An editorial in the Indian Express takes the case of former New Zealand fast bowler Ewen Chatfield, who now drives a taxi in Wellington, and makes the point that cricket needs more IPLs and ICLs, free of boundaries of nationality and monopoly, as forms of employment.

International cricket has lost for ever the sight of Shane Bond steaming in, getting unsuspected pace and bounce from dying wickets by bending his fragile back, of Craig McMillan’s extraordinary, effortless, steely-eyed hitting. That McMillan and Bond should have made this choice isn’t surprising; like cab-driving Chatfield, McMillan had tried being a car salesman and Bond a policeman — while they were still playing. McMillan, the one year he wasn’t given a central contract, felt that without quitting, he couldn’t feed his young family.

New Zealand captain Daniel Vettori has already positively gushed about his team's top order heading into the ODIs against India. On the same topic, former New Zealand batsman Mark Richardson, in the New Zealand Herald, has said Brendon McCullum should be persevered with at the top. Richardson believes that if McCullum can take the same mentality he took in his two unbeaten half-centuries in the Twentyy20s then those scores would convert to possible 150s. And scores like that achieve wins.

With the hitting power that permeates through this team, McCullum's true value to his side is in the time he can spend at the crease. This is something I feel he may have forgotten and he sold himself short in trying to demonstration his potential destructive abilities.

	Raj Singh Dungarpur transformed the Cricket Club of India into the most prestigious one in the country © Cricinfo Ltd

The man who could remember the exact words the legendary CK Nayudu muttered below his breath when he bowled him a bouncer in the 1950s remembers virtually nothing now ...

... The wealthy and influential Dungarpur managed the Indian side four times on overseas tours and had been a national selector for two terms during which he earned both bouquets and brickbats. Many still remember how he got Mohammed Azharuddin the top job by simply asking ‘Mian, Captain Banogey’ and why Mohinder Amarnath included him uppermost in the list when he called cricket selectors a bunch of jokers.

Zaheer Khan has gone from edgy, brittle paceman to the leader of India’s attack, the man who has delivered some of its most emphatic victories in the last two seasons, writes Sharda Ugra in India Today.

From an uncertain performer always on the fringe of hitting his stride to a mature bowler the Indians now rely on. He forms one half of what some call the best new ball-pair in the world, whose presence gives the Indian bowling attack its heft and will make all opposition think twice about loading their decks in bowlers’ favour.

	It's unrealistic to expect to dominate Tendulkar © AFP

Our main tactic was to try and bore Tendulkar out, keep him off strike, disrupt his momentum, contain him as much as we could. We were only moderately successful, and the same goes for Dravid, a similar type of runmaker. Tendulkar's average is much the same here as it is anywhere else, even if he wasn't perhaps as fluid in his strokemaking here as he was at home or somewhere like Australia, where conditions are more to his liking. Greats like Tendulkar and Dravid know how to adapt. They will make runs anywhere. It is unrealistic to expect to dominate them.

In the same paper, David Leggat writes that Tendulkar and Dinesh Karthik's late withdrawal from the charity game demonstrates demonstrates, on New Zealand soil, the lengths to which the Board of Control for Cricket in India will go to shut down any link, no matter how trivial, with the ICL.

Check out the Brian Viner interview with Andrew Flintoff in the Independent.

His refusal to endorse Pietersen's broadside at Stanford seemed significant to me. Flintoff is too decent and honest a character to make retrospective judgements in public about a man whose money he was happy to accept, and even as I prodded him for his feelings about Giles Clarke and David Collier of the England and Wales Cricket Board, who refuse to acknowledge their craven foolishness in hooking the reputation of English cricket to the rotor blades of the Texan's hired helicopter, I knew that I would get nowhere. "That's not my business, that's got nothing to do with me," he said, understandably, when I asked whether he would like to have seen Clarke and Collier resign. Fair enough, but did he hold private opinions? "Not really."

Let us now praise famous men. Andrew Flintoff is not playing in the fourth Test because he bowled himself into the ground in the last one. He may not play again in the series, and he may have bowled himself out of the Indian Premier League and the personal riches that come from it. It's possible that he will miss the beginning of the English summer, perhaps even the Ashes, writes Simon Barnes in the Times.

For decades, Kensington Oval was the impregnable fortress of West Indies cricket. Sides came here with aspiration and departed bereft and bruised from battering at the ramparts and the hammering inflicted on them by the rampant greats ... That was then, though, and this is now, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian.

West Indies are up against it now. To score 401 just to avoid the prospect of following-on is no easy task, even though the pitch has scarcely a mark worth calling a blemish. They were 85 for one last night, with Devon Smith (37 not out) and Ramnaresh Sarwan (40 not out) well ensconced. But for them, this will be a psychological battle as much as a technical one, the loss of Gayle a hammer blow at the end of two cataclysmic days in the field.

There are good cricketers and Test-match cricketers and, sometimes, a gulf divides them. Until now it was not known which category Ravi Bopara belonged to. When, in just under four hours of stylish batting, he brought up his maiden Test hundred yesterday, he put those doubts to bed for good, writes Mike Atherton in the Times.

To arrive at the happy place Ravi Bopara reached yesterday required a startling confluence of events. Without the birth of a baby, an injury to a key player and the poor form of another he would not have been in Bridgetown to compile a majestic maiden Test hundred and establish an impregnable position for England in the fourth Test, writes Stephen Brenkley in the Independent.

Mark Twain’s assertion that there are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and statistics - was hardly made with cricket in mind but it was accurately borne out by Fidel Edwards' figures in England's mammoth first innings. They were 30 overs, 3 for 151 and an utter injustice to the speed and spirit of a fast bowler who had every right to throw his hands in the air and to say to hell with it, writes Tony Cozier in the Trinidad Express.

Cricket will never supplant soccer as the preferred sport of the South African majority but like never before it has a priceless opportunity to enter the consciousness of the Rainbow Nation. And remain there. So says Mike Coward in the Australian as he worries about the country’s lack of Test culture.

South Africa has played Test cricket since 1889, was, with England and Australia, a foundation member of the then Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909 and its black and coloured communities of the Western Cape have a rich but largely unknown cricket history spanning more than a century. For all this, only occasionally does cricket engage across the numerous divides of one of the most complex, compartmentalised and politicised societies on Earth.

Robert Craddock, writing in Daily Telegraph, looks at the rise and potential fall of Twenty20.

The first casualty of recession is often gratuitous glitz and glamour and that is how it has proved in cricket's newest form of the game. Twenty20 cricket is not going to die - but it is going to have its wings clipped. It may have to survive on its product as much as its rowdy bells and whistles.

	Michael Slater © Getty Images

Philip Derriman, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, asks why is Michael Slater's name included as a possible answer to a quiz question in one of Slumdog Millionaire’s crucial scenes.

Slater's own explanation, according to someone who talked to him about it, is that the filmmakers wanted to include an answer that was obviously wrong - and Slater's name was the one chosen. Why? Maybe because the movie's writer, Simon Beaufoy, who is English and presumably follows cricket, happened to see Slater commentating on a cricket telecast around the time he was working on the screenplay.

In one sense, though, Slater's name was not really out of place, for he was certainly up there with the other three batsmen in terms of natural ability. Because of later setbacks, we tend to forget what a brilliant player the young Slater was.

Harsha Bhogle writes in the Indian Express that the first Twenty20 in Christchurch proved that keeping wickets in hand is vital even in the game's shortest format. He isn't too pleased though with the "six-on-demand" situation brought about by the short boundaries at that ground, and hopes the authorities in Wellington resist the temptation to bring the boundaries in.

Solid players there [at No. 5 and 6] allow the first three the option of taking the odd liberty with the bowling aware that there will not be a slide that sees the team six down with eight overs to play. And yet five and six must also be able to produce the big shots in the end. From that point of view alone it made sense to send Rohit Sharma at number four allowing two inventive players in Yuvraj and Dhoni to man the crucial positions.

Amid the celebrations of Andrew Strauss' fourth Test century of the winter, there must have been nagging concerns about the pitch at the Kensington Oval, which appears too flat for comfort. As he punched yet another boundary down the ground he could contemplate un­easily the wisdom of his selection. Was the investment in a sixth batsman really necessary? Vic Marks wonders in the Guardian.

The mistake was to describe this as a "good wicket". Prof Edwards, who oversees the ground here, had promised this pitch would be "fast and bouncy" but the groundsman has yet to be born who predicts his beloved surface will be "slow and low". In an age when everything can be scientifically annotated and analysed it is amazing how neglected the art of pitch-making remains. Last week in Karachi there was probably a dreadful cricket wicket, so many runs were scored by the batsmen of Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The balance between bat and ball was all wrong, bad for the game.

Andrew Flintoff's performance in Antigua was a startling demonstration of glorious and reckless self-sacrifice, of altruism, of a man giving everything for a cause beyond himself at a certain cost to himself, writes Simon Barnes in the Times.

Sinking of self into a common cause: this is what team sports are supposed to be all about. But it is not so terribly hard to find examples of players in team sports whose philosophy is based, instead, on the idea of sinking common cause into self. Chelsea's disappointing season can be traced to Didier Drogba's belief that his own sulks were more important than his team's results.

In the Telegraph, Steve James writes that England are starting to make some bold moves by dropping Ian Bell and Steve Harmison.

With Andrew Flintoff absent, it would have been easy to return him to No 6 and the calmer waters in which he has swum so strongly before. Instead, the stern words issued after exclusion in Antigua have been left to ring. There have been clear instructions. Bell’s fitness, and a few extra pounds, is obviously a concern. In response he has been training feverishly. But one wonders whether Harmison can now do likewise. Grave question marks linger. Bell will return one day to international cricket, but can Harmison?

Anjum Chopra, the Indian batsman, is set to become only the third women's cricketer to play in four World Cups. She chats with rediff.com's Bikash Mohapatra about the team's preparations for the tournament and the state of women's cricket in India.

This is also the first time the women's World Cup will be televised live. How does it feel?
... if a hundred countries get to watch women play internationally and if they get to watch a good standard, globally the game gets better. So I would, rather my team would, look at it as a plus point. Something that doesn't put pressure on us but something that encourages us to take the sport forward and get global recognition for women's cricket.

	Phillip Hughes was gone in 120 seconds © Getty Images

Will Swanton writes in the Sydney Morning Herald about the repercussions of Phillip Hughes’ fourth-ball duck on debut.

The following people were disappointed: Hughes, his parents on their first overseas trip, the team-mates so desperate to see Hughes succeed and the beer drinkers at the pub in Macksville. The reason for the angst in Hughes' home town? Free beer at the local watering hole until his dismissal. The revelry lasted two minutes.

In the same paper Peter Roebuck says Ricky Ponting stood defiant as his new and somewhat conservative side suffered grievous blows on an eventful but thinly attended first day.

Undeterred by the wreckage around him, and assisted mostly by his deputy, the Australian captain produced a stream of fluent strokes as he held the innings together.

The Herald Sun’s Ron Reed is impressed by Michael Clarke, who continues to thumb his nose at the critics.

	Will Andy Flower be the next England coach? © Getty Images

Why are the ECB wasting money on a head-hunting firm to help find them a new national coach, Simon Wilde wonders in the Times.

There simply aren't that many people out there with the necessary qualifications, as is plain from the job description taking up large amounts of space on the board's website. A prime motivation for bringing in outsiders to draw up the initial shortlist is, of course, to avoid the accusation - levelled when Peter Moores was appointed - that the appointment might in any way be not thorough, or an "inside job".

But I can think of only one scenario in which this becomes an embarrassment, and that is if Andy Flower, who is effectively filling in as coach during the West Indies tour, gets the full-time gig. Were that to happen, with the involvement of an outside agency, Flower would immediately start work in a weakened state, undermined by the charge that he had been chosen on a nod and a wink by people he already knows at the board.

He also pleads for a better balance between ball and bat.

Test cricket's great selling point is supposed to be that it tests participants to the limit, yet in reality any Tom, Dick or Harry can score a Test match century these days. Pitches are routinely like motorways and refuse to break up over five days, genuinely fast bowlers are few and far between, because their shins and spines have been fractured by the demands of bowling on concrete surfaces, and most outfields are smoother than a supermodel's Brazilian.

	Giles Clarke: he sees material things like product, he doesn't see human aspects like soul © Getty Images

He has a pathological ability to believe what he says. But it hasn't happened. TV audiences for cricket are at best a third of what they were. No one that I know watches Tests on a computer or a mobile.

He does have drive and he does have ideas. That is to be applauded. But too much of it is whimsical and he has a habit of alienating people.

The conclusion will not go down well within the halls of the ECB.

Like most entrepreneurs, Clarke sees material things like product, he doesn't see human aspects like soul. Deals excite him. English cricket has been tossed about on the waves of financiers' egos. The whole Stanford deal was really Clarke blowing a big raspberry to Lalit Modi, the founder of the IPL, and an attempt to curry favour with his own players. Can he now really expect Andrew Flintoff not to play in the IPL when he is busy selling the game to the highest bidders?

All the while he has been building the (unpaid) chairman's role into something so powerful and consuming that few others would have the time or scope to do it. Getting back in was a fait accompli. So the game will continue to dance to his rhythm. After last week's humiliation, perhaps the beat will be less erratic from now on. But don't bank on it.

But, as Clarke himself said of his critics: “I discard those people”.

Even the wealthy franchises of the IPL are feeling the effects of the global economic downturn as sponsors withdraw, writes Mike Atherton in the Times.

Now all eyes will be on the IPL in April, as the second season gets under way. Already the signs are that franchise-holders are finding things tougher in the second year after an average shortfall in revenues of $4million last year. Rajasthan Royals, last year's winners, are without a sponsor, while Kolkata Knight Riders and Deccan Chargers have lost principal sponsors.

The warning signs were flashing red for the co-owner of Kings XI Punjab recently when he said: “These are difficult times and we need to work out ways to make sure that all the franchises survive.” Another franchise director, unable clearly to grasp that the present crisis is all about the flow of credit, said: “There is a cashflow crunch, not an endemic problem.”

India Today's Sharda Ugra is impressed with the way Daniel Vettori handled the build-up to the series, showering India with compliments, before ambushing them in the first Twenty20.

There was no attempt at disintegration of any kind from New Zealand, except where it mattered - on the field. Mind you, the Indians have played a hand in this themselves, batting like the billionaires they all are. Or if you prefer, like Mumbai commuters who have had one last beer too many and are required to put in a sprint to make the last train home.

	Steve Harmison will have to shoulder more responsibility in the absence of Andrew Flintoff © Getty Images

Andrew Strauss was faced with more questions than answers on the eve of a Test match that his team must win. The balance of the side, the identity of the sixth batsman and Graeme Swann's injury were among them, but the most pressing concerned two players who have given England more headaches in recent years than any others: Andrew Flintoff, who definitely will not play, and Stephen Harmison, who probably will, but against whom there remains a huge question mark, writes Mike Atherton in the Times.

So now England must go into a match in which they must take 20 wickets, something they have yet to achieve in four full Tests this winter, with their default Fredless balance of an extra batsman at six and a bowler light, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian.

Quite who the batsman will be is a matter that Strauss and Andy Flower will have debated hard. Flower, in particular, is someone who might wish to break away from the cosiness engendered during Peter Moores' time in charge, which means that Ian Bell ought not to be an automatic choice. The alternative, Ravi Bopara, made a century in the tourists' match earlier this week, which proves little except that he has suffered hardly any impact from the journey and time change from New Zealand.

There comes a point in the affairs of man when it is necessary to be bold. For England that moment may have been reached. This does not mean recklessness or throwing caution to the wind – it is about assessing the risk, weighing the balance, and then concluding that desperate times require desperate measures, writes Stephen Brenkley in the Independent.

Also in the Guardian, Duncan Fletcher feels its crucial for England to work out a plan to counter Ramnaresh Sarwan.

If that fails, Plan B is to work on him around off-stump and drag him forward. His cut is his release shot, so if England can keep him on the front foot he will be out of his comfort zone. Then, if the plan to get him lbw is playing on his mind and persuading him to keep his legs out of the way, he may be forced to over-compensate and reach outside off, which opens up the chance of a nick. It's not easy, especially against such a fine player as Sarwan, but England have to be disciplined against a guy who has so far scored two hundreds and a ninety.

	Andrew Flintoff was bought by the Chennai Super Kings for $1.55 million © Getty Images

In the Guardian read the debate between Paul Nixon and Bob Taylor on whether Andrew Flintoff should play in the IPL.

Nixon: Beyond the Ashes, playing in the IPL will also set Freddie up for the next World Cup. As our performance in the last tournament showed, England still need to improve when it comes to playing in top-level limited overs matches and there is no better practice environment for this than the IPL, where the best players come up against the best players.

Taylor: Andrew more than anyone knows how big the Ashes are. His contribution to England's success in 2005 has defined his career and a similarly crucial display this year would rank Andrew as one of the greatest players England has ever had. He cannot risk missing out on that opportunity. What's more, if Andrew's on-going injury problems are as bad as they appear then this could be his last ever Ashes. Missing out could, therefore, be a disaster.

Basing deals on a 'capacity to pay' implies a board prepared to sell the national side at any expense, writes Gideon Haigh in the Guardian.

Managing cricket is about preserving value as well as leveraging price. At a time when the ECB is earnestly seeking a replacement for Vodafone, it would be disastrous to give the impression that they will whore their cricket team to anyone with "capacity to pay" – and who would wish to be that sponsor? English cricket has been damaged by association with Stanford; it is now damaged by association with a chairman and chief executive who have such a narrow and technocratic understanding of their duties.

	Michael Clarke can deal with praise or criticism © Getty Images

Something always seems to happen in Johannesburg, writes Peter Lalor in the Australian, as he looks at the venue for the first Test between Australia and South Africa.

Johannesburg has a reputation as one of the crime capitals of the world, and its famous bullring stadium, the Wanderers, provides no refuge for the timid cricketer. Something always seems to happen here. Good and bad ...

It's a heaving, threatening ground when it's full. The stands rise straight up above the field of play and fans perch above the players. The hill area in front of the low-level dressing rooms provides plenty of opportunity for the locals to say what they think to visitors. Even Steve Waugh says the place is "imposing".

Michael Clarke has his critics, but he tells Will Swanton in the Sydney Morning Herald the comments no longer bug him.

"If I'm praised or if I'm criticised, it's my job to try to keep going," Clarke said. "I'm paid to play cricket for Australia, and I take that seriously.”

In the Age Peter Roebuck writes that in theory the Australians do not have a snowflake's chance in hell of beating South Africa.

Stuart Clark isn’t on the tour, but is keeping busy studying, writes Tom Smithies in the Daily Telegraph.

In the Trinidad Express, Fazeer Mohammed revisits triple-centuries from over the years as Younis Khan prepares to challenge Brian Lara's record in Karachi.

How well we recall the look on the face of Sir Garfield Sobers on April 18, 1994, as the greatest cricketer ever watched from the pavilion at the Antigua Recreation Ground with Lara closing in on his standard of 365 not out which had stood since 1958. Yes, there was pride at the full flowering of another West Indian batting talent. But you could have also seen a tinge of regret that, 36 years after he stamped his own indelible mark on the game at the age of 21, here was this 23-year-old phenomenon on the verge of knocking him off the top of this particular statistical heap.

The effrontery of ECB's Giles Clarke and David Collier during the Stanford fiasco has been staggering on a number of levels, writes Lawrence Booth in the Guardian.

The effrontery is staggering on so many levels, the consistency of the logic shaky at best. Collier told BBC radio's Garry Richardson that there would have been an outcry if the ECB had looked Stanford's gift-horse in the mouth. Yet Stanford had already been turned away by India and South Africa, and hardly a peep of protest was heard from fans or administrators in those countries concerned about missing out on a giant pay-day. And if Collier really didn't think he had done anything wrong, why did he and Clarke even bother to discuss the issue of resignation?

Also read Nasser Hussain's interview with ECB chairman Giles Clarke in the Daily Mail.

NH: Let’s get into the Stanford affair. Did you do proper due diligence? One of his associates said the ECB were very naive not to raise concerns. It would have been easy to do so.

GC: Our job fundamentally was to see whether he could pay. There would have been nothing more shocking than to play the game and then nobody was paid. We aren’t financial service regulators. If these things were so simple why have the Securities Exchange Commission not taken the action they did considerably earlier? Their job is to protect investors. They didn’t. We are a national sporting body who were paid a sum of money for a match that was sanctioned and approved by the International Cricket Council. The West Indies board have been doing business with Stanford for many years.

In India Today, Sharda Ugra previews India's tour of New Zealand and gets insights from former players on what the Indians can expect.

A quick check of current New Zealand cricket facts: Its captain looks like Harry Potter. Its hottest young batsman was christened Luteru Ross Poutoa Lote and its wicketkeeper answers to ‘Baz’. Another fella called Jesse Ryder could just bring the double chin into fashion. Everyone else is just tall and apart from English, the natives speak a strange tongue called Rugby.

A Brisbane university hopes to take the controversy out of throwing following the development of strap-on technology that can tell immediately whether a bowler’s action is illegal, reports the Australian.

The device uses electronic sensors to measure the degree of elbow extension from the time the bowling arm reaches a horizontal level to the ball's release ... Griffith University project leader Daniel James said the device would help remove controversy "and let people get on with playing the game".

"Once somebody has developed an arm action, it is very hard to correct on the day,” Dr James said. “But as a training tool this device could be invaluable, especially for developing athletes.

Nobody quite so young as Baby Prior can have had such an influence on the naming of a Test team and the possible course of a series. Prior Snr flying home for the birth of his first child has opened a new selection conundrum for England. The only guaranteed selection is Tim Ambrose but the No.6 berth is still up for grabs and it's a tough choice between Ian Bell and Ravi Bopara. Stephen Brenkley ponders in the Independent.

Oh, and congratulations Matt and Emily.Births have been a regular feature of England tours in recent years. Indeed, every tour should have one and probably will. In 2002, Nasser Hussain took his wife and elder son to Australia so he would neither have to go home nor miss the birth of his second son. Strauss left a tour of Pakistan in late 2005 to be at the birth of his and his wife’s first baby. England lost by an innings.

English cricket is in the news for all the wrong reasons thanks to the fall-out of the Stanford deal with the ECB involving a not-so-funny US$100 million. What the country needs in these difficult times is a sane voice; somebody with a sense of the game's history as well as its present; a sense of doing the right thing, as opposed to what may be commercially expedient; a sense of decency. Jonathan Agnew, the cricket correspondent of the BBC, is that person, writes Michael Henderson in the Guardian.

Listening to Agnew last week, as the Stanford story broke, was to hear a master broadcaster at work, capable of providing a full commentary on events in the middle while pushing Clarke, his studio guest, for answers. Not pushing too hard. That would have gone against the spirit of the programme. But pushing hard enough to leave listeners in no doubt that Clarke was squirming. It made for compelling radio.

While the lavish lateral movement may still trouble the batsmen, the improvement in pitches in New Zealand has been "dramatic". The playing conditions make the hosts formidable, but for India, it is a chance to remedy their miserable record. S Ram Mahesh in the Hindu hopes for good cricket wickets that uphold the balance between bat and ball and make for a fun-filled six weeks.

Stationed 2000 km southeast of Australia across the Tasman Sea, New Zealand bred conditions for cricket that were uniquely its own. The sticky-wet wickets yielded as readily as soft-set custard, enabling the ball to dwell and deviate when landed on the seam. The dense, water-charged atmosphere allowed the ball to swing — and as if this weren’t enough, the small, open grounds, sensitive to the blustery gusts that frequent these parts, furthered the cause of swing.

How many universities in the world can boast of having vineyards and a winery on their grounds? Lincoln University, which played host to the Indian team for their practice sessions is probably the most picturesque cricket venue. Anand Vasu in the Hindustan Times takes a walk through the campus.

Mohammed Azharuddin has become the latest Indian cricketer to join politics, after the likes of Navjot Sidhu and Kirti Azad, though it's not clear whether he will be a candidate in the forthcoming general elections. Another former captain, the iconic Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, was unsuccessful in both his attempts to enter the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. Lokendra Pratap Sahi in theTelegraph, the Kolkata daily, gets Pataudi to talk politics.

Why do cricketers get attracted to politics?

Usually, they get invited by some party or the other... Their advantage is that they don’t have to introduce themselves from any platform… That way, there’s probably 30 per cent less work to do... If, for example, a relatively unknown person stands for elections, then that person’s entire history has to be repeated at every gathering.

In the Independent, Mark Nicholas feels the call for Giles Clarke’s head is fair enough after the Stanford saga. Political expediency was mentioned as a reason for the sudden tie up with West Indies cricket – votes count at the altar of the ICC – but the truth is that the chairman needed to appease restless England players, who were salivating at the riches available in the IPL and, even more urgently, he needed a trophy.

But he does not appear to have given the game at large the pastoral care it needs. How could the Pietersen/ Moores situation have been allowed to develop in the first place, never mind become so public? Why were the imaginative group of board constituents who drafted a model for an original and potentially lucrative English Premier League, not allowed a hearing?

The absence of Flintoff from the mix for the tour match has provided a selection conundrum for Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower, who must find a way of balancing the books without their allrounder, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian.

The notion of reducing the bowling option by bolstering the batting seems to go against the grain of circumstance. But how to put a quart into a pint pot? One idea is for Prior to bat at six and tell him to take responsibility. This leaves Broad at seven – too high for someone who has yet to make a first-class hundred – and a long tail in a series that has so far seen significant contributions from both lower orders.

	Charlotte Edwards poses with her trophy for the Women's Player of the Year ©Getty Images

With the Women's World Cup about to get underway in Australia next month, England captain Charlotte Edwards talks about her foray into cricket, playing against male opponents and her opinion on women striking revealing poses to promote the sport.

How far has the women’s game come on in your time?
Leaps and bounds. The media profile has improved and we are now taken seriously. When I first represented England we still wore skirts on the field! Adidas has designed kit for us and that reflects what we are - professional athletes. We don’t have central contracts but are paid by the Chance to Shine charity to promote the game.

I live in the real world and know that women’s cricket needs all the publicity it can get. So in theory I don’t have any objection to something that achieves that. I would need to know exactly what it was I was being asked to reveal before I signed up to anything!

Read on in the Times.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Jamie Pandaram reports on the Big Bash Victorian bushfire appeal match at the SCG.

Any match of this nature is fraught with the fears of officials in case a big name is injured, but all the cricketers escaped unscathed, as did all the footballers with big games looming, singers with important gigs to play, surfers with good waves to ride, and a politician with the environment to consider.

There will be fewer Australians in the crowds in South Africa during the Test series, writes Peter Lalor in the Sunday Telegraph.

The sight of a lonely Luke 'Sparrow' Gillian waving the flag alone at Australia's first game in South Africa is an indication of just how bad things are. With Australian cricket. And the economy.

Sparrow has been following his beloved cricket side since the mid-1990s and has seen them play 150 Tests. The founder of Waving the Flag is usually surrounded by hundreds of like-minded fans who have signed up for his budget tours. At the height of Australia's success he had 250 people following the 2004 Tests in India. This week in South Africa, it is Luke and Luke alone.

In the Sunday Age David Hussey, the Australia one-day international, writes about the Victorian bushfires and how they have affected people.

In 2008, Sri Lankan cricket was running backwards as if it was in a mighty hurry to fall over the cliff and then once a ‘may-be’ life line was thrown it has begun to float on like a rudderless ship, says SR Pathiravithana in Sri Lanka's Sunday Times.

The Observer's chief sports writer, Kevin Mitchell, believes that the fear of a power shift towards India led the ECB to embrace Sir Allen Stanford. While the controversy surrounding the Texan's fraud charges wages on, Mitchell says that at the heart of the troubles lay the ECB attitude to India. Where other countries embraced the new big noise in the game, England balked.

The Sunday Times' Martin Johnson feels the ECB's disastrous flirtation with Stanford is having repercussions on the pitch.

There is still some way to go before cricket can hope to match football for greed and dishonesty, but it’s getting there. Graver issues are afoot than a fraudulent appeal for a catch, but it’s all part of the wider philosophy – so shamelessly embraced by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) – of the end justifying the means. Otherwise, why, on the final day of the gripping Antigua Test match, did the England wicketkeeper triumphantly claim a catch, when the gap between ball and bat would have accommodated an Eddie Stobart lorry?

Simon Wilde, in the same newspaper, writes that the ECB bosses were seduced by Stanford's cash and took their eye off the ball.

Clarke and Collier may have been insufficiently mindful of the image of a game that is peculiarly wrapped up in morals. Football can be mired in as many financial scandals as it likes; cricket cannot. Stanford was simply too risky a venture. That should have been clear from the outset.

In the Independent on Sunday, Stephen Brenkley says it is a disgrace that the ECB is passing the buck.

Nick Cohen writes in the Observer that the on-field drama in Antigua couldn't hope to match the exposure of Stanford's rotten regime.

Growing up with a cricketing family equipped Stuart Broad with a fierce appetite to succeed, surmises Vic Marks, and Andrew Flintoff's injury has given the Nottinghamshire bowler a chance to stake a claim as a frontline bowler. Read the full interview with Broad in the Observer.

Excerpts:

"I've had to grow up very quickly," he says. "A lot of that was down to me going to Australia for six months after I left school [Oakham School in Leicestershire]. I learned how to be a bloke. I knew no one over there, I had to meet people, play tough cricket. I had to grow up a lot quicker as an 18-year-old than most because I was out in the big wide world, living on my own.

"Sometimes I need to pinch myself and realise I am only 22, I prefer to watch a film in and chill out than go out and have a few beers, which is a bit strange for a youngster, but it's part of the job."

Cricinfo's Andrew McGlashan has also written a piece on Broad. Read more.

It could very well be the groundsmen who feel the most pressure going into the marquee tour of the summer. India arrived in New Zealand last week, the first time they have been here for a full tour since December 2002, writes Mark Richardson in the New Zealand Herald.

But what to do? This is the last time New Zealanders will see the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, VVS Laxman, and possibly Virender Sehwag playing on our shores and it would be a shame to cheat the New Zealand fans once more of their considerable skill should we try to nullify them in seaming conditions. But we also want to win don't we? Nothing but the perfect cricket conditions will suffice for this tour. In the ODIs, we want conditions that provide for quality stroke play but ones that don't turn Iain O'Brien and Co into cannon fodder.

Those who want to play for New Zealand, line up in orderly fashion behind Daniel Vettori. Before long the selectors will get to you. Seriously, it's not as silly as it sounds, writes Dylan Cleaver in the New Zealand Herald.

A staggering 28 players have taken the field for New Zealand since the summer started in Bangladesh in October. Two others, wicketkeepers Peter McGlashan and Gareth Hopkins, have also been flown overseas as cover for Brendon McCullum. That's 30 players picked to play for their country - even in these days of million-dollar IPL contracts, surely the highest honour the sport affords you - out of a professional player pool of 92.

	Ashwell Prince has lost his place in South Africa's XI to JP Duminy © Getty Images

The omission of Ashwell Prince from South Africa's Test squad to face Australia is an indication of the country's progress in the game, Daryll Cullinan writes in the Weekender:

How refreshing is it that the debate around his nonselection is about what is best for the team from a winning point of view. It is good that we are finally seeing the next generation of cricketers come through whose talent and not race is the issue in the media.

Cullinan also feels that pre-tour banter between the two teams counts for nothing.

I can’t imagine the players being concerned by this game of ping-pong in the press about who is after whom with bat or ball, who are the favourites and who is trying desperately to take the pressure off themselves. Some new, refreshing comments and insight would be welcome.

One of those who made a mark on the Australia tour was left-armer Lonwabo Tsotsobe, and bowling coach Vincent Barnes tells Simon Borchardt he's impressed by the newcomer's attitude and accuracy. Click here for more.

	Aravinda, unlike Tendulkar, had to score runs for a minnow team © Reuters

Lara and Tendulkar never had to wallow in the darkness of playing for a minnow. So, their aggregate runs will be higher than Aravinda. But, neither of them have won the World Cup with their own bat ... Like George Headley (the Black Bradman), Aravinda was burdened by the fact that he was a maestro in the weakest team. The Sri Lankan batting in those days was vulnerable and impulsive. Aravinda stood out. He was not just a gifted batsman, but he had the gall.

The severing of all ties between the ECB and Sir Allen Stanford has not stopped the landslide of criticism threatening to swallow up chairman Giles Clarke. As the man who is regarded as the face of English cricket, Clarke must carry the can for the ECB's link to Stanford, says Duncan Fletcher in the Guardian.

Clarke seems happy to take plaudits when things go his way, so he should take the criticism when they do not. He's made a big thing in the past about others being accountable for actions, so I do not see why he shouldn't stand or fall according to his own standards.

The Times' Richard Hobson says the ECB's pearls of wisdom got lost in translation.

During the Antigua Test, as the locals "were drawn to the rickety stadium like pilgrims", James Lawton says that the management was told to turn off the music and increase the volume of the television commentary.Writing in the Independent, Lawton says it is a wonder that in 2009 the game in danger of death by skewered values and changed priorities should display, once again, such vital signs.

In the Daily Mail, Nasser Hussain wonders who is in charge of the leaderless England that made a mess of winning call in Antigua.

It made absolutely no sense and although it may seem like a minor detail, it cost England time and that is just what they needed more of on Thursday evening. They were effectively 300-odd for one, but still Anderson was sent out to protect Owais Shah. There was no logical explanation for it. Why on earth were the team's most fluent batsmen, Shah and Kevin Pietersen, sitting in the dressing room watching Jimmy bat? He did his best to be positive, but he is a No 9 or 10 for a reason.

The Antigua Test was a classic, says Mike Selvey in the Guardian, but England need to remember how to finish teams off.

Writing in the Mirror, Ian Botham urges England to think positive, or else the Aussies will give them an Ashes roasting.

With Stanford's fall and the appointment of David Collart as Zimbabwe's new sports minister, cricket may now legitimately hope that better days lie ahead, writes Peter Roebuck in the Hindu.

A founder member of the opposition party in Zimbabwe (in other countries it’d be called “the duly elected government”), Coltart is a keen cricketer, lawyer and man of integrity. Under the agreement recently hammered out, the education and sports portfolio was assigned to his faction of the MDC. Coltart was duly sworn in. Education will be his highest priority but cricket, will not be neglected. Coltart will want to see the long suppressed report into the finances of Zimbabwe cricket finances conducted in 2007. He’s been around and knows where the skeletons are hidden.

Richie Benaud has confirmed he will step down as a commentator in 2010 and Gideon Haigh writes in the Australian that the idea of cricket without him seems unthinkable.

But so did the idea of cricket without Arlott or Alan McGilvray, and the game marched on. This way, too, Benaud gets in ahead of the questioners, of whom some had begun gathering. The pithy Rodney Hogg recently compared Benaud with a 1960s LP "that you can't play any more because it has a scratch on it".

Instead, there is time for the composition of suitably expansive tributes. When Benaud signed off in England for the last time, at The Oval in 2005, players and spectators turned as one towards the commentary position to give him a standing ovation. The Nine Network is normally a little more sentimental and bathetic, although for Benaud it might make an exception: he has been a centre of gravity rather than a centre of levity.

Benaud tells AAP he is surprised by all the fuss created after his decision while Steve Crawley, Channel Nine’s head of sport, opens up in the Daily Telegraph about the life of Richie.

Peter Lalor, writing in the Australian, looks at the offspinner Nathan Hauritz, the Steven Bradbury of Australian cricket.

In 2004, he was twiddling his thumbs in the Australian tour party when Shane Warne broke a thumb and Stuart MacGill was too far away to make it for the Mumbai Test. Hauritz was ushered in for an unexpected debut.

When Warne resigned, Hauritz had only distant memories of the ball that got Sachin Tendulkar sweeping and the other that got VVS Laxman caught and bowled, not to mention the wicket of spinning guru Anil Kumble in his first over under a baggy green. The 27-year-old was a long, long way behind the pack of successors when selectors looked for a replacement.

Brad Haddin talks to Will Swanton in the Age about breaking his finger in his first Test while Peter Roebuck speaks to the coaching mentor of Michael Clarke and Phillip Hughes for the Sydney Morning Herald.

There’s a bushfire charity match in Sydney on Sunday and Steve Waugh will be leading one of the teams. In the Herald Maria Tsialis goes over Waugh’s close brushes with fire.

	And who's that lurking behind Stanford ... © Getty Images

Eight months on and it’s all ended in tears. The media has savaged the boards for their involvement with Stanford and not scratching under the dollar-plated surface of his financial empire. While Richards has been quiet, not so Sir Ian.

“The sorry Stanford debacle leaves English cricket with nothing but egg on its face,” he fumed in his column in the Mirror “It has been a disaster for the Antiguan people, a disaster for West Indian cricket and a disaster for English cricket - and you cannot just let something as massive as this be swept under the carpet. Someone has to be accountable. [Clarke] was the one telling everyone Stanford was the way to go - and it has been a huge mess.

"They took the Stanford deal instead and now where are we? It is all well and good suggesting it was a collective board decision, but I seem to remember Clarke pushing very hard for it."

There's still perhaps time for the Cricket Club of India (CCI) to negotiate a fair deal with IPL that will be in the best interests of their world-renowned club and the game of cricket, as well as Mumbai's cricket fanatics for whom there is no greater joy than witnessing a game at the delightful Brabourne Stadium. Khalid Ansari in his column in Mid-Day calls for the ego and arrogance to be cast aside, and wants the club to maintain its democratic view and usher in the younger generation.

As the whole Sir Allen Stanford business goes up in smoke and he becomes the latest billionaire lurking behind an impenetrable thicket of alleged lies, let's not blame poor alleged Sir A for being a monumental power-drunk, publicity-crazed vulgarian who doesn't know a doosra from a nurdle, says Simon Barnes in the Times. That's just the way he is.

When a billionaire comes a-calling, sport doesn't waste its precious time by saying, “I'm not that kind of girl.” No, one whiff of the inside of a fat wallet and sport is flat on its back with it's legs in the air, shouting: “Come and get it.”

Andy Bull in his Guardian blog says the rise and fall of Stanford was full of bluster and shady dealings, and that warning signs showed his empire was built on 'threats and innuendos'.

Although clearly in pain from his injured right hip, Andrew Flintoff bowled on a tense final day in Antigua, sending down two spells before leaving the field wicketless. Flintoff strained every sinew as England pushed for victory, but he was overshadowed by a much younger bowling team-mate. England's struggling allrounder knows that Stuart Broad is waiting to step into his shoes, says Vic Marks in the Telegraph.

In the Independent, Tony Cozier says that West Indies ended with their tails up after a dispiriting week, and that it took the composure of tailenders not reputed for such level-headedness to do so.

James Lawton, in the same paper, recalls his stormy altercation with Viv Richards nearly 18 years ago. In his own words, that bust-up with Sir Viv was bigger than World War III, and stole a certain Bush and Gorbachev's thunder.

April 14, 1990, the Recreation Ground in Antigua, bailiwick of King Vivian Richards, lord of the island, are a date and a place I was never likely to forget. But then nor was I quite prepared for the vividness of recall when the old Test battleground came back to fleeting life this week.

It was the shuddering anger, so perfectly preserved, of the great man that did it.

In the Trinidad Guardian, Vaneisa Baksh says the blight of West Indian cricket has got to her. She is not going to any cricket matches organised by the West Indies Cricket Board, and it isn’t simply to protest the gross dereliction of duty in Antigua - it is more out of disgust with its response to it.

The relative low success rate of teams travelling to New Zealand may have much to do with looking upon the assignment as just another tour. There is little folklore about Indian teams visiting there in spite of the fact that India’s first series win overseas came in New Zealand.

However, with the bowling now available to make full use of the conditions in New Zealand, and the advantage of playing the ODIs first, Harsha Bhogle in the Indian Express writes that this time around, Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his men can break the New Zealand jinx.

There is little of the excitement associated with going to England or Australia or Pakistan; or for that matter South Africa. Maybe it is because we do not see a lot of cricket from New Zealand, maybe the time difference is a factor or maybe, it is just not exciting enough. New Zealand, maybe, is a bit like a number six batsman who hangs in there, bats with the tail and returns 36 not out. Effective but not exciting.

Indian fielding coach Robin Singh feels the era of the specialist fielding positions is over and that in the age of Twenty20 cricket there is no choice, no preferred place. He also recognises that the campaign in New Zealand will be a challenging one and identified slip catching as a vital area for getting success. S Dinakar in the Hindu has more.

An editorial in the New Zealand Herald says that the country's government should not allow the tour of Zimbabwe to go ahead.

John Key has given a clear indication that he is prepared to order the New Zealand cricket team not to tour Zimbabwe in July. There, it seems, the matter will rest while the game's governing body talks things over with the Government. That should not be the case. This is not a matter over which the Prime Minister need procrastinate. He does not want the tour, New Zealand Cricket does not want it and most New Zealanders do not want it. The cricketers should be told forthwith they are not going to Zimbabwe.

The behaviour of those infatuated by Stanford's riches was, frankly, the worst aspect of the whole saga: from the ECB officials, who fawned over him when he descended the steps of his helicopter at Lord's, to the former greats, who knelt down and polished his boots at every opportunity, to the players' representatives, who did their best to catch the wave of excess, writes Michael Atherton in the Times.

When a game is played for money only, it is worthless, and enough people care about the England cricket team not to want to see them playing worthless fixtures. The England cricket team mean an awful lot to an awful lot of people and they do not like it when they see something valuable, something that represents them, reduced to a rich man's plaything.

It's not just the cricketers who are suffering. Soccer star Michael Owen and golfer Vijay Singh, could also be affected by the Stanford fallout. Kevin Eason has more in the Times.

The Stanford meltdown will have far-reaching consequences for a small country like Antigua but cricket will remain largely unaffected, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian. The suffering of cricket is by comparison small beer and will be most severe on a personal level.

His actual financial stake has been minimal, certainly where the WICB is concerned, an organisation with whom he has been at loggerheads. It agreed a licence fee for his regional competition of $1m per year over five years but he has paid only $2m of that for the two that have been staged. That is it. He paid local cricket associations $100,000 for development purposes during his regional Twenty20 competition and for a while a stipend of $15,000 per month for upkeep of facilities and so forth.

Watching so many anxiety-ridden citizens queue up outside the Bank of Antigua was unnerving, given that so many in the island have invested their money with Stanford, writes Stephen Brenkley in the Independent.

A boat builder from the US said he was there to check his funds. “There have been statements from all sorts of people including the Prime Minister but nobody has yet been able to guarantee that my savings are safe,” he said. Only Charlie Baltimore, a taxi driver, seemed sanguine. “I ain’t gonna jump when other people jump,” he said.

In the same paper, Tony Cozier writes that the West Indies Cricket Board can take a few positives from Stanford, particularly his contribution to the impoverished associations which had earlier gained little from the regional board. His impact was felt in other areas too.

Adamant that his Superstars had to defeat England in the $20m match, Stanford ordered them into a preparatory camp for six weeks and appointed a large support of coaches, trainers and physiotherapists to look after them. It was the kind of regime with which West Indian cricketers were unfamiliar. Its advantages were evident in the side’s slick |performance in beating England.

In the Telegraph, Simon Briggs writes that the ECB chairman Giles Clarke, renowned for having an answer to every question, was at a loss for words when grilled over the Stanford dealings.

The most pivotal wicket in this series is undoubtedly Chris Gayle's and his dismissal in the second innings in Antigua is an example of how England's plans against him are working, writes Vic Marks in the Guardian.

The field was shuffled for the off-spinner. There were seven men on the off-side: a slip, a silly point, two men at short extra-cover and two men guarding the boundary at cover and long-off. This meant that there were acres of space on the leg-side. There were just Harmison at deep backward square-leg and Anderson at mid-on. England were tempting Gayle with those wide open spaces.

	Peter Siddle gets comfortable © Getty Images

Peter Siddle's mates still find it hard to believe their friend gets to have lunch with Ricky Ponting and all those other high falutin' Test stars. Peter Siddle himself still finds it hard to believe, writes Peter Lalor in the Australian.

Siddle says he is growing more comfortable with each passing Test and if his form-line continues his mates will find it hard to believe they have lunch with him. The hard-toiling quick debuted in India, impressing everybody with his ability to run in and bowl a good, honest line and impressive pace.

Back home things started to come a little undone in the first Test against South Africa in Perth. He couldn't get the breakthrough the side needed and he started to bleed runs. Siddle began to look out of his depth; worse, he began to believe he was.

Imran Tahir, the Pakistan-born legspinner, is about to qualify for South Africa and could face a challenging debut against Australia in the one-day series in April. Will Swanton spoke to Mickey Arthur, the South Africa coach, about him for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Robert Craddock says a summer without Richie Benaud is like Melbourne Cup day without a glass of champagne, or Christmas day without presents. With Benaud announcing he will step down in 2010, Craddock writes a tribute in the Daily Telegraph.

He loves cricket so much that the day he retires from it at the end of next season he will be just eight months short of his 80th birthday. Few people last as long in any profession.

In the same paper Andrew Webster tells of the shrewdest piece of advice Benaud received as a television commentator. "Don't speak unless you can add to the picture on the viewer's screen."

Darren Pattinson’s journey over the past year has gone from England Test bowler to Victorian club player. Jesse Hogan reports in the Age how he wants to prove he’s not a one-Test wonder, and is closing on state selection.

Pattinson hopes his return to first-class cricket will give him the opportunity to impress once again, so stories about his performances do not always hang on that Test against South Africa. "I don't want to be known as the bloke who played one Test … I don't want to be a guy that gets forgotten about."

Just like Table Mountain in his native Cape Town, Gary Kirsten has proved to be India's own benevolent uncle—quietly watching over the team from the background. His model is perhaps the best example of how to make a positive impact on a unit of talented, but wildly individualistic, players. Kunal Pradhan in the Indian Express chronicles the journey so far for the Indian coach.

Strongly influenced by Bob Woolmer during his playing days, Kirsten’s coaching style is similar, encouraging players to self-analyse rather than insisting on telling them what’s wrong with their technique.

If a player asks for help, even if Kirsten has spotted something, he is most likely to say, “I don’t know. What do you think about it?” No pedantic lectures, no stressing on the importance of keeping your head still and your eyes on the ball. Discussions with him, players say, are on more equal terms in comparison with Chappell and more in-depth in comparison with John Wright.

	ECB's involvement with Stanford was a "huge mistake" © PA Photos

Now that Stanford's involvement with English cricket has crumbled, the ECB has little choice but to admit that their reputation has taken a beating. Derek Pringle in the Daily Telegraph has more.

If they did look into his past they would have discovered that Stanford had been kicked out of the Caribbean island of Montserrat by the British Government in 1990, after setting up his bank there five years earlier. He then took his bank in Antigua where, at the last count, his commercial interests employ five per cent of the island's workforce, a human travesty in the making if it all goes pop.

James Lawton in the Independent believes that Allen Stanford should not be the only one heading for the dock, but also those who are entrusted with running the game once described as the foundation of the British Empire.

There was an obligation to move with the times, the critics were told. Twenty20 generated vast revenue in India, it was the future. Stanford was seen as English cricket’s ally against the growth of the Indian cricket empire. No matter that the subtleties of the game may be beyond him, that the meaning of cricket’s past was of no consequence. He had what everyone wanted. He had oodles of money.

That, despite the third-rate nature of his cricket circus, meant he was not a man to be discounted when the future of the game was weighed.

The ECB certainly isn't the only loser, reveals Mike Selvey in his blog on the Guardian website. The Chance to Shine campaign for the development of cricket throughout the Caribbean, the 2,000-odd people he employed and the players in his Stanford Superstars team who invested the money on advice, would have no doubt been dealt a severe blow as well.

Money often brings out the worst in people. It has certainly brought out the worst in English cricket and the men who run it, and they have got exactly what they deserved, writes Mike Atherton in the Times.

Patrick Kidd in the same newspaper reveals more about the steely businessman beneath the charm of a typical Texan.

The seeds of Stanford's downfall were evident when ECB made their move. Andy Bull in his blog on the Guardian website throws up questions about what due diligence was done.

Elena Moya in the Guardian, sifts through VenEconomía, a Venuzuelan economics magazine, and reveals how the alarm, regarding Stanford's suspicious finances, was raised.

Arindam Mukherjee, writing in Outlook, feels the IPL this year will struggle to match the extravagance of its inaugural edition as advertisers cut down on spending in times of recession.

This year, advertisers are showing restraint, sponsors are more demanding, and investors are wary of taking too large an exposure. Says Santosh Desai, CEO, Future Brands: "Everyone thought that this year would be a blockbuster after last year's show...it's difficult to imagine that someone would take a big bet as people are much more cautious about spending."

Venkatesh Prasad, India's bowling coach, shares his thoughts on how his fast bowlers are shaping up ahead of the tour of New Zealand in an interview with S Dinakar in the Hindu.

On Ishant Sharma

“He reminds me of Srinath. He has the same body frame, high-arm action and bounce. The challenge before Ishant will be to be consistent with his off-stump line.”

On the importance of the slower ball

"If you take the pace off the ball, the batsmen have to really hit it and this is never easy. The batsmen lose a fraction of a second attempting to pick the ball and this affects their mind-set. But you need to disguise it with your field placings as well. If you have a long-on and a long-off, the batsman will expect a slower delivery and will stand behind the crease.”

The slowness of the Antigua pitch made the flamboyant Kevin Pietersen and the gutsy Paul Collingwood bat in similar fashion, says Steve James in the Daily Telegraph.

Pietersen is a genius in the making; Collingwood is a battler always straining at the outermost reaches of his ability. Pietersen smites sixes that take the breath away; Collingwood tucks runs off his legs in the hope that nobody notices. Pietersen is cricket's caviar; Collingwood is about as fancy as egg and chips. But yesterday their differences were barely discernible. They were united in their struggles: not just to stay at the crease, of course- for this is a featherbed- but to find some sort of fluency.

It is a sentiment shared by the Guardian's Vic Marks, who says England's batting in this innings was an odd mirror image of their effort in Jamaica.

In Jamaica Pietersen alone was dominant, while all the rest of the batsmen were nervous and tentative. Here Pietersen scratched around like an old hen, while all the others bar Flintoff have bristled with aggression. He has never enjoyed being one of the pack.

After watching Andrew Flintoff fail with the bat again, Martin Samuel says in the Daily Mail that No. 6 is too high a position in the order for Freddie.

	© Getty Images

So millions were spent on a new stadium miles out of town that was never going to replace the ARG in the public’s affection any more than the new Trelawny and Providence stadiums in Jamaica and Guyana, which were also built for the World Cup, are going to supplant Sabina Park and Bourda.

Now we are seeing the stupidity of it all. Inside two days, the ARG groundstaff produced a pitch and outfield that mock the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium, workmen cleaned up the dilapidated stands and the television company worked wonders in transferring its equipment to beam the evidence around the world.

India have had some sort of bogey when it comes to touring New Zealand. Ahead of what is a gruelling tour of that country, the Indian Express spoke to four players who toured there in the past, asking them about their experiences. Sachin Tendulkar recently spoke about how tough the harsh windy New Zealand conditions are, and here Dinesh Mongia describes how difficult it was to stand still out in the middle while holding a bat. Tinu Yohannan, the former India fast bowler, says he had tears in his eyes when he was bowling in one match.

	There was a liberated feeling to Strauss's stroke play © Getty Images

In between his moments of good fortune, Strauss played with the utmost fluency and freedom. It was noticeable that he was not prepared to let Benn settle, skipping down the pitch and smiting him for a straight six – his first in Test cricket in nearly three years. And he approached three figures with a number of resounding strokes, two pulls and a drive off Powell and a launch over mid-on off the left-arm spin of Ryan Hinds.

In the Guardian, Vic Marks writes that by dropping Monty Panesar for the Test, probably with the expectation that the pitch would be seamer-friendly, England have adopted a 'horses for courses' policy rarely employed when Duncan Fletcher and Michael Vaughan were in charge.

He is not used to being dropped. In fact his only experience of that since his debut in Nagpur was in Australia at the start of the ill-fated 2006-07 tour when England reverted to Ashley Giles. Then there was a populist hue and cry on Monty's behalf and he returned to the side for the third Test in Perth, never to be dropped again until yesterday. He is no longer the punters' darling, obviously not the captain's darling either.

Marks also writes that there was a liberated feeling to Strauss's stroke play, the cover drives crisp and plundered from pace and spin alike.

To Steve James in the Daily Telegraph, Strauss and Cook are, by some distance, England's best openers.

Seek level-headedness and phlegm in this England squad right now and the search will swiftly arrive at the doors of the southpaw openers. Unaffected by events, however calamitous, they have continued to work hard at their games, determined to reawaken their doggedness at the crease.

In the Daily Mail Martin Samuel wants to know why England cannot have a cricket manager who has a say in selection.

Unlike an international football coach, the manager of England’s cricketers would spend something like 250 days with his team. The argument proceeds that he would have no time for scouting, so would make decisions on players he has not seen. Yet is that the case? Could he not have a team of three observers, his appointments, in tune with his style, who are his eyes around the counties? They make recommendations or are sent out on specific missions. Is that so different to what happens now? All that changes is the random nature of national selection; the fact that, as it is, England’s team management may be responding to the choices of men who do not share their collective vision.

The rise and fall of Mark Cosgrove shows that Australia's scattergun approach to selection can do emerging players more harm than good, writes Robert Craddock in the Courier-Mail.

This has been the summer of the cheap cap. Allrounder Moises Henriques was chosen for Australia's Twenty20 side last night despite having done nothing for NSW this summer. Adam Voges got a recent one-day call-up when he was one bad match away from being sacked by Western Australia. Shaun Marsh has been fast-tracked into the Australian one-day side despite averaging 34 over eight years as a first-class player.

Luke Ronchi got four one-day internationals last year but now has been dropped to district cricket because he can't fire for WA. Dave Warner still hasn't played a four-day game for NSW despite being rushed into the Australian one-day side and bats like Tarzan on some days and Jane on others.

The obsession with finding the next big thing has prompted Australia to adopt a scattergun policy at the selection table and history tells us that scatterguns rarely work. Which brings us back to Cosgrove, the big fellow who scored a century against Queensland in the Sheffield Shield match at Adelaide on the weekend and is suddenly back in favour after a painful demotion from his state team. Cosgrove is one of the most interesting cricketers of the modern era because he is so different. So - er, how do we say it - fat.

In the Age, Will Swanton looks at what the coming tour of South Africa means for Phillip Hughes.

Ricky Ponting heads to South Africa on Monday and writes in his column in the Australian about how times have changed.

Peter Roebuck, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, feels Australia’s squad to South Africa boasts plenty of young talent, unfazed by distractions. He says Australia will miss the services of Stuart Clark, though they’ll be hard to beat on pitches likely to favour seam bowling.

Accordingly, the Australians will arrive in Africa without the baggage they have been carrying all season. Youngsters tend not to worry about margin loans, breaking bodies or upset partners. Whereas seasoned campaigners can be thrown off course by outside forces, youngsters can retain simplicity. Part of the trick in sport is to stay young as long as possible while absorbing the lessons time alone can bring. Matthew Hayden, Andrew Symonds and Brett Lee were bogged down by a variety of issues, and it showed. The main recent mistake involved Brad Haddin's gloves and response, conduct that did not stop him ascending to the T20 captaincy.

Meanwhile, in the Weekender, Daryll Cullinan writes that South Africa's team looks in good shape ahead of the series against Australia. He feels Ashwell Prince, though out of the first two Tests, still has some cricket left in him, and opening the batting may perhaps be the best way to make a comeback.

I don’t think Prince’s Test career is over. I think a smart move may have been to open with him. He must, however, be given the assurance that it is a long term move. Prince has built his Test game around good shot-selection and leaving well outside off-stump. His ability to concentrate for long periods was fuelled by a fierce determination to prove himself as a player worthy of his selection.

	'I didn’t take any pleasure from his sacking' © Getty Images

In an interview to the Weekender, Graeme Smith says he did not walk out in the second innings in Sydney to win over supporters with his brave act. His personal rivalry with Kevin Pietersen is well known, but Smith says he didn't take "any pleasure from his sacking" as England captain, having got beyond "petty jealousies".

Now that you are ‘Captain Courageous’, and everyone loves you, how does it feel?

(Laughs) Look, I’m quite grounded. I know that the world of sport is quite fickle; that results often define the way people see you. But a number of people have grown with me, seen my development, and they can identify with me a lot more. And after some of the things I’ve been through these past five years, to earn the respect of the media and the fans is a huge achievement and a really satisfying feeling.

.............................................................

Personal rivalries aside, would you like to have Kevin Pietersen in your side?

Of course he is an incredible batter and one would like that skill in your side. But knowing it will never, or could never happen, I suppose I’ve moved on and my focus is all about developing the very exciting new talent that is coming through. Not sure that answers your question? (Laughs)

Very diplomatic. We are all human and occasionally experience Schadenfreude. When Pietersen had his recent troubles, did you have any moments of Schadenfreude?

No (laughs). No, really, I didn’t. First of all, when it all happened, we were busy in the middle of the series in Australia; so I didn’t follow the situation too carefully. But I think you reach a point in your career or your life where you don’t need to be a part of that; where you get beyond petty jealousies. I didn’t take any pleasure from his sacking. I’ve just reached a point where I don’t have to feel like that. I’ve lost my nasty streak (laughs).

	© Getty Images

There's been plenty of farce on the tour already but the Sunday Telegraph's Steve James thinks there could be more in store when the third Test gets underway. He says the Antigua Recreation Ground is as unready for Test cricket as the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium was on Friday.

Potential hazards lie in the stands, where the top tier of the famous Double Decker stand will be closed. Full of wonderful memories and history it may be, but the ARG has not seen functional attention for years. It looks tired and decrepit.

The outfield is unfit in a very different way from the SVR stadium. Instead of the beach cricket proposed there, the ARG outfield has been prepared for football. It is bumpier than the island's roads, which is saying something.

“Sceptrum Est Sceptrum”, should be the ICC motto, which roughly translates into “rules is rules”. If we went through the entire list of pettifogging examples it would run to toilet-roll length.

My own favourite involved Neil Mallender, the English umpire, during the last World Cup in the West Indies, when he was given the maximum mark allowable for decision-making, but docked five points for wearing two sun hats, one his own, and one belonging to the bowler. This, you might think, is not the kind of crime that should earn you lower marks than for raising your finger for a caught behind that’s missed the outside edge by the width of a Kevin Pietersen advertising logo, but Mallender had really no defence to the charge, given that he acted in direct, not to mention flagrant contravention of the regulation that clearly states (and you can’t make this up) that the hanging of extra sun hats should be confined to the official ICC belt clip.

Paul Weaver, on the Guardian website, says that while the Test at the ARG will stir warm memories, it will also unleash an anger, a fury at West Indies administrators who left a great cricket ground out in the cold to die.

The Rec - and what powerful memories of childhood those two words evoke - is more than just the stage where Sir Vivian Richards and Brian Lara played some of their most brilliant cricket. This is where the cross-dressing Gravy danced and where Chickie's Disco blared between overs, the ground which arrived on the international scene at a time when West Indies were in their swaggering pomp.

Over in the Nation, Haydn Gill says that when there appears to be reluctance by Antigua to host regional competitions, they should not get Tests.

Watching Yuvraj Singh gesture to the Indian dressing room after a century in Sri Lanka last week, SR Pathiravithana and a colleague arrived at the notion that this was a mirror image of the cricketing woes of Sri Lanka in the present context. There is something radically wrong and that had to be fixed not with just paste, but some solid bonding concrete, feels Pathiravithana.

A few days later, after Ashantha de Mel, Sri Lanka's chief selector, mentioned that he had not seen anything amiss in local cricket other than some basic flaws, Pathiravithana and his friend revisited what they had noticed during that ODI match. Read on in the Sri Lankan daily, the Sunday Times.

Amid warning bells, the second season of the IPL battens down the hatches, writes Arindam Mukherjee in Outlook. Movie star-stud Akshay Kumar will be missing in action, as may be Hrithik Roshan, Katrina Kaif, and even those fully-clad international cheerleaders. Get ready for a no-frills IPL.

Advertisers that took big IPL exposures last year—and even resorted to IPL budgeting thanks to the big opening—are now going slow. For instance, LG Electronics, one of India's top advertisers, has cut down advertising spending by 35 per cent. Spending on IPL, that too at a higher cost than last year, is a clear no-no. V. Ramachandran, LG India's director marketing, says: "Many of us—with frozen or reduced budgets—are not coming on board, thinking it's not worth it." Companies are looking at avenues that are more likely to influence sales.

In the latest edition of India Today, Sharda Ugra says that for a serious event, about serious money, and more importantly, serious cricket, there is something almost unintentionally comic about the IPL.

Simon Wilde of the Sunday Times catches up with West Indies' 6' 7" left-arm spinner Sulieman Benn, who starred in the first Test with an eight-wicket match haul. Benn credits the camp preceding the Stanford series for instilling the discipline necessary to succeed.

“Being in a camp for that period of time, obviously all you did was eat, drink and sleep cricket,” he says. “It let you know that this was your job, this was what you had to do to be as good as possible. I have tried to maintain those standards since then; so has everyone, even those who were not part of the Stanford set-up. They saw what had been going on and wanted to get to the same level.”

Wilde also finds out how the winners of the Stanford match spent their million dollars.

David Sygall writes in the Sun-Herald about how David Warner got his chance to star during Australia’s limited-overs campaigns this season.

Some time after today's final match of Australia's international season at home, David Warner will buy Dominic Thornely a drink. He might also say to his NSW captain words to the effect of: “Thanks Mate. You changed my life."

Thornely will be watching today's Twenty20 match between Australia and New Zealand satisfied in the knowledge that his and Brad Haddin's insistence that Warner open the batting in New South Wales' one-dayers earlier this season presented him with the opportunity to make his name.

In the Sunday Telegraph Kerry O’Keefe, the former Test legspinner, makes some predictions for the Ashes.

Mark Richardson feels cheated at not having an appropriate end to what has been an absorbing one-day series between Australia and New Zealand and wants to know why Sunday's Twenty20 couldn't be converted into a 50-over game. He writes in the New Zealand Herald:

Sure, I'd imagine sponsorship and broadcasting deals around the twenty20 fixture would be in place and block the road but I'd imagine where ever that final game was played it would have pulled a huge crowd and I don't think Sydney twenty20-goers would have felt cheated had they been given an extra 60 overs of cricket to watch. And, frankly, this series deserved a winner and that winner found over 100 overs of cricket.

	How many Ayes? How many Nays? © Getty Images

Ed Smith, in the Daily Telegraph, says the recent upheavals in the England cricket team and Chelsea football club indicate how weak bosses are using "player power" as a convenient excuse.

It’s player power, we are told, that is the real problem. Almost any crisis can be blamed on the modern players, with their big egos and eye on the big bucks, the precious stars who only look after number one and don’t leave home without their entourage of agents and hangers-on. Which begs the real question: if players are so untrustworthy and selfish, why are they pandered to by executives, boards and owners?

Player power is nothing unless it is allowed to be. You don’t hear about player power at Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal, or at Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, or in Warren Gatland’s Wales.

Hugh Morris, the managing director of England cricket, admitted to having a “ring around” of the players before the removal of Kevin Pietersen and Peter Moores. How many successful captains or coaches would have survived a “ring around” at the wrong moment?, Smith asks.

D Ranganathan, or Don Rangan, is the subject of V Ramnarayan's latest post on his blog Stumped. If Shane Warne managed to get the best out of young players at the Rajasthan Royals in the IPL last year, Rangan did it year in, year out in Madras while running Nungambakkam Sports Club A in the 1960s.

D Ranganathan—for that is his full name—was a cocky little fellow, all muscle and sinew, very fit, a fiercely combative cricketer quite unlike the gentle Madras stereotype of his time. A competent, workmanlike but always positive opening batsman, he was aggression personified as a wicket keeper, not afraid to stand up to fast bowlers, and capable of the most convincing histrionics while appealing to the umpire. He was also a more than useful medium pacer, a facet of his cricket he never let us forget, resorting as he invariably did to the discarding of his gloves and pads to have a go at the batsman. His supreme confidence usually resulted in the breaking up of a troublesome partnership, enabling Rangan to crow over his success where others had failed. He always had a chip on his shoulder about being ignored as a player by officialdom and running his own club like a prince was his way of challenging the establishment. He not only scored tons of runs and won most of his matches, but made sure these victories were made possible by stellar contributions from other players the official selectors had overlooked. He was an original, not an imitation of some Test cricketer he admired. If there was anyone he hero-worshipped, it had to be Rangan himself. Virtually unbeatable in the lower divisions of the TNCA league, his team was a dark horse capable of toppling the best in the senior division, once it was promoted to that level of combat.

	Daren Powell points to a suspect part of the bowlers' run-up on a farcical day in Antigua © Getty Images

International cricket teams do not simply turn up on the morning of the first day of a Test match and find that the venue is wholly atrocious for any level of cricket. There are several standard checks and assessments which should have been put in place by the WICB to ensure that exactly what transpired at the Sir Viv Richards Stadium this morning never occur. There must have been a series of diabolical failures and gross neglect on the part of the assigned officer for it to have reached the stage where the Caribbean is left to suffer the utter humiliation now being rightfully dished out. What should have been those checks and balances? And who, specifically, was responsible?

The answer, according to the website, is chief cricket operations manager Tony Howard.

What was Howard doing? Was there a recce of the Sir Viv Richards Stadium? Who executed it? What was their report? Or was the recce a mere joyride around the Caribbean for Howard while he collected valuable per diem?

Angry stuff. But on a day the cricket in the Caribbean has been shamed, it is quite understandable.

In the Times, Mike Atherton says that heads must roll in the WICB after the latest shambles. He wonders why no match was played before the Test to test the suitability of the conditions at the ground.

Mike Selvey writes in the Guardian that the abandonment of the Test was "was not just a disgrace but another disastrous setback for the name of international cricket at a time, especially in the Caribbean, when it needs all the help it can get".

His colleague Andy Bull says that at a time when cricket needs an efficient Jeeves-like person in charge, it's left with a whole lot of bumbling Bertie Woosters. He suggests that the third Test should be moved to Barbados as the Antigua Recreation Ground isn't currently in a good-enough condition to host a Test.

The ICC and its match referee Alan Hurst are the subject of Martin Samuel's ire in the Daily Mail. He says it was more than a match that was abandoned in Antigua: it was the integrity of a sport, and the trust of the people who watch it.

Writing in Independent, Stephen Brenkley laments a crass decision by the WICB to build their new house on sand.

That a batsman of Owais Shah's inherent talent could play only two Test matches in 13 years is lamentable, and indicative of some fundamental failings on the part of both the player and the England management, writes Andy Bull in the Guardian.

"For Owais the turning point was in early 2004, when he took himself off to work with Mohammad Azharuddin in Hyderabad," Gatting suggests. "He worked on his technique and now he is very settled and very happy with it. That hasn't just made him a better player, it's helped him mature as a person. He knows himself a lot better." Shah attributes his transition from a "1,000-runs-a-season to a 15, 16, 1,700-runs-a-season batsman" to his work with Azharuddin. "I decided that if I had to sacrifice flair and become unorthodox, then I would do it."

Harsha Bhogle, writing in the Indian Express, calls upon the BCCI to revoke its ban on ICL players for the larger interest of Indian cricket, particularly after the league, hit by recession and the absence of Pakistan players, was cancelled after it was initially scheduled to be held in March.

This is the time for the IPL and BCCI to show how large their heart is; to throw a lifeline and say “come on, young men, come back and play cricket”. If the ICL decides that it is getting unviable to continue, will these cricketers never play cricket again? Wouldn’t that be inhuman? Other players in the past have romanced with apartheid regimes, no less, and returned.
........................
he establishment has to take care of them in the larger interest of Cricket in India. Children take their own decisions but parents can never shut their door on them forever. This is the time for the victor to be magnanimous, to offer a hand of support, to allow them to feel the excitement and earn a living.

The state of the outfield at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium is a cause for worry, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian. The whole of the outfield has bare patches of pure soft sand but, most pertinently, these are worst on the bowlers' run-ups and, at one end, at the point of take off into delivery stride of the pace bowlers.

Within half an hour's play, the bowlers will have so softened the sand that it will be as if they are running along the strand, losing their momentum and risking calf strains and ankle injuries. No wonder the England physiotherapist Kirk Russell was prowling around with a face like thunder. He could have some business over the next few days.

In the same paper, Dan Roebuck has an update on the betting scene for the second Test. Punters are predicting a draw, with the pitch known to be a batsman's paradise.

On the eve of today's match, the draw was best at 10–11 (general), with England 11–4 (general) and West Indies 3–1 (general). England's fragility means they cannot be backed, while the draw price looks too short as it will almost certainly trade bigger at some stage during the match. If pushed for a selection it would have to be West Indies. There are, though, far better punts to be had outside the match betting.

In the same paper, Vic Marks comments on the usage of the referrals system. He feels there should be a penalty for unsuccessful referrals - a two-run penalty for the first failed referral, four for the second, eight for the third, just to spice things up.

There is much to be said for the Stanford system, in which the players have nothing to do with the referrals and the umpires themselves opt to go upstairs for help. This worked pretty well in Stanford's Twenty20 matches but in a Test the number of referrals might mushroom out of control. Umpires would be bound to take the cautious path. But the pursuit of a better system should not be abandoned because of the inevitable teething problems. More trials are needed to cut down the errors.

In his column for the same paper, Duncan Fletcher feels that administrators and selectors should be kept from the dressing room so England can address their off-field decision-making. It is also important they appoint a full-time coach soon.

Now we've got Hugh Morris, the managing director of the England team, closely involved with the side. Yet he's the guy who sacked Kevin Pietersen. What must the players think seeing him at breakfast every morning? To me, it's crucial that the atmosphere is generated by the players, not affected by the administrators. You just hope the players can get on with their jobs.

In the Times, Michel Atherton turns the spotlight on Andrew Strauss, saying that the one thing he can control is his own batting form.

They need to feel that a leader has things under control; the appearance of control, at any rate, even if that is far from the truth. In practice this week, Strauss has been exactly that. No ranting and raving from him, at least in public.

In the Telegraph, Simon Briggs meets Angus Fraser, the man who piloted England's stunning comeback in Barbados in 1994 after being rolled over for 46 in Trinidad.

Stephen Brenkley, in the Independent, lists his ten best batting collapses.

Read Brendan Nash's player diary in the Jamaica Observer.

	'Sacking Kevin was the hardest call I’ve had to make' © Getty Images

After the astonishing collapse in Kingston, England’s cricket team have rarely been perceived to be at a lower ebb. The Daily Mail convened a meeting in Antigua with Hugh Morris, managing director of the ECB, and Geoff Miller, the national selector, to pick over the bones of English cricket.

There was plenty to discuss and neither Morris nor Miller held back: on the Indian Premier League, Kevin Pietersen, why even Fabio Capello could not sort out England’s cricketers and the man who yet might — John Buchanan, the most successful coach in the history of cricket... and an Aussie.

Excerpts from the interview, conducted by Martin Samuel:

Samuel: Are you moving towards a different sort of manager for the England cricket team, more in the manner of Sir Clive Woodward or Sir Alex Ferguson?

Miller: It depends how it fits into the tree. What would the manager’s role be, and would it take responsibility away from people who are working well at the moment? I would like to talk to Martin Johnson and Fabio Capello about how things are done in their sports, but I wouldn’t be in favour of an all-powerful manager, no. It is essential that the captain has a say in aspects on the field, that coaches control specific areas and that there is a national selector. If the manager took responsibility from the captain, it wouldn’t work.

Samuel: What about the Indian Premier League? Since the first Test there seems to have been quite a backlash at home. People are saying the players are interested only in the money.

Morris: I don’t believe the IPL had an impact on the way we batted in Jamaica. I see many positives in it.

Miller: It was nothing to do with getting bowled out for 51, but beyond that it is hard to gauge what effect there will be because it is our first time out there. After it has happened we’ll have concrete facts. What I would say is we’ve given the players the chance to make money, and we expect the same loyalty and passion in return. We would look at it again if we thought it was not working.

The rules justifying the ban on Mohammad Asif for one year gives the impression that the fast bowler has been banned by the IPL alone and not across the sport. The ICC reiterated its expectation that all members observe the ban and that Asif will not be available to play until the ban has been completed. But the question is, has the IPL got the authority to ban a player from the sport for any length of time? KP Mohan in the Hindu wonders.

The ICC anti-doping code, relevant to the year 2008, when the Asif doping offence occurred, does not extend to anything other than ICC events. Even if one were to take into account the clause relating to “mutual enforcement and assistance”, the ICC would be duty bound to enforce only a member unit’s regulations and not that of a tournament.

In an interview with Deccan Herald, Indian cricket great Gundappa Viswanath, on his 60th birthday, shares the memories of his century on debut against Australia in Kanpur in 1969, his experience with various roles in Indian cricket following his retirement and some of the issues affecting the game today.

I really enjoyed my playing years. Some people still say that I deserved to complete 100 Tests but I have no regrets. These things happen in cricket. Look at someone like (Mohd) Azharuddin, he got stuck at 99. Imagine how he would be feeling. To be frank, I always expected to come back after I was dropped, but the selectors thought I wasn’t good enough to get my place back in the side. Fair enough. Later, I became a selector and I had to drop a few players. This, I believe, put things in perspective.

Rahul Dravid, speaking to R Kaushik in the same newspaper, feels Viswanath is a role model for any young cricket aspirant from Bangalore.

In Mid-day, Dravid also salutes Viswanath in a special column.

Read Sunil Gavaskar's tribute in his syndicated column.

In the Hindu, KC Vijaya Kumar also catches up with Viswanath.

Anil Kumble pays tribute to him in the Times of India. Click here for e-paper link.

Another prominent feature was his exemplary conduct and good nature, which has left a mark on anyone who has interacted with him, on or off the field. He constantly encouraged me during the period I was dropped from the Indian team, and guided me into maintaining self belief and determination. His absolute classy style of batting was a treat to the eye, and reminiscent of an era where lots of high quality Test match cricket took place. In the modern era of abundant limited overs cricket, we may never see the skills of another Vishy flourish, although one has to accept the reality of the changing times.

Mike Selvey, in his blog in the Guardian, attributes West Indies' victory in the first Test partly to the serious change in attitude engendered by Allen Stanford's involvement in cricket in the Caribbean.

For a decade West Indies cricket has been characterised by ill-discipline that failed to make the most of its assets. Stanford's squad was together for six weeks prior to the event. They prepared meticulously, practised assiduously, played wonderfully and got their reward. From that they learned the value of putting hard work into an enterprise. Six of that successful side were members of the team that won in Jamaica, led by Chris Gayle, a batsman of immense capacity but hitherto a serial underachiever, a batting dilettante. No more.

England must look beyond mere statistics to take a decision on the struggling Ian Bell ahead of the second Test in Antigua, writes Michael Atherton in the Times.

The key to Bell's immediate future is his mental state and only the captain and coach can know that. Is he shot? Does he need a break from the pressure? If so, he must make way. As Strauss suggested in Sri Lanka, there is much to be gained from time away and it is rare for any batsman not to be dropped at some stage. Demotion need not be permanent.

Mike Selvey, writing in the Guardian, feels the nature of Bell's dismissal in England's abject surrender in the second innings could cost him a place in the team for a long time.

Any batsman can get out to a daft shot played at an inappropriate time. It is what bowlers work at. But this was just crass, an encapsulation of all that Bell has conveyed for some time. What, precisely, was his thought process? Does his mind compute that having got into that area, around 30 or so runs, that suggests his vulnerability, he must avoid the criticism that would follow his dismissal and so places further pressure on himself to survive? Or does he believe that, having played with panache to that point, he has done the job and can relax? The latter seems more likely.

In the Independent, Stephen Brenkley says Owais Shah, who has been waiting in the sidelines for quite some time, merits a place in the England team for the second Test. Any decision to leave him out, he writes, would not only be unjustified for a player who is deserving of far more than the two Tests he's played, but could also mean his chances of future selection will remain grim.

In the Nation, Tony Cozier writes that there can be as many 51 reasons for England's defeat, one for each run scored in the second innings.

In the Independent Online, Zaahier Adams says that when an individual within the Proteas ranks does get caught up in the spotlight like JP Duminy has over the past two months, it really is something to behold. In a rugby-mad nation, Duminy's every performance in the Indian Premier League will be scrutinised with a microscope.

After his heroics in Australia, everybody now expects him to score at least a half-century when he walks to the crease.He probably expects nothing less from himself, but the pressure will mount when he doesn't. And, yes, it's rich coming from a media representative who calls Duminy a "superstar", but that is also why I'm writing this column.

The HoldingWilley report is a detailed analysis on greatness, in which the thinktank has concluded that Rahul Dravid is India's greatest player. This is HoldingWilley's first country-specific special report and they have stuck to India for starters. Since Test cricket is the highest form of the game, and what players are most judged by, and since it is the only form that links eras, the men who matter decided to base their rankings exercise exclusively on this. ODI cricket therefore has been completely ignored here.

	Mark Taylor was a breath of fresh air compared with grumpy old Border and the ruthless Steve Waugh. © Getty Images

In his Line and Length blog on the Times website, Patrick Kidd resumes the Ashes Heroes series. This week he takes at look at former Australia captain Mark Taylor.

He was a breath of fresh air compared with grumpy old Border and the ruthless Steve Waugh. Even now, when I listen to Taylor's commentary, he always sounds as if he has a smile on his face, a man who genuinely loves cricket and sees it as a game, rather than warfare. Yet when he was on form (and it came and went) he was one of the world's best batsmen. Not a bad slip catcher, either.

The memory I most associate with Taylor is his very public battle with bad form in 1997 and how he came through it. He had been in the Test side for eight years and become Australia's most reliable Test opener since Bill Lawry, but he was on the verge of losing his place in the one-day side because of a lack of runs (he dropped himself for the last match of the ODI series in England) and was similarly struggling in Test cricket.

England's rugby and cricket teams appear to be bound together on the same spiralling run downwards to ignominy, says Jim White in the Daily Telegraph.

From the highs of winning the Rugby World Cup in 2003 and the Ashes in 2005, both teams are now so bereft of confidence and hope that the coming weekend looks about as appetising as Antony Worrall Thompson’s balance sheet. Never mind dreaming that we might be the match of New Zealand and Australia, we are about to be hammered by Wales and the West Indies.

There are more theories right now for the dual decline than runs posted on the Sabina Park scoreboard. The rush for celebrity, the rush for money, the rush for excuses: all have been blamed. Yet it is hard to see what is going on as anything other than an exhibition of corporate incompetence on a level we had thought was restricted to the boardrooms of city institutions.

	Not the talisman of old? © Getty Images

He might be regarded as England's talisman, but Andrew Flintoff's not been at his best since 2005 and the team's Test record is better without him, Lawrence Booth says in his latest post on the Guardian website.

The facts are these. Since Flintoff made his debut at Headingley in 1998, he has played in 72 of a possible 131 Tests (excluding the game for the World XI). With him, England win less than 39% of their matches and lose 33%. Without him, they win 45% and lose 32%. When you consider that he missed three Ashes trouncings (in 1998-99, 2001 and 2002-03) at a stage of his career when he was still some way off becoming the titan who bestrode the 2005 Ashes, it's fair to say those stats could be even worse. Again, this is not to say England should drop Flintoff. Far from it. It's simply to get a few things in perspective.

Another thing. Flintoff last scored a Test hundred and took five wickets in an innings during that 2005 series - one that marked the end of an 18-month golden spell for England's supposed heir to Ian Botham. Since then, he has averaged under 30 with the bat and not far off 34 with the ball. Even taking injuries into account, these are not the stats of a world-class all-rounder.

In the Guardian, Vic Marks says Monty Panesar should blend patience and parsimony to revive his fortunes. He feels Panesar showed some signs of improvement in Jamaica after a disappointing tour of India.

Panesar should take note of how Benn achieved his success (no West Indian spinner since Lance Gibbs has taken eight wickets in a Test match). This may not be the fashionable response to Panesar's problems (most crave that he magically becomes a modern-day Bishen Bedi) and it is a rather prosaic one: he needs to be more miserly, to bowl more maidens and the wickets will eventually follow.

Nick Hoult throws up a few more numbers in the Daily Telegraph.

3 The number of Tests (out of 20) that England have won since the 2005 Ashes with Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff in the side.

10 The number of Tests (out of 21) that England have won since the 2005 Ashes without Flintoff in the side. Pietersen has played all 41 Tests in that time.

13 The number of Tests (out of 20) that England have lost with Pietersen and Flintoff in the side since the 2005 Ashes.

The umpire review system continues to get mixed reviews, and Mike Haysman feels the current system needs a lot more tweaking. He says the method used during the Standford US$ 20 million clash was a successful one and it ought to be implemented at the international level. In that system, the entire decision-making process rested with the umpires and didn't involve the player. Read on in Supercricket.

We implemented that should the umpire in the middle be uncertain about a decision he could consult on any aspect of the appeal without making an initial decision himself. He would then immediately contact the replay assisted 3rd umpire and he in turn would answer any concise questions presented by the standing official in order to reach finality. The TV umpire would then communicate directly with the television producer and request various relevant replays and once he had made his decision he would then relay his thoughts and advice.

	Andrew Strauss could do with some support © AFP

The events of Saturday afternoon reflected more than just a momentary mental lapse. They suggested not just that a grim month for English cricket, when internecine warfare replaced any sense of team unity, has had a lasting effect, but also that there is a deeper malaise, one that has become increasingly apparent as England have stumbled along these past three years, says Michael Atherton in the Times.

The most fundamental issue of all is the absence of authority at the heart of the England team. We have a new captain and a temporary coach but whose hand is on the tiller, steering the team through a difficult period that poses such awkward challenges as the Indian Premier League (IPL)? For all the backroom staff with the team — masseurs, spin doctors, physiologists, you name it — there is one crucial position missing; that of a manager, a decision-maker who is ultimately responsible and ultimately accountable.

Suresh Menon feels it's not correct to blame the IPL for England's defeat. Read on in Espnstar.com

Usually it is the former players who missed out on the moolah who tend to sound all moralistic. Mr Graham Gooch loved to play for his beloved country so much that he was willing to chuck it all up and captain a rebel tour in South Africa, then banned from international cricket. He was banned for three years for placing money above country.

There's all this camaraderie in front of the cameras, but how genuine is it?, former England coach Duncan Fletcher asks in the Guardian. He feels the need for a head coach is important, since otherwise it leaves Andrew Strauss with a lot to handle.

Sure, not many dressing rooms can say they contain 11 happy chappies, but some get close. I used to talk in terms of a critical mass: if eight of the 11 guys get on well they can outweigh the influence of the three who may feel like they're on the outside. But as soon as that critical mass reaches 7–4 or 6–5 you have problems. I look at this side and wonder where we are at. Team spirit is not something that can be faked. It has to happen naturally.

Fletcher suggests Steve Harmison be dropped in favour of a second spinner and Owais Shah replace Ian Bell.

The one thing England can no longer afford to do is to stick with the status quo, says the Guardian's Mike Selvey.

Something has to give. In 1994 [the year England were bowled out for 46], determined that the selection merry-go-round that had characterised England cricket at that time should cease, Mike Atherton and Keith Fletcher kept faith with the same side and were rewarded. Times have changed. Continuity has been the norm, which is fine up to a point. But it has made some players bomb-proof and ­complacent. They dare not let things stand.

Kevin Pietersen's brilliant but truncated innings in Kingston will join the ranks of the game's memorable almost-hundreds, writes Michael Henderson on the Guardian website.

If Andy Flower is as tough as everyone says he is, he should demand the selectors recall Robert Key or Michael Vaughan, says David Hopps on the same website.

Stephen Brenkley expresses a similar view in the Independent.

Check out Patrick Kidd's 51 special quiz in his Line and Length blog on the Times website.

In the latest edition of Outlook, Smita Gupta takes a look at IPL chairman and commissioner Lalit Modi's rocky path. When Vasundhara was CM of Rajasthan, Modi was king. Power equation changed, his throne is now rocking, says Gupta.

Even as Modi finds the going tough with his friend and patron Vasundhara in the opposition, tales of his imperious style and skills in bending the law have become the stuff of contemporary folklore here. It wasn’t just the RCA which reeled under his onslaught—what with his election as president mired in court cases, allegations of financial malfeasance and forgery—but also bureaucrats, police, landowners and anyone else who dared cross his path.

Allegations against him may be flying thick and fast, but they don't worry the IPL's administrative face. In the same magazine, Rohit Mahajan interviews Modi, who says there will always be detractors if you create something.

Mahajan also traces how Modi climbed up the Rajasthan Cricket Association ranks.

Several off-field issues are clouding England's progress. They are not in a rebuilding stage. There is no motivation to improve when they have more than a dozen backroom staff to analyse their techniques, put out the cones at training, and virtually wipe their bottoms for them, writes Geoff Boycott in the Telegraph.

It is time that England started putting the cricket first, not the whole circus that surrounds it. One of the big problems of the last year is that everything we have heard about the national side has been to do with money and politics. Meanwhile the cricket itself has become almost incidental, which I find rather sad.

In the Times, Michael Atherton writes that England's collapse at Sabina Park has brought back bad memories of Trinidad '94.

What was Paul Collingwood doing sprinting for a couple of runs when he had been bowled neck and crop by Jerome Taylor? In that moment, there was the reminder of Mark Ramprakash’s suicidal run-out in Trinidad 15 years before, the surest sign that the situation was about to overpower a group of players who were, mentally, not up to the task.

The post-mortem continues and Mike Selvey in the Guardian calls for immediate changes to the batting order. Time's running out for Ian Bell and Paul Collingwood and it's time to give Owais Shah a chance. Perhaps sending an SOS to Michael Vaughan won't be a bad idea.

Where do England go with this? They have the best part of a week to contemplate, with the second Test starting in Antigua on Friday. Flower has his work cut out. There are denials of disunity of any consequence in the ranks but there remains an impression of the PR shots of a smiling family leaning on the gate after a politician has been caught with his pants down. Something will have to give.

In the Daily Mail, Nasser Hussain writes that the unneccessary off-field distractions and constant backroom changes have contributed to England's heavy defeat.

Pietersen has had to travel around the West Indies with Hugh Morris, who was instrumental in removing him as captain, while Andrew Flintoff has been like a bear with a sore head with the press because they said he knifed his captain. There have to be tensions there. The priority has to be pulling on that England shirt.

James Lawton writes in the Independent:

When you compare his [Gayle's] lot to that of Andrew Strauss, inheritor of a situation that made a mockery of team organisation and any understanding of individual duty to a wider cause, it is enough, surely, to make English cricket lovers groan with a mixture of bitterness and disbelief.

Why? Because if their West Indian counterparts are seeing the miracle of renewal, new gusts of hope, and pride, what do English supporters see? It is something no less depressing than the entrenchment of decay and its agent complacency and – why avoid the reality? – greed.

It's a homecoming for Ottis Gibson, who's back in the West Indies as part of England's coaching staff. He talks to Haydn Gill in the Nation on his transition from being an international player to a coach.

"I am happy to say that I think I've got the respect of all the guys. They listen carefully to what I have to say. They challenge me sometimes. That's what you want as a coach. You don't want your word to be gospel all the time. You want people to have their own views."

The Tamil Union Cricket Club in Colombo, which Muttiah Muralitharan plays for, was once formed “by the Tamils for the Tamils”, but ironically, the club is now run largely by the Sinhalese. GS Vivek of the Indian Express meets the club's president, Chandra Schaffter, who talks about how the anti-Tamil riots in the city in 1983 changed things.

“There were riots in 1983, when a mob burnt the dressing rooms, a section of the stands, and some of the club’s old documents. Since then, they’ve felt threatened. A Tamil player prefers a banner under which he can conveniently camouflage his identity. It’s weird, but it’s a fact of life here.”

	Mitchell Johnson's girlfriend provides glamour and glitz at the Allan Border Medal © Getty Images

Robert Craddock looks at whether wives and girlfriends will be travelling with the Australian team for the Ashes. In his column in the Courier-Mail he also writes about how the exposure of the WAGs increases when the side struggles.

When you are winning no one cares. When you lose everything bar your aftershave gets heavily scrutinised. You sweat over every decision and one of those sounds small but it's a big decision coming up soon – how much access will Australia give players' wives on this year's Ashes tour? It is the most delicate of issues because there was a major catfight on the 2005 Ashes tour which destabilised the side, not simply for the tour but the year after it.

Craddock writes that the squad environment has changed over the past year.

Australia have chosen 15 different Test teams in a row. Players are on edge and so are their wives. Insecurity is rampant. The new age cricketing wife or girlfriend tends to be a brassy sort of gal who can't wait to tell the Allan Border Medal interviewer who designed her dress and her hanky – both of which happened to be the same size.

	Shane Warne was the best of the lot, according to Michael Atherton © Getty Images

Speaking to Tony Becca in the Jamaica Gleaner, former England captain Michael Atherton says Shane Warne was "the outstanding cricketer of my generation".

He mastered the very difficult art of leg-spin bowling, right-arm leg-spin that is, and I believe, based on what he did with the ball, he is the greatest spin bowler that ever lived. I remember the Ashes series in 2005, how brilliantly he bowled. As a great player, he rose to the occasion while some others who were regarded as great players, their performances went down a notch. You knew, whenever you scored runs against him, that you had to be at the top of the game. Apart from his skills, he worked batsmen out. He was a master. He was he a clever bowler, he was a great cricketer. On top of that, he knew the game. In fact, I believe he would have made a great captain.

On the best fast bowlers of his generation, Atherton, who played some great bowlers through his career, says:

Curtly and Courtney were fast, they were accurate and they were difficult to bat against; but I believe, generally, that Waqar and Wasim were the best of the lot, the best of my time.

South Africa coach Mickey Arthur, in his column on cricketnirvana.com, says Australia will never be able to match their dominance of the past decade.

They revolutionised the way cricketers trained and were coached in the early 1990s and then enjoyed the unprecedented arrival of three or four 'once in a generation' players - at the same time! But the game has changed forever now and, with three different formats and an international schedule packed to bursting point, I can't see any country being as dominant as Australia were. Although that should not, and will not prevent any of us from striving to achieve world domination!

	Kevin Pietersen's off stump was uprooted by Jerome Taylor © AFP

Jerome Taylor's breathtaking bowling display revived memories of old West Indies glory, writes Mike Selvey in the Observer.

Taylor pitched full, not quite a yorker but up there, allowing the ball time to grab the air and swing away. But it went too late for Pietersen, deceiving even his gimlet eye. Pietersen saw only a leg-side scoring opportunity, but the ball swerved beyond his bat. Then, as Pietersen's body obliterated the wicket from view, we, perched in the press box eyrie high up in the massive Blue Mountain Stand, saw his off stump appear from behind his back and cartwheel gymnastically back towards the keeper. For a split second, before the implication had taken hold, there was silence in the crowd. Then, as the realisation set in and Taylor began his celebratory sprint towards the Red Stripe stand pursued by a phalanx of team-mates, a cacophony erupted.

Where on earth does this humiliation leave England? asks Lawrence Booth in the Guardian.

It's been fashionable of late to play down the problems in the England dressing room, mainly because it's a far easier thing to do than accept the serious issues that have already split the team. Fine. Bury your heads in the sand if you like. But many of us are still waiting for evidence that this England side is in any way a united one. When everything that can go wrong does go wrong, as it did today in Jamaica, you have to ask serious questions about the collective state of mind.

In the pantheon of great overseas disasters, this one actually ranks fairly low down. Or at least it would if it wasn’t for the fact that this trip was supposed to be little more than a gentle workout for the Ashes against a supposedly flaky West Indian team, writes Martin Johnson in the Sunday Times.

For comedy, albeit black comedy, we had to look in the unlikely direction of Paul Collingwood. Another venomous Taylor delivery took the inside edge of Collingwood's bat before speeding off towards the fine-leg boundary. Collingwood sped off eagerly but when he turned for a second he was greeted by the spectacle of the West Indies side indulging in another mass celebration. Unbeknown to Collingwood the ball had brushed the leg-stump on its way to the boundary, writes Vic Marks in the Observer.

The responsibility of captaincy obviously sits well on his [Chris Gayle’s] shoulders, while mind and body both seem to be in very good shape. There were, of course, moments of pure Gayle, his second-over six off Flintoff a sublime instance of a shot that comes from nowhere — proof that his innate instincts are working beautifully, writes David Gower in the Sunday Times.

The history of Test cricket at Sabina Park is replete with devastation wreaked by lethal fast bowlers. Jerome Taylor's sensational 5 for 12 from nine overs in the searing heat yesterday that led to the disintegration of England's second innings for 51 all out and defeat by an innings and 23 runs placed him in the company of Manny Martindale, Wes Hall, John Snow and Steve Harmison, writes Tony Cozier in the Trinidad Express.

Never believe those reports that said cricket in the Caribbean was dying. It was just in mourning for the passing of the good days. The people still loved the game, nursed their hurt, and waited for fortunes to change. The whoops and hollers from the stands showed that the passion was still there, writes Simon Wilde in the Sunday Times.

As far as sudden and unexpected humiliations go, this one ranks right up there with the best, says Jonathan Agnew on the BBC website. He feels Ian Bell needs to be dropped to indicate that the "established batsmen's places are not fireproof".

My stance on Ricky Ponting being rested is that it smacked of arrogance; it is understandable but reeks of unwarranted arrogance. Thus the necessity to put Australia in their place, writes Mark Richardson in the Herald on Sunday.

The Australian cricket team is a shadow of its former self and to rest their key man in Ponting says one of two things. They are either still in arrogant denial or simply do not care for the Chappell-Hadlee trophy and, to them, this series is nothing more than practice on the road to more important matters.

Martin Johnson isn't a fan of the umpire review system. Read his take on it in the Sunday Times.

Even for those who hold that cutting down on human error must be in the game’s best interests, there must be something fundamentally disturbing about the sight of a batsman declining to leave the field despite being given out by the umpire. Apart from WG, the only other recorded case of this happening in pre-referral days was in the Lahore Test of 1987, when Stuart Broad’s dad, Chris, took one look at the finger raised before him, and raised, metaphorically speaking, a couple back himself. They were just about to send for a forklift truck when his batting partner, Graham Gooch, finally talked him into leaving.

On the evidence so far, it is a recipe for organised chaos, an illustration both of the limitations of technology and man's ability to interpret the results it is meant to elicit. The influence that reviews can have on the course of a match has been abundantly clear in the first Test in Kingston, writes Stephen Brenkley in the Independent on Sunday.

In the Telegraph, Steve James also wrote that Test cricket was no place to trial the umpire referral system.

The record-breaking prices paid at the Indian cricket auction might suggest sport is recession proof. It isn't - and that may be no bad thing, writes Ed Smith in the Telegraph.

But don't be fooled: the downturn will bite in sport, too. The IPL is a special case because much of its treasure chest was stashed away before the recession. Among the rank and file professional sports teams, sponsorship is getting harder to come by. And just ask Boris Johnson or Tessa Jowell how it is shaping up for the 2012 London Olympics.

The hectic buying and bonhomie among the new lords of the game confirm one thing though: the bubble is intact in India and, forget global meltdown, it won’t burst even if a meteor strikes the planet. Yes, cricket still rules, writes Bobilli Vijay Kumar in the Times of India.

David Hussey writes in his Sunday Age column about the past two weeks in Australia’s faltering one-day side.

The blowtorch has been on the team after some poor performances against South Africa and New Zealand and, as a "new" player, the expectation to perform has been intensified. I don't really get affected by outside pressure. My focus has been on proving to my team-mates and the coaching staff that I can be consistent at this level.

Phillip Hughes has been called into Australia’s Test squad for the South Africa trip and the Sun-Herald’s David Sygall spoke to him on the day his selection was revealed.

While Hughes may look very organised at the crease, he's a little less organised off the field and had lost his phone a fortnight earlier - not an uncommon occurrence for him. His new phone had few numbers in it, so he was left wondering who all these people [congratulating him] were.

There is anecdotal evidence that, within days of humiliating England in the Stanford Super Series Twenty20 showdown and earning $1 million (about £675,000) each, three young West Indies players were seen in an Antigua jeweller's buying Rolex watches worth $30,000 apiece, writes Pat Gibson in the Times.

Chris Gayle, who was strolling around like a millionaire anyway, long before he became captain, is significantly less flamboyant, unless you count the gold earring, designer jeans and skimpy vest that reveal his bulging, tattooed forearms. What he has done with his money is personal, he says, but he revealed on his website that his priority was to provide medical treatment for his father and one of his three brothers, who has a heart condition similar to the one for which he had surgery a few years ago.

The Australian’s Peter Lalor gives a blow-by-blow account of the incident between Michael Clarke and Simon Katich after the final day of the SCG Test.

Captain Ricky Ponting doesn't insist on too much from his charges, but he insists they celebrate a win and Australia's win over South Africa was a big thing. It had been a tough summer, the team had already lost the series and it had been a great Test that had gone down to the wire.

It was about five hours after the game finished and Clarke wanted to go. The older members of the team weren't ready to pack up just yet and the rule is that nobody can go until the team song is sung by its custodian. Things were heating up and about to get heated.

In the Sydney Morning Herald Peter Roebuck looks at Clarke’s 98 at the MCG on Friday along with the culture of dressing rooms.

Male sportsmen relish sitting in the rooms as night falls across an empty ground, sipping beer, exchanging yarns. It is their secret place and it has its own rituals. But exhaustion and alcohol are potent partners. Maybe the problem these days is that players are too tightly strung, and drink for the wrong purpose. Of course, the other problem has been the lack of maturity in the rooms since the departure of John Buchanan.

Will Swanton says in the same paper Clarke will be the next Test captain, but has some other questions over the scuffle.

Paul Weaver writes in the Guardian that Kevin Pietersen, England's recently deposed captain and IPL millionaire, remains keen to prove his credentials as a team man.

On this tour Pietersen has been admirable, both as a player and in his exaggerated efforts to show himself to be a team man. The paradox is that he is a man apart, that the harder he tries to swim towards his fellows the more the strong tides of his breathtaking talent, his driven personality, his South African background and his fast-swelling bank balance carry him off to a distant island.

England had learnt overnight that they possessed the two most valuable cricketers in the world in Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff, but the judgment of a bunch of rich Indian businessmen counted for little in the heat of Sabina Park, says Michael Atherton in the Times.

Tony Cozier writes in the Trinidad and Tobago Express that Ramnaresh Sarwan’s century, and his stand of 202 with captain Chris Gayle, were as important to Sarwan’s peace of mind as to the West Indies’ cause.

All things considered, Australia have chosen a handy team to tour South Africa. Quibbles can be held about one or two of the minor positions, but overall the squad is as strong as circumstances permit, writes Peter Roebuck in the Witness.

To a fault, Ricky Ponting defended the old guard, but repeated setbacks reduced his influence and now the selectors have produced a bolder side lacking power but containing plenty of energy and spirit. Simon Katich and Phil Hughes will open the batting. Last week, I watched Hughes score 151 and 82 not out in the last Shield match before selection. Clearly he is not scared of the spotlight. A small, sturdy left-hander hungry for runs, Hughes has a homespun technique reliant on eye and hands.

	Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff have plenty to smile about © Getty Images

Derek Pringle writes in the Daily Telegraph that Friday’s IPL auction has made one of cricket’s oldest sledges – playing like a millionaire – redundant. He also wonders whether Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen becoming the most expensive players is a case of image exceeding ability.

Like Becks, KP has the pop star wife, the tattoos, and takes a good photo. He also has friends in celebrity circles ... Still, given there is a global economic meltdown, it is both surprising and gratifying that cricket appears to be recession-proof.

In the Guardian, David Hopps says that the big bucks of the IPL will not cause dressing-room problems because the disparity in earnings of the richest and poorest members of a side have long been vast due to sponsorship deals.

The IPL, as its administrators like to boast, is a classic example of the free market … It is just that, in the free market, no one has a clue any more what anything – or anyone – is really worth.

Barclays were valued at about £15bn at the start of November but only about £4bn last week as shareholders sold in droves. Perhaps they should bundle up some unwanted players like Luke Wright, Samit Patel and any number of Australian state players and flog them off to Deccan Chargers as triple-A securities.

In the same paper, Vic Marks says there was little change in the demeanour of the two millionaires in the England side.

Flintoff bowled like a million dollars, perhaps better than that by current rates of exchange but it took him a long time to get rid of Ramnaresh Sarwan. Maybe there was some justice in the fact that Stuart Broad, who had shunned the IPL, was the man whose toil was most rewarded.

In a tongue-in-cheek piece in the Times, Patrick Kidd provides an account of what transpired in the England dressing room as the auction took place.

The second player auction for IPL Season 2 was less of a grab of big-name overseas batsmen and more a pursuit of bowlers, utility men and, in the case of Kevin Pietersen and Bangalore, some much-needed inspiration, writes Sharda Ugra in India Today.

In the New Zealand Herald, David Leggat writes that New Zealand's ongoing tour of Australia, a series which the visitors lead 2-0, barely gets a mention in the Melbourne papers.

So you open the sports section of one of Melbourne's two morning newspapers to check out the state of play ahead of the game. Big splash on the back page? Nope. Turn inside for a double-page spread on the whys and wherefores that lie ahead on the day? Forget it. The first eight pages are devoted to the coming AFL season. The next one is all about the A-League finals series. Then comes the cricket, a couple of pages primarily on the Australian squad named on Thursday to tour South Africa. The ODI yesterday gets one sentence.

Minutes seemed like hours as the various franchises raised the stakes on Mashrafe Mortaza, who was eventually purchased by Kolkata Knight Riders for an unexpected US$ 600,000. What was the reaction back home? Tears of joy. Read on in the Daily Star.

The paceman was showered with greetings once the news broke and his parents even broke into tears of joy at their beloved son's amazing success: "My father was just crying while talking over phone from my home district (Narail)"

It baffles me that in some places the IPL is still being seen as a financial rather than as a cricketing phenomenon, writes Harsha Bhogle in the Indian Express.

The money in Indian cricket has not been earned by thuggery and its colour is the same as that from other respectable enterprises around the world. It amused me no end that last year it was pooh-poohed by players who thought this was another form of beach and beer cricket. The auction was ridiculed and it still is but one of the great advantages of sitting on a distant couch is that you don’t always have to present an alternative. In course of time the auction will cease to be important but in the first year it was essential. Already there are fewer players up for grabs since teams are more or less settled and we will slowly move towards a trading system as exists in the more established football leagues. Just as those who ridiculed Kerry Packer were the ones who looked stupid in the end, those that choose to ignore, or choose not to understand, the Indian consumer and Indian markets will become irrelevant. Those that close their eyes can only see darkness.

	Has Matt Prior proved his critics wrong? © Digicel

It is time to end the argument about who should be England’s wicketkeeper-batsman, or, to be more precise, batsman-wicketkeeper. Matt Prior showed again yesterday that, if the selectors are intent on fielding a player who can make Test fifties, hundreds even, and not let down the side with the gloves, then he is the man for the job, says Pat Gibson in the Times.

Steve James thinks as much in the Daily Telegraph.

Prior belongs. Every Test innings he has played has demonstrated as much. After 21 of them his average stands at 42. Yesterday was the seventh occasion on which he has passed fifty during that time. What more do you want from your gloveman? Yes, the romantics will carp at the pureness of his glovework.

But is it that bad? He makes mistakes, as he did here in letting a couple of balls slip beneath him, but so do all keepers. And so did all keepers. In England the glasses are spectacularly rose-tinted when looking back upon our former wicketkeepers. None of them dropped a catch, apparently. Indeed it came as a great shock when I watched on ESPN recently and witnessed Alan Knott dropping a dolly in a domestic cup final. Jack Russell shelled his share of catches too, including one on his Test debut. They were wonderful keepers, as, of course, was Bob Taylor, but it is all about perception.

In the Times, Simon Wilde applauds Andrew Strauss' decision not to write a newspaper column, and also looks at the real hero and villain among Pietersen and Flintoff.

It's not so much seize the day as pluck it, pluck it like a ripe apple from the tree and make it yours. So a Latin scholar explained to me, anyway. So, as we turn to the panoply of sport and look to its participants and its great occasions, we can ask: who has the talent for plucking? Kevin Pietersen does, says Simon Barnes in the same paper.

	Phillip Hughes, the 20-year-old from New South Wales, is heading for South Africa © Getty Images

Phillip Hughes is one of the new faces in Australia’s squad for the South Africa Test trip, but Stuart Honeysett reports in the Australian that Hughes was a slow starter when it came to cricket.

When he was eight the only threats he wanted to face were his father and his older brother Jason in the backyard at home. "My brother Jason was two years older than me and he played Kanga cricket and I was in the backyard one day and they just kept pestering me," Hughes said. "They were going, 'Are you going to have a game?' and I said, 'No, no, I don't want to.'”

Peter Roebuck says in the Sydney Morning Herald Australia have picked a “bold and promising” touring party.

Bryce McGain, who is in line for a Test debut, has a nine-year boy and the pair “shared a pretty good moment” when he revealed his selection. Jesse Hogan writes about McGain in the Age.

In the Daily Telegraph Paul Kent looks at Michael Clarke’s desire for the Test captaincy and his dressing-room incident with Simon Katich after the Sydney Test.

In The Times, Michael Atherton took time out to track down Richard Austin, the former West Indies allrounder who was good enough to be signed up by Kerry Packer for his World Series Cricket venture in the late 1970s, but who is now living on the streets in Kingston.

The last time I saw Richard Austin he was living in a bush. Location, location, location, the estate agents say, and this was a well-positioned bush, to be sure, in the car park opposite the Hilton hotel in New Kingston. The Hilton hotel, you see, is where international cricket teams stay when they are in Jamaica - England are staying there now - and Austin had located on the principle that someone might just remember him and give him some money to feed his habit.

He has moved now - at least when you do not own a home, selling up is not a problem - and he inhabits the Cross Roads area of Kingston in a triangle between Tastee, the patty store, the Texaco garage and Union Square, sleeping rough, begging and, when he is flush, getting high. He is high a lot of the time, says the man who runs the garage where Austin hangs out, but people are fond of him and enjoy his company, unless he is so high that he starts talking crazy.

	Ian Bell managed to turn promise into abject disappointment © Getty Images

... there was nothing ugly about Bell. He caressed and cavorted. It all seemed so easy. But it is indicative of the prevailing mood that, after a delightful three through mid-on, one press box cynic said: "Typical Bell this – he'll still get out for 30."

New captain, new coach, same old infuriating Bell, writes Vic Marks in the Guardian.

Maybe Bell felt obliged to rein himself in at the fall of a second wicket. Maybe he simply decided to give centre stage to ­Pietersen. Or maybe the fact that he scored nine runs from the next 49 balls he faced was a coincidence. Whatever the reason Bell sacrificed the initiative and was out to a very disappointing, indeterminate prod.

Kevin Pietersen fell three runs short of what would have been his 16th Test century. In the Daily Mail Martin Samuel writes that the innings may be remembered for the dichotomy that is Pietersen, working flat out to be reinvented as the ultimate team player, but ultimately unable to contain the wild side that makes him such a unique talent.

He wants to be the guy that took his lumps and came back the better man for it, happy to serve as one of a number, but if he cannot keep it up for one day what chance has he got of maintaining it through the rest of his professional life? He surely wanted this innings to be the riposte, aimed squarely at those who claim ego cost him the captaincy, instead he handed them a stick with which to beat him once more.

Also read Tony Cozier's piece on the Sabina pitch on cricinfo.com.

A knock from Peter Fulton with more than three scoring shots, and some booing from Victorians for New South Welshman Brad Haddin are among the 10 things Paul Holden would like to see from Section N at the MCG, the venue of the second ODI of the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy. Read the complete list on his blog Sideline Slogger.

Not too much distraction from the IPL auction set to go at the same time as the one-dayer. Affected players who will be getting messages from the dressing room throughout the night on how their lump sum mortgage repayments are shaping up are Kyle Mills (Minimum reserve: US$150,000), Michael Clarke (US$1,000,000) and Shaun Tait (US$250,000).

It’s amazing what a win or two can do to perk up even the most downhearted player or supporter. In Zimbabwe, the drubbing handed out to … er … the mighty Kenyans has caused the state-run mouthpiece, the Herald to launch into the kind of rhetoric last heard in Norway in 1981 when England were defeated at football and the local TV commentator went into his famous “Maggie Thatcher, your boys took a hell of a beating” rant.

“As expected, the Australians and the British have acted like perfect fools in placing sanctions on people like Peter Chingoka and Ozias Bvute,” boomed the lead editorial in the Zim$500,000,000 an issue paper. “They think by doing so, they can permanently cripple the game and isolate Zimbabwe by excluding the nation from Test cricket.

“Those who thought that Zimbabwean cricket would collapse because whites decided to play politics with the game have another think coming! Keep it up, Chingoka! Prove the detractors wrong!”

Garfield Myers in the Jamaica Observer charts Chris Gayle's journey from playing cricket over the wall from his home with his brothers as a kid in Kingston to captaining West Indies. All those who saw him in his formative years agreed young Gayle loved to bat.

George Watson, a relative of Gayle's and long-time Lucas club captain and elder, recalls that the young Chris and his brothers cut their teeth on cricket playing the hard, highly individualistic 'bowl fi bat' or 'ketchi shubby' on any available open space ... Andre Coley, the former West Indies Under-19 and Jamaica wicketkeeper and Lucas captain, now a member of the JCA's coaching panel, recalls a skinny, gangly left-hander batting for "hours and hours" on the concrete practice strip at Lucas. It was a habit that quickly convinced Coley and others that the young Gayle, who carried the unflattering nickname, 'Crampy', was destined to be a "cut above the rest".

Mike King of Barbados' Nation expects the series between West Indies and England to be a hard-fought one.

All of the individual stats are on the side of England. Shiv Chanderpaul, (49.71) is the only West Indian who averages above 40 in Test cricket. In contrast, Kevin Pietersen, who averages 50, is backed up by Paul Collingwood, Alistair Cook, and Andrew Strauss, all of whom average 42; Ian Bell (41) and Matt Prior (40).

	It is fair to assume that Kevin Pietersen's moment to lead England has gone © AFP

Never say never is the cliché and Pietersen has insisted he harbours ambitions to captain again, but unless there is a giant reversal in circumstances, it is fair to assume his moment to lead England has gone. Whatever he might achieve in cricket, above will always be a glass ceiling. Pietersen’s destiny is not to be a winning Ashes captain, like his ally Michael Vaughan, or to return from the Asian continent a victorious leader, like Nasser Hussain.

In the same paper, Nasser Hussain writes that he would have liked to play under Andrew Strauss, who is firm and solid - tough without being a bully.

Strauss has to push Flintoff and stand up to him, saying: 'Come on, I know you can walk into this side and I know you are just about to get IPL riches. 'I know you have run through a brick wall for every captain you've played under but if we are going to win the Ashes again, I need you to improve as a batsman at six.'

In his last two series against England, Shivnarine Chanderpaul has averaged 72.83 and an astonishing 148.67 - even the great Don Bradman could not match the latter over a single series. In the 2007 series in England, he averaged nearly 12 hours at the crease in total, scoring 448 mostly unspectacular, yet equally priceless runs. Therefore, England's biggest challenge in the Caribbean in the Test series will be penetrating fortress Chanderpaul, writes Pranav Soneji in BBC Sport.

The 34-year-old shares his name with the Hindu God Shiva, but their temperaments are polar opposites. Shiva is the destroyer, known for his untamed passion which leads him to extremes in behaviour; while Shiv is the creator, known to frustrate opponents with his crab-like stance as impenetrable as it is unique in tranquil and serene fashion. Yet Shiva the destroyer has had a profound effect on Shiv the creator.

Across three decades, West Indies cricket has gone from respect, to fright, to a short interlude of joy at England's ascendancy, to worrying about the future. In his blog on the Guardian website, Rob Bagchi relives the West Indian dominance during the 80s and shares with Colin Croft his fears over the future of his old team.

In the same paper, Andy Bull and Rob Smyth list six classic England v West Indies moments. Remember "those little pals of mine?"

	Should this photo be called The Night of the Vanishing Stars, or The Mountain Top? © AFP

Robert Craddock writes in the Daily Telegraph about how the mighty Australia have not fallen, but disappeared.

Australia's cricketing landscape has been devastated since its grand win in the 2007 World Cup final against Sri Lanka in Barbados - just 21 months ago. There are six survivors to play New Zealand at the MCG on Friday night.

A photo snapped just after the 2007 match shows the Australian side in all of its celebratory glory. If it was a painting by a famous artist it might have been called The Night of the Vanishing Stars, or simply The Mountain Top - because, for Australian cricket, life has never been as good since that moment.

There are nearly 80 one-day games between now and the next World Cup so that means somebody coming into the squad has the opportunity to gain loads of experience before the tournament. Fans need to show patience at a time like this, but I know from years of watching AFL that teams in a rebuilding phase can give you great satisfaction.

Phillip Hughes needs only a couple of nods from selectors when they meet on Wednesday to earn a spot on Australia’s trip to South Africa. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Will Swanton spoke to Hughes’ dad during New South Wales’ Sheffield Shield match over the past week, when his boy scored 151 and 82 not out.

The father was standing on the hill at Newcastle No.1 Sportsground as the son played the most important innings of his life. If the latter succeeded, he could be chosen to represent Australia. It was that simple, and that daunting. The son was displaying calm beyond his years, but the father was a nervous wreck.

The Daily Telegraph says Hughes could earn as much as A$200,000 if he makes the squad.

	Andrew Flintoff is one of seven England players in the IPL auction © Getty Images

Comical Ali would find it difficult to argue all is hunky dory in the England dressing room and Friday's IPL auction is unlikely to help matters, says Lawrence Booth in his post on the Guardian website.

The goodish news is that only four members of the squad in the West Indies - Kevin Pietersen (bidding starts at $1.35m), Andrew Flintoff ($950,000), Paul Collingwood ($250,000) and Owais Shah ($150,000) - are on the IPL list. Three others - Ravi Bopara ($150,000), Samit Patel ($100,000) and Luke Wright ($150,000) - are in England. In theory, this limits the scope for jealousy. But then in theory, the Stanford match was a simple enough proposition too, and look how England failed to get their heads round that one.

It's true that other dressing rooms round the world failed to implode with envy when the first auction took place a year ago in Mumbai. But England's circumstances right now are particularly sensitive. Pietersen is putting a brave face on the treatment he received at the hands of his team-mates and the England and Wales Cricket Board; Flintoff has had to admit he backed Peter Moores; and Andrew Strauss is doing his best to hold the whole thing together with the help of Andy Flower, a decent man who isn't even sure whether he wants to be coach. The blue touch paper is waiting to be lit.

Pakistan's decision not to send their players to India for the IPL's second season could be a prudent one at a time when crowds in stadiums could turn hostile towards professional athletes from the country, Sharda Ugra writes in her blog Free Hit.

So, Kamran Akmal or Umar Gul will always be comfortable in dressing rooms in Jaipur and Kolkata because the professional athlete is essentially apolitical. But out on the field there is no predicting how they would be received in India. No, actually, there is: had there been no announcement, the question of the appropriateness of hosting Pakistanis would have been brought up in a couple of weeks and the protests and threats would have followed.

Imagine for a moment the reaction to a Pakistani cricketer in Mumbai - and not merely from the lunatic fringe whose numbers sadly continue to multiply in the once-liberal metropolis. Now the Mumbai Indians may not have a single Pakistani on their rolls but it would have had to host them in the IPL all the same. How would that have gone down with the citizens of a scarred city? It is of course hardly fair on Pakistan’s cricketers to carry the blame for their government’s role – or even that of “non-state actors” - in 26/11, but then again life was hardly fair to the victims of that night, either.

Is cricket played as much with the head as with bat and ball? Though essentially a physical pastime, David Foot in his blog on the Guardian website tries to reason why the game in particular has appealed so much to men of letters, the poets, those with sensitive, philosophical natures.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle loved the game's swaying statistics with one theory superseding another as entrenched batsmen were ground down and then outwitted. His friends believed that the capture of a wicket was to him as fulfilling as the villain's nadir in the final chapter.

Michael Vaughan is very bad at singing - well music in general really. By his own admission, he's an awful singer but it doesn't stop him from belting them out from time to time. It gets more interesting in The Five Minute Interview with John Matthew Hall in the Independent.

You know me as a cricketer but in truer life I'd have been...

A businessman. I'm always coming up with great ideas that I know would do really well.

For the trivia buffs, the Snow special quiz on the Times website is worth a shot.

Jonathan Millmow says in the Dominion Post Brad Haddin plumbed new depths by disturbing the bails with his gloves for the "bowled" of Neil Broom in Sunday's one-day match.

Breaking the stumps when a batsman misses the ball is a stunt normally the domain of schoolyard bullies and Haddin would be wise not to watch a replay of his gamesmanship at the WACA. A good sport would have at the least asked for confirmation from the match officials.

Paul Holden writes in his Sideline Slogger blog that Haddin deserves to incur the wrath of the New Zealand cricketing public.

The former international umpire Darrell Hair, speaking in the Sydney Morning Herald, says the delivery should have been a no-ball.

With Australia in trouble and missing their captain, Peter Roebuck names an alternate team in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Phillip Hughes can open up with Simon Katich. Both shine in every form of the game. Notions that Hughes is not ready are wide of the mark. David Warner and Shaun Marsh can get the grounding they need in Shield cricket. They'll be back. Hashim Amla and JP Duminy are examples of young batsmen who know their games inside out.

He also has a go at naming the Test squad for the South Africa trip.

Ron Reed, writing in the Herald Sun, says the Allan Border Medal, which will be held on Tuesday night in Melbourne, might lose some fizz this time.

Each year since the awards night was first held in 2000 the mood has been merry - it has always been a celebration of another dominant summer. Not this time. At Test and one-day level - Twenty20 is not yet part of the criteria for the medal or associated awards - Ricky Ponting's teams have endured a tough 12 months. The stats aren't pretty.

Gamini Lokuge, the Sri Lanka sports minister, has been involved in a lof of cricket controversies during his ongoing term, the most recent being a defamation suit filed by Arjuna Ranatunga, who he sacked as Sri Lanka Cricket's interim committee chief earlier this month. Lokuge spoke to Hindustan Times about problems with Ranatunga, sponsorship issues and releasing players for the IPL.

Arjuna Ranatunga, was having problems with the players, his fellow workers, the sponsors (Dilmah Tea spent $ two million during a three-year period and did not renew the contract) and even the media. We cannot run an association like that. So, I was forced to sack Ranatunga and dissolve the committee ... Now, I have given Duleep Mendis complete authority. Next month, we are planning to hold elections. We will set up a new Interim Committee. At the same time, I want to get the cabinet's approval to set up a trust that would take care of the financial activities.

The first Test of the Wisden Trophy is in Jamiaca, the scene of Steve Harmison's greatest triumph - the 7 for 12 that destroyed West Indies five years ago. In the Times, Michael Atherton wants Harmison to watch the video of that spell, rejig the memory and get back to being the genuinely fast bowler that England need.

He might find looking at the tapes profitable because technically he was at his best then. He ran in hard and straight, stayed tall at the crease - arms reaching for the heavens as if in worship - held a firm rather than floppy wrist behind the ball and followed through with purpose.

Stephen Brenkley also relives that spell in the Independent, and says that Harmison has since gone on to become England's most exasperating bowler.

	Keepers can help bowlers in lots of ways ... but tickling the bails before the ball has arrived is one of the less orthodox versions © Getty Images

John Townsend, writing in the West Australian, looks into Brad Haddin’s role in the “bowled” of Neil Broom in New Zealand’s win over Australia on Sunday.

How the Kiwis must be rejoicing. Not only have they knocked off Australia on the last ball of the one-dayer in Perth but, joy of joys, they also have another villain to add to the Anzac sporting hall of infamy. Trevor Chappell is the patron, of course, and will remain so for eternity. Underarm bowling has that sort of lasting quality. Greg Dyer is a vice-patron after claiming a catch off Andrew Jones in the Test match at the MCG in 1987-88 ...

Exactly 28 years to the day since the underarm incident, Haddin has ensured his name will always be known in New Zealand for his assistance in getting Michael Clarke a bowled decision against Neil Broom. Keepers can help bowlers in lots of ways apart from the standard catches and stumpings but tickling the bails before the ball has arrived is one of the less orthodox versions.

In his blog Sideline Slogger, Paul Holden calls Haddin's actions "dishonest, opportunistic and desperate".

These sorts of unsavoury sporting acts are what gives cricket intrigue, but also provide a memorable insight into the character of the people playing the game. Brad Haddin came up short last night. I can’t wait to point that out to him from the Beige Brigade section of the crowd at the MCG on Friday.

Daniel Vettori was disappointed with Haddin and his comments are here.

One of the problems in the maverick life of Andrew Symonds is that no one in Australian cricket is prepared to pull him into line, Robert Craddock writes in the Courier-Mail.

Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland told Symonds three years ago the next time he misbehaved his contact would be torn up in front of him. It was an empty threat. Since then Symonds has drifted off the rails at least twice and his contract is not only in one piece, it's fatter than one of those big barramundi Symonds was chasing when he should have been at a team meeting in Darwin last year.

There is a strong chance Symonds will miss the tour - and the sad part about it is Australia needs him more than ever.

Observers of the game have been worried about the growing importance of Twenty 20 and how it could adversely affect batting skills. But the format could add value to the game, writes Daryll Cullinan in Businessday.

A prime example was Duminy’s lap over the keeper’s head off Australian quickie Shaun Tait during the recent Twenty 20 series. It was one of the most amazing shots I have ever seen. The ball is going to new places in the field.

The new kids on the block have fresh minds and seem less paranoid about adapting between limited-overs cricket and Test cricket. Fifty-over cricket affected scoring rates in Test cricket for the better. Fielding also drastically improved and the need for athleticism, strength and power quickly became paramount. Can Twenty 20 take it even further, and is it affecting the game positively or negatively?

Flaws in the domestic structure have contributed to Australia's sudden slump in the world stage and the most glaring of them all is the average age of players in Shield cricket, writes Peter Roebuck in the Sydney Morning Herald. Provincial players hang on as long as they can. They are clogging up the works and Australian cricket needs to find a ruthless response.

State teams are getting older. The average age is about 27, roughly the same as life expectancy in Zimbabwe - a jolly nice place to live, in the opinion of the cads running the ICC. Among contracted players, only a handful (5 per cent) are under 22. Contrastingly, 23 per cent are over 31. The average age of the Queensland squad is 29.4. Martin Love is still playing in his mid 30s, a batsman whose best days are long behind him. For goodness sake, Andrew Bichel is still available. But let's not pick on the banana-benders. Even NSW, the state most likely to encourage youth, has given Greg Mail, a lovely 31-year-old with a modest record as an opener, four Shield matches this year. Meanwhile, Warner, Usman Khawaja and Moises Henriques twiddle their thumbs. Plain and simple, it is wrong.

Over the past year, Rahul Dravid has not been in the best of form and though he has learnt a lot from his recent failures never did he think about walking away from the game. In an interview to Nihal Koshie in Daily News & Analysis he confesses that he still loves the game and enjoys playing it, even if it is a match in the Ranji or Duleep Trophy.

'I just try and enjoy it and hopefully I will know that when I am not enjoying it. The thumb rule is as long as I can enjoy... coming to the gym, practising and training... I will keep doing it. Hopefully, I will get to know some day when I am not enjoying it and that will be the time to walk away.'

The mess between the unsanctioned Indian Cricket League and Indian cricket's governing body, the BCCI, continues. Refusing to be snuffed out, the ICL now prepares to breach the BCCI's rigid defences against it, writes Rohit Mahajan in Outlook.

Though the ICL and the BCCI refused to discuss the matter, those familiar with the developments in the ICL camp say the BCCI's tactics are designed to tire them out and discredit Kapil. "For instance, by asking if there were allegations of match-fixing against him and not asking if he was found guilty, they wanted to establish that his credibility is questionable," says an ICL source.

Watching a media opportunity ahead of the five-ODI series between Sri Lanka and India, SR Pathiravithana noticed something he had never before seen in all his years covering cricket in his home country. Sitting with Sri Lanka's captain, coach and board chief executive were the sports minister and his secretary. A politician leading an international cricket exchange in Sri Lanka?

It doesn't gel with Pathiravithana, who in the Sri Lankan daily, the Sunday Times, says that it all looked a bit out of place.

After witnessing the sorry state of cricket in the West Indies, David Gower finds himself longing for the eighties. He writes in the Sunday Times about feeling nostalgic about 5-0 blackwashes and facing Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall and Co.

Playing in the West Indies in those days, one had to endure the test of “pace like fire”, one of the catchphrases of the time, while attempting to appreciate the vibrant atmosphere of the grounds and the unquenchable enthusiasm of the fans.
...
Nowadays the fire of West Indies cricket, on the field and in the stands, has been quenched. There are still fireworks to be seen from Chris Gayle’s bat, and once again there is some pace in the attack, but it does not come with the quality stamp of the 1980s.

With problems for the West Indies in both the batting and bowling departments, England are strong favourites to prevail in the Caribbean, writes Vic Marks in the Observer.

It's a view that's shared by Simon Wilde in the Sunday Times. He wonders which of England's five fast bowlers will be excluded from the XI for the first Test.

He also believes England must find a way to dismiss Shivnarine Chanderpaul on his home turf if they are to succeed, but it will certainly not be an easy task