Writing in the Guardian blog, Dileep Premachandran believes that Harbhajan's slap on Sreesanth may prompt a welcome change of attitude in Indian cricket.

On Tuesday night, I was part of a panel that debated the controversies that have spiced up the IPL's opening week, and there was complete agreement among the audience when it was suggested that all of India had a right to feel let down after what Harbhajan did.

Christopher Martin-Jenkins writes in the Times that while Twenty20 may be dazzling all, Test cricket will stand the test of time (pun intended). He calls on history to give us a few lessons for the present and says the ECB could restructure its domestic competition to embrace Twenty20, the game it marketed first, even further.

I suggest three competitions: the County Championship, the bedrock; one 50-over tournament, starting as a league, leading to quarter-finals and semi-finals and a Lord's final; and a regular weekend Twenty20 league, allowing each club a home game every fortnight. For television, that would mean a couple of big matches each weekend to rival football's Premier League; for most clubs, it would guarantee mean ample television and gate revenue; for players, a four-day game in most but not all weeks and a high-profile one-day match each weekend.

This is, after all, just the latest shift in a sport that has always mirrored social trends. Packer's cricket in coloured clothes was innovative, it seemed, but they had played in coloured kit, albeit rather more tasteful, in the 18th century. Nor were 20-overs-a-side matches anything new when they were presented in fresh new clothes by the counties five years ago. I played them on summer evenings in the 1960s. It was just as much fun: matches were always vital and competitive.

Even the marketing of the game is old. William Clarke, of Nottingham, was every bit as much an entrepreneur with his touring England XIs in the 1840s as Lalit Modi is in 2008.

Meanwhile, Jon Culley caught up with Nottinghamshire’s new player Stuart Broad for The Independent ahead of his Notts debut. He finds, like many before, that Broad has a calm head on his young shoulders. While Broad realises that he will be forever associated with Yuvraj Singh hitting six sixes from him, he shrugs it off. His chilled-out approach belies his youth and he’s just enjoying playing Test cricket for now, and learning as much as he can.

Are players performing up to their IPL price tags? The Economic Times works out their moolah-run rate and finds that Abhishek Nayar, Shane Watson and Yusuf Pathan have fared much better than star players Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Andrew Symonds and Rahul Dravid.

In the Times of India Daniel Vettori, who leaves for England on May 1, hopes to make his IPL exit on a winning note, while Mark Boucher thinks the Bangalore Royal Challengers won't be too affected by the Australian and New Zealand exodus.

Anil Kumble has bowled alongside Harbhajan Singh for a decade and is now his Test captain. Regarding the latest controversy that Harbhajan was involved in - an on-field spat with Sreesanth - Kumble writes in the Hindustan Times that it's important someone ensures that players are given the right kind of advice, that there are professionals around to help them cope with fame and handle the money it brings.

Players need to learn to respect the opposition and most importantly, to gain the respect of everyone. It's very important to understand what you should not say instead of what you would naturally say.

At the same time, just because you're a cricketer, it doesn't mean you hold back constantly and suppress your normal character. But because people watch, learn, imitate you, it’s vital to find a balance. Which is why perhaps, we need to be educated on how to handle success and failure…

In the Indian Express, Kunal Pradhan asks how the Indian board and media would have reacted if Harbhajan had slapped a foreign player?

As we sit in judgment over Harbhajan Singh and Sreesanth, it would perhaps be prudent to evaluate our own attitude. There is no denying that the off-spinner is out of control and the fast bowler is no saint. To put it bluntly, they have both got what was coming their way for a while now. But weren’t we standing and cheering as these players became emboldened with every misdemeanour they committed?

	Will Steve Harmison cruise the easy road with Durham or fight back into the England side? © Getty Images

Steve James in the Daily Telegraph looks at what role Steve Harmison can play in England's future.

Harmison's progress from now on will be intriguing. He has been copping flak from all directions. But I was impressed by an interview he gave before Durham's first Friends Provident Trophy match of the season against Yorkshire. Too often he has not helped himself in such situations, speaking over-emotionally and appearing to rid himself of cricketing responsibility. But here he was upbeat and clear. "I wouldn't be playing for Durham if I did not think I could play for England," he said cheerfully and defiantly.

It was a good comment for two reasons. Firstly there are too many cricketers playing out time in county cricket with no ambition to play for England. There is, of course, a vital balance to be struck between experience and youth in any team, let alone a county side, but that should not be confused with the pointless tending of dead wood. Secondly, such a long-term scenario is a much-discussed worry - albeit mostly in private - about Harmison now. Will he cruise until the end of his central contract in September and then head for the easy road with Durham thereafter?

Christopher Martin-Jenkins is leaving The Times and, as a parting gift to his many fans, he lists 25 of his favourite moments covering the sport.

1981

Headingley. This has to be the Dom Perignon 2000. The match that England could not win but did. Ian Botham's wonderfully free-spirited innings and Bob Willis's sensational fast bowling on a horribly tricky pitch on the last day. As in 2005, the matches that followed, at Edgbaston and Old Trafford, were scarcely less inspiring.

1985

Edgbaston in glorious weather and more Aussie bashing. David Gower in supreme form, ten wickets in the match for Richard Ellison, and Edmonds and Emburey in harness.

While the BCCI probes the Harbhajan-Sreesanth controversy, Amiesh Saheba, one of the on-field umpires, offers hints as to what instigated Harbhajan to slap his opponent. Saheba says Sreesanth relentlessly abused the Punjab players through the match, despite being warned twice by the umpires. However, he condemns Harbhajan's reaction. Mumbai Mirror has the full story.

"Sreesanth was sledging Mumbai's batsmen right from the start. He was over-the-top throughout the match and was acting like a petulant schoolboy."

On the topic of infamous altercations on the field, Mid-Day caught up with Rashid Patel, the left-arm seamer who was banned by the Indian board for 13 months in 1991 for chasing Raman Lamba with a stump during a Duleep Trophy match. Patel advices Harbhajan Singh to keep himself occupied and work on his spin variations and forget he's serving a sentence.

During my ban period, I supervised Baroda’s Ranji Trophy preparatory camp. Harbhajan can help his teammates too. I firmly believe that a cricketer can continue to learn by observing others at play and there is a lot of action that Harbhajan can watch.

Meanwhile, Andrew Symonds, who was caught up with his all entanglements with Harbhajan in Australia, says he is "much better off" after his IPL stint in India. Sandeep Dwivedi of the Indian Express caught up with him on the sidelines of an ad shoot.

A day after the theft of power cables at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata, there are signs of a larger controversy brewing, with the Cricket Association of Bengal chief Prasun Mukherjee fearing that yesterday’s thefts and the April 20 floodlight fiasco are “linked” and part of a “larger concerted effort to sabotage” the IPL matches in Kolkata. Expect a thick security cover when Kolkata take on Mumbai on Tuesday. The Indian Express has more.

While Kolkata Police Commissioner GM Chakrabarti has deployed policemen in huge numbers at the stadium — almost turning the ground into a fortress — the CAB has hired a 25-member security team from Group-4 Securicos for round-the-clock vigil. The city police chief, meanwhile, briefed that a few people were being interrogated over the power cord thefts at the Eden Gardens.

Harbhajan Singh has been temporarily suspended from the Mumbai Indians side for his on-field altercation with Sreesanth and the Hindustan Times editors wonder if they were wrong in presuming the new professionalism among Indian cricketers would actually spur IPL rivals to egg each other on when it comes to playing for India.

According to the Indian Express editorial, the BCCI should be concerned about the iconisation of its cricketers.

It was obviously felt that an Indian icon was required by the squads for a sense of city loyalty to coalesce around each of them. Without the stars, it could be said, the IPL as a summertime entertainer would not be possible.

Harbhajan’s outrageous — though unsurprising — behaviour shows the dangers of nurturing the star system.

In the Times of India Sanjay Manjrekar writes that the clash has given the IPL governing council and excellent opportunity opportunity to show the cricketing world and especially its skeptics, that underneath all its million dollars and the glamour, the fanfare and the uninhibited commercialisation of the sport, rests a pure cricketing soul.

Mid-Day, a Mumbai-based tabloid, carries an account of an on-field brawl between Farokh Engineer, the match referee in the Mohali game, and team-mate Abid Ali in a Prudential Cup match in 1975.

The Engineer-Abid scrap did not get physical but water was thrown at each other much to the disgust of late manager G S Ramchand whose expensive suit was more than just damp.

Also read the letters to the Hindu editor from readers disappointed with the incident.

	Shane Watson - 'blown away' (file photo) © Getty Images

Will Swanton writes in the Sydney Morning Herald on the galvanising effects of the IPL which is bringing global harmony:

The IPL was supposed to divide the cricketing world. Instead, it's bringing an end to racial hostilities. All they need to do now is get Harbhajan Singh to stop slapping his fellow Indians around.

Shane Watson has been “blown away” by the IPL and thinks it will be good for future international matches. He tells the paper:

“It's like a celebration of cricket. You have Indian players playing with Australians and South Africans and Pakistanis and you get the chance to know blokes you didn't really know before. There's such a different range of players in every team, and it's going to break down a lot of the bad feelings or bad communication there might have been before. There will always be strong rivalries when we go back to having countries playing each other, but this is bringing a lot of people together.”

	Malcolm Speed: worrying more about chrysanthemums than cricket © Getty Images

In the New Zealand Herald, Dylan Cleaver pulls no punches, describing them as “too many small men with large egos who have too much at stake”. He added:

“Only Speed's family would describe his stewardship as flawless but he was at least trying to force an endgame in the thorny issue of Zimbabwe. But trying to out those who run the game there cost him his job. Go figure.”

The Guardian reported that Speed “was known to have grown increasingly uncomfortable with what he considered Mali’s policy of protection for Zimbabwe Cricket, an organisation that has become politicised by Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF regime”.

“English and Australian officials are known to be increasingly despondent with the ICC’s failure to demand reform of Zimbabwe Cricket but Chingoka has been able to count on the support of Mali, the South Africa board, Kenya, an associate member, as well as India. Speed leaves after a stormy tenure which ultimately left him disillusioned with an organisation dominated by an Asian bloc that many believe has become close to ungovernable.”

The Age said Australia’s administrators were weary with the ICC’s failure to address the Zimbabwe issue.

"One senior cricket figure, who did not want to be named, said it was sad that Speed had stood up for a principle and paid for it with his job. It exposes the naked politics at play around the ICC board table and the deep divisions in the game. The relationship between Speed and acting ICC president Ray Mali is said to have deteriorated beyond repair when Mali lobbied for the suppression of an audit that accused Zimbabwe of 'serious financial irregularities'."

In the Independent on Sunday, Stephen Brenkley cut to the chase.

“Zimbabwe, in case it be forgotten, have not played a Test for three years, are woefully weak as a one-day team but still retain full-member rights at the ICC. If you want to talk about sport, and not politics or morals or theft or the sins of old empire, what the hell are Zimbabwe doing there? The ICC chose to do nothing except lose a chief executive. Who knows who may be next? But it will be somebody because Zimbabwe gets them all.”

England might have a new Troy Cooley on their hands, reckons Steve James in today's Sunday Telegraph, with the appointment of the relatively unknown Richard Halsall as their national fielding coach. Inevitably, thoughts turn to England's weakest fielder and what Halsall can do to help Monty Panesar:

Halsall's ideas are refreshing; his thoughts frankly articulated. Take my question about what to do with Monty Panesar, surely his biggest problem child in the England side.

"I will look to overload his practice and put him under more pressure," he says confidently. "I haven't met the bloke yet - only to say hello - but from all the things I've been told, he's got massive hands and never drops the ball in practice. But he obviously drops them in games. At first I'll probably show him clips of him being poor - to give him a reality check. I wouldn't let any practice situation with Monty become comfortable. I do a lot of sensory deprivation stuff where I actually put a patch on the player's eye. My idea is that if Monty is taking catches with me on a Monday before a Test with his non-dominant hand, and with only one eye, then he should be OK in front of thousands on the Thursday."

Former New Zealand batsman Mark Richardson does not want New Zealand to head to Pakistan for their three-ODI series. In the New Zealand Herald he writes:

If Pakistan is to host the ICC Champions Trophy, then a three-match, one-day international series between New Zealand and Pakistan in Pakistan just prior to the tournament makes perfect sense - except for the fact that Pakistan should not be hosting the Champions Trophy and New Zealand should not tour there right now.

	"I've never tried to copy anyone so I don't think my action matches anyone else's" © International Cricket Council

Ahead of the Women's Asia Cup, scheduled to begin in Sri Lanka on May 2, Pakistan captain Urooj Mumtaz spoke to PakPassion.Net about cricket, her life, fitness, legspin, Jonty Rhodes, why she thinks the Pakistan women's team is a committed unit, and a whole lot more.

Sample some snippets from the exclusive interview:

Even now a lot of the girls still have a lot of problems stemming from society (not from their immediate families), where people talk and this causes complications for them. It's very sad actually because it's such a beautiful sport to play. I think a lot of girls will understand when I say that even if the immediate family are willing, they often get influenced by society and that causes them to object to the girl playing cricket. Hopefully if the media give us more coverage and people get to see women playing cricket all the time, then it will become more acceptable to everyone.

or this:

The Shahid Afridi [of our team] is Kanta Jalil who's also a fast bowler but she loves to strike the ball out of the ground and she does hit it a very, very long way. When she gets it in the middle of the bat, the only place you'll find the ball is outside the ground! The Shoaib Akhtar is Asmavia Iqbal, she's the fastest bowler in our team and her favourite player is Shoaib Akhtar. She copies everything he does. The only difference between him and her is that she's completely fit, sticks to her game and does the job she's asked to do.

	The volatile Sreesanth and Harbhajan Singh © AFP

Despite having played international cricket for a decade and being one of the more experienced players in the side, Harbhajan is never referred to as one of the senior players, writes Anand Vasu. Kadambari Murali, meanwhile, writes that its difficult to think of Sreesanth and think cricket. What comes to mind is an attention-seeking problem child. Read them in the Hindustan Times.

In this great attempt to make the IPL appear the biggest success of the century none of us is being told how the organisers, except perhaps in Kolkata, are struggling to sell tickets and most of the full houses we watched are courtesy generously distributed passes, writes Pradeep Magazine in the Hindustan Times.

That the media too has lapped up this concept is evident from the amount of space being given to in newspapers and TV channels. What I found baffling was that when the news channels were discussing the issue of cheerleaders, they only harped upon the wrongs of moral policing and how our politicians are 'spolitsports'. No one focused on the fact that the cheerleaders themselves are feeling harassed by the crowd and find themselves the target of appalling, shocking and disgusting comments.

Deccan Chargers are still to win a game and their captain VVS Laxman is copping a lot of flak for their poor show. Sandeep Dwivedi writes in the Indian Express:

When VVS Laxman entered Eden Gardens to play his first Twenty20 game, it was akin to a maestro turning up for a boy-band on a stage that had witnessed his timeless classic.

The IPL’s entire structure rests on the TV ratings advertising generator for which it is critical that on TV it continues to look like it has host cities agog— for the next five weeks, writes Sharda Ugra in India Today.

William Rees-Mogg, of the Times, has seen the great Don Bradman bat, and isn't impressed with cricket's latest format. In fact, he thinks its destroying the game's culture. In his view, Twenty20 "is a good deal less interesting than baseball, which is itself less interesting than cricket". In case you missed it first time round, the piece is now doing the rounds in Australia.

The culture of cricket now seems to be going the way of Troy, or indeed of the Roman Empire. The glory of cricket, with its intelligence and the complexity of the interplay, is sinking into the past. We are moving, surprisingly rapidly, into the dumbed-down cricket of Twenty20. Cricket first developed on village greens such as Hambledon, it looks as though it may come to an end at Bangalore.

Why do I instinctively dislike Twenty20 so much? It is not that I ever played cricket with even the lowest degree of club competence. I did have the good fortune to be a contemporary of Peter May at school. He was the leading batsman of the under-16 XI, and I was their scorer. My objection to Twenty20 is that it purports to be cricket but is a quite different and much less interesting game. Cricket seems to me to be the most fascinating of the team games of summer.

Forget the notion that playing for England is the only thing that matters to Michael Vaughan and his side, says the Independent's Angus Fraser. Taking a look at a recent survey by the Professional Cricketers Association, which shows that 35 per cent of those picked to play Test and one-day cricket would consider retiring from the international game prematurely to sign up for the highly lucrative Indian Premier League, Fraser lends a shoulder to "the hundreds of thousands of cricket fans who continue to spend a small fortune supporting the national side both at home and abroad".

He’s been the ‘Sheik of Tweak’ and ‘Hollywood’ for years, but now Shane Warne is the ‘IPL King’, according to the Australian’s Bruce Loudon. Warne is not only the captain, coach and match-winner, but he has also picked up some Hindi.

There can be no minimising the reality that the Hollywood ending and high drama of the match against the Chargers shows that Warne is king not just of the Rajasthan Royals but the entire event.

Ron Reed says in the Herald Sun he can’t watch more than 12 overs of an IPL game because there is no emotional attachment, which is “pretty much a must-have ingredient if sport is to be meaningful”.

Who cares if the Deccan Chargers beat the Rajasthan Royals? Not this column, that's for sure. The fans in India might, but if it is Australians doing most of the heavy lifting - as has been the case in most matches so far - does that dilute the dynamics?

Today's Guardian carries an archive obituary of Jim Laker by John Arlott 22 years after the former England spinner died. Arlott, who was cricket correspondent for the Guardian between 1968 and 1980, paid handsome tribute to Laker and carried some short anecdotes, such as the following:

He once asked me how many strides he took in his run-up to the wicket - "Sometimes four, sometimes five, sometimes six." "Well," he said, "you have missed four-and-a-half, five-and-a-half, and the little rock." He had so many arcs of flight - and none of them foreseeable by the batsman - that he took wickets through the air as well as off the pitch. Once that deadly off-spinner landed, though, it tugged at the earth and turned back savagely: or, just when the batsman thought himself used to that, it pitched and skidded and there was a catch to slip - and there was that twisted grin of satisfaction.

Harsha Bhogle, in his column in the Indian Express, says the IPL has worked after its first week.

The ads have been good, some of the anthems have been excellent; the fireworks have gone off and the dancers are showing a lot of energy. But cricket is winning, as we always knew it would. The first week of the IPL has worked. Now it must draw repeat crowds, it must be a success in its fourth week. Chances are it will do more than just that; I sense we are seeing a lifestyle change, like the personal computer, broadband and digital music.

The sceptics abound and that is not bad because success must be challenged; new thought must stand up to scrutiny. The first people who said the world was round took a long time convincing others. This will be a much shorter journey towards acceptance. Maybe it has already happened

Meanwhile, the Hindustan Times' Arjun Sen has blamed the Indian Cricket League for the poor turn out for the IPL games in Hyderabad.

	Jack Fingleton opened the batting for Australia in the 1930s © The Cricketer International

Philip Derriman writes in the Sydney Morning Herald about Jack Fingleton, the opening batsman and journalist, who is famous for his writing – and a lifelong rift with Don Bradman. The centenary of Fingleton’s birth will be celebrated at the SCG on Monday and a biography about him will be released later in the year.

The feud apparently began in the early 1930s and ended only when Fingleton died in 1981. Nobody has ever got to the bottom of why they disliked each other so much, although everyone has assumed religion had something to do with it. Bradman was a Mason and Fingleton a Catholic.

There was also the question of who leaked a dressing-room story to the press during the Bodyline series of 1932-33. Fingleton was blamed for it, but he always maintained Bradman was the culprit and should have owned up.

In the lead-up to Anzac Day Paige Taylor wrote in the Australian about the fast bowler Tibby Cotter, the only Australian Test player to die in World War I.

It is generally accepted that Cotter was shot on October 31, 1917, by a Turk after the famous charge at Beersheba by the 12th and 4th Australian Light Horse regiments. But in his book to be published in October, Andrew Sproul and co-author Max Bonnell advance a new theory: that the 32-year-old was fatally wounded when a Turk prisoner committed an act of perfidy. "I have felt driven, over time, to get the story right and to tell it," Sproul said.

Giles Smith has a funny take on the IPl in The Times.

People putting in the most effort at this point? That's an easy one. It's the cheerleaders. They never stop. And the cameras never stop showing them never stopping. The odd thing being, of course, that you have never seen crowds less in need of leaders for their cheering.

Meanwhile the Hindu's Nirmal Shekar doesn't seem too impressed with the shortest form of the game:

The best of sport allows for the pause. It lets us sit back and savour the has-been and dream of the still-to-come. Nothing that is breathless — and therefore leaves no room for a complex cognitive process leading to emotional fulfillment — can lay claims to sporting greatness.

Twenty20 is here to stay, and unless Test cricket and ODIs are given a subtle makeover we will be left with dessert and no main course, writes Dileep Premachandran in the Guardian.

But back to the cheerleaders (briefly). In The Telegraph, Paul Bolton writes about a beach cricket tournament that took place in Australia three months ago that has just now being shown on Sky. There is an inevitable comparison to the IPL, but what may also interest readers is our observation that the IPL was not the first to employ cheerleaders: the XXXX Angels set the trend by giving it some in the tournament, much to the unsurprising delight of the crowds.

The Guardian's Mike Selvey is excited about Allen Stanford's plans in the Caribbean.

How much would it cost him to take over the central contracts of the top players and up their wages to the sort of stratospheric levels that would prevent them from seeking greener grass elsewhere?

The Indian Premier League (IPL) may think of the Indian Cricket League (ICL) as a rebel without a cause and the feeling may well be reciprocated but, when it comes to hiring technicians, cheerleaders and even Bollywood stars, they seem like brothers in arms, writes Anam Arsalan in the Hindustan Times.

Two Russian cheerleaders, Katrina and Maria, who put on their dancing shoes for the ICL, are now busy entertaining supporters of the Jaipur IPL team. Their choreographer, Sylvester, said: “They are freelancers, so when they were performing at the ICL, they got an offer from an IPL team. So, now you can see them performing there as well.”

In more ways than one, Warne is an ambassador for the IPL, writes R Mohan in the Asian Age.

The Courier Mail’s Paul Starick says Andrew Symonds, the IPL’s A$1.5m man, is being humiliated. Symonds, who was hit for 30 in an over by Virender Sehwag on Tuesday, has struggled with bat and ball during the first week.

It is not the Indian crowds tormenting Symonds – as happened on last year's Australian tour – but his own form. In his first two games, Symonds, the IPL's most expensive non-Indian player, has gone for 55 runs from four overs at an economy rate of 13.75 runs per over. He has scored 44 runs off 52 balls. With Symonds earning an estimated A$200,000 for his fortnight in the IPL, he has yet to turn Deccan's investment into value for money.

News coverage of the competition in Australia is about to get smaller, according to the Australian, due to the IPL’s demands, which led to a boycott by international news agencies.

The Indian Premier League is a good thing, so long as we understand that it’s only fun because it attracts Test and one- day stars from around the world, writes Alex Parker, in the Johannesburg-based Times.

If not, TV money will devour the sport. Once it is done, it’ll spit out the corpse, which will by then consist of a Twenty20 championship in India, some low-level club tournaments around the world, international “friendlies”, a la soccer, and that’s about it.

Eventually, even the IPL will have nowhere to find its international superstars, and then the game will have eaten itself in a frenzy of greed and TV rights.

Meanwhile in iafrica.com Rob Peters asks what's not to like about the IPL.

While I enjoy Test cricket as much as the next guy, I do not view the T20 format as a naughty child. Truthfully, it only adds to the game for me. You have all the elements that make cricket such a great game with the added excitement of huge hitting, fierce bowling and a carnival atmosphere. I’m not about to complain about dancing girls either!

Amar Shah is doing his best to keep abreast of all things IPL...from Los Angeles at 4am:

Since the league began, I've risen as early as four in the morning each day to log on to my computer to watch live choppy streams of such grandiose (ok, nascent) rivalries as the Bangalore Royal Challengers vs. the Kolkata Knight Riders and the Delhi Daredevils vs. the Rajasthan Royals.

For the next six weeks, top cricketers from all over the world will participate in a league that could shift the entire landscape of the sport. Traditional cricket, the test variety, lasts up to five days. But the IPL's Twenty20 format , where matches are limited to 20 overs (one over equals six pitches), is a run and gun, slap-happy form of the game that perfectly suits the waning attention span, especially my own.

As a recent cricket convert, I've come to realize that cricket is not so much a sport in India, but the lingua franca as Cricinfo.com blogger Lawrence Booth put it. Which makes the audacious experiment of the IPL an exciting proposition for the commercial expansion of the sport. And just perhaps, intriguing enough, for the American sensibility.

ESPN has the full story.

	Spotting talent: Shane Warne has shown faith in the unheralded Dinesh Salunkhe ©

While the Mumbai selectors have ignored the performances of Dinesh Salunkhe, Warne has picked him alongside himself in the both the IPL games for the Jaipur side, writes Pradeep Vijayakar in the Times of India.

Salunkhe had not played for any of the Mumbai age group sides, but after playing for Jhunjhunwalla and Khalsa College, he was picked for the university side thanks to the insistence of selector Sanjay Patil. Kapil Dev rewarded Salunkhe with a stint in Leicester cricket in 2007. Air India then took him on scholarship and he has rewarded them with consistent performances.

Also read S Ram Mahesh in the Hindu writing on the remarkable rise of P Amarnath.

When mulling over the decision to quit his job for one that wasn’t nearly as secure, Amarnath didn’t for a moment consider the transition he would eventually make — progressing in four years from bowling in the city’s fourth division to bowling in the Indian Premier League.

The same paper also has a piece on Sanjay Bangar's penchant for writing.

The seven-article series Sanjay Bangar wrote on a popular cricket website is still read widely. He’ll laugh if you describe it as good, but the feedback to his writing has mostly been positive.

Bangar's articles appeared on Cricinfo. You can read them here.

The quality of spin has dropped considerably over the years and yet the batsmen of today flounder on what would have been an average wicket a few decades ago, writes Saad Bin Jung in the Asian Age.

The use of a pink ball at Lord’s has given Cricket Australia hope of finding a suitable object for day-night Tests. Michael Brown, the board’s general manager of cricket operations, tells the Sydney Morning Herald he will be meeting with scientists and Australian Institute of Sport experts next week.

"We want to try and do a proper, orchestrated research project," Brown said. "If we are serious about this issue - to get a better day-night cricket ball and a ball we could possibly use in Test cricket - we need to understand the constraints, which is what the MCC are doing ... We need to factor in the practical cricket people, the scientists, the people who make the leather, the cricket ball manufacturers. We see this as being a really serious project that could have lots of implications, but you've got to understand, too, it could go nowhere.”

A first look at the ratings by TAM Peoplemeter System shows that IPL has delivered a record opening, write Ratna Bhushan and Surbhi Goel in the Economic Times.

Official broadcaster Sony Max says it will now hike spot rates to Rs 3.5-4 lakh per 10 seconds for the remaining matches. Said SET president Rohit Gupta: “The response from television audiences and stadia has been higher than what we expected. People rooting for Sanath Jayasuriya in an Indian stadium was unheard of but it happened.”

In the Indian Express, Shivani Naik traces Lalit Modi's fetish for funky team names.

Whether it's the Rajsamand Pelicans or Jhunjunu Dragons, they greet you revealing a set of canines that could never add up to a friendly grin. Even the usually-docile camel seems to acquire predatory pouts under the Barmer-district banner. Lalit Modi's fetish for team names, elaborate logos, and scope for merchandising can be traced back to two seasons ago when he decided to distribute these tags to 32 districts, which now play under these banners.

The saga surrounding the Eden Gardens pitch is far from over. An investigation by the Kolkata Telegraph has revealed that the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) did not go through even the basic ground drill before throwing open the ground for the opening game.

The media continue to pore over what effects the IPL will have on cricket as we know it. Richard Williams in The Guardian takes a positive view:

"Cricket first developed on village greens such as Hambledon; it looks as though it may come to an end at Bangalore," a former editor of the Times wrote yesterday, deploring Twenty20's success. Strip away the cheerleaders, the film stars, the promotion and the players' salaries, however, and I'll bet that last weekend's inaugural IPL match was closer to the game played by Hampshire landowners and rustics on Broadhalfpenny Down in the middle of the 18th century than the weird, distended, passionless version enacted at various county grounds last week.

No one is taking the Indian Premier League more seriously than Shane Warne, writes Simon Hughes in the Daily Telegraph.

He has taken an unlikely character under his wing. Dinesh Salunkhe is a swarthy 25-year-old from Bombay who last year was an anonymous club player ... Warne likes him. "He's got a positive attitude and learns fast. The important thing about leg-spin is not where the ball lands but how it gets there. You vary your grip, trajectory and position on the crease, and you can make two apparently similar balls totally different."

	© Getty Images

For many fans there's an emotional disconnect with the IPL, writes Pradeep Magazine in the Hindustan Times.

Whether to enjoy Sourav Ganguly's dismissal or to celebrate Ishant Sharma's pace magic in shattering their own Rahul Dravid's stumps.

Indications are that the cricket-mad Indians, who got hooked on Twenty20 when the country won the World Cup in South Africa last year, are now addicted to the IPL, writes Bruce Loudon in the Australian.

On evidence of the first few games, it appears that the city-based rivalry that the IPL has sought to conjure with rupee power on television could take some time to fructify, writes Avijit Ghosh in the Times of India.

The IPL got off to a great start, but questions need to be answered, writes Steven Smart in the Observer.

Most sports in the world are over in less time than a Twenty20 game, writes Amit Varma in Mail Today. All popular sports, in that much time, pack in immense drama. Regular fans of those sports appreciate the sophistication in each of those games, and can talk about the nuances endlessly. Why then do so many of us speak of Twenty20 as if it is gilli-danda?

An erstwhile editor of The Times, William Rees-Mogg, uses his opinion column to rail against what he sees may be the end of cricket:

The culture of cricket now seems to be going the way of Troy, or indeed of the Roman Empire. The glory of cricket, with its intelligence and the complexity of the interplay, is sinking into the past; we are moving, surprisingly rapidly, into the dumbed-down cricket of Twenty20. Cricket first developed on village greens such as Hambledon; it looks as though it may come to an end at Bangalore.

	Duncan Fletcher and Andrew Flintoff during happier times © Getty Images

Fletcher is at home in Cape Town, "waiting for something interesting to come along", as he puts it. He's in no rush. He is also unusually philosophical. There have been offers of employment, but life has not been without its complications since his resignation from the England job a year ago yesterday.

Not being one to want sympathy, it's not a subject he talks about easily, but his delightful wife, Marina, has been unwell. Cricket has quite rightly been put on the back-burner. For long periods Fletcher has been in charge of domestic duties. For a dedicated family man - a proud grandfather now - it has been a difficult time. Thankfully the worst appears to have passed.

James also says that it was not Fletcher's intention to "humiliate" Andrew Flintoff after disclosing his problems with drinking.

As Fletcher's ghost-writer I know that he did not set out to humiliate Flintoff. Those close to the game know there was much, much more that could have been said. But Fletcher did feel horribly let down. Nobody in his entire life had disappointed him as much as Flintoff had on that last fateful Ashes trip.There were gripes aplenty in the book. Maybe I could have tempered them more. On more than one occasion Fletcher said to me: "I think I'm having too much of a go at people."

	A handful of spectators made the trip to Lord's for the match between MCC and Sussex to mark the beginning of the 2008 county season © Getty Images

In affectionate remembrance of the hope that the England cricket team would soon win a global one-day tournament, which died, at home, on April 18, 2008, while the rest of the world celebrated the birth of the Indian Premier League at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bangalore. The health of the team itself had been undermined by the loss of grave quantities of money offered by a circle of Indian friends. The body will be cremated and the ashes scattered on the Ganges. - with apologies to Reginald Shirley Brooks, the Times, 1882.

Scyld Berry, while analysing the impact of the IPL, feels the tournament needs "major surgery to survive. His article in the Telegraph has more.

But the organisers of the IPL seem, at this stage, to have missed a couple of tricks - and they could prove extremely, perhaps terminally, damaging. Yesterday, sandwiched between the successes in Bangalore and Delhi, came a match in Mohali in front of a stadium that was half-full - a match which saw a superb century by Mike Hussey set up a 33-run victory for the Chennai Super Kings.

The first drawback is that too many unremarkable Indian cricketers are making up the numbers: a problem which can be solved either by reducing the number of franchises (impossible in the short term) or increasing the quota of foreign players from the existing four-per-side. Indian spectators and television audiences want to see stars, whether in films or on the cricket field. It was a point made last year when India staged 20-over matches between state sides, and the country became the only place in the world where the format did not take off. The second point is the IPL organisers are asking too much of fans in expecting them to exchange old instincts for new loyalties.

Meanwhile, Vic Marks, in his blog in the Guardian, critisises the scheduling of the match between Surrey and Lanchashire in the middle of April after the entire fourth day's play was washed out. He also hopes the IPL will force a change in the hectic county schedule.

	Brendon McCullum can now have his pick of adverts and endorsements in India © Getty Images

Following his pyrotechnics he was taken to a party in Bangalore, attended by both teams, where he was schmooozed by Khan and an array of India's Bollywood and industrial giants. McCullum was apparently impressed with Khan's passion for cricket and his humility. The star, who is as recognisable in India as Brad Pitt is in Cailfornia, introduced McCullum to his family and the two chatted for the best part of an hour.

Paul Holden takes time out to give you taste of cricket's WWF in his blog Sideline Slogger.

Get a bet on - it is a crass, over-hyped tournament focused on money so you should get on the bandwagon by flinging some dosh around as well. Twenty20 is a complete and utter lottery - witness Indian winning the T20 World Cup with their B team, and England destroying us via Master Mascarenhas. So I’d be heading toward slapping $20 on the least favoured teams - they really do have just as much chance in this inaugural competition where nobody knows what they are doing. Get on Shane Warne’s coachless Jaipur team (aka the Rajasthan Royals) or the Martin Crowe-tillered Bangalore Royal Challengers.

Also read Andrew Miller's interview with McCullum on cricinfo.com.

	Fireworks before the game and plenty from McCullum too © Aneesh Bhatnagar

It was perhaps fitting that the new world should challenge the old in the city of Bangalore, a place where old colonial clubs and buildings jostle with cool bars and swanky headquarters of software houses, writes Simon Hughes in the Daily Telegraph.

If Rahul Dravid were to suddenly break into a brief bhangra in between shadow cover drives nobody would be surprised, writes India Today's Sharda Ugra. In another piece she says that if Test matches are extinct two decades later, it will be because cricket—its governors, its players and its entire community—didn’t fight hard enough for them, didn’t believe them to be worth preserving.

For all the well-meaning - if belated - intentions, it was hard yesterday evening to imagine an international event in England matching the IPL for sheer unadulterated hype, writes Lawrence Booth in the Guardian.

This child of hype and bombast needed some substance to make it credible, and it got that from the scimatar-like bat of Brendon McCullum, writes Dileep Premachandran in his Times blog.

Kunal Pradhan has a say in the Indian Express: "The excitement in the match will have to complement the pre-game frenzy for the IPL to hold the audience for 44 days. An abject surrender by the home team doesn’t help their cause."

Stephen Brenkley chips in with his views in the Independent: "India have been bold and if some of the figures would seem to suggest that the boldness strays into fiscal foolhardiness those involved can afford it."

Also check out Hindustan Times' interview with Geoffrey Hampson, the CEO of the Vancouver-based Live Current Media Group who are hosting IPL's official website. You can sample the official site here.

Emily Wax of the Washington Post writes about the impact of the 12 cheerleaders from the Washington Redskins on the opening day of the Indian Premier League. The girls have been brought to Bangalore by Vijay Mallya, the owner of the Royal Challengers, and are training an all-Indian cheerleading squad.

In white go-go boots, yellow spangled short shorts and bikini tops, they pompomed their way onto the field, bursting right through local notions of modesty. The result was something that few in this cricket-obsessed nation thought possible: tens of thousands of male cricket fans finding it hard to keep their eyes on the game.

She continues …

The Redskins cheer choreographer, Donald Wells, said the Indian cheerleaders he's working with are already adept at shaking their hips and staying on the beat. He noticed that Indian cheerleaders were very expressive with their hands -- Indian classical dance has countless hand motions -- and joked that they probably wouldn't need pompoms.

"The Indian girls who tried out so far were so beautiful and so good, they were practically better than us," said Sharica Brown, 27, a Redskins cheerleader from Baltimore, as she snacked on a plate of nachos before the game at Bangalore's Hard Rock Cafe.

	No cold vibes between Dhoni and Yuvraj © AFP

I know Friday's game was being seen as Sourav versus Rahul and Saturday's game being spoken of as Dhoni versus Yuvraj, but at the end of the day it will be teams who will take each other on, and not just a couple of individuals.

That's just fodder for advertisers to whip up excitement before a game, and does not translate into actual rivalry. Fortunately, I am not a bowler otherwise the hype on the 'Dhoni-Yuvi face-off' would have shot through the roof! Yuvraj is an aggressive cricketer, and I know that he will come hard at my team, but that's the charm of this format since it pits you against your teammates and teams you up with your opponents. I have been meeting Yuvraj quite a few times since Thursday, and there have been no cold vibes between us.

In the same paper, Poonam Saxena is fed up of the non-stop IPL chatter on Indian new channels.

In keeping with its time-honoured tradition of giving us Rakhi Sawant day and night, Headlines Today did a hundred-hour interview with her about the IPL ... There were three of them in the studio, asking her penetratingly intelligent questions such as which of the IPL videos she likes best (and why she isn’t in any of them), which team is her favourite and so on. Rakhi wiggled her eyebrows and eyes, often both at the same time, and gave equally penetratingly intelligent answers (she favours the Vijay Mallya video because he’s in the company of men for a change).

In the Mid-Day, Anand Naik has some tips for those who want to come to the stadiums to watch the IPL games.

Shane Warne says in his Herald Sun column the Indian Premier League is here to stay – and his only concern is “the ridiculous new sledging law”.

It will be hard not to say something to someone, but I think the pace of the game will help as there will be no time to sledge. Well, maybe a little sneaky one here or there.

Warne, the captain and coach of the Rajasthan Royals, is excited about returning to bowl after a long break.

Although I am pulling up a little sore in the mornings, it's hard to know if I have lost any zing until we start playing. To be honest, I have not done lots of batting and bowling until this last week and, surprisingly, I feel in a pretty good space and am looking forward to testing myself in the Twenty20 format.

Alex Brown, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, says the ICC is not listening to the players, the national administrators or those who seek to profit from cricket.

In the inaugural week of the Indian Premier League - a competition many believe will revolutionise the way the game is played, marketed and distributed worldwide - participants have formed a united front to express their belief that, unless the ICC installs an IPL window in the Future Tours Program, cricket could be torn apart.

Alarm bells should be ringing throughout the ICC's Dubai headquarters at a decibel level to rival a Long Bay prison break. After all, cricket should be more mindful than most sports of the threat posed by cashed-up raiders with players in their sights. But despite the impassioned pleas and the painful lessons of history, the ICC does not seem to be heeding the call.

In the same paper Philip Derriman compares the IPL to the popular singer Andre Rieu.

Writing in ABC's Unleashed, Dileep Premachandran believes that the IPL might undermine the primacy of international cricket.

A journalist is preparing to sit down for dinner with his family when the phone rings. It's the agent of a player who wants the journalist to write his biography. "I’m on a yacht in the harbour, with four bottles of champagne by my side," he says cockily. "Our man just sold for close to a million." His jubilation is understandable. After all, he is Mr 15 Per Cent.

The player has just been through a gruelling season, one in which he has enhanced his reputation as one of the game's modern-day greats. Won't 14 matches in six weeks, even if it's Twenty20, be a bridge too far, asks the journalist. The agent's response was revealing. "He can always do a hamstring after three or four games," he says with a snicker.

The traditional woollen cricket jumper has been cast off with nary a batted eyelid as the winds of change sweep through the clothing at international level. But Patrick Kidd, in The Times, pauses to pay tribute to a garment which has been interwoven in the fabric of the game for decades and decades in a news feature.

Another day, another hallowed cricket tradition falls. After matches that can be completed in three hours, cheerleaders, players auctioned to the highest bidder and pink balls, a further piece of iconoclasm occurred at Lord’s yesterday when the last rites were read for the cable-knit cricket sweater.

The Telegraph is up in arms, but at the same time resigned to the fact that change was inevitable.

The Indian Premier League is widely perceived as the marriage between cricket and entertainment, and the early evidence shows that the entertainment is certainly the dominant partner. On the eve of the opening match, the Bangalore Royal Challengers, led by Rahul Dravid, weren't allowed to practice in the stadium. Why? Because the preparations for opening ceremony were considered more important. Kunal Pradhan of the Indian Express has more.

The Chinnaswamy Stadium is a hub of activity a day before the so-called revolution. There are huge stacks of speakers lying at various corners of the outfield. At short mid-wicket, a drum-kit takes pride of place on a tailor-made platform. Deep third-man has a troupe of young performers walking on stilts. At long-on, there are Washington Redskins cheerleaders in tank tops and bridal veils practicing an expansive jig.

In the same paper, Harsha Bhogle says it would be unfair to compare the Indian Premier League to a Friday blockbuster release, where fortunes are made and lost in the first three days.

This is more like a brand launch, to be assessed at the end of the season, for commitments are in place for much longer. Few brands get it right the first time; and when the horizon is ten years, the first year becomes a learning phase rather than a do-or-die shootout.

In the Hindu, Nirmal Shekar wonders if the IPL’s big money will subconsciously translate into ‘high value’ and ‘quality’ in our minds.

As players see their bank balances swell by hundreds of thousands of rupees with every over bowled or every brief innings played, some of us might lament the demise of cricket’s so-called soul (for the want of a better metaphor) and the game’s selling out to commerce.

The Telegraph lists out the luxury items available at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore on opening day.

Respecting your freedom of choice, we would like you to sample IPLT20.com

In the Sydney Morning Herald Alex Brown speaks to John Buchanan, now the coach of Kolkata's IPL franchise and a man whose radical ideas perhaps don't seem as outlandish in the wake of the IPL explosion.

"This is just the beginning," said Buchanan, prior to the Indian Premier League's first match between Kolkata and Bangalore tonight. "Administrators need to make very good decisions over the next few years. I believe all three versions of the game can coexist, but I think this particular form of the game has the potential to take off round the world.

"I can see cricket getting to a stage where in the next three to five years the world is split into zones, like in soccer, with the winner of each zone playing off in an annual world series under a roof somewhere. Players will be spread round the world. Here at Kolkata we have eight or nine internationals, and I think that's a model you'll see more and more of."

Some have likened Buchanan to a bread-board toting street preacher in recent years, proclaiming the end of the world as we know it and making wild predictions of what form cricket's future might take. But as the league and other Twenty20 competitions have taken hold, the former Australian coach's views no longer seem so radical, suggesting he may yet prove a soothsayer.

Many of the county reports in the media made the comparison that the cold start to the Championship is in some ways a metaphor for the shadow cast on the English game by the Indian Premier League. In The Guardian, Paul Kelso observes the knock-on effect of the IPL on the opening day at the Rose Bowl and finds Hampshire chairman Rod Bransgrove in fighting mood.

I think the challenge is to respond to the IPL. We invented this game, it's our game and we should be leading," said Bransgrove. "Hopefully the chairman and the board will found a vibrant, exciting Twenty20 competition in this country that will decide our players to stay, as well as attracting the best players from around the world to come here."

Geoffrey Boycott is typically forthright in The Telegraph and looks to the long term implications on central contracts, among other issues. In a must-read piece he is firstly sceptical about Allen Stanford’s potential Twenty20 match involving England players, calling it “a brilliant publicity stunt”. He calls for England’s two-Test series next year to be scrapped, while demanding the players are allowed in next year’s IPL, but not to play all of it so that they can play the first three county matches ahead of the Ashes:

if the players don't like the idea of missing half the IPL, the ECB have one big ace in the pack. They can come back and say: "You don't have to have a central contract at all. And we don't have to pick you." Once these lads stop getting international exposure, all their endorsement deals are worthless, no matter how many Indians are watching them in the IPL.

In The Independent, Angus Fraser offers an insight into how the IPL took off and talks of how the BCCI influenced events in the recent Tests between Australia and India. The Times have Alan Lee in position in Bangalore ready for the start of the IPL.

A small, sober poster reminds us that it will also be World Heritage Day. If cricket had a similar occasion, a movement to protect its sacred customs, it would rail against the Indian Premier League

And also in The Times there is a piece on some off the off-field entertainment that will be on offer, most notably the cheerleaders who having been imported from the Washington Redskins.

Donald Wells, the Redskins’ entertainment and cheerleading director, said: “This fusion of dance backgrounds has created a new amazing style. I am really looking forward to the reaction of India towards the Redskins cheerleaders. What we are doing is cutting edge and it’s great to see that we are going to start this squad off on the right foot.”

Mr Wells is also helping to coach a group of locals who will lead the cheering after their mentors have returned to the United States.

With just over a day left for the first match of the Indian Premier League, Rod Curtis looks at the game of cricket [kilikati rather] in an island far away from the glitz and glamour of the billion-dollar league in the Age.

Kilikiti is an interesting exercise in what happens when you take a sport and drop it in the middle of the Pacific and let it evolve without the guidance of wealthy guardians seated in plush chairs in north London.

Played between two villages on a cricket-sized ground — or any-sized ground that's mostly clear of coconut trees and ocean — kilikiti has a pitch running down the middle, with three stumps just off each end made from skinny, bark-stripped branches, that go all the way up to your armpits.

As does the bat — an unwieldy, 1.2-metre-long weapon carved from a single piece of the Fau tree, said to be a cross between an old cricket bat and a war club. And yes, "death by kilikiti bat" has occurred. A note for the weary traveller: if you're invited to bowl in a game, always agree with the Samoan wielding half a tree.

Most English players will be playing county cricket during the first edition of the Indian Premier League but Mike Selvey thinks with the introduction of the Twenty20 tournament this could be the last English domestic season as we know it. He writes in the Guardian:

Should the IPL prove to be the success that is predicted even beyond the hype of those with vested interest, then the repercussions will be hard to resist. England-qualified players, up to 30 of them according to Mark Ramprakash, have already had their toe in the water and next year will want some of the wealth available to them despite the bullish noises coming from the England and Wales Cricket Board.

In the Telegraph, Nick Hoult looks at the IPL's latest rival - Allen Stanford.

You do not have to spend long in Stanford's company to realise that he is not used to hearing the word "no". The island of Antigua is his personal fiefdom. Stanford owns Antigua's national bank, runs the hospitals, built the biggest hotel, and owns the island's airline. You half expect to see his picture on the east Caribbean dollar notes.

Indian Premier League teams are still topping up their player rosters and that is good news for Australian state players like Shane Harwood, according to Chloe Saltau in the Age.

Harwood is a prime example of a cricketer for whom the Twenty20 explosion could work wonders. Though his Cricket Victoria contract is expected to be renewed next month, its value may be reduced on account of the 34-year-old's propensity to blow a shoulder or tweak a hamstring at any time.

But even if his days in first-class cricket are numbered, Harwood could prolong his career and boost his pay considerably with a contract in the IPL. He remains a feared weapon when fit, and last summer was ranked by his peers as the country's best Twenty20 bowler. Though he is yet to sign, Harwood is ready to fly to India at a moment's notice.

Though he thinks the series ended with a fair result, Jacques Kallis is keen not to play in Kanpur for a third time. It was a gamble, he writes in the Hindu, to order such a poor wicket and it could have easily backfired.

I am a traditionalist when it comes to pitches and I believe that the surface for a Test match should have something for everybody. Some pace and movement for the quick bowlers, good batting conditions in the middle and then help for the spinners on the last two days.

Like India, we have been pretty dominant at home and have lost a series only to Australia on our own turf. But we have also been competitive away from home beating everyone (apart from Australia!) at some point.

India should be aiming for the No. 1 spot, too, but they will need to improve on ‘good’ pitches.

Neil Manthorp can't wait to leave Kanpur as well. He writes in supercricket website:

If the Proteas could be accused of leaving with indecent haste, think again. Given the fact that nobody in the world of cricket was thinking of a three day finish when the third day began, not a single bag was packed nor extras bill paid. Yet the home side were on a bus pulling out of the city within an hour of returning to the hotel. The best Goolam Raja could manage for Graeme Smith and the boys was a 6.00am departure the following morning. Is Kanpur really that bad? Yes.

The Indian team and media can't stand coming here and actively encouraged the South African media and players to highlight how unacceptable it is as an international venue and to lodge formal complaints, where applicable.

While the focus of attention will be on India and the launch of the IPL, back in England the County Championship begins on Wednesday. The domestic game comes in for more than it's fair share of criticism, but the Championship has developed into a keenly fought competition where the quality has improved with two divisions. In The Sunday Telegraph, Steve James welcomes the new season by saying there is plenty of interest in what will happen.

At least the championship has the excuse of being mostly played on working days. So it has a mystifying multitude of hidden fans. They include the scourers of newspaper scorecards on the train to work; the Ceefax addicts ensconced on the sofa at home, and more recently, of course, the internet browsers sneaking a look in the workplace. Cricinfo, the leading cricket website, says that its county cricket site recorded a remarkable 26-million page views during the 2007 season.

	Ajantha Mendis, Sri Lanka's young spin bowler © AFP

With a smile on his face as he caresses the ball before delivering it, Mendis bowls the off-break, he bowls the leg-break, he bowls the googly, he bowls the flipper, he bowls a straight delivery, he bowls them with different grips and different actions, he bowls them with a different trajectory and at a different pace, he disguises them brilliantly. The result is that he mesmerises, or bamboozles, batsmen - as he did Chris Gayle and Daren Sammy on Thursday.

With the batsman groping forward, Mendis trapped Gayle leg before wicket just when the big right-hander appeared ready to open up. Then he bowled Sammy off-stump - the batsman, looking shocked and confused, playing beside a straight delivery after pushing forward and missing one that spun into the right-hander and one that spun away from him.

	The IPL continues to make the headlines © AFP

When dusk descends on India this Friday evening, and the lights go on in Bangalore, not only will the Indian Premier League commence. It will also launch the fourth age of cricket.

The first era extended from the sport's birth in medieval England to the 1870s; the second covered Test cricket for the next hundred years; and the third was the commercial, international era launched in Australia by Kerry Packer.

Starting next weekend, India will shape the sport, as their eight city-based franchises play matches of 20 overs per side in a three-hour package designed for mass, global entertainment. The salaries of the top IPL cricketers are beyond the wildest imaginings of anyone who has played before - unless the Aladdin who went into a cave was a useful all-rounder.

Ian Chappell, in the same newspaper, says the ICC haven't learnt anything from the Packer revolt. Click here for the full article.

The administrators haven't studied the history of the game closely; in the seventies they fought Kerry Packer over World Series Cricket and lost. To the extent that the ICC haven't offered IPL a window in the schedule where the tournament can be conducted without affecting players' commitments to their country, the administrators are again resisting change

Meanwhile, Mike Brearley calls for embracing the "fizz-buzz appeal of Twenty20" in the Observer.

Also in the Observer Jamie Jackson has his take on the revolution.

Simon Wilde previews the English county season in the Sunday Times. He writes about the cloud of uncertainty hanging over it due to the emergence of the IPL

Neil Manthorp, in his tour diary on the SuperCricket website, criticises the IPL for its "obsession with money"

As New Zealand search desperately for international-standard players, the omission of Chris Martin from the one-day squad to tour England is odd, writes Dylan Cleaver in the Herald on Sunday.

No, he can't bat, and you wouldn't stake your life on him under a steepler, but he's a better fielder than Gillespie and not far behind Mason. Neither of those two are threatening allrounder status with the bat either, though Gillespie will always be remembered after fluking some runs in that epic Chappell-Hadlee run chase last year.

Martin's dumping is a nonsense; it's just a shame it is only his team-mates and not the selectors who recognise that.

New York has become the first school district in the US to introduce cricket as a sport in public high schools. Most of the players in the New York City cricket league are from the West Indies, India or Pakistan, and the response has been better than expected. Read on in the New Zealand Herald.

Angus Armstrong, born and raised in the United States, has been playing cricket for around three years at Stuyvesant High School, before the league was introduced. He said the experience allows him to gain an insight into cultures of other nations where the sport is popular. "There's an entire international community out there that so many Americans don't know about," he said.

Paddy Upton, India’s mental-conditioning coach, writes for Moneyweb.co.za website to explain how he and Gary Kirsten adapt to supporting India when they are both South African.

And what does it feel like to be planning and putting our every effort into beating our home country? The truth, for both of us, is that with every part of us we want and are willing India to win. The disappointment of defeat at the hands of the South Africans in the last Test burned us as much as it did the Indians.

Brad Haddin doesn’t normally wait by the phone to find out if he’s been selected for the national squad, but this time around he just couldn’t help himself. It was a painful two weeks he tells Alex Brown in the Sydney Morning Herald.

"I just wanted to hear it officially: you've been named in the squad for the West Indies. I was on edge every time the phone rang. I was like a bear with a sore head until I got that confirmation."

The famous Wisden Almanack still has its place, says Mike Selvey in the Guardian, and is about more than handing out a few prizes every year. Selvey praises the collection of comments, in particular the appraisals of the careers of the trio of geniuses who retired during 2007, but doesn't quite agree with editor Scyld Berry's idea that "physical violence is threatening to take over the traditional non-contact sport of cricket".

Wisden's real strength lies in the chronicling of the world game and especially in the articles - always imaginatively commissioned, well written and meticulously edited - and the oddments at the end of the book. And yet, in a cricket world increasingly in ferment, this brick of a book still represents something reassuringly steadfast, its spring arrival always a portent of things to come as much as a document of those past, even the primrose cover seeming to offer subliminal hope, forlorn more often than not, of a summer of unrelenting sun.

Proof that some people have too much time on their hands. Professor Paul Boyle, from the University of St Andrews in Fife, has delved into the lifespans of England's Test cricketers and found that those who have played more than 25 Tests have a life expectancy of 80 years while those who have played fewer than 25 live on average to be 73.

In the Daily Telegraph, he writes that:

“One suggestion is that they benefited from the kudos they earned and this stayed with them for the rest of their lives, meaning they were less likely to be stressed and suffer ill-health."

In a far-from shattering conclusion, he adds that captains live no longer than non captains.

	Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh should get a pitch tailor-made for spin in Kanpur © AFP

South Africa's bowling coach Vincent Barnes is not worried about the brownish Kanpur pitch, writes Sandeep Dwivedi in the Indian Express.

Since South Africa’s tour to India followed their trip to Pakistan and Bangladesh, Vincent Barnes has a ‘been there, seen it and done it too’ expression on his face as he takes a look at the Green Park track. He speaks about the pitch in Dhaka during the Bangladesh tour and how his team’s fear proved unfounded. “We first thought the pitch was certain to break in the first couple of days. It actually lasted for five. The same thing happened in Chittagong as well,” he says, highlighting how modern-day tourists to the subcontinent aren’t that fussy about the dust bowls they encounter.

However, Anand Vasu writes in the Hindustan Times that the players were surprised at the state of the pitch.

Mickey Arthur, the South African coach, who had made it out to the middle a little before his team, was not particularly impressed by what he saw and actually had a chat to [Graeme] Smith, asking him to take a deep breath and relax, warning him not to be too perturbed by what he saw.

“Greed and arrogance” is the damning headline in an editorial for The Hindu which predicts a media boycott of the IPL whose administrators are making “over-the-top” demands.

Under the guise of protecting its intellectual property rights, it issued a set of guidelines for media bristling with unacceptable conditions. The most outrageous condition in the original accreditation guidelines was this clause: “For the avoidance of doubt, IPL shall be entitled to use and reproduce, free of charge, worldwide and without limit in time any and all photographs/images captured by the Accredited Party at any ground and the Accredited Party shall make the same available promptly to the IPL...at his/her cost.”

The piece goes on to list what the IPL want, commenting that this is far from likely to happen. The paper believes that in fact the only answer is a boycott and calls on the history of previous stand-offs which have only gone one way: the administrative bodies in question, be they cricket, rugby or soccer related, have had to back down to the media’s will.

Meanwhile Prem Panicker, in his blog, says the problem isn't with the terms of the negotiations but the fact that the media is negotiating at all.

In Canadian newspaper the Star, Faraz Sarwat writes that with the IPL filled to the brim with international stars there is sensory overload. At this point, the average fan would struggle to identify the team South Africa's Jacques Kallis will play for or who will open the bowling for the Delhi Daredevils. Meanwhile the ICL showed that it is a living league and there is reason to believe that there will be more players signing on, although still of the disgruntled, rejected and retired variety.

In the Sydney Morning Herald Jamie Pandaram finds out more about Australia's newest fast bowler, Doug Bollinger.

Cricket is the loneliest of team sports, and the backslappers and well-wishers don't usually arrive until after success. Bollinger learned early, nobody would be knocking life's stumps down for him.

So when he decided to take up cricket at 15 after spending his earlier years on the rugby league field with Seven Hills, the son of a Dutchman wasn't taking shortcuts. By 21 he was picked up by the Fairfield grade club, and in quick succession he had managed to knock over three more stumps; the third grade team, seconds, and then firsts in his debut season.

Bollinger featured in the first grade grand final that year, and knocked that stump over too with a premiership win. "After that it just kind of happened," he said.

Patrick Kidd chats with John Emburey, one of the ICL coaches, about "the ICL World Series...a triangular tournament between the pick of the players from the eight ICL franchises".

"The lack of practice facilities has been the big problem," Emburey added. "The BCCI have made it very difficult for us to play at anything other than municipal grounds and the practice facilities have been shared between the teams, but hopefully this will improve."

The ICL staged its first Twenty20 tournament before Christmas, taking some of the wind out of the IPL, which is backed by the Indian board. Emburey said that crowds for the matches, played at only three grounds, have been "mixed but excellent at the games in Hyderabad with up to 20,000 watching". The former England off spinner added that the TV viewing figures for the ICL, helped by the partnership between Zee and Ten Sports, have been impressive. "There have been more people watching the ICL on TV than were watching the India v South Africa Test series," he said.

Read the full story at The Times' Line and Length.

An Indian journalist met an old classmate of Gandhi's, who remembered a “dashing cricketer” who “evinced a keen interest in the game as a school student”. If these oral testimonies are reliable, Gandhi spun a cricket ball long before he spun khadi, the hand-woven cloth he argued should be worn by all Indians in preference to machine-made textiles.

The thought is appealing, even if the evidence of the printed record runs in the other direction. In his autobiography, which deals extensively with his childhood and schooldays, Gandhi does not mention cricket.

Cricket barely touched Gandhi, yet, by virtue of who he was and what he did, he had a substantial impact on cricket in India. As I argued in A Corner of a Foreign Field, the Mahatma's teachings profoundly influenced the way the game was played and perceived.

After the featherbed in Chennai and the lively pitch in Ahmedabad, on which India were shot out for 76 in the first session, the Kanpur wicket will undoubtedly be under scrutiny ahead of the third Test between India and South Africa. Sandeep Dwivedi spoke to Chotelal, the groundsman at Green Park, in the Indian Express.

“In 1983, I prepared a green pitch for the India vs West Indies game and the consequences weren’t great,” Chotelal says. It was the game in which Malcolm Marshall’s fiery bouncer saw Sunil Gavaskar’s bat falling from his hands and India suffering an innings defeat. What followed was brickbats and Chotelal’s shelved his green experiment for good.

Then in 1996, Sachin Tendulkar led India against South Africa in the final game of the series in a do-or-draw scenario. A wiser Chotelal rolled out a brownish carpet with myriad designs on it. India’s big win had then coach Madan Lal appreciating the groundsman with a Rs 25,000 award. “Even Tendulkar was quite happy. He met me after the game and was so happy that he gave me all the money that he had in his pocket,” says Chotelal.

Alex Parker, in the Johannesburg's Times, writes that the Indian team is famous for being a collection of monstrous egos sloshing about in great vats of self-importance.

"The Indian team and it's administrators appear to be very close to a state of disarray," writes Neil Manthorp on Supercricket.co.za. "They might want to think about seeking an answer to an important question before they finalise the XI for Kanpur. Who actually wants to play Test cricket."

Prem Panicker, writing in the Rediff blog, questions the motives behind the controversial IPL accreditation process.

... And more than the provisions pertaining to media accreditation for the IPL, this is the crux of the problem—the BCCI has repeatedly thrown aside all norms, and treated cricket as its personal property, to buy and sell at will ... Can the BCCI on the same lines either start its own magazine, or ‘sell’ rights to one paper or magazine, and immediately prohibit everyone else from mentioning Indian cricket, in whole or part? Can the BCCI launch a television station tomorrow, and forbid everyone else from applying for coverage rights, or showing even the briefest of clips? And most importantly, what do you mean, sold? Was this a private transaction the rest of us are not privy to? What was the process followed?

There is a further update as well. Read here.

Writing in the Wisden Almanack, an extract of which is in the Times, Mike Atherton pays tribute to the cavalier genius of Brian Lara.

No other contemporary player, save perhaps Mohammad Azharuddin, could deflect the ball so finely and so powerfully with a turn of the blade and flick of the wrists. Lara had subtlety in an age of power and brute force.

This unrestricted repertoire, the widest of arcs being open to him, and the ability to hit good balls to the boundary made him uniquely feared by opposing captains. You might worry about Adam Gilchrist, say, butchering an attack and smashing a bowler to smithereens, but Lara made captains, not bowlers, look silly. If you knew you were going to die, you’d prefer a single bludgeoning blow to the head, or a quick bullet to the brain, rather than death by a thousand ever-so-precise cuts. Eleven fielders were never enough; there were always gaps to plug.

Andrew Strauss writes about the legacy of his former coach Duncan Fletcher in the Wisden Almanack. Read it in the Times

I defy any recent player to stand up and say he didn't learn anything from Duncan Fletcher, whether he played one Test or a hundred ... Prior to the 2005 Ashes series, Fletcher came up to me stating that he thought I needed to work on my method against Shane Warne. Being slightly pig-headed, I replied that rather than change anything before the series started I would prefer to see whether my technique worked first. I was running back for advice and guidance two Tests into the series.

If India take a few gambles in Kanpur to try and square the series, it might mean their playing three spinners and just one full-time seamer to share the new ball with Sourav Ganguly. This plan, Jacques Kallis thinks, could backfire for three reasons. He writes in the Hindu:

Firstly, South Africa really isn’t that bad against spin as our record over the last five or six years shows. Secondly, I believe the new ball is still the best way to take wickets and, with respect to Sourav, he isn’t a great threat. And thirdly, if the pitch is dry and uneven, then Dale Steyn, Makhaya Ntini and Morne Morkel will be just as dangerous as Anil and Harbhajan.

In the Hindustan Times, Mark Boucher writes that India missed Sachin Tendulkar in Ahmedabad.

	Amol Muzumdar, the Mumbai stalwart, doesn't find a place in the Mumbai Indians, the IPL team based in the city © Cricinfo Ltd

England's players are not the only set missing out on the Indian Premier League. Also MIA are some of the most consistent and prolific performers in India's domestic circuit, who - despite years of experience - have failed to cash in the Twenty20 boom, reports the Indian Express.

As the cricket fans get excited about getting the first feel of the city-based league with international stars and get blissfully lost in their dilemma to be a Knight Rider or a Daredevil, it’s quite unfashionable to speak about [Nilesh] Kulkarni. Or say, Amol Muzumdar, Amit Bhandari, Gagan Khoda, Hrishikesh Kanitkar, Sairaj Bahutule and Shitanshu Kotak. These are the stars; who for more than a decade have turned up for their respective state, city or region but their efforts haven’t been significantly applauded, rewarded or even recognised. T-shirts with their names were never seen at retail outlets, there were no promotional videos made of their team, nor have they walked on to the field with a theme song on the public address system.

...

Interestingly, there is one team in the IPL that has a few old-timers. Bangalore Royal Challengers, on the advice of former Indian captain Rahul Dravid, have drafted in a few 30-plus domestic cricketers. Karnataka regulars Sunil Joshi, J Arun Kumar, R Vinay Kumar and Thilak Naidu are the rare domestic seniors in the IPL.

The English season kicks off with MCC playing the champion county, Sussex, at Lord's next week to kickoff the English season. However, "the main subject of discussion in both dressing rooms, however, will not be the match, or how splendid Lord's is looking, or the impending domestic season. It will be of the IPL and where it is leading us," says Stephen Brenkley in the Independent.

All hell is being let loose out there. Every cricketer in England – and beyond – is talking about the advent of the Indian Premier League, how they might get a piece of the action and instructing their agent, if they have one, to check if there might be a contract available. There are millions of dollars swilling around the game and cricketers – some of them – will be rich beyond their dreams and perhaps be the objects of adulation not seen since, well, W G.

But MCC are still playing the champion county. Oh to be in England now that April's there. It is a safe bet, given the rapidity of events, that in 2108 the season's curtain-raiser willnot be a first-class match at Lord's between MCC and the champion county. MCC may still exist; not so the champion county. Doubtless Lord's will host some Twenty20 festival match for charity. It may not take a century, but more like a year.

In the Sunday Telegraph, Steve James writes that should Robert Mugabe be forced from office in Zimbabwe then there will be a bonus for cricket in the country in that it may well signal the demise of ZC chairman Peter Chingoka.

Under Chingoka and his evil-eyed side-kick Ozias Bvute, Zimbabwean cricket has been crippled. Only without them could cricket in the country ever hope to begin dragging itself from its "quagmire of cronyism", as one close observer has described it.

Even if Mugabe and Chingoka are ousted, a return to Test cricket seems impossible. Zimbabwe's cricketing infrastructure appears far too damaged. Their twin pillars of school and club cricket have all but been destroyed. A talent base of players and administrators has left the country. Those that remain have little desire to be involved, change of government or not.

Times of India's Manu Joseph remembers his 2003 trip to Zimbabwe:

One morning, the blonde host began to tell me how much the world hated Robert Mugabe. The world, of course, called him a despot and considered his campaign against affluent white farmers, racist. “Even the blacks hate him,” she said. That, I was not willing to believe. The Third World brain is universal and I knew that between the rich and their despot, the poor will always hate the rich more.

Seeing India go through their motions on a lively Motera pitch, one got a feeling that Test cricket is on its deathbed, writes Pradeep Magazine in the Hindustan Times.

There has to be something terribly wrong in the order of things when the news of a Test match in India is relegated behind whether or not Shoaib Akhtar will be allowed to play in the IPL.

In the Sunday Telegraph, Scyld Berry, the editor of the Wisden Cricketer's Almanack, writes on the role of the yellow brick.

Test cricket is the most wonderful game. It has been played since 1877 and yet, still, the plot of every Test match is different - provided it is not hopelessly one-sided, like those involving Bangladesh. This month sees the end of an era, with 20-over cricket becoming the pinnacle of the game in the commercial and financial sense. But long may Test cricket continue to be played, and Wisden to record it.

	© Getty Images

Dimitri Mascarenhas will be England's only representative when the IPL kicks off in two week's time after signing with Shane Warne's Jaipur franchise. Mascarenhas's England team-mates can only watch on enviously. In the Sunday Telegraph, Steve James looks at the man who is the first, but certainly won't be the last, to follow a path to riches and the impact it will have.

Here meetings are being held, statements made and gossip garnered. Shame that caution and compromise are county cricket's time-honoured watchwords. So probably best not to hold your breath about any great structural change. After all, Twenty20's invention was a blip in the conservatism; where marketeers prevailed over the majority of the cricketing fraternity.

Amid this maelstrom Mascarenhas's role appears refreshingly clear. To rake in the cash, you might argue. There is that. But what about experiencing the frisson of a world-class tournament? What about actually being quite good at this super-abbreviated form of the game?

Put simply, Mascarenhas is our best man for this job; the perfect revolutionary. Only a fully fit and available Andrew Flintoff would be better suited.

Simon Jones was facing the prospect of early retirement after losing his ECB central contract and being offered a reduced deal by Glamorgan following long-running injury problems since the 2005 Ashes. Now, though, he is preparing for the new season with Worcestershire and still has ambitions to return to England colours. And the key to his recovery? Troy Cooley, the former England fast-bowling coach who left after the 2005 Ashes and returned to Australia. Jones spoke to Bill Day from the Mail on Sunday.

I've been sending video footage for Troy to inspect my bowling action after recovery from my knee injury...He was building my confidence when, frankly, England were no longer keeping in touch.

I felt really disappointed that someone who had worked so hard for that Ashes win could be forgotten so soon. I wanted someone to believe in me, not kick me in the teeth. Troy did that, and so did Steve Rhodes, Worcestershire's cricket director, who said he wanted me, but only if I still had England ambitions.

Mark Richardson, writing in the Herald on Sunday, says the dumping of Matthew Bell and Mathew Sinclair from the England tour shows runs at domestic level are not enough to earn Test selection.

In fairness, Sinclair was given every opportunity to regain his early international form but showed he is not the player he was in 1999. So the selectors were able to ignore his good return for Central Districts again and his quite outstanding domestic record.

Bell, on the other hand, would have stimulated more debate. In 1998, Bell was selected on potential then dropped. In 2000 he earned his place back on sheer volume of runs and was dropped again. At the start of this year, he again showed top domestic form and gained re-selection then ended the year being dropped.

In the same paper Paul Lewis looks at Aaron Redmond, New Zealand’s latest addition. Redmond’s father Rodney posted a hundred and a half-century on debut and never played again.

The Melbourne club Northcote is hoping to attract Tatenda Taibu for next summer, Chloe Saltau reports in the Sunday Age.

Taibu is expected to relocate to Melbourne and represent Northcote, a move that could position him for future Bushrangers selection, although he will not be considered for a place on Cricket Victoria's contract list for next season. Northcote president Mark Sundberg confirmed the club hoped to recruit the bright young wicketkeeper-batsman, but said he had so far been unable to contact Taibu.

	Asif Iqbal feels the act of criticising the board does certainly not merit anything as drastic as what is for all practical purposes, a life ban © AFP

Pakistan’s fast bowling superstar Shoaib Akhtar seems to have timed his protest against his five-year ban imposed by the Pakistan Cricket Board just right, says former Pakistan captain Asif Iqbal in the News.

I agree with the majority of opinion that seems to think that a five-year ban on Shoaib is excessive and out of proportion for the offence that he was hauled up for on this occasion. True, that his record has a lot more than this or any one offence, but since the ban has come following the last offence, which was of criticising the board, the perception inevitably is that this is the offence for which he has been punished.

To that extent, the punishment is draconian; the act of criticising the Board does certainly not merit anything as drastic as what is for all practical purposes, a life ban. In fact, such a punishment may have been considered befitting if it was imposed after the drugs scandal or after the incident in which Shoaib was alleged to hit teammate Mohammad Asif with a bat in the dressing room.

These were much bigger misdemeanours and a ban, if imposed following these offences, would be more difficult to agitate against. But this was not the right time for such a drastic punishment; the crime simply did not fit it.

That said, Shoaib’s outburst against the Board and its Chairman is equally wrong. His claim that he is being punished for being a loyal Pakistani only qualifies as an utter load of rubbish, for by insinuation all those who are not punished — which includes the overwhelming majority of cricketers — are not loyal Pakistanis, and those who have inflicted the punishment on him are not either.

As a country India has begun to achieve a lot and grow in confidence so it is no longer appropriate for the cricketers to lose focus after every famous victory, writes Peter Roebuck in the Hindu.

Nothing in India’s performances after the triumph in the World Twenty20 or after taking the one-day spoils in Australia suggests that the cricket culture is strong enough to sustain success. On the contrary, India immediately looked flabby. It is not entirely the players’ fault. Locals seem to relish awards. Pictures of people shaking hands are widely featured in the newspapers. It is well intended. No-one wants India to be a boring place full of people talking about property prices. But when joy turns into delirium it becomes corrosive.

Jamie Pandaram, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, looks at how New South Wales’ talent scouts have found players such as Brett Lee, Michael Clarke and Phillip Hughes. The next big thing is tipped to be Josh Hazelwood, a 17-year-old fast bowler.

Those in the know at the state’s high performance unit believe they can tip a future champion before he or she is old enough to get a driver's licence. "It's the X-factor," the department's manager, Alan Campbell, said. "They look like they want to be there, they keep bouncing back after all the tests we put them through. And they have the ability to perform when it really counts.”

In the Herald Sun Ron Reed writes Geoff and Shaun Marsh, who was picked in the one-day squad to tour the West Indies, are in line to become only the second father-son combination to represent Australia.

Fewer than 1000 people play cricket in the Big Apple even though it hosted the national championships in 2006, reports Timothy Williams in the New York Times. However, the game has been introduced as a school sport and about 600 students are joining in. Despite the interest, Williams says nobody is expecting it to overtake baseball, football or soccer.

“In my travels around the city, it became clear that in the major parks around the city a lot of people were playing cricket on weekends,” the Department of Education’s Eric Goldstein said. “The old baseball field I used to play on in Cunningham Park in Queens is now a cricket pitch. It’s amazing to see.”

Parks on the edges of the city — Van Cortlandt, Soundview and Ferry Point in the Bronx; Canarsie Beach in Brooklyn; and Baisley Pond in Queens — are filled with cricket players on summer weekends, their crisp white uniforms presenting a vivid contrast on the grass fields. Some 650 adults play in the city’s six leagues.

And no story about cricket in the United States is complete without a description of the game.

It is similar to baseball, but with differences that can make it difficult for Americans to follow. Players run with their bats in hand; balls are bowled, not pitched; spit balls are allowed; fielders are not permitted to wear gloves; there is no foul territory; and bowlers (pitchers) sprint before releasing the ball, which typically bounces and picks up spin before reaching a batsman.

Don't forget to check out Cricinfo's Beyond the Test World blog, featuring news and updates from the lesser-known reaches of the cricketing world

Richie Benaud will be one of the first inductees into New South Wales’ Hall of Fame, but he tells the Daily Telegraph he would be 12th man if the dozen selected ever played in the same team. Don Bradman, Victor Trumper and Steve Waugh will also be honoured.

"When this side was first announced back in January, I recalled seeing Bill O'Reilly listed at No. 12 on the list,” Benaud said. "And had that been the case [in a match], I can assure you I would have been on the end of a blasting from Tiger O'Reilly."

The British Pakistani cricket fraternity are to voice their anger at the banning of Shoaib Akhtar in a Southall curry house this evening. The Times’ Patrick Kidd has the full story at Line and Length:

Tonight at 7pm, members of the British Pakistani community will be gathering in Chaudhry's TKC, a restaurant in Southall that has been catering for Pakistani touring teams to Britain for more than 30 years, to air their displeasure at the five-year ban handed down to Shoaib Akhtar for criticising the Pakistan Cricket Board.

Dalawar Chaudhry said that more than 100 guests were expected to attend the protest meeting - "everyone who is important in the Pakistani cricket fraternity in England" - and that they want to air their displeasure at the PCB's actions. "The PCB should support their players," Mr Chaudhry said. "The penalty really does not fit the crime. Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif can be forgiven after criticising the Pakistani government, but Shoaib, who has some of the best Test statistics by any fast bowler, is not forgiven. It is very harsh when you consider that far more sacrilegious crimes, such as match-fixing, get lesser penalties."

In the Age Alex Brown looks at the fall – and excuses – of Shoaib.

He has never learned his lesson. He has chosen to wound those who have defended him and act without a shred of remorse or accountability. And, this time, he intends to take the game's reputation with him.

On Monday New Zealand will name their squad to tour England and in the Waikato Times, Ian Anderson looks at how few options the selectors have.

This season's programme has shown us we don't have 15 players who can automatically make claims for Test squad selection. We have ten then it's a scramble for the remaining spots. Batting is the major achilles heel – there's still no definitive opening combination and the top six has more obvious holes than a hastily-invented alibi.

Matt Pryor meets Mike Gatting who's undertaking his first desk job within the bowels of the ECB: managing director of cricket partnerships.

“That goes through from grassroots to first-class cricket,” Gatting said. “It encompasses MCC, PCA [the Professional Cricketers’ Association], [Lord’s] Taverners and charities, National Playing Fields Association, Sport England, premier leagues, age-group cricket, up to the first-class game. My first job was going round to all the first-class counties and talking to them about everything from issues with their county boards to academies and Kolpaks.”

But he has been at the other end of the scale, too. “I was down at a place called Englefield Green not so long ago, next to Wentworth Golf Club,” he said. “A guy had written to us to say ‘this is outrageous, we’ve got this funfair and it keeps ripping up our outfield.’ It’s one of these nice things; you go down and have a chat with the local council and hopefully there will be a compromise. So you do get out and about a bit.”

Read the full story at the Times

	Shoaib Akhtar could be out of international cricket for five years © AFP

The only surprise in the PCB losing confidence in Shoaib is that it took them so long. Yes, at a time when bat is dominating ball his record of 178 Test wickets at little more than 25 apiece places him among the leading pace bowlers in the world. He was indulged by captains and coaches because he was special.

In his blog for the Times, Dileep Premachandran writes that by banning Shoaib, the Pakistan board has taken another step on the road to oblivion.

The Guardian's Andy Bull recalls watching Shoaib bowl for Worcestershire on a hot September afternoon three years ago:

Sitting up in my seat, squinting into the sunshine, I'd see him run in, I'd see his arms describe an arc and the ball leave his hand. And by the time the batsman began his stroke the bails would already be hitting the turf somewhere beyond second slip.

He took three wickets in four balls, and went on to record the best limited overs figures (7.2-2-16-6) in Worcestershire's history. It didn't stop the club moaning about what a poor signing he'd been, but it did give their supporters something to remember him by.

Pakistan daily, the Dawn's Khalid Khan feels the board should be applauded for making a bold move to curb probably the worst case of indiscipline committed by an individual in the chequered history of Pakistan cricket.

	There was no fairytale Test call-up for Bryce McGain © Getty Images

Victorians have traditionally felt their players get overlooked for national selection to accommodate New South Wales cricketers. Australia’s 15-man Test squad to tour the West Indies features eight New South Wales players and no Victorians, although both teams made the Pura Cup final. In the Herald Sun, Ron Reed reports.

For the first time, Victoria has no cricketer considered good enough to be picked for an overseas Test tour. The Australian selectors, including Victorian Merv Hughes, yesterday ignored the Bushrangers in naming 15 players for the three-Test trip to the West Indies next month. Cricket Australia statistician Ross Dundas said the only other time this had happened was in 2003, when champion spin bowler Shane Warne was serving his year's suspension after failing a drugs test.

Victoria’s main hope for a Test call-up was the legspinner Bryce McGain. In the Age, Peter Hanlon chats to McGain after he missed the cut.

The Test squad, however, is again bereft of Vics, leaving the Bushrangers some way off meeting their mission statement of having 30% representation in national teams by 2011. McGain by then will be pushing 40, but thinks himself more of a chance than now. He knows he is an unusual story, and has enjoyed people's interest, but is aware that he was essentially a first-year player this summer.

After Virender Sehwag plundered his second Test triple-century, Jaideep Varma argues in holdingwilley.com that Sehwag is the most under-rated cricketer in the world. Only one batsman in the modern age, Adam Gilchrist, has numbers to match Sehwag's eye-popping strike-rate of 77 allied with the astounding average of 53. Varma contends that Sehwag has already done enough to be considered an all-time great and that he is a shoo-in for a spot among the top five Indian Test batsmen of all time.

Sehwag’s uncluttered and simple see-ball-will-hammer approach has been more than just effective. It has a brought a different way of looking at the game, because before him, no one in the history of the game has had as much success doing this. If cricket was film, fiction or music, Sehwag would be a genre of his own.

Former Test batsman and current Tamil Nadu coach WV Raman recalls the days when, even as an Under-19 batsman, Rahul Dravid showed an aptitude for correct technique and a stomach for a fight. He writes in the Hindu:

The young skipper was crowded but his ability to smother the spin with solid defence indicated that he had the stomach for a fight. The taunts from the close-in fielders were ignored and he went on to bat out the overs without allowing the bullying to ruffle him. A word of appreciation from me at the end of the innings was acknowledged with a measured smile and softly uttered thanks.