India's tour of Australia may have produced the most riveting cricket in recent times, but it has also spewed venom, anger, even hatred, thereby making it deserving enough to put it in a leaky time capsule and bury it deep somewhere, writes Harsha Bhogle in the Indian Express. Matthew Hayden's 'obnoxious weed' comment on Harbhajan Singh and MS Dhoni's suggestion that youngsters need to learn the art of sledging doesn't do the game any credit. He calls on the ICC to step forward and just ban sledging.

And yet, unwittingly, Hayden may have done us a favour for he has surely taken the game closer to the “zero-tolerance” on sledging that the ICC so happily endorsed last week. It can no longer remain on the agenda, it can no longer require another meeting to endorse. It must be done today. Cricket is on the path to hatred and the ICC needs to pull it back now.

There aren't too many cricketing memories to list under February 29, Leap Day. But for Kenya and (West Indies) it's a day they won't forget any time soon. Mid-Day's sports editor Clayton Murzello remembers when he was assigned to cover the World Cup game 12 years ago.

In the press box, the Kenyans were willed on by a new set of fans — greenhorns and veteran scribes. At the pavilion end, a group of Kenyan students joined the build-up to one of cricket’s biggest upsets. The organisers had thrown open the gates for the second half of the match.

Odumbe led the charge and sent back Chanderpaul, Adams and Roger Harper. Rajab had not finished for the day. Cuffy became his third victim, the last wicket to fall.

Suddenly, the atmosphere was electric. The Kenyans leapt, ran and yelled in ecstasy. If India beating the West Indies in the 1983 World Cup final was a shocker, this was another one which proved sport has little respect for reputation.

Murzello also interviews Leap Day-born Australian cricketer Gavin Stevens.

Peter Roebuck writes in the Sydney Morning Herald the “moment of decision has come” for Australia and India.

These two cricketing nations must find a way to live together and play against each other without creating these foolish disturbances. A choice must be made. There are only two viable positions: either everything goes or nothing goes.

The Age reports on the reaction to Matthew Hayden’s “obnoxious weed” comments in India and Peter Hanlon looks at the end of an embittered summer.

However, Mark Taylor, speaking to the Daily Telegraph, says this season has been the best he has witnessed as a commentator.

"You'd have to go back to those West Indies days of the late '80s and early '90s where there was fierce competition and also a fair bit of animosity to match the same intense rivalry today."

Why did Hayden do it? Kadambari Murali has her say in the Hindustan Times.

There was no earthly reason for a smart, experienced player like Hayden to make obnoxious comments on public radio about an Indian player or make fun of another. If you hear the show, you’ll hear him trying to mimic Ishant Sharma’s accent and manner of speaking and given the current atmosphere, that isn’t fun and games, it’s racial. Period.

David Hopps, of the Guardian, believes 'remorseless Hayden revels in bad reputation.'

It is striking behaviour from a man who talks regularly about himself as a committed Christian; presumably more fundamentalist than pacifist. He has just won an award as Australia's best one-day player of the year. His outburst has received predictable approval from many Australian sports fans on web forums.

..He revels in his reputation as Australia's most unforgiving on-field sledger - many England players privately view him as a loudmouthed bully - and now it seems that he intends to rubbish some opponents off the field as well as on it.

'Agent-sharks and youngsters with 'attitood' have queered the pitch for India's promising cricketers,' writes Dileep Premachandran in his Guardian blog.

It was a mundane party in the middle of another nondescript one-day series, and the conversation was inanity itself. A young man who had played for India for a couple of seasons was part of our group, and speaking shyly about his chances of playing in the final that weekend. Out of nowhere, his agent stepped in and caught his eye. "I've got two girls arranged at an apartment," he said, oblivious of the fact that there were at least four others listening in. The player's face went pale, and he was quiet for a good few seconds. "Come on, let's go," said the agent. The player was hardly the picture of enthusiasm, and pointing to his India blazer, he said: "I can't come wearing this."

The agent just laughed. "Don't worry, I've got a change of clothes for you in the car," he said. And that was that. Within five minutes, the two of them had left. The player did little of note in a final that India lost miserably, and it's fair to say that his on-off career has hardly scaled any great heights in the half-decade since he was whisked off into the night.

In the Hindustan Times Pradeep Magazine writes that Mahendra Singh Dhoni is the "new Ganguly of Indian cricket."

He did not want seniors in the team and stuck to his guns, much to the chagrin of many. For many, former captain Sourav Ganguly is his mentor. Yet when it came to what he thought was the future of his team, he shunted him out. Today, after the openers' failures, is he missing the presence of Ganguly? Going by what one can read of the man, certainly not. He would rather lose, backing his gameplan than compromise on what he believes is the way ahead.

In many ways, he is the new Ganguly of Indian cricket. May be much calmer from the outside, but someone who is going to be there for those on whom he has faith. Ganguly, through his steadfast support to those who were talented and his aggressive approach, transformed the Indian team.

R Kaushik, writing in the Deccan Herald, dwells on the rapid rise of Dhoni.

Superstars aren't shown the door; time waits for them to call it quits, however belated that might be. To go against the grain, therefore, and insist on the blooding of youth at the expense of some of the biggest names to have graced the cricket firmament called for not just immense conviction, but also great courage. To the cynical several, Dhoni’s successful push for the infusion of young blood was a pointer to his rapidly growing clout within the establishment.

R Kaushik, of the Deccan Herald, writes that "From a very early age, Tendulkar worked out that the best way to silence criticism was to score runs. Not even 18 years of non-stop adulation bordering on worship has spoilt Tendulkar."

Malcolm Conn writes in the Australian the country's players are frustrated with Cricket Australia over its lack of support through a regularly heated campaign against India. The latest incident came when Matthew Hayden was reprimanded for calling Harbhajan Singh an “obnoxious weed”.

The players are annoyed that Cricket Australia continues to kowtow to a constantly threatening and whining Board of Control for Cricket in India despite India maintaining its reputation as the worst behaved team in the world.

	© Getty Images

Ryder, the fat boy made good in a sport where the levels of fitness required are now considerable, became an instant hero. A Test place beckoned for he played the ball late, technically better than a mere beefy biffer. A bit like Marcus Trescothick thought some. Then, in the Stock Exchange bar in Christchurch, he blew it.

On Monday, Ryder was paraded for the media, arm heavily in a sling, and the sight of his sad, bloated face mumbling out his prepared statement of contrition was genuinely one of pathos. Clearly he was embarrassed, although it was hard to tell if this was because of the deed or the public exposure.

Ryder drinks heavily after games but does so beforehand too. I asked one player about a report I'd heard that he was knocking back tequila slammers in the early hours before a Twenty20 international, and was told that this was the tip of the iceberg and by no means a one-off.

As might any young person who feels the need to drink to excess, often alone, into the small hours, Ryder needs help more than condemnation. This is not to suggest that efforts have not been made, because the cricket authorities of both Central Districts and Wellington have sought to help him, but he has not responded

Antigua’s Recreation Ground was host to some of international cricket’s classic moments, from Brian Lara’s 400 to Viv Richard’s brutal 56-ball hundred. But now it lies forgotten and forlorn, a victim of the obsession with building new, largely characterless, stadiums for last year’s World Cup.

In the Daily Telegraph, Nick Hoult visited the ARG.

The once famous ground is now only used for local football matches, and even hosted a state funeral two weeks ago. The outfield is overgrown and the centre circle cuts across the pitch on which Lara twice set the record for the highest ever Test innings.

It is ironic that the construction of the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium has robbed the ARC of international cricket. The groundstaff for many years were inmates from the local jail, where Viv's father Malcolm was a warden.

Dale Steyn talks of his form over the last year, of Morne Morkel's Twenty20 World Cup performance and his plans to go fishing in Chittagong in this interview with the Dhaka-based Daily Star.

There are always other guys coming through, other bowlers like Morne Morkel who basically does the same thing as me … bowls fast. You can never think that your spot is guaranteed. It's good to have pressure from underneath, knowing that there is someone who can take your place.

Saad Shafqat writes in the Pakistan daily, Dawn that it makes no sense for Australia to single out Pakistan as a country they are unwilling to tour for security reasons. Since 9/11 Australia are the only team not to visit Pakistan.

The reality behind the canard of safety and security is that Australia have never liked coming here to begin with. Cricket may be a global family, but Pakistan is its poor relative, living in a poor, rough neighbourhood. As with any poor neighbourhood, the place struggles with its reputation. So rich relatives like Australia, nestled in material comforts and stable circumstances, have been loath to visit.

Pick any cricket autobiography from Australia, New Zealand or England, and it will make a point to complain about the drudgery of touring Pakistan. The playing conditions are alien, and there are no bars or nightlife to liven up the evenings. That the cricket can provide intense and satisfying competition doesn’t seem to enter the equation.

Ricky Ponting’s wife showed off her baby bump as the partners of Australia’s players had their moment on the red carpet at the Allan Border Medal. For the lowdown on the WAGs go here and take a look at our photo gallery. A report on Brett Lee’s medal win is here.

Two of New South Wales’ brightest young players have come a long way since Moises Henriques Mankaded Usman Khawaja in the first game they played together. In the Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Stevenson takes a look at the duo’s development, which peaked with a dramatic 90-run partnership against Victoria.

The 21-year-olds - Khawaja was born in Pakistan and Henriques in Portugal - might be an emblematic pair showing off a new face of Australian cricket. They might be great mates who've known each other since they were 10, who've played junior cricket together for Australia and who share a burning ambition to wear the baggy green. But not all the history is good.

"We didn't get along too well to start off," Henriques says in masterly understatement. "The first game we played against each other 'Ussie' kept backing up two or three metres as I was bowling, so, not really knowing the rules, I Mankaded him and he was given out."

Khawaja, who went into the match with two centuries under his belt, didn't say much - and not just because he's too well brought up. "I think he was crying," Henriques says. "Yeah, there might have been something like that," admits Khawaja, who still has a video of the incident. Friendship came soon after.

	The world's rushing to India © Getty Images

In the past week we've just watched the cricketing world being turned topsy-turvy in front of our eyes, says Paran Balakrishnan in the New Zealand Herald.

Once upon a time the greatest dream of any Indian cricketer was to spend the summer playing with an English county team, getting a taste of pace bowling and walking on the field with big hitters from around the world.

Now many of the world's top cricketers will be picking up their kit and converging on the subcontinent for 45 days a year. They'll brave the Indian summer and the other attendant dangers of living in this part of the world, like the much-feared Delhi Belly. They'll learn to drink only bottled water and avoid raw food if they want to stay healthy - yep, that means no salads.

Balakrishnan highlights the influence of Lalit Modi, the BCCI vice-president and the IPL's chairman and commissioner.

Modi brought together an unbeatable combination of India's two loves - movies and cricket. So you had movie superstar Shah Rukh Khan as a team owner bidding for cricketers like India's one-day captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

The impact that the IPL will have on the game is being debated in depth since last week's player auction. Opinions vary from mild concern to a complete breakdown of cricket as we know it. In The Times, Christopher Martin-Jenkins says there is a threat to Test cricket if the Twenty20 machine isn't carefully managed but it should be possible to strike a balance.

There are exciting aspects to the IPL, of course, especially for the lucky few players involved. Twenty20 is still cricket, after all, and the game has always had to keep up with social trends to remain vibrant. But too much will breed contempt. The new beast can still be controlled. The primacy of international cricket, and especially of Test cricket (albeit probably played over four days rather than five), is worth fighting for.

According to an editorial in the Business Standard, the IPL is a safe bet for the team franchises and the real test would be for the broadcasters.

The real risk has been taken by the TV company that has committed a little over a billion dollars for TV rights over the next decade. Over the same 10 years, the team owners will get their lion’s share of TV sponsorship fees (80 per cent for the first five years, 60 per cent for the next five) and the title sponsorship fee (60 per cent) which is to be paid by DLF. Each team owner therefore stands to get a guaranteed share of between $80 million and $100 million over 10 years — which makes the teams themselves virtually free for some of the less ambitious bidders (even the highest team bid, by Mukesh Ambani, was for $111.9 million). The team owners also get access to all on-ground and local revenues as well as the obvious branding opportunities, all of which taken together should be comfortably enough to pay the players’ fees (a total of between $3 million and $5 million per team). After 10 years, team ownership is there in perpetuity without any further charges. So what might have seemed like a flaky play by movie stars and cash-rich businessmen is in fact a pretty safe bet.

Subir Gokarn, writing in the Business Standard, dwells on the Indian Premier League and its possible ramifications to the game of cricket as we know.

The main threat comes from the duration of the league and the density of the scheduling. Forty-four days may be a good starting point, but can hardly become a permanent timeframe. The franchise will have to be expanded to at least twice the current number of teams over the next couple of years and the frequency of games will have to be reduced to mitigate viewer fatigue. Realistically, this means at least a four to five-month season every year, which will both eat into the domestic schedules for many countries and reduce the time available for the international calendar, which is set up by the International Cricket Conference several years in advance. If the IPL is to work financially, it cannot but challenge the ICC’s international schedule.

Alokananda Chakraborty, of the Financial Express, believes the IPL will bring back the magic of television.

Writing in the Mint, Ramesh Ramanathan believes the real transformational change in India’s debate on a market-based economy didn’t announce itself on the front page of politics or economics, but sneaked in last week through the back door of the sports pages.

“The untold story is how an opaque monopolist such as BCCI was forced to respond by the competitive threat created by Subash Chandra’s ICL (Indian Cricket League).”
Wait until the tournaments actually start. Imagine the Kolkata cricket team and what it’s going to do to the political debate in that state in the coming years: The aam aadmi lining up to watch his city team promoted by a Bollywood badshah, funded by market capital, featuring marquee players from across the world, and undertaking a daily mark-to-market on Sourav Ganguly. A thousand Montek Ahluwalias couldn’t have managed to pull this off in a 100 years, bringing the common man into the complicated conversation on markets and society.

Srinivasan Ramani, writing in the Post, says the IPL is as skewed as the system. He compares it with the "well-oiled structures" of club-based sports in USA, Spain and Japan.

	© Getty Images

Sanjay Manjrekar lists Tendulkar's statistics when chasing and wonders why "no one wants to talk about Sachin's failures." Read the piece in the Times of India.

In the last 51 One-day internationals, Tendulkar’s batting average when he bats first is 62.10 in 24 innings. In contrast when he bats second, it’s 26.00 in 27 innings. After a brilliant Test series, it’s not so much his form in this One-day series that is the concern but his contribution, at that crucial opening position when India is set bigger targets to chase. If you look at it, it’s a simple batting issue that the maestro along with the team management should professionally address.

But with Tendulkar, it’s like the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.

Asking Tendulkar to bat down the order could help India do better, writes Peter Roebuck in Mumbai-based Mid-Day.

Whereas most batsmen move their back foot across their stumps and into line, he gives himself room to play off-side strokes by leaving his right leg in its original perch. That makes him vulnerable to break-backers.

As a result, Tendulkar has been dismissed clean bowled and leg before a remarkable number of times. Often he finds himself forced to play across the ball. His front leg obstructs his bat and causes him to miss deliveries darting back. In his pomp he could adjust his shot and flick the ball away with a late roll of the wrist reminiscent of Viv Richards. But his peak has passed.

Former Indian captain Suni Gavaskar also feels it's time the team changed the batting order.

... which would mean having Gambhir open with Sehwag and Uthappa at three with Tendulkar at four What this will do is protect Tendulkar and Sharma from the moving ball. Dhoni has shown been bold to send Pathan at three and if he shows the same attitude, India may well be able to get a batting order that actually bats deep rather than just being strong on paper.

Read his column in the Hindustan Times for more.

In the midst of Ricky Ponting’s century at the SCG, one act of sportsmanship passed almost unnoticed, Peter Roebuck writes in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Ponting could not avoid his partner's shot and diverted the ball into an unpatrolled area. Since the collision was unintentional and the stroke was heading towards long-on, the Australians were entitled to take a run. Instead, the home captain sent his colleague back. It was a small act that passed almost unnoticed. But it showed a sense of fair play. It was the conduct of a man determined to win but not at any price.

Ponting’s men might have fetched big money in the Indian Premier League auction but as Chloe Saltau reports in the Age, they could earn $20 million for a single Twenty20 match if Allen Stanford’s latest plan gets off the ground.

Not for the first time English cricket is being left behind as the rest of world is swamped by the riches of the IPL. Due to their touring commitments and county season no England players have yet to join the IPL, buy as Scyld Berry reports in The Sunday Telegraph that could be about to change.

It is only a matter of time - and a few days at that - before English cricketers join the IPL and miss the start of the coming county season. England's top 12 players are on central contracts so they won't be going anywhere except New Zealand in the next few weeks. But that leaves several marketable players who are currently being tempted by offers.

And he says that "when (not if)" players begin to sign it will test the county's attitudes towards the IPL.

There is simply no precedent for a county player going off to play somewhere else during the county season: it is only recently that the economies of the East have boomed.

In The Observer, Jamie Jackson tries to make sense of all the goings on of the past weeks and speaks to some of the main men involved.

Modi, though, hardly seems to care. In a further indication of just who now holds the power in world cricket, he was dismissive of the ICC's proposal, tabled on Thursday, that an official window for the IPL should not be created in the international calendar.

This is due to be ratified next month, but Modi is not moved. 'I'm not concerned. Most countries' season ends in March, apart from the West Indies and England,' he says, apparently dismissive that English cricket's pre-season will prevent Kevin Pietersen and company playing unless an official window is created. 'Our time of year [for the IPL] has traditionally been free, it is a natural window - and I'm sure that will stay.'

	Who wouldn't pay to watch this man in action? © Getty Images

Andrew Symonds has often been likened to Viv Richards, and the West Indian legend is not surprised by the Australian allrounder's price at the Indian Premier League auction. He tells the Sydney Morning Herald:

"I am a great fan of Andrew Symonds, his fielding and the way in which he plays his cricket, with that sort of aggression. Having people like that on board is certainly going to add to the [Indian Premier League] razzamatazz. So if I was as well-connected as those individuals [the league's franchise owners] in business, with the funds they have, why not?"

The Sunday Telegraph says it discontinuing Symonds' column after Cricket Australia gagged it twice.

In the same newspaper, Stephen Corby recounts his experience of playing park cricket against Brett Lee, Stuart Clark, Nathan Bracken, Darren Lehmann and Stuart MacGill.

	Support for Mumbai, Jaipur or India? © Getty Images

Since discovering its own value, Indian cricket has courted money often to the exclusion of all else. The IPL auction was the logical extension of this love affair with the free market, says Sharda Ugra in India Today.

IPL franchises are now left holding their big brood of babies. They have their teams, their teams have an event that begins in less than two months. Already some are feeling frazzled. A Delhi insider said all team owners wanted was to get the first tournament under way and over with.

The impact of such money on young cricketers who traditionally dreamed only of playing Tests for their country is yet to be seen, but they may now go to sleep dreaming of the incredible riches to be made in the short-form competition, says Peter Lalor in the Australian.

Sorry for being a voice of dissent in these times when everyone wants to celebrate the power of India’s cricket economy, writes Kunal Pradhan in the Indian Express, but true loyalty is not easy to buy — especially not in a country such as ours, where cricket is linked so closely with national pride.

Liverpool fans who went to Istanbul, despite 21 years of despair, for the Champions League final against AC Milan in 2004, will tell you. Boston Red Sox fans, who waited 86 seasons at Fenway Park for a World Series title, will tell you some more. They had stuck it out through the bad times; that’s why they wept on the streets in the good.

Meanwhile in the Week magazine P. Sreevalsan Menon and Neeru Bhatia wonder how the IPL franchisees fill their coffers.

	"It is time to consider what Victor Trumper achieved, to look at the photographs and piece together the way he batted and ask ourselves have we selected the right hero?" © Stamp Publicity (Worthing) Ltd

Mike Coward, writing in the Weekend Australian, tells the story of David Strange, who wants to create a “Trumper Day”.

Strange, 36, married with a three-year-old son named Victor, after the master batsman of the Golden Age, refers to his Trumper passion as a magnificent obsession. "I have to refrain from talking about it all the time," he said.

That Trumper's name has faded from the consciousness of the contemporary cricket follower distresses Strange and he has the backing of the Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust to organise the inaugural Trumper Day for November 2.

"It is curious we have overlooked Trumper," Strange said. "It is time to consider what he achieved, to look at the photographs and piece together the way he batted and ask ourselves have we selected the right hero? While Don Bradman is deservedly loved and respected and will always have a place in the Australian psyche, there are other batsmen out there who can also fit the bill."

	The run struggles of Andrew Symonds and Ricky Ponting continue © Getty Images

It has not been a great time for Australia's batsmen in the CB Series and both Andrew Symonds and Ricky Ponting are suffering from a run drought. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Roebuck details the struggles of Ponting, who "not so long ago a presentable case could be made that he had become the second-best batsman his country has produced."

Now he finds himself scratching around like a backyard chook and relying on more vibrant team-mates to put runs on the board. Doubtless supporters expect more from their captain and heaviest scorer. Old-timers with reliable memories will reflect on their careers and say "welcome to the party!" Hell, Ricky, some of us felt like that all the time.

Just make some runs, is Jon Pierik's advice to Symonds and Co in the Herald Sun.

A report in the same paper says an Australian franchise might be on the cards for the Indian Premier League.

"While a cricketer's value can be determined by a salivating squillionaire, a man's worth can only be determined by his actions," says Andrew Webster in the Sydney Morning Herald while reflecting on Michael's Clarke decision to ignore the Indian Premier League. Webster got hold of a copy of the letter Clarke sent to Lalit Modi, the IPL chairman and commissioner.

"With no disrespect to the IPL, I feel my body and mind needs a break and with the hectic international schedule over the next 18 months, I feel I need to freshen up and a break will do me good," Clarke wrote. "By trying to continue to advance my profile and reputation with the Australian team, I hope to one day become an asset to your tournament.

	Time for some tax calculations © Getty Images

Amol Agarwal wonders whether a Dutch auction would have been better than an English auction - the probable one that was used, when the Indian Premier League's franchises tried to outbid each other in the race for players. To get what that means, read his article on livemint.com.

Another report on livemint.com ponders whether Mahendra Singh Dhoni is a depreciable asset or stock-in-trade?

Ricky Ponting expressed surprise at his rather low price of US$400,000, but the Australian captain could take solace from this statement:

Ponting might have something to cheer after all, although he attracted a surprisingly low bid of $400,000. Even if his Kolkata teammate Murali Kartik, who is not considered good enough to play for India, will get paid $25,000 more than him, Ponting’s take-home package may be higher as IPL’s overseas players have to pay a basic tax rate of just 10% as against the maximum basic income tax rate of 30% Indian players will attract.

	Will fans of the IPL's Delhi franchise be delighted by watching this sight? © AFP

Kunal Pradhan in the Indian Express feels the franchises of the Indian Premier League will have to strive hard to find a following like their counterparts in other sports, since "it takes time — years, decades — to get such loyalty. And it takes as long for that devotion to translate into good business for those who own the clubs from the day of their inception."

He points out that the auction reflected how franchises sought out Indian players, as most Indians would connect with them, and expresses his doubts whether supporters will opt for country over club.

Picture this: if Brett Lee of Mohali is bowling to M.S. Dhoni of Chennai, sitting in the heart of Punjab, whom will you support? Will you feel enough loyalty for your city that you cheer against a national hero? Will you jump up in joy in Jaipur if, with four runs needed to win, Mumbai’s Sachin Tendulkar is caught on the fence by Shane Warne off the last ball of the match?

The entire auction in Mumbai on Wednesday was a reflection of that same national pride. Ishant Sharma was bought for Rs 3.8 crore and Ricky Ponting for 1.6, Rohit Sharma went for Rs 3.1 crore and Matthew Hayden for 1.5. Corporate India showed where its priorities lay. They wanted crowd pullers, not necessarily the best team available. Nationalism was the mantra, not cricketing logic.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his boys might have done world cricket a disservice by winning the Twenty20 Cup in South Africa last year, says Suresh Menon in his blog on espnstar.com. The same generated a buzz around Twenty20, and was perhaps the prime driver behind the formation of the IPL. He voices his concern:

If the 44-day tournament (where the top players will make crores of rupees) is a success, then it is not difficult to see India nudging the world in the direction of Twenty20 cricket - to the detriment of one-day internationals and Test cricket.

A reduction in the number of ODIs may not be a bad thing, but if Test cricket and all that it stands for begins to disappear, then the harm done to the game will be incalculable.

The thought of the market deciding what form of the game should survive is at once scary and abhorrent. No sport can be about making money alone. That is why cricket boards, and indeed the ICC itself needs to be old-fashioned and consider themselves the custodians of the game rather than boardrooms where men in suits squeeze every last penny out of it.

Read Harsha Bhogle's take on the same.

	Dilip Sardesai was paid Rs 150 for his first Test in 1961 © Playfair Cricket Monthly

Cricket has always been burdened by a myth: unlike other competitive sports, we were told, cricket and the men who played the game were doing it for the ‘love’ of the sport. So while footballers were being transferred by clubs for millions of dollars, golfers and racing car drivers were millionaires, cricketers were expected to be amateurs playing a sport for the sheer joy of it. In India, this meant that you were employed in a 9 to 5 job by a public sector bank or through the ‘charity’ of a benevolent business house like the Tatas, even while you sweated it out on the field. Wearing the India cap made the size of your bank balance irrelevant. A Vinoo Mankad was actually dropped from the Indian team for a tour of England in 1952 because he had the ‘temerity’ to try and earn a living by playing professional cricket for a Lancashire club.

In the same paper Pradeep Magazine asks if cricket in India has entered an age of sponsored gambling.

The editors at the Hindu warn that the fears of Twenty20 cannibalising the classical Test format and IPL compounding player burnout are real. The most optimistic view of the IPL, according to them, is of it as a means of induction and culling:

Young cricketers yet to make the grade benefit from competing against the world’s best while those on their last legs refrain from unnecessarily prolonging their international careers.

The Indian Premier League has been shopping for players; India’s cricketers have been shopping for clothes. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph is impressed by their spending habits.

Sachin Tendulkar, Harbhajan Singh and Yuvraj Singh turned heads on trendy Oxford St when they walked into the Ed Hardy store in Paddington. In the end, the men, who play Australia on Sunday at the SCG, left with a whopping bill of A$9120.

The IPL will make the Packer years look like a storm in a teacup, writes Peter Roebuck in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Cricket is undergoing a radical change, the second in its history. Far from being a passing phase, the franchise system launched in India recently will spread. Before long, Pakistan, South Africa, the West Indies and Sri Lanka will have their own franchises in place. Within a decade the entire structure of cricket will have changed beyond recognition.

In his column in the Australian, Ricky Ponting indicates Andrew Symonds, who was signed for a US$1.35 million in the IPL's players' auction, has been at the receiving end of jokes, but also voices serious concerns over the impact the tournament will have.

Symonds embodies the confused state of world cricket, Greg Baum writes in the Age.

He is, in two senses, wanted in India. He is wanted as a villain is wanted, as he was in India last year when the crowds turned on him, and again in January for his part in the Harbhajan affair. He also is wanted in the meaning of desired; he was the second-most expensive player in Wednesday's unprecedented auction. Symonds' head must be spinning.

In the Australian Malcolm Conn takes aim at the ICC over its lack of action over creating a window for the Indian Premier League.

Long tresses, spiked hair, ear studs, shaved chests - ever since the Indian Under-19 cricketers in Malaysia heard their matches would be shown live on TV back home, they've gone into overdrive enhancing their appearances. Sandeep Dwivedi of the Indian Express catches up with the fashion-conscious cricketers.

Just before a batsman is about to go onto the field, he gets a few last-minute instructions from a teammate. Along with the usual ‘stay cool, play your natural game,’ there is a small bit of advice delivered in half-jest. “And don’t forget to take off your helmet when you complete your 50. How else can everyone at home see your new hairstyle?” he sniggers.

The Indian Premier League auctions felt “grubby” for the Age’s Greg Baum, who asks who will care about the tournament?

Sport is at its best when spectators feel that players share their cause. IPL cricketers will have time only to learn to love their pay clerks and their first-class seats on the first flight out. The usual tired arguments have been advanced about how sportsfolk have only a small window of opportunity and cannot be blamed for making the most of it. But it is not as if any of yesterday's stock was facing a life of destitution.

The trend of India's cricketers lapping up the lion's share of the money is sure to startle even those who have been tracking this business closely, and anger some Australian cricketers, writes Anand Vasu in the Hindustan Times.

It defied cricketing logic that Yusuf Pathan was sold for more than Ponting, that someone like Ishant Sharma, the flavour of the day but very much a greenhorn still, came in at close to a million dollars.

In the same paper, Atreyo Mukhopadhyay catches up with Manoj Tiwary in Australia who talks about his ambitions as an IPL recruit and what a startling figure like $6,75,000 means for a youngster who has witnessed financial strife.

Thoughts of buying a house for his parents who "struggled a lot to educate their three sons in an English medium school", were obviously there as was the plan to give shape to certain other dreams. Also, there was a promise to help others chase their dreams.

Michael Clarke put that into perspective this week when he said that he'd rather save himself for Australia and spend downtime taking his old man fishing. England's Alastair Cook said he was well enough remunerated for playing for England, and it was not as if he had grown up dreaming of playing for Mohali.

The Courier-Mail surveys five sporting figures on the impact of Twenty20.

Allan Border, who appears in Adelaide’s Advertiser, believes India currently has “too much to say in matters”.

The bids have begun in the Indian Premier League auction, with vast sums of money exhanging hands while franchises scramble to outbid each other for the Dhonis, Symonds and Dravids of the world. But which poor soul has to make sense of this madness? Richard Madley, a lifelong Glamorgan supporter, and the main auctioneer.

Madley, an auctioneer with Dreweatts, the British firm, will handle today's sale of 79 cricketers to the eight franchises in the Indian Premier League (IPL), the new Twenty20 competition that will start on April 18, and anticipation has become feverish.

“I've just been mobbed outside the hotel,” Madley said yesterday. “They say that cricket is a religion here, but it appears to be a bit more than that.”

Patrick Kidd has the full piece in today's Times

The news that Brad Haddin and Mitchell Johnson have turned down the chance to play in the IPL comes like a gust of fresh breeze, writes Sharda Ugra in her India Today blog.

The cynical will say that they have missed the bus to the next big thing in cricket. But what the three Aussies with the best of their careers ahead of them have done is make an eloquent choice between, 'cash and country', to use the words from Symonds' latest column. At the very least, they have also earned the right to express outrage at cricket's cash-rich fat cats.

In the Hindustan Times Anand Vasu speaks to Yogesh Shetty, the CEO of the GMR Group that owns Delhi Daredevils.

Chloe Saltau, writing in the Melbourne-based Age, on Michael Clarke putting his country and family ahead of money.

Shane Warne will leave his former team-mates in the shade by commanding the highest reserve price at today's historic player auction in India, say Robert Craddock and Jon Pierik in the Courier Mail.

Mumbai tabloid Mid-Day tells you why the Indian Premier League will stump you even before the first ball is bowled

John Inverdale in his excellent Daily Telegraph column ponders some other moments of sporting ignominy in the light of Bermuda women's losing inside four balls on Monday. He highlights the game which every stats-obsessed schoolboy football fanatic should recall – Bon Accord’s record 36-0 defeat by Arbroath in the Scottish FA Cup – and offers a new insight … they were actually a cricket club.

The invitation back then should have been sent to Orion FC in Aberdeen, but in a heartening reminder that misdirected post is not an invention of the recent past, it was sent inadvertently to the Orion Cricket Club. Obviously eyeing a spot as a trivial pursuit question in perpetuity, they decided to accept the offer of an away trip to Arbroath, called themselves Bon Accord FC, and arrived without kit or, as history recounts, much talent.

Reading about the match, an enduring image is of the Arbroath goalkeeper called James Milne, who clearly served as an inspiration for Steve McLaren all those years later, because he borrowed an umbrella from a spectator and sheltered beneath it during the match as the rain lashed down on his penalty area while all the action took place at the other end.

Peter Lalor, writing in the Australian, looks at the reduction in one-day totals since the Twenty20 World Cup.

It might be the bowlers, the batsmen, the balls or the pitches, but whatever the explanation the facts remain clear: this summer's one-day international series is in the middle of a run drought so severe Al Gore could include it in his next film ... Six months after the ICC introduced a rule to change the ball after the 35th over, an extra power play and allowed a free shot after a no-ball, the batsmen who dominated the game are in such bad touch the administrators might have to ban swing bowling.

It’s a travesty that a bowler reported for chucking is sent to the NCA, gets cleared and returns, only to be reported again, writes Makarand Waingankar in the Hindu.

There have been more than a dozen bowlers reported for suspect action and though one of them, Mohnish Parmar, is an offspinner from Gujarat, he has been picked for the Duleep Trophy final in place of classical offie Ramesh Powar.

Having helped England's women side retain the Ashes, Kolkata-born Isa Guha speaks to the Telegraph's Amit Roy about her Indian connection.

Asked whether Isa was English or Bengali, her father Barun thought for a moment before replying: “She is 75 per cent English, 25 per cent Bengali. She cannot speak Bengali but she understands Bengali. She loves to come to Calcutta, and meet all her relations. May be the next trip will be at Christmas.”

Adam Gilchrist is surely the flavour of the season. Jamie Pandaram reports the wicketkeeper-batsman will be one of the keenly-contested players during the Indian Premier League's auction on Wednesday. He writes in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Indians Sourav Ganguly and Yuvraj Singh may combine to make Gilchrist the highest-paid Australian player to bolster their own pockets.

Maths and music have long been linked, but composers seem to have a talent for cricket, writes David McKie in the Guardian. He investigates:

There may be examples lurking in the Wisden Book of Cricketers' Lives, but this has more than 8,000 entries and the only one I've discovered so far is a man called Chadwyck-Healey, "quite well known as a composer of church music". Unfortunately he doesn't seem to have been much of a cricketer: "his enthusiasm greatly exceeded his skill".

The outstanding crossover case in this book is probably Neville Cardus, who within living memory wrote magnificently for the Guardian about both cricket and music. In later years, music seemed the more powerful passion. I can still remember those moments when his handwritten notices would arrive in the features department, brought in by his chauffeur. "From Neville Cardus, Festival Hall", they would say at the top, and at the foot : "please do not cut". One night the concert was cancelled, and his piece of paper proved to be blank; except that it said at the top: "From Neville Cardus, Festival Hall"; and at the bottom, as ever, "Please do not cut".

Australia had their bowlers to thank for their victory over India in Adelaide and Peter Roebuck in the Age considers the poor form of the team's leading batsmen.

Ponting was scratchy. Usually, smartly executed pulls are his damper and vegemite. When he is on song, such shots are lost in the crowd. Now the stroke stood solitary owing to the company it was keeping. Cricket is a tough game and captaincy can be the hardest part. Previously a constant scorer, the Australian captain might find reassurance in the ups and downs endured by counterparts such as Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara. But a man cannot sort out his game until he has cleared his mind.

Andrew Symonds was also tentative. Dangerous in the latter stages of an innings, he has been obliged to bat with more circumspection than befits a player of his power. Batsmen capable of changing the course of a match in 30 minutes are not to be wasted.

	Marcus Trescothick is on tour with Somerset as he rebuilds his life and career © Getty Images

Marcus Trescothick is about to embark on his first overseas tour since he broke down in Australia with a stress-related condition. Peter Hayter, in the Mail on Sunday, finds out more:

And Trescothick, who last played for England in a one-day international against Pakistan in September 2006, admits: "I won't deny I am a little nervous about the prospect.

"I don't want to pre-empt anything, but I know the beast a bit better than I did when I had my troubles in Australia and India. I know the signs and how to work through them.

"I'm feeling well and things are pretty good, so I'm 95 per cent certain that the trip will be all right for me, but it's a big step and I'm not taking anything for granted."

	When it all went wrong: England let their passion overflow in the first two one-dayers © Getty Images

England's morale-boosting win in Auckland was testament to a team at last thinking about their game, and not letting their emotions spill over - as happened in the previous two one-dayers. Mike Atherton writes in the Sunday Telegraph:

Paul Collingwood's young England team went through this Fleming-like rite of passage this week at Hamilton and Auckland. At Hamilton, defending a pitiful total, and having been given a last-minute blast by Collingwood in the now-familiar on-field huddle, England came out snarling, looking for a fight. After every delivery of Ryan Sidebottom's first over, Jesse Ryder was surrounded by a phalanx of fielders with plenty to say. James Anderson backed this up at the other end with a barrage of bouncers, and when Owais Shah dropped Ryder at slip, Sidebottom let rip such a howl of anguish it looked like his head would explode.

For a while this was an England team out of control and in schoolyard bully-mode. No one could accuse them of not caring, or not trying, but they were certainly not thinking. Within two overs, it was clear from the sidelines that the bouncer ploy was misguided and that Brendon McCullum and Ryder were happy to feed off the bouncers to the short, square boundaries. Amid all the hoopla, nobody had the wherewithal to step back from the fray, calm things down and demand a different plan of attack. It was as brainless, as witless a passage of play, as it is possible to see. The intention was to rattle New Zealand, but it was England themselves who were rattled.

England's recovery, for want of a better word, wasn't due to extra nets or a physical thrashing by their New Zealand fitness coach. It was, as Stuart Broad tells Atherton, all about talking:

"It was an open floor. It was a case of has anyone got anything to say because that wasn't good enough and we're going to sort it out now. Colly [Paul Collingwood] had some words. KP [Kevin Pietersen] had some words. And we were just open. Then we sat own in Auckland and vowed to sort it out and come out fighting. It proves what honesty can do."

"I'm happy to contribute to those sorts of forums. The way we did it was very good, splitting up into groups and discussing things. It gets the younger lads involved so that you're not just sat in the corner frightened to say anything. You can get your view across without feeling under pressure to say anything and that's what's fantastic about this team. Everyone is good friends with everyone.

13 months have passed since the Schofield Review dissected English cricket’s failings but, says Stephen Brenkley in the Independent on Sunday, no action has yet been taken about the quantity of cricket being played:

A key component of the Schofield Review, however, was that there should be a reduction in the amount of professional cricket being played, domestically and internationally. Schofield was perfectly candid on the point. The report said: "It is essential the ECB act now."

But England are still tied into an arduous future tours programme – they will have no substantial break until 2010 – and the counties will this season play more cricket than last year, not less. More worrying still, there remain no concrete plans for dividing the World Cup from the away Ashes series. Playing them so close together has affected England badly.

[…]

Morris said: "The critical thing is we have to ensure that our players have the right balance between the amount of time they have to prepare, the amount they play and the amount they rest."

In the same paper Brian Viner compares Ian Botham to Mohammad Ali: two brave sporting icons with fears of vertigo and flying respectively.

	Dav Whatmore: in charge of the Indian U-19 side © Getty Images

On the eve of the Under-19 World Cup in Malaysia, the Indian Express' Sandeep Dwivedi speaks to India’s coach Dav Whatmore about the days ahead.

Also read Dwivedi's profiles of four relative unknowns in the Indian squad.

It's quite unusual for India’s ODI captain MS Dhoni to say "Baap re" in response to some stunning strokeplay. But that's exactly what happened last season at Eden Gardens when Jharkhand was pitted against Bengal in a T20 game. As a number of Tiwary ‘big ones’ disappeared into the stands and fielders were nursing blisters in their palms, Jharkhand was celebrating the spotting of Dhoni II.

One of India's U-19 stars, Ishant Sharma, is now making a big impact in the world stage. Read Rohit Mahajan's profile in the Outlook magazine.

Michel Platini and Zinedine Zidane were probably the greatest footballers to play for France. Eric Cantona holds a French passport but won fame and fortune at Manchester United. Is the IPL going to create cricket's Cantonas, asks Ashok Malik in The Pioneer.

Worried over the lack of worldbeaters in New Zealand? Well, Paul Lewis has a solution in the Herald on Sunday: Get Adam Parore to have a go at them, like he did at Jesse Ryder over his excess kilos, a move which apparently worked wonders. Parore has also congratulated the man whose selection he had questioned.

In the same paper, Mark Richardson deliberates over New Zealand's selection of Daniel Flynn in place of Paul Hitchcock.

In the Sunday Age, John Harms says although Twenty20 and its add-on gimmicks may draw in the masses, the format itself is not appealing and needs to be modified to balance the order between bat and ball.

So much about being at limited-over cricket is now not about the cricket. The short form of the game has become shorter in an attempt to win back the concentration of those attending, and to satisfy the base passions of a particular type of fan.

Paradoxically, though, Twenty20 cricket will be less satisfying in cricketing terms. The contest between bat and ball is skewed. It so favours the batsman. The games will become a poor imitation of baseball.

Daniel Lane talks about cricket's ticking time bomb in the Sun-Herald.

The Indian board has warned Cricket Australia not to cancel its team's tour to Pakistan, which seems under threat over security concerns.

Rajiv Shukla, the BCCI vice-president, was quoted by the Daily Telegraph:

There will be serious consequences because you can't just pull out [of] a committed tour when the host board is giving you assurances about security and so is the government.

If the host board and government is willing to give assurances, you have to accept that. You can't just cancel a confirmed FTP [Future Tours Programme] tour.

In the Australian the columnists Patrick Smith and Mike Coward have different views on the growth of Twenty20. Smith is in favour of the development while Coward is horrified.

“There is room for all types of cricket and the sport must accommodate all of them,” Smith writes. “Twenty20's greatest strength is that it gives access to a new audience. It is attractive to families because it is done with in three hectic hours.”

Coward cannot believe how quickly things have changed.

The avarice and hypocrisy has been breathtaking. Players and governors are kowtowing before the god of mammon and thereby hurting and alienating the loyal shareholders ... Time and again the game's legislators have said the growth of Twenty20 cricket will not be achieved at the expense of the sanctity of Test match cricket.

Yet this week we learn that moves are afoot to revamp existing Test tour itineraries and redesign the future tours program to ensure the Indian Premier League can be held at a dedicated time every year. And the initiative has the blessing of Australia captain Ricky Ponting.

Greg Baum, of the Age, is not impressed either.

Gilchrist this week foresaw that the IPL would act as a kind of benefit for long-servers, hastening them into retirement and so opening up chances for younger players still motivated by Test dreams. It is a naive idea.

At World Series, at the time of the South African rebel tours, the talent followed the money. And this is a generation that has grown up expecting to make money from sporting gifts. Everyone loves TT — now. But remember basketball, the last sport that tarted itself up in tinsel and tassels, and dazzled momentarily, and was going to take over the world, and disappeared faster than you can say "de-fense"? Remember? Remember?

In the same paper, Tim Lane believes the IPL will "succeed or fail in India" and is not sure how the non-Indian followers of the game will take to it.

	Adam Gilchrist reaches his 16th ODI hundred © Getty Images

Adam Gilchrist got to the nets early before his farewell hundred at the WACA, Jon Pierik reports in the Courier-Mail.

More than two hours before play started against Sri Lanka, Gilchrist was working on his timing through repeated throwdowns from coach Tim Nielsen. Frustrated by an unlucky duck at the MCG last Sunday, the soon-to-retire Gilchrist was determined to do well for the last time in his adopted home city of Perth.

Michael Kasprowicz, who retires as a Queensland player on Saturday night, tells the same paper his best ball, sledge and batsman. His biggest regret is never scoring a century.

Peter Roebuck believes Usman Khawaja, who made his first-class debut for New South Wales on Friday, is part of the changing face of cricket in Australia. Read the piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Writing in the New Zealand Herald, Adam Parore offers his tributes to his former team-mate and skipper Stephen Fleming.

"There was a hard core of players in the New Zealand team, strong-minded individuals who needed some handling. Think of Chris Cairns, Dion Nash, Craig McMillan, Nathan Astle, Chris Harris and yours truly ... The couple of years preceding his appointment were turbulent. Things had been difficult when Glenn Turner was coach, but Fleming won the respect of the players."

Parore, who had earlier criticized the selection of Jesse Ryder, saying that international cricket has no place for fat men, offered his congratulations to the young man. " I tip my hat to Jesse Ryder. He copped plenty of flak from me, and others, when he was chosen to play England, but he came in and did exceptionally well in Hamilton. He took the criticism, kept his mouth shut and let his bat do his talking. It's not easy to go out and play in that manner in an ODI. Ryder gave a pretty strong response to those who'd doubted whether he was ready. Good luck to him."

Yuvraj Singh’s life sketch at the moment is incomplete, writes Pradeep Magazine in the Hindustan Times. Whether on completion it will remind people of a genius who lived life on his own terms or of a man who frittered away God’s benedictions, no one knows.

The images of film star Deepika Padukone failing to get a chance to applaud her friend’s stroke play from the galleries did nothing to douse these rumours and as the tour is now almost coming to an end, the man who everyone believed would be the king, has lost his crown even before he could wear it.

	'World cricket needs India and Australia to understand each other and their cultures better' © Getty Images

In course of time, the equivalent of the four hundred yards after a Mumbai traffic signal, there will be order again and people will know where they stand. But while that happens, people will do what they think right. However, they will have to co-exist, like the BMW does with the auto-rickshaw, and to be able to do that they must understand each other, appreciate that they need each other, that everybody has a right to be on the road, and that therefore, one is not necessarily more correct than the other.

The lesson from this year’s tour of Australia is that world cricket needs India and Australia to understand each other and their cultures better. Hawkish, sensationalist, stances don’t help. India has the money, Australia play cricket better and harder than the others, the two need each other. Arranged marriages still work, they are still honourable.

At 17 years and 104 days, Sydney schoolgirl prodigy Ellyse Perry will make cricket history at a fittingly historic venue when she pits her all-round talents against the Ashes holders at Bradman Oval in Bowral as the youngest Australian Test cricketer. The Sydney Morning Herald has more.

"I was in year nine at Pymble Ladies' College, and I like to follow women's cricket as much as I can, so I was at home cheering the girls on"

Adam Gilchrist is set to play his final match in front of his adopted home ground, the WACA, when he takes guard against Sri Lanka today. The crowd which booed Gilchrist more than 13 years ago in his first game for Western Australia, as a replacement for local legend Tim Zoehrer, will give him a very different reception. And the emotion is hitting him by the day, says Ricky Ponting. Read on in the Australian.

"He probably won't like me saying this but when I was batting in Sydney during the second game against Sri Lanka, in the middle of one of the overs he came down and had a bit of a chat. "He looked at me and said, 'I'm going to miss this. I'm going to miss being out here with you and I'm going to miss all the good times we've had on the field'.

A report in The Times says that MCC and Middlesex are considering a merger to create a team that would reduce the gap between first-class and Test cricket. Middlesex have been tenants at Lord's since 1877 and the idea would be use MCC's wealth and expertise to form, what MCC chief executive Keith Bradshaw has billed, "The Manchester United of cricket". Ivo Tennant has the full story.

MCC, which owns Lord’s and has a missionary role in Britain and overseas – and does not play in any established competition – would become the dominant partner in the pooling of resources and assets...

It would tie in with the planned £100 million development of Lord’s, which may incorporate an academy for promising cricketers. “Keith and I will be looking at all options over the next year,” Vinny Codrington, the Middlesex secretary, said. “We have to have an open and honest debate.”

There are 480 letters, 59 words, 15 members and one team, writes GS Vivek in the Indian Express. With an average of 32 letters per name, this team is the longest named international cricket team, which contains 23 of the 26 alphabets in the English dictionary except q, x and z.

Uda Walawwe Mahim Bandaralage Chanaka Asanka Welegedera is the cricketer with the longest initials in world cricket and has one more than existing record holder Warnakulasuriya Patabendige Ushantha Joseph Chaminda Vaas.

	Perth was not very appealing on the first couple of occasions Adam Gilchrist played there © Getty Images

John Townsend, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, looks at Adam Gilchrist’s introduction to Perth, the city where he would make his home after moving from New South Wales.

The first time Gilchrist played at the WACA, his New South Wales team was thrashed within two days and team-mate Greg Matthews was badly bashed by a nightclub bouncer. The first time Gilchrist appeared at the ground as a Western Australia player, he was booed all the way to the middle and for much of the match by a home crowd angry that local hero Tim Zoehrer had been axed to make way for him.

However, Gilchrist says the Perth crowd helped mould him for the international scene.

"That instilled in my own mind that I had to earn some respect, not just from my team-mates but from the crowd, the members and the local community," Gilchrist said. "Fortunately, they welcomed me into that set-up after some time. It is amazing how valuable that experience was once I made the transition into the Australian team because it was a case of deja vu, but it was easier because I had that experience to fall back on."

A day after Australia’s prime minister apologised to the country’s stolen generations, the Courier Mail’s Robert Craddock says the country’s cricket is also sorry.

Sorry that of the 399 men to represent our wide brown land during 130 years of Test cricket, none has been a full-blooded Aborigine. In fact, no full-blooded Aborigine has come close. Jason Gillespie, a descendant of the Kamilaroi people who once populated northern New South Wales, is the only Test player to publicly acknowledge his Aboriginal heritage.

Cricket Australia is pushing hard to find an Aboriginal role model, with its annual Imparja Cup featuring 28 indigenous teams from around the country who had breakfast together in Alice Springs yesterday to watch the prime minister's apology. The best 12 players from the carnival will be sent to the Centre of Excellence for a week's special attention but history tells us they will then return to the anonymity of club and country cricket rather than springboard into the spotlight.

In the Age, Chloe Saltau criticises Cricket Australia's decision to play only three ODIs against Bangladesh in Darwin later this year, citing the clash with the Beijing Olympics.

As Australian players prepared to auction themselves off like paintings to share in the riches of the Indian Premier League, and the national team's tour of volatile Pakistan hung in the balance, it could easily have escaped attention that two Test matches against Bangladesh that were written into the Future Tours Program, the blueprint that is supposed to make the cricket world go around, effectively slid off the face of the earth, or at least were postponed until Ricky Ponting's team next comes up for air some time in 2010.

It is perfectly understandable that players would seek to maximise their earning power in the IPL, and they should not go to Pakistan if it is not safe, but if cricket is scheduled primarily for commercial reasons then there will be little reason to play anyone except India and England.

	Should a coach control selection? © Faras Ghani

The two changes that he made to the 'official' squad to form the 'Arendse squad' were quite possibly the least radical anybody in South Africa could have come up with. Herschelle Gibbs in for Neil McKenzie and Charl Langeveldt in for Andre Nel. Gibbs and Langeveldt? Herschelle has over 300 international caps and Langers has been established international cricketer for five years and has earned over 50 one-day caps. Where was Lonwabe Tsotsobe and Yousuf Abdullah in Arendse's squad? Where was Henry Davids and Ahmed Amla? At the beginning of the week Arendse spoke of "giving the youngsters a chance...if not against Bangladesh, then when?" His solution was to recall two 33-year-olds, one of whom - Herschelle - is the oldest nationally contracted player and will celebrate his 34th birthday on the 23rd of this month.

In the Johannesburg-based Times Archie Henderson writes that it appears the real battle is for control of the team.

Arthur and his anonymous comrades believe they should have complete control over the team. The captain even has a say in the selection of the team, which is outrageous ... When the Proteas coach objects to “interference” by the president, what is he implying? That Arendse should meekly sign off on the team (like some notorious cabinet minister did in the apartheid era)?

In the same paper, Alex Parker puts forth his idea of transformation where in eight black players should be included in a South African XI.

And iafrica.com's contributing editor Dan Nicholl writes a letter to Arendse backing Herschelle Gibbs' selection in to the squad for Bangladesh as Nicholl has Gibbs in his Cricinfo fantasy squad.

Shane Warne says in his Daily Telegraph column the world should embrace the Indian Premier League rather than fight it.

International cricket for your country must be the No.1 priority, but let's throw the common sense hat on and say the IPL is not going anywhere and it's a wonderful opportunity for players, spectators and all the fans. Let's make it part of the international schedule and the ICC and the boards can create a new future tours program. Let's find a way for it to work rather than finding a way it can't.

Malcolm Conn, writing in the Australian, looks at the current problems with umpiring and speaks to Robin Bailhache, an official from the 1970s and 80s.

England might have been trounced by 10 wickets in the second ODI in Hamilton, but there's hope for the future in the shape of a rubber bat.

It was invented by James Cornford, a former minor counties and second XI player. Mark Garaway, the England analyst, has helped to refine it to a standard where it is now a fixture in the team kitbag. After more than a year of tests, it will go on sale next month through Fusion Sports, the company set up by Cornford, with a club market in mind.

The Skyer is chunky, bright orange, tapered at the top of the blade and weighs about one kilogram. It is made from a 25mm thick, rubber-based compound cut into the blade of a normal bat. The trade secret lies in the density of the rubber, imported from Germany, which allows balls to be hit higher, farther and more accurately.

Richard Hobson has the full story in today's Times.

A little more than a month after the furious row about race and sportsmanship exploded at the Sydney Test match, one young cricketer is ready to step up from the grade ranks and step out on to the SCG. Meet Usman Khawaja, 21, born in Islamabad, believed to be the first Australian Muslim to play interstate cricket and all set to fly the flag for a new generation of cricketers Down Under. The Sydney Morning Herald caught up with this "very" ambitious player.

Even Peter Roebuck had something to say about him.

Anger is starting to spill over between Cricket Australia, its players, and the Indian Premier League, according to Jon Pierik in the Herald Sun. He says the parties need to resolve matters quickly, for the good of the game.

It should be remembered these players have all pledged their loyalty to CA - a body which has helped to turn them into the household names they are today. Officials are keen to point out that these same Australian sponsors - the likes of Travelex, Foster's Group and Commonwealth Bank - help to pour $1 million simply in base contracts and match payments annually into the pockets of most of the top players.

These same officials also note players will soon push for a greater cut of the CA pie when talks on a new memorandum of understanding begin. Clearly, these sponsors are the lifeblood of the game here and without them cricket, under siege from a growing number of summer sports and entertainment, could quickly lose its hold. No wonder CA is digging its heels in and ensuring everything is done to protect these interests.

Malcolm Conn writes in the Australian that Channel Ten’s decision to show all Indian Premier League games live in Australia is another sign that Twenty20 is starting to overwhelm Test and ODI cricket.

Lou Vincent's battle with depression in modern sport is not just a one-off case in New Zealand, says Judi Clements, chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation. Clements reveals that an estimated 15% of elite athletes suffered from the condition. On the bright side, she adds that athletes are now more willing to talk about their problems rather than bottling it up inside. Read more in Sunday Star Times.

Clements said there was no doubt elite male athletes suffering from depression could find their testosterone-fuelled industry even more difficult to deal with, especially if they believed they needed to adhere to a certain role.

With all due congratulations to Daniel Vettori and New Zealand after rolling over England in Wellington, the match failed to stimulate the senses thanks to the lifeless drop-in pitch, writes Chris Rattue in the New Zealand Herald.

It is tempting to take the gloss off Saturday night's win by pointing to a pitch that was to cricket entertainment what William Shatner was to opera singing. It's also the sort of track that Kiwi trundlers of the Gavin Larsen ilk prosper on.

The banners were out at the Westpac Stadium, with Jesse Ryder's mates making the mickey out of him. But the man sportingly laughed it off. Read more in stuff.co.nz

Ryder, 23, is keen to shed the party-boy tag and be recognised for his cricket but you get the impression nothing would keep him awake at night, especially not his mates from over the hill pulling his leg.

	Mahendra Singh Dhoni was right on the ball during India's win in Melbourne © AFP

India's attacking approach in Melbourne ensured they could match and even outdo Australia, writes Peter Roebuck in the Sydney Morning Herald. He believes the attitude was best exemplified by the young Ishant Sharma and applauded Mahendra Singh Dhoni's handling of the 19-year old.

As might be expected from a novice, Sharma held nothing back, charging to the crease and mixing corkers with wides and no-balls. Youth knows nothing of mortality let alone fear. In his enthusiasm, he over-pitched and suffered as Matthew Hayden drove sumptuously. His first two overs cost 24 runs and the scoreboard was rattling along.

Now Dhoni faced his most important decision of the day. A lesser man might have withdrawn Sharma until his blood had cooled. Sri Lanka had made this mistake in the previous match at the SCG, scattering the field at the first sight of an antipodean charge. That's no way to beat these hosts. This is a confronting continent of fires and drought.

Dhoni proved his worth by telling Sharma to have another crack. Wisely, he did not ask him to cut his pace but instead suggested pulling back his length a foot or so (one of Ian Thorpe's pedals might have been required). Encouraged, Sharma produced a vivid spell that changed the course of the match.

The Herald Sun says Dhoni is the probably the closest to the retiring Adam Gilchrist among wicketkeeper-batsmen.

He averages 43 and has a strike-rate of 94, whereas Gilchrist averages in the mid-30s and scores at 96.

Two years ago Dhoni smashed Gilchrist's record for the highest score by a wicketkeeper, 172, when he smashed 183 not out from 145 balls with 10 sixes against Sri Lanka.

He's no part-timer with the gloves, either, impressing during the Test series with footwork that compared more than favourably with the Australian's fading efforts.

	Australia's players could well be competing for prizes in the upcoming Indian Premier League © Getty Images

Among growing concerns over the participation of Australian players in the Indian Premier League, the Sydney Morning Herald reports of a possible compromise reached between Cricket Australia and its contracted players to ensure they can play in the BCCI-run Twenty20 tournament.

It is believed the Federation of International Cricketers' Associations, which is handling the negotiations, has struck two crucial compromises. Under the original contract, Australians would not have been released to play for their states or attend national training camps during the billion-dollar Twenty20 tournament, but that stumbling block has been cleared in the past 48 hours.

Significant progress has also been made in relation to players' obligation to endorse products that may clash with Cricket Australia's commercial partners. Now images of Australian players, for example, may be used only in advertising campaigns in the Indian market, not the global market.

The Herald Sun tracks the progress made so far in reaching an agreement.

Outlook's Rohit Mahajan profiles Andrew Symonds: Very melting-pot, very Aussie. Symonds plays by basic laws, with a straight bat.

A close associate of Symonds at Queensland narrates a chilling story. "Well, he got into a slight disagreement with a rugby player in South Africa," he says. "Let’s say they did not see eye to eye on a certain matter—How do you think Andrew sought to settle it? He said he’d prefer to handle it ‘man-to-man’, fight it out!"

What could easily have descended into gladiatorial bloodletting was averted by a cooler man present—the young Michael ‘Pup’ Clarke. "Andrew’s philosophy in life is rather basic," says his associate. "But he’s also a free spirit who likes nothing better than to hook up his boat to go fishing or crabbing."

The current selection row in South Africa between Norman Arendse and Mickey Arthur has raised some interesting points, like the issue of the quota system supposedly being a thing of the past, writes Tony Becca in the Jamaica Gleaner.

Over the years, for many, many years, selectors, most of them, have believed that they are the sacred cows of cricket. Maybe it is because the job is usually reserved for ex-players and most times for ex-great players why most of them, behave so.

	Andrew Symonds doesn't appear happy with his employers © Getty Images

News Limited papers say Cricket Australia has gagged Andrew Symonds from writing his Sunday column, but they carry a lengthy interview with the allrounder instead. He is annoyed with the body’s stance on the Indian Premier League.

"Right now a lot of the boys in the Australian side are excited about maybe taking part in the IPL,” Symonds says. "But we can't quite work out what's going on with the chiefs at Cricket Australia, who seem to be trying to run interference by putting up a heap of red tape. To be brutally honest, as players we just can't understand the stance they've taken. We're all keen to have a hit if the tour of Pakistan gets called off, but Cricket Australia have played what looks like a bit of a trick shot.”

Philip Heads asks in the Sunday Telegraph whether Cricket Australia is running a police state or a sport?

The agent of Brett Lee and Michael Hussey has urged Cricket Australia to offer its players longer contracts to avoid the lure of Twenty20 tournaments, Jon Pierik reports in the Sunday Mail.

Amanda Dunn, writing in the Sunday Age, runs through some cricket definitions to help Australians over their summer barbecues.

The Herald on Sunday has reported that Stephen Fleming will call time on his international career next month, after the third Test against England in Napier.

Fleming's wife, Kelly, is expecting their second child in June, and there is also bound to be some lingering resentment at the way he was shunted out of the Test captaincy.

"Anil Kumble is to Indian cricket what the house of Tatas is to Indian business ethos. Excellence in a remarkably understated way," writes KN Anand in the New Indian Express.

Had Sunil Gavaskar been leading the side in Sydney, there would have been hell to pay. His temperament and his track record would have guaranteed it ... Had Kapil Dev been in charge at Sydney, he’d have shrugged and got on with the game. A Saurav Ganguly would have thundered, “Damn the torpedoes —full speed ahead.” A Dravid would have sounded like Greg Chappell, issuing a 200-word statement which would have been translated into just one word: “Disappointed.” And Kumble? Well, he displayed an extraordinary ability to see the larger picture without succumbing to side issues.

	Chris Martin: Why hasn't he played more for New Zealand? © Getty Images

Despite New Zealand's resounding win in the first ODI against England, Mark Richardson attributes it to the visitors misreading the pitch and voices his concern over the future, especially in the wake of the IPL and ICL. He writes in the Herald on Sunday:

England look a very useful side but they completely misread the pitch and did not play well at all. The Black Caps won't think this was a bad pitch - they'll love it to death - but it is a portable or "drop-in" pitch and it clearly hadn't been in long enough to be termed a quality pitch.

...

Young players like Tim Southee and Jesse Ryder coming through are great. They really are a glimpse of the future, but you wouldn't want to be playing any more than one or two of them in a side if you can help it.

Yet if more senior players are going to go to India, our lack of depth will be exposed again. We have to find a way to retain our senior and quality players.

In the same newspaper, Dylan Cleaver analyses the ills plaguing New Zealand cricket and points out the factors that have put the game in a crisis in the country.

Cleaver wonders why Chris Martin hasn't played a whole lot of matches for New Zealand.

Okay, so he wouldn't be able to stake a claim as a specialist batsman in the Ratapiko thirds, and his fielding will never be compared favourably to Jonty Rhodes, or possibly even Wilfred Rhodes, but the boy can bowl.

Martin is 33 and yesterday was just his 16th ODI. Given New Zealand's lack of international class players that's a ridiculously low total.

He also says that Jesse Ryder is heading for cult status. Ryder's weight has been a point of debate of late, with a few having expressed doubts while others backed the player who made his ODI debut on Saturday.

Chris Rattue, writing in the New Zealand Herald, asks whether Twenty20 is all it is cracked up to be.

Is Twenty20 really a salvation for a game that is struggling in some old strongholds, offering a thrilling new road ahead. Or is it sporting candy, a rush of excitement that invites a subsequent and depressing lull?

Twenty20 is here to stay. But what about in two years' time, or five years, or 50 years? And might Twenty20 cricket devour the game which gave it life? Or could it be a flash in the pan, a glitzy newcomer whose charms quickly wear thin and leave a ghetto behind especially with the rich Indian leagues threatening to drag the world's best players to their extravaganzas?

Peter Roebuck says it is unwise for India to be planning so far ahead of the 2011 World Cup. Instead India must set out to win as many matches as possible. Read the full piece in the Hindu.

Dhoni and his think-tank must also avoid the temptation to use inexperience as an excuse every time a match is lost. Responses of that sort display a lack of faith. Rather they should absorb the lessons and promote improvement. Players must become familiar with their roles.

Sharda Ugra in India Today says Dhoni and the young bats need to show India enough signs of why it was a good idea to ask Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman to go home, and not only by taking catching blinders or running fast.

	Adam Gilchrist is in demand in India and Australia © Getty Images

Adam Gilchrist is the man as far as Indian Premier League teams are concerned. Jon Pierik reports in the Courier-Mail on the race to get his signature.

In the Age Tim Lane writes about how Australian players, from the captain down, seem prepared to go to war for the right to play in India.

A lot has changed. Obviously, life for a touring team in India is infinitely better now than was once the case. Even for those used to a five-star lifestyle, many of the big city Indian hotels are eye-opening in their opulence ... For elite cricketers, this rapidly developing nation and growing economic powerhouse has become the most attractive country on earth. The land of the Ganges is a proverbial river of gold.

The Australian’s Mike Coward takes a look at the status of Indo-Australian cricket while his counterpart Malcolm Conn writes about what the game can learn from F1 when it comes to race.

In the Herald Sun Michael Hussey says after Shaun Tait’s exit from the game maybe it’s time for Australia to use sports psychologists more often.

Two of Jesse Ryder's biggest supporters will be cheering on from afar as he opens another chapter in his rollercoaster life story, his one-day debut. One is Aaron Klee, chairman of Ryder's Naenae Old Boys club, and the other is his grandfather. Read more in stuff.co.nz

Says Klee:

"I was texting Jesse before and he was asking if I'll be watching, and I said I'd have to go and find a pub somewhere to watch it.

Meanwhile, Jesse Ryder, in an interview in the New Zealand Herald, responds to Adam Parore's statement that fat men have no place in the modern game.

I'm not fussed with what he had to say - he wasn't an angel himself was he? It was easy to ignore. I'm a chilled-out sort of guy and not much fazes me. I've heard it all before mate. I'm still working hard on the fitness. It is an issue. Getting fitter can't hurt my game.

In the Courier Mail Robert Craddock looks back at the career of Michael Kasprowicz.

Inevitably he was defined by his hard yakka work in India, including the 1998 tour that almost broke him.

One night I rang him in his room and he confessed that minutes earlier he had broken down and cried on the phone to home, so physically and mentally distressed was he feeling. His voice sounded croaky and weak. I thought he was shot for the tour. Somehow he got through to win Australia the last Test. It was some effort.

He was branded a subcontinent specialist but once, with a West Indies tour looming, hinted to the selectors, "I do like pina coladas and coconuts as well, not just curries."

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald Peter Roebuck dwells on the coming together of the old firm - Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist - and their effect on the opposition.

Others might favour playing the ball late and other subtleties, but the bananabender strives to dictate from the outset. It was the approach adopted by the likes of Colin Milburn and Charlie Macartney, a gentleman inclined to crack the ball back at the opening bowler's head at the earliest opportunity. Hayden was soon into his work, driving past the bowler with a restraint that belied the potency of his stroke. Already he was stepping forwards in a manner calculated to make Chaminda Vaas regret his loss of pace.

... Gilchrist took his time against some demanding pace bowling and alert fielding. Not that he dawdled. A bloke called David Hemery used to teach in England. In the 1968 Olympics he won a gold medal in the 400m hurdles. Anyone wanting to talk to him on the move had to break into a trot while the medallist was, by his estimation, walking. Gilchrist is like that. His idea of pottering along is to take only one risk an over.

	Ricky Ponting says the new players in Australia's sides have provided extra energy © Getty Images

Ricky Ponting looks ahead in his column in the Australian, running his eye over the country's fringe and developing talent.

Adam Voges has been around for a while and hasn't had much of a crack at it, but he has done well when he has played. Brad Hodge is one of those who has come in and out of the side but been unable to nail down a spot because there is so much talent in the squad ... Shaun Marsh, Luke Pomersbach and David Hussey and those sort of guys are going to be the next generation of Australian one-day players, and you are starting to see them getting a go in the Twenty20s as a recognition of their efforts.

In the Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Stevenson sees some of Australia’s rugby league players encounter Brad Haddin and Nathan Bracken.

It's not only cricket that's struggling to cope with the issue of racism. Other sports have had to cope with racist controversies as well and their governing bodies have proved to be largely ineffectual, writes Marina Hyde in the Guardian.

... it was Fifa who imposed the paltry £44,750 fine on the Spanish FA for the racist chanting. It was also Fifa who fined the Cameroonian FA £86,000 for wearing the wrong kit in the African Cup of Nations that same year.

We seem to need a more radical solution than waiting on governing bodies to act on racism. Why should people be satisfied with this pace? At this rate black athletes will be taking abuse another 45 years from now, while some governing body or other churns out a milquetoast press release saying what a shame it all is.

	Goodbye, old friend: Adam Gilchrist's favourite piece of willow broke during the Twenty20 © Getty Images

Adam Gilchrist speaks to the Australian’s Peter Lalor about his “Wonder Bat”, which dressing-room folklore says carries the same powers as one made by Homer Simpson. Since getting it before the 2006-07 Ashes, he has nursed it like “an orphaned marsupial”, but it finally broke in last week’s Twenty20.

It has been glued and pinned and preserved at every turn. If staying up nights with a cold flannel and a bottle of milk would have done the trick, Gilchrist would have been there. The axemen of the team will carry six or eight blades in their kit, but Gilchrist carries just three: the much-loved Wonder Bat, a practice bat and a spare.

Once he was aware just how good this model was, it was immediately excused from training. By the time last year's World Cup came around, it was starting to show some fragility.

Lalor also writes about the change in Nathan Bracken’s prospects since Mitchell Johnson’s arrival while in the Courier-Mail Robert Craddock says Michael Kasprowicz is considering retirement.

The Brecon Beacons in Wales are as bleak and lonely a landscape as Britain has, where the Royal Marines test their physical endurance and where the SAS trek 40 gruelling miles to whittle out the weaklings in their infamous Long Drag. Not a place for cricketers, then - or is it? Tom Davies and a group of Gloucestershire's academy players have been spotted up there with guttering pipe, bamboo and rope:

The first station was quite simple to find, the piece of equipment was a piece of guttering pipe. Then all of the other stations were hard but a good challenge of your map reading skills. We ended up on the top of Sugarloaf Mountain with a piece of guttering pipe, piece of rope, big bottle of water and 2 pieces of bamboo canes.

In my eyes this was a very good challenge as it showed how we could work as a team i.e. following maps, listening to what the team members have to say. Even though my team came last I thought that we worked well together but we failed to read instructions properly as did other teams which cost us a couple of time penalties.

We then were given a challenge at the top of the mountain. In our teams we had to try and get a table tennis ball out from a pipe and place it in a small circle within the big circle however there were a few ground rules, there was the big circle I would say it was about three meters to the middle all the way round, we were not allowed to step inside this circle, the tube was situated in the middle of the circle. We had to think things through as a team. Our plan was to rest the piece of guttering pipe on the tube and run the water down into the tube so the table tennis ball would float up to the top. Unfortunately we ran out of water so we had to send two team members for some more supplies, luckily I found three orange juice cartons in my bag and we used those however it was still not enough. Eventually they returned and we got the ball to the top of the tube. Our task then was to get the ball without touching the ground into the small circle. Our plan was to get it in the guttering pipe and then control it into the small circle unfortunately this did not happen and we failed the task.

Find out how they got on at Gloucestershire's website.

"What does it mean to be a "good sport"? Is it as obvious as simply playing fairly, or in these days of fiercely competitive professional rivalry does the very idea of being a "good sport" need renovation?" ABC's Radio Sports Factor investigates.

Major-General Michael Jeffrey, lawyer, blogger and cricket fan, Irfan Yusuf, Fairfax journalist and ABC cricket commentator, Peter Roebuck and Debbie Simms, manager of the Australian Sports Commission's Ethics Unit, form the panel.

Roebuck: The sort of outburst of nationalism that began in the 1970s when this country freed itself from English petticoats, in theatre, in comedy, in so many areas, politics, and so many areas it freed itself from that. Subsequent to that for 30 years there's been this great breast-beating tradition, chest-thumping tradition in Australian sport, in some Australian sport of course, not all of them. And that I think, I saw the SCG Test Match as basically the last statement of that, and I almost was challenging Australia to say, Well, we've sort of done that, we've established ourselves as a proud and independent nation now.

I think what happened at the SCG was partly that Australia regressed, because it's trying to be partisan I believe, but also that India started playing the old Australia, that it too is now establishing itself as a proud and independent nation, and those two, like two big bulls at each other, they came. There only used to be one bull in this paddock you know, and now there's two. And that's what happened there. So the Australians, I would submit are trying to move on a little bit; they've made some efforts in that regard. The Indians are determined to establish their right to the paddock as well, and so they're now playing, as they think, as Australia has always played.

Dileep Premachandran, writing in the ABC's Unleashed, says Andrew Symonds only has himself, and his words, to blame for his tarnished reputation in India.

Bang in the middle of a heated one-day series last October, Symonds mouthed off about the country and its celebration of an unexpected win in the inaugural T20 World Cup.

Perhaps he was motivated by envy. Perhaps he forgot to engage his brain. Whatever it was, the anger of the crowds was palpable. Some say that the targeting of Symonds with monkey chants was proof of inherent racism. They neglected to mention the adulation that followed the likes of Adam Gilchrist and Matthew Hayden around the country. The reason Symonds was bagged had very little to do with his ancestry and everything to do with the manner in which he had disparaged a young nation still trying to find its niche in the world.

	Jesse Ryder scored 22 and claimed a wicket on his Twenty20 debut © Getty Images

When Ryder was selected a couple of weeks ago Adam Parore launched. Ryder had a bad attitude and was too fat. Parore invoked portly Jock Edwards and David Boon as examples of players who would not be selected in today’s fitness-conscious environment.

On the bad-attitude charge it was surely a case of the pot dropping a line to the kettle to indicate the kettle was of darker hue. In the first few years of his international career Parore was a disaster zone in pads - the kind of player who should have klaxons sounding when he walked into a dressing room.

As for Ryder being too corpulent, I say if you’re good enough you’re thin enough. Parore after all played alongside Craig McMillan, a fairly large chap, for half his career, and played against the likes of Inzamam and Merv Hughes, neither of whom regularly ignored a pie-warmer. Shane Warne was never trim the entirety of his career, and is the greatest player of our generation. Parore, at his peak, had a wonderfully sculpted body - I know, I saw it when he took off his shirt in a bar in the West Indies trying to impress some American medical students. Chat-up lines clearly weren’t his thing. But why come out swinging at Jesse Ryder? Why not let Ryder do the swinging?

The New Zealand Herald's David Leggat feels that Ryder answered his critics with a brisk 22 and a wicket on his Twenty20 debut against England

Meanwhile, Paul Holden, in his blog Sideline Slogger, pokes fun at England's Twenty20 squad in an article titled 'A slogger's guide to England'.

Christopher Martin-Jenkins has serious reservations about the future of cricket now that Twenty20 is growing and growing. The game, he says in the Times, is at once “a commercial phenomenon and a Frankenstein’s monster”:

A new chief executive for the ICC is being chosen this week and when he starts work in July his first tasks will be first to retain control of the Frankenstein in Bombay and then to restrain the monster so that it does not unbalance the game irrevocably. We want Flintoff's first loyalty to be to England, not the Mumbai Maulers.

But if you missed it a few days ago, in the same paper Shane Warne has nothing but praise for the IPL, not least because of the promotional benefits that can accrue – hair promotion products, anyone?

In the Guardian, Lawrence Booth considers what conclusions, if any, can be drawn from England’s Twenty20 win against New Zealand on Tuesday.

Jack Simmons, the new ECB chairman, makes his feelings clear on Kolpaks in county cricket, as analysed by David Hopps in the same paper.

On Foxsports, Ben Dorries looks at what he believes is the folly of starting a series late, as the CB Series in Australia has kicked off later than usual:

Only 6481 true cricket diehards - mostly subcontinental expats - turned out to show interest in the India-Sri Lanka clash. By now, mums and dads have gone back to work and kids have had their schoolbags packed and grudgingly headed back to class after the summer holidays.

South Africa’s home international series is over, but not everyone is happy with what they have seen. Writing on the 24.com website, Arthur Turner says that the expansion of the game has led to too many poor sides, and he blames the ICC.

Over exposure has also made a big contribution towards the weakening of international cricket as a product. The ICC has totally lost the plot with regards controlling its product at the source. The simple principle of supply and demand has been ignored for greed.

Scott Styris' retirement from Tests may have weakened New Zealand's batting but England will do well to watch out for Jacob Oram, writes Scyld Berry in the Telegraph. Oram will remind England of Andrew Flintoff, a player in a similar mould, though unfortunately ruled out of the tour with persistant injury problems.

The pair have played against each other since Under-19 level, and Flintoff always had the edge because of his superior bowling - but not any more. Oram, you would think, is one of those New Zealanders who grew up in the countryside carrying a sheep under each arm and playing rugby.

	Shaunt Tait has taken a break from cricket © Getty Images

Here is a case that makes us understand the vital value of the role of a counselling psychologist in every state team and even at the NCA for the growth of a modern cricketer.

When a fast bowler is struggling with his rhythm, he is mentally down and expects reassurance from the coach of his capabilities.

The last thing he needs is technical lectures, as he is mentally not prepared to grasp solutions. Once he is reassured of his capabilities, he would then be ready to work on the solutions.

	© Getty Images

The British are credited with bringing most of the sport and tourism to St Moritz and, inadvertently, one distinguished Brit is responsible for the dottiest activity of all.

In 1988, David Gower - soon to be made England captain for a second time - played here in an inaugural game on the lake. It was a marketing ploy, a picture opportunity, but Gower characteristically provided more publicity than planned by sinking his car on a thin patch of ice. They talk about it to this day.

Soon after Gower’s car sank into the murky depths, Daniel Haering rounded up enough British friends to get a team together for another cricket match against his former school. It was the start of an eccentric institution.

There were several reasons for India's second successive batting failure against an inspired Australian attack, writes Peter Roebuck in the Sydney Morning Herald. Asking a jet-lagged Manoj Tiwary to face a rampant pace attack on a juicy pitch was madness, as was the Indian board's reluctance to add a practice game or two for India's 'Twenty20 stars' ahead of the 50-over CB Series.

If India is wise it will keep 20-over cricket in its place. If young batsmen think only about 20-over cricket they will never learn to build an innings or to play off both feet or to counter the moving ball on fresh antipodean decks.

In the Daily Telegraph, Robert Craddock says Brad Hogg's omission at the Gabba is a worrying sign for Australia's spin-bowling future.

Wrist-spin bowling in Australia is officially starting to fade from view again to the point where Australia's next spin bowling debutant could currently be as far back as the under-17s - or even lower.

Peter Lalor in the Australian looks at the decline in Australia's fielding.

Writing in the Outlook, Brian Stoddart believes the whole Harbhajan-Symonds saga throws up "some serious questions about the nature and mental attitude of the Australian game in dimensions running from the on-field approach through the game's management to the Australian media's handling of affairs".

Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspaper cricket writers have been noticeably pro-Australian during this series ... That approach has extended to the Channel Nine commentary fed to the Australian and international public. The judicious Richie Benaud is now edged out by the partisan efforts of ex-players like Ian Healy.

... At the on-field level it is easy to see it as just the Australian players having unexpectedly "glass jaws", the ability to dish out on-field invective accompanied by a lowered capacity to absorb it

India Today's Sharda Ugra analyses the money flow of the Indian Premier League.

Media planners are wondering how it will all add up. Divya Radhakrishnan, vice-president, The Media Edge, India, the media planning arm of Rediffusion DY&R, says, “If we do the math backwards and divide the monies paid by advertising time, Sony should be selling a 10-second slot at Rs 3 lakh (US$ 7500), which is twice that of an India ODI series.” The figure of $1 billion touted by IPL, say industry watchers, is something of an optical illusion driven by Lalit Modi’s desire to match ICC’s billion-dollar deal with ESPN-Star Sports (ESS).

In the Indian Express, K Shriniwas Rao profiles the franchise owners of the IPL.

Cities have teams, and teams have owners. Can club culture take root in cricket and rake in the dough? Outlook's Arindam Mukherjee investigates.

Can the IPL be the first success story among city-based sports leagues in India? The Economic Times looks for the answer.

The Business Standard also takes a look at the business potential of BCCI's new venture.

Ramnaresh Sarwan, the West Indies batsman, has gone into hiding in Guyana amid fears of escalating violence in the country.

Sarwan, who is currently training for the Stanford 20/20 tournament, abruptly left practice on Thursday after relatives called him and said that suspicious men were spotted in his neighborhood, said team manager Carl Moore and cricket board president Chetram Singh.

Caribbeancricket.com has more.

	IS Bindra is in the frame © Getty Images

Scyld Berry, in the Sunday Telegraph, says "it is a sign of the changing times that the candidates' list" to succeed Malcolm Speed as the ICC's CEO "has a heavy Indian presence." Of the six, the most controversial is IS Bindra:

When holed up in his personal fiefdom of Chandigarh, where he developed the fine stadium of Mohali, Bindra led what opposition there was to the Calcutta businessman Jagmohan Dalmiya, who long ruled Indian cricket and became the first Indian president of ICC.

Since Dalmiya was finally forced out of his various offices, Bindra has become the power behind the throne of Sharad Pawar, the current president of the Indian board and powerful politician, who has already fixed up to be the ICC president in 2010.

Earlier, Bindra told the Sydney Morning Herald:

India is in a position where it can grow the game. It should be seeking greater responsibility, not more power. By using its resources wisely, and not just trying to impose a dictatorship, everyone should benefit from India's position in the game.

	Andrew Symonds: People saying I'm not playing cricket in the right spirit really makes my blood boil © AFP

Andrew Symonds has had to watch what he says in the media while the Harbhajan Singh affair has dragged on. Now that it's over, he writes in his News Ltd column that the past month has been the most stressful period of his career.

From the initial racism row to the threats about the whole series being called off, my head hasn't stopped spinning. There have been meetings with lawyers and advisors, a day in the Adelaide courtroom, the charges downgraded by the court, fingers pointed and all of a sudden I'm somehow getting the blame. To have people questioning my integrity as a person and cricketer is pretty ordinary. Anyone who knows me understands that I'm a very straight up and down bloke, what you see is what you get, so to have people saying I'm not playing cricket in the right spirit really makes my blood boil.

Symonds says the experience has been particularly hard on his family and he is thankful to the "rock solid" Ricky Ponting for standing up for him.

I'm quite happy for the general public to make up their own minds about what did or didn't happen, but I can assure you I wouldn't take a stand against something unless I really believed in it.

	A happy ending to a great sporting story © Getty Images

In the Sunday Age, Amanda Dunn pays tribute to Adam Gilchrist.

Gilchrist also seemed to understand that we want our sports stars to tell us a story, preferably with a happy ending and plenty of action sequences in between. We want them to take us away from mortgages and work and petrol prices and the dog's weird weepy eye for a few hours and tell us, show us, an uncomplicated, exhilarating tale of what is possible.

We want them to elevate us; to show us a little of the best in people, when we sometimes feel we've forgotten what that is. Gilly did all of that, often. One of his many gifts was to play cricket not necessarily as it always was, but how we imagined it should be. It couldn't — he couldn't — go on forever, of course, but there will be one very large hole in the team and the game without him.

Also in the Sunday Age Gilchrist's former team-mate Damien Fleming reflects on a brilliant career.

He was unselfish to a tee. One time he was captaining the Australia team in Malaysia for a Super 8s tournament. After everyone had had a big night and were feeling under the weather, Gilly offered to go to the ground a good 10 minutes' walk away for the toss, potentially to give us a sleep-in. We put the binoculars on him and when Gilly gave us a thumb's-up we knew he had won the toss and we were batting, so the bowlers could get another much-needed half-an-hour shut-eye.

In the Sun-Herald, Peter Roebuck writes that "It's time to have another crack at the glib Western response to the Harbhajan affair".

India must stop being defensive. It has a mighty story to tell, a functioning democracy created from a chequered history, a nation built in a generation, temples and mosques sitting side by side in so many cities. Nor does its cricket history justify the comment made not long ago by a white opponent that "all Asian cricketers are f---ing cheats." Please can First World newspapers dust off all articles published between 1901 and 2001 deploring the manner in which Anglo-Saxon interests dominated the game? Suddenly India is ruling the roost and the boys are worried about monopolies and cultural hegemony. It is a bit late for that.

In the Sydney Morning Herald Nathan Bracken takes us through his preparation and execution of plans while bowling in a one-day international.

In my mind's eye, I'm standing at the end of my 21-pace run-up. There are 45,000 screaming Indian fans in the stands and the outer ground. It's as hot as hell - 38 degrees - and sweat is dripping from my hand. Before I start to run in I look towards one of the fielders square of the wicket. He tells me where the batter is standing on the crease. It's vital information because that is what allows me to alter my length to ensure I get the yorker right.

	Mahendra Singh Dhoni must tell his team-mates to aim for Test cricket © Getty Images

Peter Roebuck, writing in the Hindu, says Mahendra Singh Dhoni faces many a challenge in leading a young side. He believes Dhoni can put it across to his team-mates to look forward to the challenge of playing Test cricket.

Barely worth his place in the Test side after patchy form with the bat, he must prove that he understands Test cricket is paramount, fifty over cricket is next and twenty over matches are a light-hearted romp that ought not to define a cricketer or his community. Otherwise recent victories in the shorter versions of the game will do more harm than good.

India cricket faces a formidable threat to its production line of players and Dhoni is the man best placed to keep things in check.

In Tehelka, Dileep Premachandran says Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly should have been accorded a dignified exit from ODIs.

The decent thing to do, if the captain and selectors were of one mind, would have been to give them farewell games at home against Pakistan, rather than send them home midway through a tour that both consider cricket’s pinnacle. There could yet be a long kiss goodnight against South Africa in April, but that might be almost insulting after indicating to them that they’re no longer considered good enough to take on the best two teams in the world — Australia and Sri Lanka.

Dhoni may one day be a great captain. But you can’t help but think that he’s flunked his first big test. Words from him, a team-mate, would have meant a whole lot more than insincere ramblings from selectors. Instead, two of Indian cricket’s finest sons have been left to look back in anger. Or sorrow.

The remarkable drainage system at Lord's, which passed with flying colours in a decidedly wet 2007, is the inspiration behind the ECB's new drainage funding plan which other counties will be able to apply for to improve their own sub-standard systems.

Giles Clarke and David Collier, the chairman and chief executive of the ECB, come from a background of administrative experience at smaller counties that have been less well protected from the elements than Test match grounds and are to allocate about £500,000 for every club that has not yet installed adequate drainage. This work would be undertaken by specialist companies under its auspices and, not surprisingly, the idea found favour with every county chairman at their meeting last week.

The value of MCC's investment was seen to good effect when play recommenced remarkably quickly during the Lord's Test against India last year after a downpour of the kind that in the past would have resulted in an abandonment for the day. Clarke and Collier are keen that all counties properly protect their squares and bowlers' run-ups in future so as to ensure spectators have value for their money.

Read Ivo Tennant's piece at The Times.

	Jesse Ryder's girth does not find favour with Adam Parore © Getty Images

For a start, the way Ryder presents himself is a bad sign.He's too fat. He's in no fit state to play for New Zealand and if I was still in the national side, I wouldn't want him in my dressing room.

He claims to have lost 10kg, in which case you can only wonder what shape he was in before that. This selection sends a poor message to other players. There is an implication that fitness parameters only apply to some players.

The days of picking Jock Edwards-types are over. Or David Boon, the tubby Tasmanian, for that matter. Boon was a fine batsman, and an exception to the rule. But those guys are the dinosaurs and have no place in the modern international game.

Then you consider Ryder's off-field track record, his problems with discipline and alcohol. He says they're in the past and good luck to him, but I wouldn't have him there until he'd tidied his act up physically for a start.

	The Australians aren't thrilled with the outcome of Harbhajan Singh's appeal against his three-Test ban © Getty Images

Australian players frustrated at the lack of support during Harbhajan Singh's appeal want to send in a letter to Cricket Australia expressing their disappointment, says Alex Brown of the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Herald understands that the players, through their representative body, the Australian Cricketers' Association, will formally air their grievances to an employer they believe pressured them into accepting a move to downgrade a charge of racism against Harbhajan.

...

The association feels the board displayed hypocrisy in having espoused a commitment to stamping out racial vilification from cricket, only to sweep it under the carpet.

In a tongue-in-cheek article in the Daily Telegraph, Robert Craddock wants Cricket Australia to scrap the prestigious Allan Border Medal and replace it with "The Harbies". Awards are handed out for such categories as "Best foreign language actor" (Harbhajan Singh) and "Best comedy" (The Spirit of Cricket pact signed by Australia's leading players) among others.

Meanwhile, Cricket Australia is in negotiations with scientists to develop an appropriate ball for night cricket, reports the Australian.

Dileep Premachandran, in the Sydney Morning Herald, says the BCCI has become sport's biggest juggernaut, and points out that though a few other sporting entities may generate revenue on the same scale, they don't have the political muscle that can subvert a game. He highlights the need for a statesman like Mahatma Gandhi in Indian cricket.

Many Indians are discomfited by the board's greed and naked displays of strength but there's also a new, prosperous brigade that takes perverse pride in sticking it to the old world. The voices of reason look at the lack of facilities in small towns, ramshackle stadia and haphazard itineraries and wonder where all the money goes. Those that burn effigies and parade donkeys on the street couldn't care less.

Nearly a century ago, MK Gandhi returned from South Africa to lead a motley crew of princely states into the modern world. He did so with humility, common sense and an unshakeable belief that truth would prevail. Indian cricket awaits a similar statesman.

In the Daily Telegraph, Garry Linnell writes that we should get used to the fact that the BCCI are the new masters of world cricket.

Pradeep Magazine says India should use its clout to correct the issues plaguing the sport, instead of only reacting when there's trouble. He writes in the Hindustan Times:

India, now for most, is a country for which the business of sport and not the sport itself is the most important business. It is a dangerous sign and the sooner India tries to dispel this notion, the better it will be for its image and for world cricket.

	'A faultless team man: loyal, modest, chivalrous' ©The Cricketer International

On the heels of Adam Gilchrist's retirement from Test cricket, and on the day he prepares for his final Twenty20 international, the Telegraph's Michael Henderson opines that there was a greater wicketkeeper-batsman - Alan Philip Eric Knott. Henderson says that in the last 15 years, Australia have been able to call on three cricketers who have changed the way in which Test cricket is played - Gilchrist, Michael Slater and Shane Warne - but still feels for talent with the gloves, reliability with the bat, and loyaty, Knott's the man.

The greatest wicketkeeper-batsman was, and remains, Alan Knott. Most things can be argued either way, but this is one thing that can't. Raymond Illingworth, the captain when England regained the Ashes in Australia in 1970-71, said of Knott's work that it was simply not possible to keep wicket better than he did on that tour.