but my first reaction to Avi was surprise of my own, as it had never occurred to me to write something about Bradman, that day or any other. Avi’s message made me wonder why I had not thought of it – as a cricket-obsessive with a cricket blog, should I have written a tribute, or at least thought of it? The result of my self-reflection is my own small and indirect tribute to the Don.

Bradman has been a legend to me for over 40 years, since I started reading Wisden at age 10 or 11. Of course I’ve only ever seen him bat in some film footage, but I own several auto- and biographies and have read dozens of articles. I can reel off a list of his achievements, and just recently was amazed to learn from "The List that he was top run-getter in only 6 of his 11 Test series. He was outscored five times? By whom? But until last week I would not have been sure of his birth-year, let alone his birth-date.

In fact, the only cricketers whose birthdays I do know are Wasim Akram – because he shares mine – and the Waugh twins, because they’re the day before. I admired all three in different ways, so I enjoy this coincidence. But in general cricketers’ birthdays seem irrelevant, even if their age is not.

On the other hand, I do remember the birthdays of my two lodestars as an economist – Marx and Keynes – and also the years of their birth and death. Every year on May 5 and June 5 respectively, I figuratively tip my hat. And earlier this year, the celebration of Mandela’s 90th birthday, outside South Africa as well as within, felt entirely appropriate.

So why no Bradman tribute? I think it has to do with ‘identity’, about how I see myself, and particularly about the ways in which icons shape identity and vice versa. There is a difference between heroes and icons. Heroes – like Steve Waugh – are people whom one can aspire to emulate, because for all their qualities and achievements, they are flesh and blood, with human imperfections and limits. (And in the TV age are not limited to one’s own nation, as Fox correctly pointed out.) Icons have transcended all that, and moved into the realm of mythology and faith, as the repositories of our hopes and fears, and via their reflected glory, of how we want to be seen by ourselves and especially others.

The iconic realm is where we find Mandela of course, whose iconic status is a core part not only of our South African national founding myth, but also of the global myth of harmony between races. For me as fundamentally a left-leaning political economist, it is also the realm of Marx and Keynes, but this is far from a universal view, to put it mildly.

The iconic is also the realm of Bradman. But not for me. Bradman seems to be iconic for Australians in the way Mandela is for South Africans, a central player in the national founding myth. (The Charles Williams biography is a brilliant discussion of that point.) And as the greatest player who ever lived, he is iconic for the ‘cricket world’, in the way that Mandela is for the human race, or at least for humanists and non-racists.

After the Mandela moment last July, I did not feel that Australia went over the top about Bradman last week. But since I’m not Australian, any piece I might have written would have been because cricket is a core part of my identity. So I conclude that not autonomously writing a Bradman tribute means that I do not see myself as entirely within the cricket world. I may be a cricket-obsessive and I may be helping in a very marginal way to produce the ‘cricket world.’ But I am not a cricket fanatic or fundamentalist, it is not a religion for me. This little self-discovery, about something I think about every day, is rather comforting.

So, Avi, I hope that explains it. It’s not about the Don, he’s right up there in the pantheon.