Chris Woakes caught the eye during his international debut in Australia last winter - both with bat and ball - and he's started this domestic season in fine style to keep himself well in the England reckoning. Paul Newman caught up with him in the Daily Mail and found a confident young man eager to make his mark.

'A lot of my early form has been down to playing four-day cricket in the West Indies with the Lions before the season,' said Woakes, who has a century to his name already this year to add to his 17 Championship wickets. 'The England performance programme has played a massive part in my development and, after a winter playing mainly with a white ball, facing good opposition on flat wickets in first-class cricket was ideal. It got me off and running.'

Woakes is just one of a number of young England cricketers enjoying impressive early-season form ahead of the international summer. Over at The Cricketer website, Christopher Martin-Jenkins says the signs are very promising with plenty of options to choose from.

Other things being equal, Anderson will no doubt lead the attack at what used to be called Sophia Gardens on May 26, with two from Tim Bresnan, Chris Tremlett and Stuart Broad. But what a line-up of reserves that would leave: Finn, Shahzad, Onions, Woakes, Dernbach, Harris, Roland-Jones…. there is a case, certainly, for a system of rotation.

In the Indian weekly newsmagazine Outlook, Rohit Majahan speaks to some of the world's leading bowlers - Zaheer Khan, Daniel Vettori, Morne Morkel - and India's bowling coach Eric Simons to try and figure out what bowlers need to do to survive in an era of powerful bats, flat tracks and short boundaries.

Simons feels bowlers are trying too much too often, and mastering nothing. “They’d be trying seven-eight different deliveries—slow balls, yorkers, back-of-the-hand balls, bouncers, slower bouncer, knuckle ball, one-finger ball, et al,” he says. “That’s all wrong, because while you must have variations, you’ve got to bowl from a proper foundation.”

Scyld Berry, writing in the Daily Telegraph, tells us about Siegfried Sassoon - the soldier and the cricketer.

Sassoon was the bravest of cricketers on two counts, and possibly three. First came his physical, military bravery, when he led his men over the top several times in the First World War, including at the Somme, armed only with a pistol, and was awarded the Military Cross in 1916 “for conspicuous gallantry” ... What sets Sassoon apart is that he risked being shot when on leave from the trenches as well. His statement of protest against the mad futility of the First World War was read out in the House of Commons by an MP. Pacifists such as Bertrand Russell had protested against the war, but not somebody who had been there and done that.

The IPL is fast turning into a Frankenstein, says Suresh Menon, writing in DNA. The BCCI, he says, cannot abdicate its responsibility in restoring sanity to world cricket.

Should the BCCI be concerned so much about world cricket when its brief is Indian cricket? So long as Indian cricket is served, why worry? Countries construct their diplomacy and economic policies on the foundation of self-interest, so why should sport be different?

As the world champions, the No. 1 Test-playing country, and with the power and influence that comes with having the richest cricket board in the world with the potential to make themselves and everybody else richer, the BCCI must give up their narrow-minded domestic concerns and focus on cricket the world game. Whatever the compulsions of political entities in the United Nations, sport must follow the beat of a different drum. For that is the reason for its existence — it is artificial and should strive to be idealistic.

Differences in language, culture and religion make India a hard team to manage, says Makarand Waingankar, writing in the Hindu. This, he says, puts the coach's personnel management skills to a stern test.

There might not be a vast improvement technically in the players, but their confidence and comfort zones have been enhanced post-Kirsten. It's those zones which have boosted their performance. It's this aspect that even the Indian coaches in the 90s couldn't handle.

With such motley of people, seeds of discontent could easily be sowed through regional groups that can destroy a team. Kirsten had ... studied the history and the ethos of Indian cricket. The Indian team as seen during the Kirsten era was a curious mix of studious seniors and somewhat over-enthusiastic juniors. To make it work like a well-oiled team, one had to develop a sense of unity within diversity which Kirsten did.

It takes a true connoisseur of the game to appreciate the medium-pace bowler, says Harry Pearson, writing in the Guardian.

With the wisdom of years, I can see now, for instance, that the attack of Viv Richards's West Indies team was unbalanced not by the lack of a top-class spinner, but by the clear absence of an heir to Vanburn Holder, whose elegantly bowed legs and sensible insistence on line and length above pace and bounce brought a hint of the King's Singers to calypso cricket, I can see now why some of the gentlemen who sat around me at Headingley and Scarborough would greet the sight of Vanburn replacing Andy Roberts with the contented sigh of tired gardeners sniffing the scent of evening drizzle after a hot August day. You could relax with Vanburn.

Barney Gibson - who broke a 144-year-old record on Wednesday to become England’s youngest first-class cricketer - on getting a call up for Yorkshire's first team and sitting down to homework after dinner. Rob Stewart reports in the Daily Telegraph.

Gibson, a pupil at Crawshaw School, Pudsey, was given permission to take time off after being called into the team and he quickly showed the old ‘if you’re good enough you’re old enough’ adage was true, as he dealt with the pace of England’s Ajmal Shahzad before being mobbed by his team-mates after taking a stunning catch in the 10th over to dismiss opener Luc Durandt off Oliver Hannon-Dalby.

“I spoke to the head teacher, who said she was really happy for me but told me not to forget about my school work. I’ve just got to get on with it after we’ve eaten, but it would be nice to watch a bit of the Barcelona-Real Madrid game as well.”

Michael Vaughan, writing in the Daily Telegraph, says Duncan Fletcher is the best analytical cricket coach he ever worked with. His new job with India, says Vaughan, will suit him perfectly.

The Indian team will discover he is an innovative ideas man who is always looking to be one step ahead ... He had a scientific way of presenting ideas to the players. He loved explaining to batsmen why the forward press was important against spinners. He would talk about looking under the ball because it gives you more time to pick up length. The little ideas he taught me as a player were things no other coach mentioned to me.

He will be a terrific foil for Dhoni, who will benefit from Duncan’s philosophy that the captain is always the man in charge. Duncan views his big job being on a Tuesday or Wednesday in the run-up to a Test match to prepare the team and get his points across.

Having worked with Fletcher and watched him operate from a distance, I can say with absolute confidence that India have appointed an amazing coach, writes Nasser Hussain in his Sky Sports column.

Fletcher's persona should fit in perfectly with the Indian set-up because he is a man who achieves his best work behind the scenes. Naturally his knowledge of modern cricket and current players is vast and his understanding of the game's techniques extensive. But he won't try to take on the Indian media or the team's star players in the same way that Greg Chappell did, nor will he interfere unnecessarily in the way Mahendra Singh Dhoni leads the team and as a result I'm sure coach and captain will get on well together.

Duncan Fletcher had to drag England up from the depths; now as coach of India he must handle a team starting at the very top, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian.

Fletcher may give the impression of being a curmudgeon, and at times an autocrat, but Kirsten and of course MS Dhoni will recognise and appreciate someone whose qualities tend to involve working in the background. He has never craved attention, believing that as it is the players ultimately who win or lose games, then it should be they who have the profile.

He was always keen to set up a business‑style structure – whether it was at England or Western Province, or Glamorgan before that – in which the captain was viewed as the chief executive and himself as managing director. If there were ever any doubts that whoever was appointed it would be Dhoni, along with Sachin Tendulkar, who ran the show, then they have been dispelled by Fletcher's advancement.

Former wards tell Bharat Sundaresan, writing in the Indian Express, that while Fletcher is keen on discipline, he is not an authoritarian and allows players space to think for themselves.

...Fletcher comes across as stern and not easy to please. But those who have worked with him closely say the former Zimbabwe captain doesn’t believe in ruling with an iron-fist, despite coming into a job with bunch of well-entrenched values and philosophies ... “He is not a hard taskmaster like some make him out to be. He does have his own set of rules, but doesn’t believe in imposing them upon the players,” says [Ashley] Giles. And [the expression] is mainly a result of the seriousness with which Fletcher approaches every single assignment. Like former South African fast bowler Craig Matthews says, his former coach in fact is among the best people to hang out with when it comes to relaxing after a tough day at work.

The 'likeability factor' will play a role in determining Fletcher's success in India says Suresh Menon, writing for the BBC website.

History is no guide when it comes to coaching India. You can be a cricketing genius or a coach with an enviable record; you can be highly qualified or a fresher; young or old; you can be an Indian or an outsider. But none of this matters unless your "likeability factor" is high. The players have to like you, the media have to feel involved. Officials want flexibility and regular acknowledgement that they are the bosses. Coaching is the least of the tasks.

While in every other way Fletcher is an admirable coach, he was saved on the media front by two England captains - Nasser Hussain and Michael Vaughan - who liked to talk and knew every journalist in the pack says Ted Corbett, writing in the Hindu.

Derek Pringle, writing in the Daily Telegraph, looks forward to the duel between Andy Flower and Duncan Fletcher when India tours England this summer.

Farooq Nomani argues in the Dawn that the PCB's recently released 'Registration of Agents Regulations, 2010' – a set of rules intended to oversee the legitimacy of player-agent arrangements - is inadequate.

In the aftermath of the spot-fixing scandal, “agent” was the catchword of regulatory hawks because that’s what Mazhar Majeed sold himself as. But what if the next Mazhar Majeed presents himself as a lawyer? An accountant? Or a ‘business manager’? Are such service providers covered by the Agents Regulations? I suppose that depends on how the Agents Regulations define an “agent”? Problem is, they don’t. The Agents Regulations are silent as to what would constitute an “agency activity” and neither does the ICC Players Handbook or the PCB Constitution provide any guidance on the scope of the term.

Wouldn't it have been a help to West Indies' youngsters to have Ramnaresh Sarwan or Shivnarine Chanderpaul meeting them at the crease at some stage to rotate the strike, to deal with Saeed Ajmal and to take some of the pressure off them during the ODIs against Pakistan, asks Garth Wattley, writing in the Trinidad Express.

Skipper Darren Sammy, poor fellow, has not been able to be of such aid [as one of the discarded seniors could have] to his young charges, struggling as he is even more than them with bat and ball. Captain after captain over the last decade has said similar things [after a loss]. But, nowadays, the need to "make things happen" is urgent. Why? Because West Indies cricket is full of greenhorns as the cowboys of the old West would have said: young, undeveloped talent searching for direction but not yet finding it.

The exclusion all at once of the three most senior batsmen, Sarwan, Chanderpaul and Gayle has made an already bad situation worse. Good sense would suggest that such an imbalance be rectified by at least the re-introduction of Sarwan for the ODIs, and he and Chanders for the Tests.

Sandeep Dwivedi, writing in the Indian Express, says Lasith Malinga has merely chosen a format of the game that suits his frail physical condition. Malinga, Dwivedi says, decided that he no longer wanted to risk injury and suffer the solitary confinement of his house as he has in the past.

Malinga definitely had his reasons to give up the flannels for good. He was fit enough to bowl four hours, that too slit in two-three spells, with a sufficient break between games, but he wasn’t sure if his knee could take the workload of the tough five-day routine of a Test match in England. But despite their long experience of playing the game, the Lankan administrators failed to get this cricketing logic. They took it personally. It was a rejection, they believed.

With Daniel Vettori saying the day when a left-arm spinner will bowl the doosra is not far, S Dinakar, writing in the Hindu, examines the implications of such an innovation.

Murali Kartik, still the finest left-arm spinner in the country [India], revealed he had attempted bowling the doosra — here a left-arm spinner gets the ball to spin into the right-hander — at the nets and managed to pull it off from only 10 yards. “You require hyper-flexible wrist and shoulder to send down this delivery from 22 yards. And I do not believe this is possible without a degree of bending and straightening of the arm.”

A doosra could be a potent weapon against a left-handed batsman who could be forced to hit against the spin. And against a right-hander, the short-leg and the leg-slip could come into play.

With there being no such thing as a cricket season - unless you’re referring to the period between January 1 and December 31 - cricket is being robbed of it's meaning says Shehan Karunatilaka, writing in Outlook India.

It’s all about context. At a time when commentators were heralding the death of one-day cricket, the World Cup proved that there was still life in the old format. There were plenty of nail-biters, many of which featured England. Each game had a meaning, a subtext and a reason for being. Something which a 7-game series between New Zealand and Zimbabwe may lack. While the World Cup final had most of us riveted, can the same be said for the last 50 Sri Lanka-India games, which probably took place in as many weeks? If we keep repeating the same battles and lowering the stakes, cricket will be shorn of its meaning.

The Old Batsman takes a look at a recent IPL game and wonders whether 'playing yourself in' is as important as people once assumed.

At the end of the sixth over in their game against Rajasthan yesterday, Kings XI were 77-1. It would be easy to pass this off as symptomatic of one of the many warping forces T20 is applying in its first era. Yet it hints at something more fundamental. In distilling the game down to an extreme form, conventional wisdoms will be challenged.

Over 400 runs were blasted at the Feroze Shah Kotla in the IPL game between Delhi Daredevils and Kings XI Punjab on Saturday. Indranil Basu and Devadyuti Das in the Times of India track how the pitch at the Kotla was transformed from a much-criticised one and a frustration for for batsmen to a belter.

But how did the usually low-slow Kotla, so frustrating for batsmen, become a belter? It's because Saturday's game was played on a side track and not one of the three centre wickets. The centre strips are bare without a speck of grass and have been low and sluggish ever since they have been re-laid in 2010. "The grass just refuses to grow on the centre wickets. It could be because of the layer of soil underneath or due to wear and tear. Wickets on either side have a healthy coverage of grass," DDCA's grounds and pitches committee chairman Venkat Sundaram said.

Cricket is still to make make big strides in the USA but Peter Della Penna, writing on the website dreamcricket.com observes that visitors have reacted positively to experiencing cricket for the first time at National Baseball Hall of Fame.

“I’d love to go see a full game actually,” said 45-year-old Karen Knights of Raymond, Maine. Knights was with her husband Rodney and 13-year-old daughter Megan on a day out to discover baseball history when they came across the Swinging Away display. The entire family was quite intrigued by the differences between baseball and cricket.

Sushant Sareen, who works with the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, writes in Tehelka that Indo-Pak cricket will never be the right vehicle for taking bilateral relations to the next level.

That cricket can never be a substitute for quiet, serious diplomacy is borne out by past record. Gen Zia-ul-Haq initiated cricket diplomacy in 1987 by forcing himself on a reluctant Indian government after a near crisis caused by the Operation Brasstacks military exercise had been diffused. Pervez Musharraf’s sojourn in 2005 to watch the match in New Delhi also didn’t lead to any major breakthrough.

Dileep Premachandran argues in the National that the IPL is not helping produce the bowling talent the Indian side needs.

Zaheer Khan and Harbhajan Singh are on the wrong side of 30, but there has been no one else making a case to be indispensable in every form of the game.

RP Singh made it to the Honours Board after a Test against England at Lord's in 2007, but has not done much since, while those who can recall Irfan Pathan's bowling from 2004/05 wince when they see him in action now.

What's wrong with cricketers earning large sums of money, Dileep Premachandran asks in the Sunday Guardian. Rather than blaming players for being greedy, he says, it is the administrators who should be asked why they don't pay cricketers from countries other than India, Australia and England more for playing international cricket, and why they don't create a window for the IPL.

Instead of lining up the soft targets, the players, let's ask some serious questions of the administrators. When you can't pay an international cricketer a fair wage – those that aren't Indian, English or Australian often take home in a season what one of our talentless ham-actors gets for a show – why do you come between them and IPL riches? When more than 95 percent of international cricketers express an interest in being part of the league, why the reluctance to create a window for it?

There's a refreshingly youthful look to many of the squads on the English County circuit, writes Barney Ronay in The Observer, and that bodes well for the future of the national team.

Three matches into the current season the County Championship already appears to be undergoing a generational changing of the guard, showcasing not just the much lauded endeavours of Reece Topley – a 17-year-old fast bowler from Essex who is currently the leading wicket-taker in the country – but a thickening posse of young English batsmen with their eye on an early-season Test spot. The present may be racked with financial strife for many counties but the future seems likely to benefit from the breath of regeneration percolating around even the most leathery of dressing rooms.

Syld Berry, writing in The Telegraph, doesn't see the domestic situation in England as quite so rosy. Indeed, he blames the 40-over domestic limited-overs format for England's failure in the 50-over World Cup. Touching on the issue of Associate involvement in the next World Cup, Berry suggests that the easiest way for England to improve by the next tournament in 2015 would be to induct players such as Ryan ten Doeschate, Kevin O'Brien and Paul Stirling into their ranks - a suggestion that even he concedes is "cynical ... But not quite as bad as banning 50-over County cricket".

But it is also irritating that the public in this country are deprived of the excellent spectacle that is a 50-over match on a dry pitch, when the right schedule is so easily attainable: start the season with the championship, go into 20-over cricket in June then 50-over cricket in July, and finish off with the championship, instead of squeezing in CB40 matches at every spare moment.

Damien Fleming, the former Australia seamer, shares a birthday with Sachin Tendulkar. He tells Mid Day's Clayton Murzello about April 24, 1998, when Tendulkar was smashing Australia's bowling all over the park in Sharjah.

Here's the anecdote: "I remember it flashing up on the screen that it was Sachin's birthday when he was smashing us on the field. When the game was about to end, it flashed up, 'Happy birthday, Damien Fleming', and there is nothing like being booed by 30,000-40,000 people really to make it special," said Fleming with a chuckle.

Few other major sporting events change their format from one edition to the other as the cricket World Cup does, Saad Shafqat muses in the News on Sunday. The ICC's latest decision, to limit the tournament to ten teams, is a purely economic one he says.

Perhaps even more toxic is the unwelcome odor of exclusivity reeking from the ICC proposal. Cricket, a product emerging from Victorian English gentry, has its roots in snobbery and social hierarchy. Indeed, there was a time when the sport would distinguish between "gentlemen" and "players", and captains of national teams would be chosen based on heritage and social rank rather than tactical acumen and cricketing ability. ICC’s plans for keeping even the most promising second-tier teams out of the next World Cup harken back to those clubby days. In the 21st century, this is most jarring.

In the News on Sunday, Dilanka Mannakkara says Tillakaratne Dilshan may not be as diplomatic and well-read a captain as Kumar Sangakkara was, but he is aggressive and daring, and the risk may pay off for Sri Lanka.

He may not have a cool, calm head like Dhoni; he may not be a tactical wizard like Mark Taylor; he may not be diplomatic like Sangakkara or a strategy specialist like Daniel Vettori but he brings explosiveness, innovation and aggression to the team, similar to what Shahid Afridi brings to the Pakistan team. Hopefully he will not take captaincy too seriously and change his game plan as he knows one way to play -- attack at all costs.

In his Hindustan Times column, Ian Chappell analyses the different types of fans that follow cricket - the humourous ones from the Caribbean, the perseverant ones from India, and more.

In my early days of visiting India one woman bounced up to me, introduced herself and stated very confidently, "I know a lot about cricket." I replied simply: "How come?" She responded with an equally simple answer: "I've watched a lot of games." "So has my mother," I shot back quickly. The slightly bewildered lady replied, "What do you mean?" "Well," I explained, "Jeanne [my mother] had a father and three sons who all played cricket for Australia so she watched a lot of matches. However, that doesn't mean she really understands the game."

In the Independent on Sunday, Jon Culley says: "The temptation to hail Ben Stokes as the new Freddie Flintoff – maybe even the new Ian Botham – has already proved too much for some to resist. His employers do not care for such labels, which they see as inviting unwelcome pressure. Yet if you will insist on taking three wickets in one over, knocking off a 135-ball hundred and then hitting five consecutive balls for six, all in the same day, it is difficult to avoid being noticed."

Perhaps his background will help him cope. His father, Ged, is a former New Zealand rugby league international who brought the family to England in 2003 when he was offered the coach's job at Workington. Ben, born in Christchurch – although with no trace of a Kiwi accent, and ambitions only to play for England – was 12, and while he had played a little cricket, he was more interested in following his dad into rugby. While some of his mates might have imagined themselves being Flintoff, such fantasies never crossed his mind.

Three matches into the current season the County Championship already appears to be undergoing a generational changing of the guard, showcasing not just the much lauded endeavours of Reece Topley – a 17-year-old fast bowler from Essex who is currently the leading wicket-taker in the country – but a thickening posse of young English batsmen with their eye on an early-season Test spot, writes Barney Ronay in the Observer

"In the next week or two Andrew Strauss will meet with Andy Flower to discuss whether a fifth country will need a new one-day captain," writes Scyld Berry in the Sunday Telegraph. "At first, on returning home, Strauss was inclined to go. After reflection, he should be persuaded to stay, at least for the one-day series against Sri Lanka that follows the three-Test series."

Alastair Cook, at 26, is far and away the strongest candidate to lead England into the 2015 World Cup in Australia — where pitches have tended to suit him — and New Zealand. But he is a man best equipped to bat all day, such is his self-discipline and strength of character, and by nature a Test batsman.

So the arrangements that will give Cook the best chance of succeeding as a 50-over batsman and captain will have to be elaborate, lest he starts off on the wrong foot and never arrives. He has to bed in first as a one-day batsman, without thinking about the captaincy as well.

As cricketers from across the globe do battle in the IPL, a home-grown revolution is happening 3000 miles away. Easter sees the 15th staging of the Bali International Sixes. Its motto is ‘Developing Cricket for Indonesians’ and for the first time in its history, Indonesian teams outnumber their ex-pat and visiting counterparts, writes Simon Fry in the Independent on Sunday.

Only four teams competed in the inaugural event which was won by the Rebels from Jakarta, Java. Fourteen years later, 12 teams featuring players aged from 16 to 70 will gather at the Bukit Oval, Udayana Cricket Club’s ground on Bali’s Jimbaran Heights, where cobras and monitor lizards await fielders retrieving balls whacked beyond the boundary.

In the country versus club debate, which is the inevitable consequence of the way IPL is structured, we fail to address one simple fact: Who is responsible for creating a situation where players get pitted against their respective boards which is detrimental to international cricket? asks Pradeep Magazine in the Hindustan Times.

Can one visualise a situation where a national team goes to play a series in another country with the core of their team missing for practice games? Imagine India embarking for the tour of England with their main players, including their captain, still playing in a league tournament in some other country? Will the Indian public and the hyper jingoistic media allow that to happen?

Aakash Chopra says the player must not be put in a position where they need to make a hard choice between playing for the country and a life-changing, lucrative IPL offer.

In the Indian Express, Aditya Iyer says, "In a system where business tycoons and Bollywood starlets with deep pockets are parading as team owners, the birth of Real Madrid equivalents in IPL's franchise structure was inevitable. But Dream Teams are not necessarily player friendly."

Plucking nervously at those bleached locks that came to the forefront only last season, Saurabh Tiwary tapped his feet restlessly in the Bangalore Royal Chal lengers's dug out. Seventeen overs had passed, and the boy who had made the headlines both for his formidable top-order batting, and for being state-mate MS Dhoni's lookalike, hadn't yet made his way out to the middle. Playing against his former team - the Mumbai Indians - at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, Tiwary looked earnestly towards the men draped in the blue jerseys. He had taken the previous edition of the Indian Premier League by storm for them, smashing as many as 419 runs in his debut season while batting at No.3. Now, padding up in the lower middle order for his new franchise in red and gold, the grass seemed greener under the other fibre-glass shed. By the end of the evening though, Rohit Sharma would prove to him that it wasn't.

India's tennis ace Mahesh Bhupathi, writing in DNA, says despite being fully aware of the fact that athletes cannot perform daily, he selfishly expects Sachin Tendulkar to score every time he bats for India. And time and again, Tendulkar delivers. That, says Bhupathi, is what sporting geniuses do.

We [Indians] are fanatical about our cricket, and I remember after the team came back to outrage from an early exit at the World Cup in the West Indies, I said playing cricket for India is possibly the highest pressure job out there across all industries.

For Sachin, I am thinking it’s triple the pressure. Not only do all of us expect him to score, all his teammates expect him to, and he has his own internal expectations. But time and again, he delivers. That’s what sporting geniuses do. They are big stage players and they thrive on delivering under pressure. Roger will never play a bad Grand Slam final, Tiger will never miss the cut at the PGA Championships, Sachin will always deliver in a big tournament.

Harbhajan Singh is a great, while he's just stepping on to cricket's ladder, R Ashwin tells Sanjjeev K Samyal in an interview in the Hindustan Times. So, the offspinner is willing to wait his turn and is just concentrating on making good use of the opportunity whenever it presents itself.

"I don't go on the field telling myself 'I have to win against this guy'. I play this game only for fun and if there wasn't fun in it, I wouldn't be playing ... Playing together against West Indies and Australia [with Harbhajan in the World Cup] was brilliant. Every time I had something to say, I would go and tell him. It was easy for him to shut out a youngster, but he didn't and we always had a good chat."

England's team director Andy Flower is unlikely to be tempted by any offer to replace Gary Kirsten as the India coach, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian but the ECB would do well to make sure their diamond is not purloined by a third party, be it India or anyone else.

Flower's relationship with the ECB is as a staff employee, with all the contingent protective rights that this brings. It is unlikely that this locks him into a fixed term. The board may well be looking to change that, tying him into a fixed-term deal with an option for extension.

Of most concern, however – and this is something I've written about before in this column – ought to be the prospect that the intensity of the scheduling could prove too debilitating for him to last the course unless he can be protected from himself. He was an angry man, with no small justification, when confronted with the itinerary between the end of the Ashes and the World Cup. Now he will insist on having some input into scheduling.

Over the past year, Wahab Riaz has become one of the brightest prospects in Pakistan cricket. The Dawn speaks to him about his five-for in the much-hyped India-Pakistan semi-final at the World Cup, and his struggle to break into the national team.

When reminded of the selection drama, Wahab said he got relaxed after Shoaib`s magnanimous gesture in the nets prior to the semi-final. “Shoaib Akhtar came up to me during the pre-match nets session and said `It`s not about you and me, it`s about Pakistan! Do your best!` What a fine gesture on his part,” narrated Wahab.

S Sreesanth talks to Prasanth Menon in the Times of India on his performance in the World Cup, why he considers India captain MS Dhoni his brother, and his goals for the future.

If Dhoni had any problems with my attitude, he wouldn't have picked me for a game as big as the World Cup final. I have not played under too many captains. But for me, he is the best captain I have played under. He is street smart.

I want to spearhead the Indian bowling attack in years to come. I think Zaheer bhai has still got a few more years left in him. He has done a terrific job leading the Indian pace attack for years. So when he decides to hang his boots, I would like to step into his shoes.

If the England and Wales Cricket Board was worried about Andy Flower being lured away by Indian cricket’s largesse, it clearly does not know its man, says Derek Pringle in the Daily Telegraph.

Loyalty and integrity could be his life’s guiding principles and while money most certainly talks in modern sport, Flower would be deafer than most to its siren call.

Loyalty and integrity have contributed to his success as England’s team director, too, and explain why he is respected alike by friend and foe, but they are just two of the ingredients.

In the Guardian, Frank Keating looks back at the rivalry between Glamorgan and Gloucestershire, and the role played by the combative allrounder Wilf Woolley in fostering it.

Our Boy Scout niceties were appalled, for instance, when our upright young champion Tom Graveney's 200 out of 298 all out against Glamorgan in 1956 was publicly and sneeringly dismissed by Wooller as "quite the worst double-century that can ever have been scored".

In the Daily Telegraph Scyld Berry looks back at his four years as editor of Wisden, and makes it clear he is unhappy at losing the job after a relatively short stint.

The Guardian commented last week that the change in editorship had been made in ‘ill-explained circumstances’ — and I can only agree. When I was called into the Soho office last October, the then chief executive explained that I had been “a very good editor” but that after four years, my year-by-year consultancy agreement would not be renewed because another editor was wanted to run a new website; then added, “it might be the wrong decision”.

Tillakaratne Dilshan's appointment as Sri Lanka captain is justified, writes Rex Clementine in the Island because there is no doubting that he has been the best Sri Lankan batsman across all three forms of the game over the last couple of years. In recent times, he has had this ability to turn whatever he touches into gold.

He’s not only been the best batsman of the side, but the best fielder too and has always come up with something remarkable when the ball was thrown at him. He would have finished with a hat-trick in Sri Lanka’s World Cup game against Zimbabwe in Kandy, had Mahela Jayawardene not dropped a chance.

Dilshan certainly has proved himself as a cricketer and now is the time to show what he’s got to offer as captain.

Bihar's Moin-ul-Haq stadium last hosted an international match in 1996 when Zimbabwe played Kenya in the World Cup. Fifteen years on, the stadium is in a shambles, writes Roshan Kumar in the Telegraph. The pathetic condition of the stadium in a sense reflects the cricket scenario in the state.

The same stadium now greets cricket aficionados with a cracked pitch, untrimmed grass and encroachments. Kadamkuan police station operates from a portion of the stadium. It houses Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) battalion 131 too.

One of the leading umpires in world cricket, Pakistan's Aleem Dar reflects on his World Cup stint, how the DRS has impacted umpires and why he finds the subcontinent difficult to officiate in. More in an interview with Gautam Sheth in the Daily News and Analysis.

The DRS is not a competition between human ability and technology. It is a way forward for the correction of possible human errors as one single wrong decision can change the whole scenario of the match. So, I would never mind if a player rightly survives with the help of DRS. I am confident that good umpires make very less mistakes in the matches and if slightest possibility of error is also eliminated with the help of technology, it would only add to the grace of the game

Simon Wilde, cricket correspondent for the Sunday Times, explains why it was worthwhile to write a new biography of Ian Botham, hardly the most underwritten of cricketers.

Botham's life may have been often chronicled, but not always well. I found myself constantly surprised by fresh details: from the great-great-grandfather named Chappell, to his grandparents being married a short walk from the ground where he would play his first match for England; from him picking a drinking mate for a Sunday league match against Glamorgan, to him having a Mickey Mouse phone in his bedroom; from the chambermaid delivering a breakfast of two pints of milk and the racing papers, to the steps he took to leave Somerset before the trouble over Viv Richards and Joel Garner ever arose.

Martin Chandler, writing in Cricket Web, reviews the Wisden Cricketer's Almanack 2011.

I enjoy the vastly improved coverage of overseas cricket, and while I am not a great fan of the shortest form of the game I am pleased to see that, again as it should be, twenty over cricket, IPL included, is properly covered. In years gone by the space devoted to the supposedly inferior one day game was also cut in order to meet the increasing demand for space caused by the rapid increase in the number of Test series played around the world, and I would not have been entirely surprised if the short game had been relegated to a mere footnote.

Chandler also reviews the The Wisden Collector's Guide in the same publication.

Seventeen-year-old Reece Topley is leading wicket-taker in English first-class cricket this season. Though he has to go back to school - and, as he turned 17 only in February, he is not yet even in his second year of A-levels - Scyld Berry in the Sunday Telegraph reckons that school, after three consecutive matches in the first fortnight, is no bad place for Topley. He has to be allowed to grow in peace.

So the future beckons for Topley, and the present isn’t too bad either, as he bowls a full and old-fashioned length that draws batsmen into the drive, and the Tiflex ball that is used in the second division swings copiously. As he grows stronger, he can develop the plan B of banging it in and pushing the batsman back, as Voce and Sidebottom learned to do. And maybe go one better.

In a special supplement in the Deccan Herald marking India's World Cup win, R Kaushik speaks to Zaheer Khan, the man who almost single-handedly shouldered the burden of leading India's bowling attack and emerged the joint-highest wicket-taker of the tournament, on India's approach to the campaign, the responsibility of the leading the attack, how he has mastered his craft and more.

To be honest, I was just in the zone. I didn’t really think too far ahead or what happened in the previous game. I was trying to stay in the present, take it one game at a time. Once things started to fall in place for me, I just kind of built on it throughout the tournament.

That’s what we always talked about – peaking when it mattered. Everyone knew about it. Obviously, when we had to go into the knockout stages, we also talked about how now is the time, that we have to put in that extra bit from here on. It definitely worked this time for us.

In the same newspaper Madhu Jawali speaks to Virat Kohli, one of the key cogs in India's victorious campaign about winning the World Cup in his debut campaign, Tendulkar and the emotional aspect of the win and his own performance in the final.

It was such a high and there were so many thoughts doing rounds in your head... It was beyond our imagination that we had done it. Everyone was so emotional because we had put in lots of hard work in the last three years and particularly in the last one year for this World Cup.

Playing my first World Cup, getting to play the final was a dream come true for me. I didn’t see any point in messing it up thinking about too many things

In the Sunday Telegraph, Steve James speaks to Jonathan Trott, who is fast becoming England's most reliable batsman in both Tests and one-dayers. Trott reveals that his favourite memory from the Ashes victory in Australia doesn't involve his batting, but his fielding.

It is his running out of Simon Katich on the first morning at Adelaide. “I’d like to think that I helped to start the day off well,” he says now with an understatement not necessarily apparent then, when he began a joyously celebratory run that threatened never to end. “I’ve got a habit of doing that,” he admits, “I just get a bit excited and think I’m a [football] striker. If I take a catch, I’m pretty similar.”

Barney Ronay meets Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis, and finds them "almost alarmingly garrulous" and "endearingly genial" and discusses their new book Duckworth Lewis: The Method and the Men Behind It. More in in the Observer.

This is the odd thing about Duckworth-Lewis. They attract irrational hostility. "We've had a little bit of nastiness," Lewis says. "There is the hate mail – 'How does it feel to be the most hated person in the world, more so than Osama bin Laden?'

One of the primary objectives of the India Premier League was to to unearth Indian talent and bring relatively hidden skills to the fore in front of a global audience courtesy satellite television. Finally, as R Kaushik writes in the Deccan Herald, in its fourth season, the league seems to be realising that goal.

The Yusuf Pathans and Ravindra Jadejas used the IPL as the stepping stone to India caps. If a few more can follow suit, then the IPL can rightfully take credit for being an assembly line, and not merely for bestowing ‘unreasonable’ gifts on the not-so-gifted.

Pradeep Magazine in the Hindustan Times writes that the World Cup has once again established the primacy of the 50-over game. Despite its shortcomings, the one-day format remains the best compromise between the skills of the game and the need to provide instant gratification to the spectators.

The argument that the days of one-day cricket are numbered and T20 is going to swamp it, are over. The 100-over game has the capacity to give enough space and time for genuine talent to express itself, unlike a 40over game, where luck and chance play a far more pivotal role in the performance of a player.

Prahlad Kakkar in the Daily News and Analysis looks at how the endorsements market is dominated by cricketers and why the cricketers are at and will remain top of the pie.

They bleed and sweat it out. Brands look for other qualities too. It’s not just enough to get runs, how you get them also counts. Win or lose, those are fickle predictions of faith. However, conduct and courage is the key.

Sunil Gavaskar talks to G Viswanath of the Hindu about what made Gary Kirsten a successful coach, India's World Cup win, MS Dhoni's captaincy and the road ahead for the Indian team.

The team has to maintain the intensity which is what differentiates the champion from the others. Just like Roger Federer or a Rafael Nadal, the Indian team has to maintain the intensity at big events. They have to raise the level of the game when needed. Dhoni did not have a great start, but he raised the level when needed. He set the example and the others will learn how to do that

He [Dhoni] has shaped well. It might not be obvious to everybody, but he's picked up so many things from the others. He's learnt to build an innings without losing his natural aggression. He's picked up the good parts of captaincy from his predecessors and grown as a cricketer and person

Three girls from Pakistan made the trek across the border to watch the India-Pakistan semi-final in Mohali. One of them, Sana Kazmi in the Dawn, recounts all that went into making their journey possible, and a memorable one.

We ran to the Indian side. It was kind of surreal, but we were too rushed to think about how big a moment that was. The Indian guard at the border didn’t smile, but he was quick, which meant he was nice. The chatty officers at registration told us we had enough time to get to Mohali (not) and reassured (sic) us that it wasn’t going to rain.

Kevin Howell in BBC Sport writes that players should be told that if they want to go and play as 'freelance' performers, do so and that the ECB should stand up to players and agents who want the Indian Premier League money and still to turn out for England and their county clubs.

I for one don't blame them chasing the money. It's a correct freedom of choice. But if that's the path they take, the clubs and the England and Wales Cricket Board should from next season say 'fine but we'll talk about different contracts and see you in June for our T20 and we'll pick our Test team from those who are fully committed to it'. Will that lead to us losing our best players? Possibly. But a compromise is unsustainable and I don't think it will.

Australian cricket has a lot to figure out about itself in the off-season, Chloe Saltau writes in the Age. The unfilled job of fast-bowling coach is key due to the number of young fast bowlers around, while Phillip Hughes may well be the long-term replacement for Simon Katich.

First, the selection panel chaired by Hilditch, whose position will be examined in one of four separate inquiries prompted by the Ashes fiasco, will pick Cricket Australia's 25 contracted players for the next 12 months. That will involve making calls on the careers of veterans such as Simon Katich and Michael Hussey and bringing on the younger players the selectors think can withstand difficult initiations and emerge as resourceful, successful cricketers.

In an interview in the Guardian, Michael Holding looks back at the highs of his Test-playing career, his toughest opponents and how he managed to intimidate batsmen.

We bowled bouncers, yes. And the mere fact we could bowl at 90mph was intimidating enough – you didn't have to bowl bouncers to be intimidating. If you look at the footage of guys who actually got hit while we were playing, quite a few of them ducked into bouncers. A lot of them got hit on their fingers. What is wrong with hitting someone on their finger? That just shows you they are incapable of playing a ball at 90mph. You don't put your hand above your head when you are batting.

Hampshire captain Dominic Cork has completed the transition from show pony to war horse, writes Robin Hutchison in the Daily Telegraph.

“Fortunately I’ve changed as a person,” he says. “When I first took over at Derbyshire, I was a bit stubborn at times. But you learn as you get older that you have to open yourself up and listen.

"I’m keen that the dressing room is not dominated by the captain. I want the youngsters to express themselves. I’ll still always have my opinion, but age has mellowed me and I now realise that my opinion is not always right.”

A 63-ball 120 from Paul Valthaty not only helped Kings XI Punjab beat Chennai Super Kings on Wednesday, it also catapulted Valthaty into the limelight. Devendra Pandey in the Indian Express looks at how the "big day" finally arrived in Valthaty's life and how he overcame the partial loss of vision in his eye to fulfill his cricketing ambitions.

However, it was hard not to get depressed as Paul career went into decline even as his peers in the Mumbai circuit climbed to higher ho nours. A solitary ODI in 2006 and a handful of T20 matches were all he managed in domestic cricket — till today’s match. A technically perfect knock, it got him both the Man of the Match award and this season’s top run-getters’ Orange Cap.

Usain Bolt's younger brother, Sadiki, opens up about his Olympic-champion sibling's bowling exploits, his own plans to make it big in cricket and their life in Jamaica. Simon Briggs reports in the Daily Telegraph.

There is also the supreme self-belief of a man who can showboat his way through the last 30 metres of an Olympic sprint final. Poise, audacity, arrogance – call it what you will. But it is a crucial element in the make-up of a sporting champion. And it seems to run in the family ... Usain's brother Sadiki has revealed his armour-plated conviction that he will play cricket for the West Indies one day.

..."My brother [Usain] is actually a decent bowler. He's got height and a lot of pace. In fact he bowled Chris Gayle in a charity match last year, and Chris wasn't trying to get out – he was genuinely beaten.

For the past five years, the two brothers have lived together in the smart Kingston suburb of Norbrook. Sadiki reciprocates Usain's interest in cricket by joining his brother at sprint training. Or, at least, he does when he wakes up in time ... Other than that, Sadiki says that the pair of them spend a lot of time "just chilling" ... "Sometimes we hit the club – there's a nightclub called Fiction not far from where we live, but if we don't feel like going out we just play dominoes or video games."

While county cricket has had notable success in feeding the England Test team, maybe it's time to look to the franchise model for limited-overs domestic competitions says Robin Scott-Elliot, writing in the Independent.

In Britain there is not the all-consuming passion for cricket, nor the vast numbers wanting to watch it that has helped India become the game's powerhouse. But that does not mean a franchise system couldn't work well for Twenty20 in this country; a spread of urban bases can easily ensure nationwide reach. Perhaps they could assume responsibility for all limited-overs cricket. Scrap the embarrassingly pointless 40-over competition and reintroduce a 50-over knockout with a showcase Lord's final. That helps rid the game of the impenetrable mess that is the current fixture list and leaves the counties to concentrate on feeding the Test side, a role they are meeting with a notable degree of success.

Ravi Bopara has shown his class by jettisoning the gold of the IPL to have a chance to push for a Test spot. For that brave decision alone, he deserves to be in the starting XI for the first Test against Sri Lanka, writes Barney Ronay in the Guardian, contrasting it with Eoin Morgan's decision to turn out for Kolkata Knight Riders.

In a sense Bopara leaves the selectors little choice. What kind of message would it send out now to prefer Morgan? Bopara scored an excruciating 16-ball duck in his first innings since deciding to force the selectors' hand with sheer weight of runs in county cricket, but in effect we know enough about him already. He may or may not be good enough, just as Morgan may or may not be. But it would be sound self-promotion if Bopara's stance - Test cricket over gold - were to be rewarded.

Great knocks are about context, argues The Old Batsman, and despite the endless hype, Shane Watson's unbeaten 185 lacked one.

It's probably appropriate that Australia's much-hyped 'modern' captain, Michael Clarke, hit the slippery slope when he described Shane Watson's slogathon as 'probably the best innings I've ever seen'. Not seen a lot of cricket then, Michael?

India's cricketers and fans have crossed an important psychological barrier, says Suresh Menon, writing in Tehelka. They have gone from anxiety to belief, he says, in three steps spread over several decades.

At 31 for two in the final of the World Cup, and with India’s best batsmen dismissed, only the generation that had followed the Lord’s Test of 1971 had any doubts. We were prepared for the worst ... The younger ones didn’t flinch. My son leaned over and bet the price of a Dream Theater CD that India would not only win, but win easily. He is a fan in the age of Sachin Tendulkar — confident, self-assured and with faith in the cricket team. A completely different animal from his father who is wracked by uncertainty and carries too many memories of promise collapsing at the last hurdle.

Has an era finally ended? The era of Doubting Thomases and the-other-team-will-win certainties? The era when the dominant emotion at an India match was not anticipation but anxiety, and everyone believed that even if India had to score 10 runs in 10 overs with 10 wickets in hand, they would somehow manage to screw it up? When Virender Sehwag says today that he always backs the opposition, he means it as a joke, as a way of proving to himself the sheer absurdity of such thinking. Not so long ago, that was the way to bet.

After the 28-year wait it's only natural that India's World Cup triumph will leave a lasting legacy in the cricket-crazy country says Boria Majumdar, writing in the Times of India. The IPL meanwhile, he says, couldn't have come at a better time for Indian cricket.

While player fatigue is surely a factor, crowd or viewer fatigue is no longer a serious issue in the World Cup aftermath. Rather, the IPL comes as the perfect relaxant. While it will ensure that cricket fanatics will not have withdrawal symptoms in the post-World Cup scenario, it will also ensure that they don’t have to follow the matches with nerves strained and fists clenched. With nationalistic passions no longer of consequence, fans can just continue to savour the World Cup success while enjoying their dose of cricket entertainment on offer in the IPL.

In fact, the IPL could not have come at a better time. Had the World Cup been followed by a tri-series or a bilateral series, the expectations from the Indian team would have been at their peak. From the world champions, the fans would brook no failure ... In such a scenario, the IPL is the best thing to happen to Indian cricket.

TVNZ's Max Bania takes a look at how the Plunket Shield players fared this season, and puts together his 'Team of the Year'.

Domestic top orders have tended to be littered with journeyman and Black Caps discards in recent years, which is why it's nice to see fresh talent in the form of the 25-year-old right-hander [Brad Wilson]. Wilson's season highlight came in the form of a career-best 151 in a 274-run opening stand with BJ Watling that saw Northern chase down 385 against Wellington with just one wicket down.

Does cricket-crazy India celebrate the sport or the victory of glamour and money, asks Ashoak Upadhyay, writing in Business Line. The IPL, he says, is an amplified form of sport-as-spectacle.

Who, or what, are we celebrating? Our appreciation of Dhoni and his team's victory [in the World Cup] springs from our immersion in a spectacle created for our gratification. We were and are celebrating the idea of victory as filtered through the print [media] but most of all through television. And television trains its spotlight on the individual.

The fourth edition of IPL is a Bollywood fantasy, a carousel of music and lights and glamour moderated by “talking hairdos” in Neil Postman's memorable phrase who shall fill the numbed mind with useless “chatter”. What the IPL audiences will experience is one long commercial meant to reaffirm their self-estimation as Glamorous Indians.

Meanwhile, Richard Lord, writing in the Wall Street Journal asks if the IPL will lose some of the glitz and glamour that has made it so distinctive in an otherwise conservative cricketing world in the absence of the flamboyant Lalit Modi.

More than the star players, more than the quick-fire format, more even than the money, what defined the first three editions of the Indian Premier League was the razzmatazz: the hype, the music, the cheerleaders—all the sound and fury. This year, the lucrative domestic Twenty20 league that revolutionized cricket still has the blasting rock music and incongruous-looking young women dancing on platforms, but behind the scenes, there's a new atmosphere of sobriety.

England's Ashes hero Alastair Cook in conversation with David Lloyd, writing in the Independent, on darts, helping out on the farm, the secret of batting and whether he expects to be the next England captain.

Surely all those big [Ashes] numbers add up to a life-changing experience? "No," says Cook with a smile and a look of relief. "I've probably been recognised a few more times in the street or when out shopping, but that is about it."

While most of his Test colleagues played a one-day series Down Under and then went straight into the World Cup, the opening batsman returned to a somewhat less glamorous routine: batting in the indoor nets at Chelmsford, training, promoting Samsung's latest notebook baby and helping out on the farm owned by his girlfriend's family.

The World Cup may be over, but the financial gains keep pouring in says Archna Shukla, writing in the Indian Express.

The ICC World Cup may be over, the celebrations done, the accolades exhausted but the profits are still piling up. Not just in terms of money and other goodies being showered on our cricketers, but also the revenue generated by the event and the bonanza for the ICC, the BCCI, sponsors, advertisers, television channels and others who have jumped on to cricket’s money-spinning bandwagon. The total receipts for the ICC from the World Cup was Rs 1,476 crore while the cost of organising the event was Rs 571 crore.

BCCI vice-president, Rajiv Shukla, in an interview with Sandeep Dwivedi, Archna Shukla and others in the same paper, says the "BCCI is like USA at United Nations. Our point of view is always given weightage".

MS Dhoni exemplifies the confidence of the small-town Indian says Rohit Mahajan, writing in Outlook India. Big change, he says, has been afoot in India for 20 years, but the transformation in the hinterland is radical, and the national cricket team mirrors this.

[In the small-town Indian, there is] an absence of a history of failure in the psyche — there never was much opportunity before the 1990s, and there was, consequently, no great failure. Dhoni’s life would have been successful enough if he’d only played cricket for the Railways and worked as a ticket collector ... Senior journalist Kumar Ketkar isn’t surprised at the emergence of the confident, small-town superstar. He believes it’s a linear growth that occurred due to two important developments of the last 40-odd years—banking and communications spreading their networks into the hinterland. "Something sensational like cricket had to come to make us aware of this reality, that small-town India is confident and surging ahead,” he says.

Sachin Tendulkar, in an interview with Sunandan Lele, in the same magazine, says small-town players are more motivated to succeed.

"They are different because they are original, as far as their cricketing style is concerned ... In places like Ranchi, Mahi [Dhoni] tells me that cricket facilities were a bare minimum. Look at him or Munaf now, they have their own playing style. Dhoni used to play football and that’s made him faster and stronger. Players from smaller towns sacrifice a bit more to develop their cricketing skills. They are more motivated about making it big."

Meanwhile, Sanjay Manjrekar, writing in the same magazine, feels the World Cup triumph is Indian cricket's greatest, simply because this team played with bowling and fielding handicaps.

This is Indian cricket’s greatest triumph, mainly because this team was not the strongest Indian team ever but played like the best Indian team ever. It is quite incredible when you look at India’s bowling attack and its general fielding ability. Those were two massive weaknesses that Mahendra Singh Dhoni had to contend with right through the six-week-long tournament. India’s bowling was about just one world-class bowler in Zaheer Khan ... This win has also thrown out the window that theory or cliche — to win 50-over matches you need to be a great fielding side. Two teams have won the World Cup with poor fielding — Pakistan did in 1992, India in 2011.

The recent emergence of the Twenty20 game has confronted traditional cricket with the equivalent of a reverse swinging yorker, writes Greg Dyer in the Sunday Herald. He says that Twenty20 is both the greatest challenge to real cricket since Kerry Packer and an even greater opportunity to grow the game's financial base and future prosperity.

Twenty20 can and should be leveraged to provide a renewed financial basis for the game, providing funds which can be directed to the ongoing development of the generations of players to follow.

In fact, Twenty20 can provide a big part of the answer to the 21st-century challenges of keeping the sport relevant to today's target market of 10-year-olds. Firstly, Twenty20's bright lights will attract them to the sport and then, if leveraged properly, it can provide the money to train them. So those responsible for the next steps in Twenty20's commercialisation have the tough job of designing a structure which creates value in the right parts of the system for the long-term benefit (or perhaps even the survival?) of the sport.

Peter Roebuck, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, says the IPL, a competition tainted by corruption, is more concerned with money and show than the spirit of the game.

Cricket is finished as an international game, and hereafter faces a long and slow decline caused by a board that lacks vision and integrity, a board of knaves and fools that makes one-star decisions while staying in five-star hotels. Through no fault of the ICC's admirable employees, cricket has become a corrupt and worthless activity and deserves nothing better than the Indian Premier League, a format known for jiggery pokery, social excesses and cosmetic grins.

The IPL has got off to a subdued start, says Dileep Premachandran writing in the Guardian, and the impact of the league's expansion is already being felt.

Prior to the [opening] match, several fans at the gate admitted to being emotionally spent. They seemed to be there out of habit more than anything else. They'll find that easier to do in Chennai than at other venues because the Super Kings are the only franchise to have retained the core of the team that tasted so much success last year. Muttiah Muralitharan may have moved on to Kochi and the Tuskers, and Matthew Hayden hasn't been invited back, but the rest of the cast isn't very different. Contrast that with the likes of Bangalore Royal Challengers, with not one big-name local player, or Delhi Daredevils – only Virender Sehwag of the stars has roots in the area – and it's easy to see why Chennai can expect sizeable crowds throughout the season.

TR Vivek, writing in the Economic Times, answers the question 'is the IPL making money for the team owners?' The franchise model, he says, is risk free.

Saumya Bhattacharya and Kamya Jaiswal, writing in the same paper, tell us why MS Dhoni, Sachin Tendulkar and Yuvraj Singh would have excelled in an office.

Why New Zealand's appointment of a new captain is creating such angst and has to go through such an excruciating due process is anyone's guess, says Paul Lewis, writing in the New Zealand Herald.

It's important and the choice needs to be the right one. But when did New Zealand sport get so moribund that we can't even select a cricket captain without excessive handwringing and the creation of more steps than the Sky Tower? NZ Cricket CEO Justin Vaughan said recently that the Black Caps did not play again until towards the end of the year - so there was plenty of time. Yep, absolutely. Heaps of time. If you want to look like chumps.

MS Dhoni brings a lot to the team as a batsman, as the World Cup final proved, and he is also blessed with a talented team, but it is his savvy decisions and ability to stay calm that has ensured his name has gone up in the pantheon of Indian greats, Akshay Sawai writes in the latest edition of Open

A senior player once said about Dhoni that he does not worry about the future or the past. But this could be a result of his record. When you have won so much, the future and the past take care of themselves. The present is, then, automatically the only thing you worry about. From his outlook, Dhoni does seem a person who likes to keep things simple and, significantly, do them his own way. This also means that while he respects icons, he is not overly lyrical talking about them. For example, when speaking of Tendulkar, he is respectful but never over the top.

Peter Roebuck, writing in the Hindu, says cricket is in a terminal state of decay, following revelations in Malcolm Speed's autobiography, instances of corruption and the exclusion of Associates from the next World Cup.

Despite the best efforts of the dedicated few, including the ICC staff, cricket is suffering from a rotting soul.

Take a look around the ICC top table. Most of the outstanding men have left, and it's high time the rest joined them. Cricket is dominated not by the best the game has to offer but the worst.

Barney Ronay, writing in the Guardian, says the IPL and the County Championship, two contrasting tournaments of two different formats, will give fans - who can consider both to be mutually beneficial - an opportunity to enjoy them in tandem.

There is of course a natural polarity between these two extreme interpretations of the word "cricket". The IPL is brash, expansionist and draped in a cladding of new imperial glamour. It wants to conquer the world. The ECC is old, quiet and draped in a cladding of house dust and summer‑tog cagoule. It wants a nice cup of tea. They are two entirely separate entities, scarcely the same species of sport. But which one is better?

At 40, Paul Nixon is the third-oldest cricketer on the county circuit, but despite undergoing a fifth knee operation just two weeks ago, the veteran gloveman shows no sign of discomfort says Justin Goulding, writing for the ECB website.

While the longevity of Mark Ramprakash, 42, and Robert Croft, who turns 41 next month, is to be applauded, neither has spent the best part of a quarter of a century, in Nixon's words, “doing 1,000 squats a day”. Such is the wicketkeeper's lot, and it is testament to Nixon's fitness, professionalism and enduring love of the game that he remains a key figure on and off the pitch at Grace Road.

Indian cricket has rarely had a true leader says Rajdeep Sardesai, writing in CNN-IBN blogs, with royalty dominating the role in the early years. India's captain courageous MS Dhoni, who has drawn on the Sourav Ganguly legacy, fits the bill perfectly though he says.

Dhoni has brought a remarkable Zen-like calmness to a fiercely high-pressure job. In the last three years as Indian captain, one doesn't recall a single instance where Dhoni has really let his guard down or allowed himself to be carried away by the surround sound which is now part of the game ... He's even publicly admitted to his mistakes, an all too rare quality in our leaders.

India could not have won the Cup without Dhoni, writes Ramiz Raja in the Daily News and Analysis. According to him, you can rave about other performers in the team but they are dwarfed by Dhoni’s impact on the tournament.

He may have never crossed his limits with Tendulkar or Sehwag, but that did not make him a soft captain. In fact, he was not shy to throw a challenge at his men after the South Africa collapse, when in a shielded manner, he denounced the penchant of a few to play more for the gallery than the cause of the team.

Captaincy, besides other things, is about straight talk and issuing timely warnings to players. India never looked back in the tournament after that siren was sounded by Dhoni.

What will the fourth season of the IPL bring, asks Andy Wilson in the Guardian. The anticipation is likely to be on an all-time high, now that every game will include a clutch of World Cup winners, but will the cricket live up to the hype?

Twenty20 is OK as far as it goes, but I wonder whether the IPL might suffer slightly this time around as those millions of Indian fans who were so absorbed by the twists and turns of 50-over cricket during their heroes' World Cup triumphs feel a bit short-changed by the comparatively relentless crash-bang-wallop of 70-odd 20-over matches.

Vijay Lokapally, writing in the Hindu, says while the IPL could be a throwback to days gone by for some - the time when a certain Australian legspinner left batsmen embarrassingly helpless, for example - it also signifies a huge transformation in the character of the game.

The game has undergone a huge transformation from the time when bowlers would applaud the batsmen on being hit for a four or six. These days they glare or mouth profanities as an aggressive advertisement for aggressive cricket. And the IPL signifies this transformation ... In IPL, there is money, and then there is cricket.

The missing piece - and a sizeable one at that - in this year's IPL is Lalit Modi, says Dileep Premachandran, writing in the National. In his absence, says Premachandran, the BCCI has to find another individual, or two, with the foresight to keep the show going.

For many people, Modi was the IPL, with his steel-grey-and-beige suits and pink ties, popping up at every other game as he travelled the country in a private jet. Much as other officials loathed him, they could not do without the dynamism or the strength of will that created a financial behemoth from a pipe dream. Rules were broken and corners cut, but Modi invariably got what he wanted. And in most cases, what he wanted was what served the IPL best.

The exclusion of the associate countries for 2015 was down to TV money and turkeys understandably not voting for Christmas writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian.

Do not underestimate the significance of this second decision to come out of Mumbai this week, or the diplomacy that went into arriving at it, for it could mean that Zimbabwe do not qualify, or perhaps Bangladesh, or possibly even West Indies. Each, it is reported, fought their corner vehemently to protect their position but in the end were forced to concede the ground. Somehow the turkeys really have been persuaded to vote for Christmas.

Celebrating the start of the county season in England, Dominic Cork in the Independent writes that while there are quite a few people who are quick to knock county cricket, he believes that the standard is as good as it ever was in his time, even though we no longer see as many top quality overseas players committing themselves to a county for a whole season.

The domestic game in this country is alive and kicking. Yes, there are economic problems and a lot of counties are experiencing financial difficulties, but that is not a situation limited to cricket by any means. Plenty of businesses are struggling in the current climate.

The county championship in England begins on the same day as the Indian Premier League starts in India and the contrast between the two could not be greater, writes Paul Newman in the Daily Mail.

One is traditional, old-fashioned and, to many, an anachronism in an impatient modern world; the other is full of glitz, glamour and, above all, money. Are those cricketers who take to the field at Chelmsford and Bristol today really playing the same game as those who will do battle in Chennai?

Shahid Afridi may have lost a large chunk of his fan-following in India after his comments on the Indian media. Amna Khalique blogs in the Dawn that Afridi should not be vilified for not sounding diplomatic, since that is just not his job.

Sure, he has an opinion on politics just as much as every other citizen does – but does this mean his thoughts on diplomacy are more important than the upcoming tour of the West Indies? More important questions to ask him (and for him to discuss in these press conferences) would be how the team plans to continue making a bigger impact in international cricket, who the next wicket-keeper will be and so much more. As @Tazeen said on Twitter: That man is tired, let him sleep. Mrs. Afridi, take his phone and hide it. Either that, or Afridi needs to give fewer interviews – especially those not related to cricket.

Cricket transcends sport to become a deeply felt expression of culture. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the subcontinent, where passion overflowed during the World Cup. Boston.com captures this frenzy through 47 pictures of people playing, watching, and living cricket in South Asia.

It's almost been an entire week since the World Cup ended, and Chuck Culpepper of the National can hardly stand the 'horrid, wretched cricket-lessness of it all'. But the circus will rev back into action when the IPL begins on Friday. Here's his tongue-in-cheek look at how things have unfolded in the 141 interminable hours between the two events.

The Wankhede area seems back to normal. The sun sets beautifully just half a block over on Marine Drive. Delivery lorries come and go at the stadium. World Cup signs remain pasted on the gates, instructing about proper credentials. Two Indian passers-by ask if Sachin is in. A security guard tells you basically to get lost and notes the Indians' first home match will occur on April 15.

A World Cup closes down, and a league revs right up, hungry sponsors at the ready. Really? Really amazing.

Venkat Ananth, on the Yahoo Cricket website, pays tribute to Trevor Chesterfield, the veteran cricket journalist and former first-class umpire, who died at the age of 75 on Wednesday.

My first encounter with Chesters was in 2007, when I visited Sri Lanka on a research trip for my impending book. It wasn't quite a pre-planned appointment with him, but as I started meeting several legends of Ceylon cricket - the likes of the late Channa Gunasekara, Abdul Lafir and the likes, it became evident that Chesters was going to be an important source in understanding the finer details about the game in that country from a neutral perspective, the unique premise and perspective he brought as a New Zealander, who lived in South Africa for many years, before settling down in Sri Lanka and importantly, as someone whose seen the game from the sort of adjacency, many would dream of.

MS Dhoni ranks right up there with the best international captains – think Imran Khan, Mark Taylor, Arjuna Ranatunga – of the last three decades, says Ian Chappell, writing in the Hindustan Times. Like all good captains, says Chappell, Dhoni displays an aura that, no matter what is happening on the field, suggests to his team ‘all is well’.

Dhoni and Ranatunga both had moderate attacks, which makes their achievement in winning a World Cup even more meritorious … Neither Dhoni nor Ranatunga were ones to lament their lack of attacking options; they just devised plans to beat the opposition with the bowlers they had in hand. Dhoni even admitted after the semi-final he’d misread the Mohali pitch but that still didn’t stop him from finding a way to win with the attack he had…

Dhoni gradually brought his team to a peak during the tournament and they were at their best in the final. And, as good as they were, not even Imran, Taylor or Ranatunga put on such a commanding personal performance as Dhoni did in a World Cup final.

Meanwhile, writing in the Daily Telegraph Tanya Aldred says Wayne Rooney could learn a thing or two from the calm-under-immense-pressure India captain, after the footballer received a two-match ban for his expletive-laden goal celebration.

Testosterone can take you a long way, but it doesn’t defend you from looking like a thug … On the same Saturday, over on the other side of the world, another man was under more pressure than even Rooney could imagine. A small town-boy, sturdy, stubbly and with a most magnificent nose, MS Dhoni was leading India in their pursuit of the cricket World Cup against Sri Lanka … The din was transcendental, the weight on Dhoni’s shoulders oppressive. Yet there he was, ridiculously, unbelievably, calm.

That six that won the Cup, high into the exploding Mumbai sky, was icing so pink and delicious it was almost sickly. Never will he play a more rewarding shot. And yet, though he gave himself perhaps a fraction of a second too long to admire the ball sailing into the night, there were no foul-mouthed celebrations to camera. Just embraces with team-mates and worthy handshakes with opponents…

Abhishek Ghosh remembers his one-time school-mate, a certain MS Dhoni, in Tehelka.

India's World Cup victory was as much an economic success as it was a cricketing one, writes Ed Smith in the Times.

It is true that India has won the World Cup before, in 1983. But that was an underdog victory that did not reflect the real cricketing balance of power. In 1983, England still shaped and administered the game.

Now, 28 years on, India hasn't just won the World Cup, it leads the world in every department of the game. India has the most lucrative and influential tournament, the Indian Premier League, that dictates terms to the rest of the world. It has the biggest market and the most iconic players. It has now hosted a superb World Cup and dominated on the pitch.

Film critic Raja Sen, in his blog, rewinds to 2003, where a fledgling cross-border love story was cut short by the contrasting reactions following Sachin Tendulkar's dismissal in that game in Centurion.

The ICC's decision to restrict the number of teams in the 2015 World Cup to its ten Full Member nations, is a decision that shows no consideration for the good of the game, writes Greg Baum in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The reality is that the game desperately needs to expand its horizons, and Ireland and the Netherlands are frontiers, and the ICC has abandoned them.

The ICC says the door remains ajar for minnows in the 2019 tournament. That is a sop. One-day cricket will be dead by then.

Australia has just become host of cricket's Shame Games, writes Malcolm Conn in the Daily Telegraph. The showpiece 2015 World Cup, to be held in Australia and New Zealand, now carries the unmistakable stench of rampant cronyism.

There is no logical reason why Zimbabwe should have gained preference ahead of Ireland for the next World Cup, but then there is no justification for Zimbabwe maintaining the full voting rights and entitlements of a Test-playing country.

The Belfast Telegraph blasts the ICC decision to exclude Associate nations from the 2015 World Cup, and wonders whether Ireland will be able to retain their best talent in the absence of one-day cricket.

George Dockrell will be only 26 in 2019 and Paul Stirling in his prime at 28 but will they still be Ireland players by then? Will a biennial Twenty20 World Cup and the occasional ODI be enough to keep them in Ireland colours or will England come calling for the country’s finest?

India’s World Cup victory has led to many paeans about MS Dhoni’s leadership skills, as well as examinations of the various traits and characteristics of various members of the team. The Times of India went a step further and commissioned OD Alternatives, an organisation development and consulting firm, to map the personality and leadership styles of the playing XI using the Enneagram tool- a globally accepted personality profiling method.

Of the nine personality types, Type 3 and Type 1 dominate with two cricketers respectively falling into the category. While none of the cricketers fell in the Type 4, 5 and 6 categories, some had overlaps of Type 7 and 8 together; 3 and 8 together and 2 and 8 together. Since little information was available on Munaf Patel, his personality type could not be ascertained. Read on for the details.

TYPE 3 | M S DHONI & VIRAT KOHLI: Optimistic, adaptable, success-oriented, self-assured, and charming. They can also be status-conscious and highly driven for advancement. They are diplomatic and poised, but can also be overly concerned with their image and what others think of them. Consequently, they can be impatient and image-driven. They seek to be loved for performance and achievement. Masters at appearances-they are able to recover quickly from setbacks and charge ahead to the next challenge, staying informed, knowing what's going on, competent and able to get things to work efficiently and motivate others.

We have seen and will see many of the modern-day greats leave the game. There will always be stars writes Andy Bull in the Guardian, but how many of them will have the potential to achieve a similar status in the sport as the likes of Murali, Tendulkar, Ponting and Kallis, all indisputably among the very best in history?

There surely were players in this World Cup who will shape the next 10 years, but it takes a degree more foresight to pick them out than it would have in 1996. Virat Kohli is one, though he is yet to make his Test debut, Suresh Raina another. Stuart Broad and Eoin Morgan. New Zealand could build their batting around Kane Williamson. Umar Akmal and Angelo Mathews are two more. Mohammad Amir would surely have joined them, if his career had not run off the rails. These seem like slim pickings, at least in comparison to the riches we have enjoyed for the last 15 years.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Steve James says the time has come for overseas players to be excluded from county cricket, as the plethora of international cricket and the IPL has ensured you just cannot sign the stars any longer.

It [signing overseas players] is just not worth the money or effort any more … Gone are the days of ‘Proctershire’ when Mike Procter became as much a part of Gloucestershire folklore as the Severn Bore, of Viv Richards and Joel Garner at Somerset, of Clive Lloyd at Lancashire, of Malcolm Marshall at Hampshire, of Richard Hadlee and Clive Rice at Nottinghamshire and so many more legends who made various counties their second homes.

Nathan Astle, writing in the New Zealand Herald, says that old debate is bound to spark off once again following Sachin Tendulkar’s stellar performance in the 2011 World Cup.

As long as he's [Sachin Tendulkar] physically feeling alright he could have a couple more years left, and I think he has a few milestones in the back of his head that he wants to reach before he does give it away. Is he the best cricketer of all time? Don Bradman is one of those guys you can never compare to as he's out there on his own but Tendulkar is certainly the best player of the modern game. His record and his consistency has been unbelievable.

What is fair about denying the team ranked 10th in the world - Ireland - any chance of a spot in a 10-team World Cup asks Dave Tickner, writing in Sporting Life. The 2015 World Cup has been replaced by a 2015 ICC Invitational, he says, as no tournament that denies an entry route to all but a select few has the right to the title of 'World Cup'.

What is 'just' about telling every other cricketing nation outside your protected elite that they are not welcome at the game's biggest global gathering? The ICC have cancelled the 2015 World Cup. No tournament that denies an entry route to all but the select few has the right to that title.

The World Cup has two main problems: it's too long, and has too many meaningless matches. Simply reducing the teams solves neither. You could increase the number of competing teams to 16 and polish off a neat 31-game tournament with at worst a handful of dead rubbers through four groups of four, followed by knockouts from the quarter-finals onwards. But in the 2015 ICC Invitational, the 10 teams will play each other in a round-robin first stage followed by semi-finals and a final. That equals 48 games. The World Cup just finished had 49 games.

An editorial in the Indian Express states that one of the things that the 2011 World Cup will be remembered for is the hospitality and effort of the three host nations — Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India, which includes the includes hard technicalities — upgrading stadia and infrastructure and making the host venues welcoming in look and feel — as well as words and gestures, to say nothing of the initiative seized by the Indian and Pakistani political establishments.

There were, of course, slip-ups and misses. So it was unfortunate, but unavoidable in the circumstances, that Pakistan lost its status as a co-host long before the tournament began. In every other way, the purported “snooze-fest” of February ended as the delight of spring, to which ICC associate members like Ireland contributed every bit.

Saturday night’s triumph will affirm the confidence of, and indeed boost, an already upwardly mobile and aspirational young India still further, states and editorial in the Asian Age.

Not for nothing does the world now look as this country as the story of the future, and the self-belief that will be derived from seeing their team beat every world champion team of the past — the West Indies, Australia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — on their way to the pinnacle will serve to underline aspirations and self-confidence still further. India now knows that it can take on — and best the best.

Once again in the Indian Express, Dilip Bobb looks at the ten commandments of cricket that have emerged from this World Cup.

Thou shalt worship one true god: It may be a team game, but cricket demands one superstar who symbolises greatness and durability and inspires the rest of the team. Sachin Tendulkar has been anointed in that role for many years, regardless of who is captain or his own form. His has been a model role or role model, and his “tears of joy” are now part of official cricketing history.

Thou shalt always convey a sense of history: The history making has been overwhelming — first host team to win, first Asian finalists, first after 28 years, biggest TV audience, all time greatest captain, greatest team, the headline writers are having a historic time.

Avirook Sen in the Open magazine, relives his experience of watching the World Cup semi-final between India and Pakistan in Srinagar.

By nine in the evening, it is clear that India is ‘going’—to the World Cup finals, that is. In a houseboat on Dal Lake, with Tariq and Raees for company, I watch Manmohan Singh, Yousuf Raza Gilani next to him, usher an Indian win with awkward applause. I understand his situation. I am quiet. Srinagar falls silent. No one acts “funny”.

An increasing number of Canadians claim heritage from parts of the world where cricket is the most important sport played, Dave Liverman writes on Canada Cricket Online, and therefore cricket's status as a sport in the country is growing. However, the speed of development, he says, will depend on whether Cricket Canada can be a unifying force and settle their disputes with other cricket bodies.

We can leave it there, with all the responsibility lying on Cricket Canada’s shoulders, but that will not work. Their role is to lead and support; the game will go nowhere without the interest and effort of those labouring in the trenches across the country. This summer we need to play cricket in the public eye- invite reporters, politicians, friends, and most importantly kids. Hold clinics, fun days to introduce anyone who is interested to the game. Develop recreational cricket where ability and wining are irrelevant. Start a women’s team, and develop a youth system. Move away from traditional club patterns built on ethnic origin – be inclusive, not exclusive. Get into your local schools. Cricket perhaps will never be a mainstream sport in Canada – but it can be a highly successful minor sport in every city in the country.

John Stern looks back at the World Cup in the Wisden Cricketer and says its legacy is the revitalisation of the one-day format, which had received loads of criticism since the rise of the Twenty20 game.

And an India-Sri Lanka final was the most appropriate climax for an Asian World Cup showcase. It wasn’t quite as close as neutrals would have liked but it was still compelling – and that was just the faces of the Indian supporters. Numb disbelief when Sachin departed for 18 turned to concentrated angst as their team’s run-chase unfolded.

England might have been exhausted and spent five weeks playing from memory but one of the great things about this tournament has been the quality of the cricket and that star players have shown their best side.

In his review of the tournament, Johnathan Agnew says in the BBC the final was a memorable climax to a tournament that has been frustrating in some ways and surpassed expectations in others.

Oliver Brett wonders in the BBC whether India can be the new world-beaters in cricket, like the West Indians of the 1980s and the Australians over the past two decades. He says the hectic schedule could be one of the things that could hold India back.

So how do India's finest players prepare for the important tours of West Indies, England and Australia that lie in wait for them later this year (plus a home series in November against West Indies?) Oh yes. The Indian Premier League starts on Friday. That's right, this Friday... and goes on until 28 May.

With two new franchises, Pune and Kochi, and 74 matches squeezed into less than two months, players will have to suffer a stressful regime of practice-match-hotel-flight (repeat ad nauseam) week-in, week-out.

In his latest blog, Siddhartha Vaidyanathan explains just why every player in the Indian team dedicated the World Cup victory to Sachin Tendulkar. Tendulkar was the only one old enough to have memories of the 1983 win and he alone understands the real significance of that day.

It’s fascinating how the cricket lives of most in this team have run parallel with Tendulkar’s international career. Ten members of this squad, and most of them forming the core, are between 27 and 32. Many of them were drawn to cricket because of Tendulkar and many have talked about idolizing him in their impressionable years. Many tried to bat like him before getting more realistic. A few initially picked up heavy bats – the kind that he uses – before exchanging them for lighter ones.

Mahesh Sethuraman relives the misery India faced after the 2003 World Cup final, and says that is what made the victory in 2011 all the more special.

Sehwag finally found some form. Ponting bowled his spinners to complete the 25 overs soon for there was a threat of rain. The move backfired. Sehwag launched Brad Hogg out of the park for a couple of sixes. Someone did the wise thing of bursting firecrackers then, for it was the only time we even had an outside chance of winning the match. It left a deep scar on us. We couldn’t even talk ourselves up. We could have hated Australia, but we didn’t want to. They were clearly superior.

Mahela Jayawardene made a century in the World Cup final and James Lawton in the Independent writes that when we look back to that tumultuous day at the Wankhede stadium in Mumbai, Jayawardene's performance and demeanour will surely dwarf the usual chasm between victory and defeat.

This was an achievement worthy of a place in anyone's pantheon of sport, a place which is never accommodating to anything remotely resembling a cheap victory.

Watching his unbeaten century was indeed a humbling experience for those of us most reluctant to acknowledge there is much chance of anything truly memorable occurring in any of the shortened forms of a great game. Jayawardene did not flail against this prejudice. He simply caressed it to death.

In a freewheeling interview with Dinesh Chopra in the Hindustan Times, Gautam Gambhir reveals that he had an inkling he would do well in the World Cup final, believes India's new calm approach to challenges in the key to their success, and urges people not to lose perspective after India's fantastic run in world cricket over the past couple of years.

The calm with which this team approaches challenges is the key to success. You'd never feel we are flustered or rushed. This self-belief has developed over the years after being through the lows a number of times.

At times when you are close to the pinnacle, subconsciously you reach there even before you are actually there. The same happened to me. I reached the hundred before I got there, was imagining myself raising the bat and lost focus. But now who cares? We are the world champions.

MS Dhoni's form had been scratchy right up till the World Cup final but he was able to put that behind him in the game that mattered the most, writes Peter Roebuck in the Sydney Morning Herald. He dared to push himself up the order, didn't falter, guided his partners,and finally opened his shoulders to complete the victory.

In the critical hour and despite modest returns, Dhoni dared to back himself. That is leading from the front. Even in the toughest times, too, he managed to convey composure. Throughout, his players felt their captain remained on the bridge and the situation was under control.

Cricket folklore is littered with game-changing decisions, but Dhoni’s promotion of himself to No 4, after a mediocre run with the bat, will become the stuff of legend, writes Derek Pringle in the Daily Telegraph.

It might have been different had Nuwan Kulasekera not dropped Gambhir when he was on 30, after misjudging a catch at long off, but once Dhoni strode purposefully to the crease and began to hit the ball with such decisive power and purpose, you sensed it was always going to be India’s night.

Dhoni, apart from all else, writes Stephen Brenkley in the Independent is a man who recognises destiny when he sees it.

India and Chappell did not turn out to be a comfortable fit for each other, but Dhoni is some legacy. He is a natural leader because it comes naturally to him. Nothing seems to change his outward facade and he makes Andrew Strauss of England, himself a placid captain, look like a king of melodrama.

India's win over Sri Lanka in Mumbai stirs so many emotions that the final's script could have been written in the stars writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian. It's almost as though destiny was fulfilled.

So it came to pass, almost as precisely as planned when first the subcontinent was awarded the World Cup and Mumbai the final. In hindsight, as the day dawns over the Arabian Sea, it seems inconceivable that anyone but India should have taken the trophy. The astrologers were right with their predictions. Well, almost. There was a fairytale for the sainted Sachin Tendulkar, but not in personal performance for he was too readily undone by the ferocious maverick Lasith Malinga. Tendulkar was carried shoulder-high around the ground in celebration by his young team-mates as though a symbol, draped in the Indian flag, of how he has carried the hopes of a nation for so long.

In the same newspaper Barney Ronay writes that the World Cup final had a bit of everything – including huge sunglasses – but it was also an expression of a new continent-size confidence.

What next for New Zealand in the Test arena, asks Andrew Alderson, writing in the New Zealand Herald. While inconsistencies remain, the team under John Wright, he says, is showing all the right signs.

The recipe is simple. Mix the John Wright coaching regime with a group of open-minded, tenacious players and an attitude of controlled aggression. That is the simplest way to return New Zealand to another successful cricketing era.

The evidence is stark. A team that could win just one ODI out of 12 on the sub-continent towards the end of last year have made the semi-finals of the World Cup, lining up with "the locals" - Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan.

Looking back at the World Cup in the Observer, Vic Marks writes that while the tournament has had its imperfections, the thrills and spills have reminded us of the virtues of the 50-over game. This has been the best World Cup since 1992.

In India the tournament has captured the imagination of the public just as vehemently as the Indian Premier League has done in recent years. Every India game has been a sell-out and even those matches not involving the hosts have been well‑attended. The commercial partners have got their money's worth, so, too, the TV companies, who have been able to hike their advertising rates. So that keeps an awful lot of money men happy. No doubt they will be angling for a two-month competition next time.

Scyld Berry in the Sunday Telegraph looks back at the highs and lows of the World Cup gone by and writes that the 50-overs-per-side on a dry pitch is far and away the best format for a one-day cricket match.

Worst run-chase...South Africa not even getting close to the 222 they needed to beat New Zealand in the quarter-final and losing by 49 runs.

Bravest innings...Faced with a baying crowd in Ahmedabad, and calls for his resignation from the Australian captaincy, and handicapped by a left finger that is still a painful mess, Ricky Ponting scored a century.

Now the World Cup is over, its time to look forward to IPL4, writes Sumit Chakravarty in the Daily News and Analysis, that will bring its own brand of enjoyment.

It isn’t that one form of the game is better than the other. The World Cup had its moments and you can’t match the passion and nervous excitement that something like the Indo-Pak semi-final can produce. In league cricket, it’s different. With both players and fans a little more relaxed, although the matches are all keenly contested, it’s just a great environment for enjoying the nuances of the game. So cheers to both the World Cup which has just ended, and the IPL which is starting in five days. These are good times indeed for cricket lovers.

Nina Lakhani watched the game in a London hotel with a group of Sri Lankan and Indian fans. In the Independent, she says it was just as frantic in London as it was in Mumbai.

As the game gets under way, Gaveeka, an investment banker, lets his nerves show. It doesn't go down well with his brother. "In my heart, we will win, but in my head, well, I think India might have the edge. Maybe." As the first boundary of the match finally happens in the sixth over, the whole family leaps up, and maracas and tambourines are shaken. "We'll definitely win," says Gaveeka more confidently. Next ball, a batsman swings and misses, the room gasps and Gaveeka looks forlorn. Who says cricket isn't exciting? The fools who don't get it, that's who, and there are still more than seven hours to go.

There's no holding MS Dhoni back when the situation demands nerves of steel writes Ian Chappell in the Hindustan Times. He's the most determined batsman and saved his best innings of the tournament for the biggest game, to help India seal a famous World Cup win.

Dhoni had spoken about peaking at the right time at the start of the tournament and he was as good as his word on the last day of the mega event. It took a great chase to neutralise Jayawardene's century and India were worthy champions in a final that did credit to a well-organised tournament.

Mikey Selvey in the Guardian writes that though Sachin Tendulkar failed to live up to expectations in the final, caught behind off Lasith Malinga, making only 18, the win meant that 21 years of glory still gained high reward.

As Malinga performed an exultant celebration, even as far as deep square leg, the crowd was stunned into disbelieving silence. Men held their heads in their hands, women put hands over mouths as if they had seen a ghost. On the big screen, they played replay after replay as if hoping that eventually he might middle the ball and send it skimming through the covers. But it always went to Sangakkara.

In the Daily Telegraph Geoffrey Boycott writes that before the final everyone was talking about the big two, Muttiah Muralitharan and Sachin Tendulkar. But this match wasn’t about individuals. It was about the team and it was a fantastic effort by India.

Dhoni’s performance and the whole day was a great advert for 50-over cricket, especially as some countries want the next World Cup to revert to a 40-over format. Well, you can forget that now.

In the same newspaper, Simon Hughes lauds MS Dhoni and writes that Dhoni timed India's World Cup campaign to perfection.

With total conviction and complete self-assurance he clipped and chipped, occasionally carved, and ultimately clubbed, his side to handsome victory with a massive six over long on to finish 91 not out. The prolific Tendulkar may be India’s national treasure but Dhoni is their modern icon.

India beat Sri Lanka by six wickets in Mumbai on Saturday to win the World Cup and Andrew Alderson in the New Zealand Herald writes that India demonstrated "want" more than Sri Lanka to win their second World Cup.

The players channelled - or possibly ignored - the endless endorsements and hype surrounding the tournament. They needed to. The chase of 275 was the highest completed at a World Cup final, a record haul on this ground and just the third time a team batting second had won in 10 tournament finales. Getting that took courage.

Nirmal Shekhar in the Hindu writes that while MS Dhoni's men deserve their success every bit, what Kapil's Devils achieved in 1983 was a pioneering triumph that can never be matched.

India first won the World Cup in 1983 and now again in 2011. The Hindustan Times looks at how life and times have changed in the last 28 years.

Ranchi: MSD was two years old in 1983. Since then his home town went from being a provincial town of 5 lakh people to a state capital housing 8.6 lakh. Last year, it was picked by Asssocham as the highest employment generating Tier-III city in the country.

BCCI: Back then the Indian board was a minnow in the cricketing fraternity dominated by England and Australia. The 1983 win started a shift. Now it’s the richest cricketing body — with more than 70% of the sport’s revenues coming from India.

First India beat Pakistan, the old sporting enemy, and then trumped Sri Lanka in the final – a win that is being tied to a national coming of age, writes Gethin Chamberlain in the Guardian.

MS Dhoni's captaincy, in an almost ironic way, mirrors his batting say Shamik Chakrabarty and Karthik Krishnaswamy, writing in the Indian Express.

Dhoni has led undemonstratively ... and given everyone the feeling that he is always in control. His captaincy, many thought, would mirror his batting. In an almost ironic way, it does — both his batting, formerly free-spirited and aggressive, and his captaincy are now pragmatic, calculated and largely risk-free.

Michael Clarke faces a greater challenge than any of the 42 Test captains before him, writes David Sygall in the Sunday Herald. Apart from being loaded with the burden of turning the fortunes of the struggling team, he is also expected to lead cricket's resurrection and reinvent its identity.

Where there are big-picture challenges facing the game - such as privatisation, the place of T20, a rusty player-development structure and administration, and challenges to popularity, ratings and revenue - internet forums, letters to editors, and some media have found an easy, and sometimes too obliging, target in Clarke.

In the the Age, Richard Hinds writes that he is trying to hate Michael Clarke, as seems to be the norm. But try as he might, he can't; he thinks Clarke will make a good captain and even perhaps a great one.

Indeed, I can't help thinking that a captain who has endured a few real-life problems might be able to assist his young teammates with more than just a few tips about their front-foot defence. And, as much as we revered the win 'em and wear 'em toughness of Allan Border, Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting, maybe the time has come for a sensitive Gen Y skipper.

Gary Kirsten, MS Dhoni and Sachin Tendulkar are an excellent trio of leaders, says Duncan Fletcher, writing in the Guardian, who India will owe a lot to should they triumph in this World Cup.

Kirsten is a tough man, but he is also the kind who is quick to put an arm around your shoulder ... You hear them [the India players] talking about him as though he were a friend more than a coach, which is very telling ... Tendulkar tried the captaincy and decided it was not for him, but still contributes so much to the team on and off the field. When he gives advice to MS Dhoni … he does not wave his arms around just to show the crowd that he is still making decisions, but just walks up and has a quiet word in the captain's ear.

He [Dhoni] is a model of good body language on the field. Watch him when a catch is dropped. He does not mutter to himself or stare at the grass. He holds his head high and puts his hands on hips, almost as though he did not notice it happen. The message he is sending the players is "OK, let's move on and get on with it."

If there’s one man likely to steal Sachin Tendulkar’s thunder, it’s Kumar Sangakkara says James Lawton, writing in the Independent. The steely Sangakkara has mastered the art of ‘psychological sledging’ and has it in him to take advantage of any frailties displayed by India.

At 33 he [Sangakkara] is only four years Tendulkar's junior and he is not likely to get close to that astonishing haul of 99 centuries, but in every other respect this is a man who can cheerfully place his record against any contemporary. But then it is in his mastery of "psychological sledging" that this universally admired character reveals a special talent for exploiting the pressures on Tendulkar and his team-mates.

It [the sledging] works devastatingly at times, but never in a way that might bring shame ... There is none of the rough, often sexually oriented abuse ... “Sledging should be a measured comment designed to provoke a reaction. It can be something as simple as, 'Let's leave a big gap there, he can't score through there.' Even if you're mentally strong, something like that can still work in the mind…" said Sangakkara.

‘The Whirly Twirly Rubber Man’ exits world cricket on the grandest stage of all says Shane Warne, writing in the Daily Telegraph. Muttiah Muralitharan bucked the trend of the quintessential offspinner he says, drawing comparisons with himself.

What he has done for Sri Lankan cricket is outstanding, but that applies not just to the sport in his country. I saw at first hand in the aftermath of the tsunami in Sri Lanka what a generous and fun nature he has … As an off-spinner you are supposed to prefer bowling to left-handers. But Murali prefers right-handers. As a leg-spinner I liked the opposite too. I preferred bowling to left-handers … The reason was identical — because they had to play at the ball or otherwise it was going to hit the stumps.

Derek Pringle, writing in the same paper says contrary to Steve Waugh’s assumption that there are no fairy tales in sport, Sachin Tendulkar has two within his grasp in his hometown – that elusive World Cup winner’s medal and a 100th international century.

Both are achievable, though the 100 hundreds would be the most notable feat, only likely to be surpassed by a long-lived prodigy such as him. He certainly has the tools, the opportunity, the team-mates and, it would seem, the divine intervention, to do it, following his captain MS Dhoni’s comments on Friday that “God just made Tendulkar to play cricket.”

The World Cup final is in safe hands with the best umpires around, Aleem Dar and Simon Taufel, in the middle says Stephen Brenkley, writing in the Independent.

In the middle at the sharp end will be Aleem Dar, of Pakistan, who is umpire of the year for the second successive time, and Simon Taufel, his predecessor for the four years before. Although Taufel has made a couple of errors in the tournament, Dar's progress has been unblemished. All his decisions have been upheld in the court of the slow-motion replay and all challenges were thrown out.

In India, Sachin Tendulkar ceased being just a person a long time ago, says Suresh Menon, writing for BBC Sport. During the two decades he has played for the country, Menon says he has become a symbol of a resurgent India, the coming powerhouse.

To the vast majority he is merely a figure on television, indistinguishable from characters such as Superman and Batman … The campaign to award the nation's highest civilian honour to a sportsman might reek of cuteness anywhere else, but in India there is no embarrassment in suggesting that Tendulkar be placed in the same category as the great leaders, scientists and social workers.

Sachin Tendulkur and Muttiah Muralitharan, that’s what the World Cup has come down to in the end says Ron Reed, writing in the Daily Telegraph. Even fate can’t decide which sporting icon to support, he muses, with Muralitharan taking a wicket with his last ball on Sri Lankan soil and Tendulkar being conceded several lives in the semi-final.

It's the batsman who has made more runs than anyone against the bowler who has taken more wickets than anyone … If only because he has about a billion people barracking for him as against Sri Lanka's 20 million … Tendulkar is under significantly more pressure.

The stage is set for a triumph of a magnitude that even his [Tendulkar’s] adoring scriptwriters could not have imagined. He has the opportunity to score his 100th international century in the World Cup final in his home town, Mumbai, in the month of his 38th birthday against the world's greatest bowler. Wherever he is, even Don Bradman will take his hat off if that happens.

Peter Roebuck, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald says the two best teams in the tournament have arrived in Mumbai to capture the cup. It’s a battle between a tiger and a lion, two motivated champions, one yearning to play in a World Cup winning side, the other eager to go out with a bang.

India and Sri Lanka have much in common, a reliance on spin, a captain who also keeps wicket, a population devoted to the game and a great player approaching the end of his career … If everything falls into place, the visitors are quite capable of causing an upset. They'd deserve it because they play with an abundance of spirit and regularly take the bold path … But it's hard to avoid feeling that it is going to be India's day. Dhoni has the more powerful line-up at his disposal, and fewer headaches … Whatever the result, it will produce a worthy winner.

MS Dhoni may not have done much with the bat in the tournament, and he may have received criticism for some of his decisions, but if India win against Sri Lanka in Mumbai, this will be remembered as Dhoni's World cup, Siddhartha Vaidyanathan writes on his blog.

Dhoni has a great chance to become the first captain to lift a World Cup at home but there’s another, slightly more quirky, statistic which many may not be aware of: Dhoni may become the first World Cup winning captain to go through a whole campaign without a single half-century. But it won’t matter. One of the most forgotten stats from 1987 is that Border made 183 runs in 8 World Cup games, with just one fifty, at an average of 22.87. His only half-century was against Zimbabwe.

There's been a great deal written about South Africa's troublesome history when it comes to high-pressure situations in the aftermath of the spluttering quarter-final loss to New Zealand, a great deal of it critical. The players have borne the brunt of the criticism, writes Neil Manthorp in the Mail & Guardian, but what about the less-than-perfect administrators behind the scenes?

Like foot soldiers being held accountable for the failure of military strategy, Graeme Smith and his players face the guns alone while the generals sit behind teak desks in oak-panelled offices. There is no apparent accountability among the most senior of Cricket South Africa (CSA) executives. The chief executive, Gerald Majola, recently celebrated his 10th anniversary in the job (a press release was even issued to commemorate the occasion) while the executive board dutifully supports and endorses his every decision.

Administrative executives in South African cricket have never been held accountable for on-field performances, yet the office, surely, is as important as the grass when it comes to running a successful, multimillion-rand sports business.

In the same newspaper's Sports Leader blog, Adam Wakefield pins the blame for South Africa's ignominious defeat on the quirks of the national psyche and urges fans to rally round the team rather than abandon them.

Rob Houwing, a former editor of SA Sports Illustrated and now chief editor at Sport24 perhaps said it best when it comes to describing how we should feel about the Proteas following the 2011 World Cup: “Still, I don’t believe this South Africa group, who overwhelmingly gave it their all and then some, deserve a rotten-tomato welcome home. Let’s be gentlemen and ladies. Let’s all take it on the conk, just as GC Smith and company are having to. And move on. Or at least bloody try to.”

With four Man-of-the-Match awards in India's six wins in the World Cup, Yuvraj Singh has arguably been India's most crucial player in the tournament. Akshay Sawai of the Open magazine profiles Indian cricket's overgrown boy, and in particular the role played by his parents in his development.

Yograj has grand designs for his children. Zorawar, Yuvraj’s younger brother, must go to Hollywood. “If he does some body-building, I see him becoming the next Arnold Schwarzenegger. If he is willing to train under me, he can be in Hollywood in four years,” Yograj said in a TV interview in 2007, when Yuvraj had just returned home from India’s World T20 triumph. Yograj also wants his seven-year-old daughter, Amarjot, to become Serena Williams. “I don’t want her to be a Sania Mirza. I want her to be Serena Williams, a Wimbledon champion—the best in the world.” A few years ago, he wanted Yuvraj to marry “someone of the calibre of Steffi Graf”. Call it genetic powerplay.

India may have scraped and scratched their way to the World Cup final, writes Peter Roebuck in the Sydney Morning Herald, but sometimes even the best and most attractive teams have to win ugly. It is all set up now for a contest between two attractive teams and two great veterans, Murali and Tendulkar.

India owed their victory more to the mistakes of their opponents than to any inspiration of their own. It was a day of graft and gruel. But it was not only the pitch. It was a semi-final of a World Cup. Glory was so near and so far. And the chance might not come again.

David Leggat in the New Zealand Herald asks: was India's 29-run win at Mohali a bullet-dodging moment en route to a second World Cup title to follow 1983?

They have had their thin-ice days during the cup, but this time, with what seemed like most of Asia looking on, they hung on as Pakistan failed to grasp a wonderful opportunity. Pakistan's botched job leaves Sri Lanka as the only team between India and glory; of preventing MS Dhoni following the great Kapil Dev as the second Indian to lift the trophy.

Patrick Kidd in the Times writes that the World Cup he finalists have a lot in common, apart from being only the second and third hosts of a World Cup to reach the deciding match, after England in 1979.

Sri Lanka's openers in this tournament have the fireworks, but they also have staying power. Tillekeratne Dilshan is the competition's leading run-scorer with 467 at a strike-rate of 93 that seems impossibly pedestrian compared with Jayasuriya.

India's openers have been similarly effective, although they have taken it in turns to fire, with an average stand of 61 to the Sri Lankans' 112.

The ICC believes that this World Cup has breathed life into the 50-over format, miraculously this World Cup has managed to conjure precisely the right pairing in India and Sri Lanka, the main hosts, but Stephen Brenkley in the Independent writes that there is still reason to be sceptical about the life of this format.

It's all come down to the batsman who has made more runs than anyone against the bowler who has taken more wickets than anyone in this World Cup final, writes Ron Reed in the Herald Sun.

Even though there will be 10 other talented combatants on each side, if either of these two megastars defeats the other, it is highly probable it will determine the outcome.

Millions in India believe that that victory in World Cup final is India's destiny, writes Dileep Premachandran in the Guardian.

Derek Pringle in the Daily Telegraph writes that while the whole of India is celebrating their team's entry into the World Cup final, spare a thought or two for coach Gary Kirsten and his assistants who have played a key role in making this happen.

Muttiah Muralitharan is a magician whose prestige will never fade, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian and given all that he has been through, he deserves to end his superb career as a World Cup finalist.

In two decades, Sachin Tendulkar has been both symbol of a resurgent India, writes Suresh Menon on BBC Sport and on the eve of the World Cup final all Tendulkar's fans ask for is that India win the title, and that Tendulkar himself score his 100th international century.

Nikhil M Ghanekar from the Tehelka magazine spends a day with 13-year-old Sarfaraz Khan, who is considered a cricketing prodigy right now pitches of the Azad Maidan in Mumbai, to find out what sort of imapct the ongoing World Cup is having on the future generation of cricketers.

This World Cup is a huge opportunity for prodigies like Sarfaraz to be so close to the big stage. He is always watching, always learning. It is a stage where reputations are made and broken, prodigies compete fiercely, superstars blaze opponents and homes across nations turn into mini-stadiums.

Do Indians really love cricket, questions Aakar Patel in Mint. Spectator behaviour in India is not about enjoying a sport and appreciating the ability of professionals to play it. It’s about nationalism, which in India is narrow and zero-sum. And this manifests itself in other aspects as well, most prominently the commentary that accompanies the sport.

Between its spectators and commentators, Indians have ruined cricket for everybody. With the growth of our economy, this has got worse. Indian money has been poured into cricket, sloshing in its crevices, spilling out of its guts.

Matthew Norman in the Daily Telegraph looks at the way India fans gathered in a restaurant, celebrated after Sachin Tendulkar's lbw decision was reversed in the semi-final against Pakistan and comes to the conclusion that while the British like to regard themselves as wildly passionate about sport, they are not.

Their [the India fans] deafeningly joyous dementia made pub celebrants of an England World Cup goal look like effete theatregoers politely clapping the interval curtain at a performance of one of Strindberg’s lighter comedies of manners.

South Asia — with three teams in the semi-finals of the World Cup — clearly has the power and is the nerve center for cricket, but are they aware that with it comes with responsibility, asks Suresh Menon in Tehelka magazine.

The future of cricket will depend on how well the region handles this power. The prognosis is not very encouraging. Match-fixing and its cousin spot-fixing have been rampant. Three Pakistani players, Salman Butt, Mohammed Asif and Mohammed Amir have been banned and face trial in a British court next month. No country is willing to tour Pakistan after the attack on the Sri Lankan team bus in Lahore. Pakistan play their matches abroad, and are entitled to their share of the financial returns. Where does all that money go?