Osman Samiuddin in the National writes that in sport, the business of retirement can be an unsettling one, not only because it is not easy to know whether something irreversible has set inside a player or whether it is merely a temporary slip. While they make make adjustments as they recognise the approaching of the end, what the sportsmen are really doing, writes Samiuddin, is battling the conceit of the rest of us who think we know that it is time for them to leave.

Why should sportsmen care what people say? Why should Dravid, Laxman, Federer go at any time other than of their own choosing?

It is not for them to understand they are past it. This is all they have known. It is what they have sweated towards their entire lives. To expect them to leave voluntarily and suddenly, when others think the time is right is presumptive nonsense.

In Caravan Magazine, Rahul Bhatia looks back on how Mark Mascarenhas - who was in fatal car accident ten years ago to a day - first broke open the business of cricket.

Over the course of the era that he helped define—and then in the decade after him—the sport grew up from a gawky adolescence to an irresponsible adulthood, and the hesitations of yesterday were cast aside for the noisy satisfactions of a protracted financial bender. Looking back now, the sums involved were minute, but they made headlines at the time: when one of Mascarenhas’s clients became the first cricket millionaire in 1995, it was big enough news to make the cover of the weekly news magazine Outlook. A million dollars is what some cricketers now earn in a month. Mascarenhas was derided for the price he paid to acquire the 1996 World Cup; 16 years later, that amount wouldn’t have bought him two days of Indian cricket coverage. The transformation of the game wasn’t accomplished by one man alone, but Mascarenhas made the first move.

Be it Vernon Philander, Pat Cummins or James Pattinson, Doug Bracewell or Umesh Yadav, pace has dominated in the most recent Test series, says Andrew Alderson, writing in the New Zealand Herald. Subsequently, in the age of Twenty20, batting techniques look brittle.

Observations indicate pace bowling's resurgence could be a trend; at least in places where grass grows willingly. Evidence of pace bowling dominance has come with the wickets taken in the last five series. In the first test of the Australia-India series, quick bowlers took 88 per cent of the wickets; in the South Africa-Sri Lanka series up until the end of 2011, it was 76 per cent. The Australia-New Zealand series saw 80 per cent of the wickets fall to pace, whereas it was 83 per cent between South Africa and Australia.

... Perhaps the most telling example of the demise has been Rahul Dravid's recent lean trot. The batsman known as "The Wall" has looked more post-1989 Berlin than China against Australia, getting bowled three times in two tests, including between bat and pad twice ... Dravid is not alone among the world's batsmen. Blades of willow looked redundant at times in 2011 when you consider teams passed 400 runs in a test 24 times out of 141 innings (17 per cent). Added to that is the fact seven of those 24 innings came from the world's No1 team, England. Compare that to 2010 when teams scored 400-plus totals 45 times in 164 innings (27 per cent).

In The Hindu, S Ram Mahesh writes of how Craig McDermott has silently transformed the fortunes of Australia's pace attack by getting them to bowl fuller.

All around the world, bowlers of fast-medium pace and greater are starting to reclaim lost ground from batsmen, cricket's glory boys. The conditions have conspired, at least in England, South Africa, and Australia, and the seamers, like spotting that old pair of jeans in their closet that has returned to fashion, have found, to their delight, the fuller length.

In the Indian Express, Karthik Krishnaswamy looks back at the success fast bowlers have had at the WACA in Perth, and how certain batsmen have had their moments too. But with the pitch reportedlyt returning to its old menacing ways, he asks how Rohit Sharma, a debutant, will rise to the challenge.

The acronym, WACA, sounds like whacker. You almost expect to see it in the dictionary. Whacker: Noun; a bowler, made ten times as potent by the bounciest pitch in the world, liable to cause batsmen bodily harm with whacks to the chest, side, arms and head.

In the Herald on Sunday, Paul Lewis lists the ten things he'd like to see in international cricket in 2011, from Tendulkar's 100th ton to Tarun Nethula's debut.

2. Jesse Ryder loses weight and gets fit

We could award Ryder the Shane Bond Trophy for Most Injuries (previous holder: Jacob Oram) but what we'd really like to see is the big Wellington bloke shed some more kilos and do a Shane Warne. Ryder's comfortable upholstery does him no good when fans cast jaundiced eyes over it after his latest injury. His poor form with the bat is also no recommendation.

The last twelve months have seen some spectacular highs, both on and off the field. There was Virender Sehwag’s ODI double-hundred, England’s ruthlessness in retaining the Ashes Down Under and Kumar Sangakkara’s stirring ‘Spirit of Cowdrey’ lecture. In the Guardian's The Sport Blog, Mike Selvey recounts these and others in his XI highlights of 2011.

We shall never see Dravid bat again in a Test match in England, but what a legacy he left. None of India's travails last summer could be laid at his door, and to score at Lord's, Trent Bridge and the Oval, three centuries in four Tests, mostly in adversity, was remarkable. Calling him the Wall does not do him justice. This is the Great Wall.

From MS Dhoni's ultimate captain's innings to Alastair Cook finally cutting loose, the Guardian's blog lists a few cherished moments of 2011.

When my colleague Rob Smyth is really tickled by something he tends to gurgle in amused satisfaction. I, on the other hand, squawk like a strangled parrot. Many of the happiest moments of my cricket-watching life have, oddly enough, come while I've been sitting next to Rob, the two of us gurgling, giggling and squawking as we write over-by-over commentary. We are, as you can imagine, a popular pair with our workmates, who are all trying to get on with the business of producing a newspaper. I'm not sure anything we've seen has ever given Rob and I more delight than the sight of MS Dhoni pacing out his run-up so he could fill in Zaheer Khan's missing overs during the Lord's Test. It epitomised the gulf between the two teams, and presaged the shape of the series to come. But better yet was that it showed, again, the sheer moxie of the man: if something needs doing, best do it yourself.

Are the injuries to modern-day fast bowlers really down to too much cricket, Dileep Premachandran asks, among other things, in the Sunday Guardian.

Botham and Hadlee bowled nearly 44,000 deliveries between them in Test cricket alone. Neither possessed a body that would have made them candidates for a Gold's Gym advertisement, but in their prime both were genuinely quick. There's a lesson in there for those entrusted with charting a course for young pace bowlers.

In the Guardian, Mike Selvey says a rotation policy, something Mickey Arthur, the new coach of Australia, has supported, may not go down with those players who want to play and see being part of a playing XI as a challenge.

I think that for all the superficial way in which players will buy into the system, there will be, lurking beneath the surface, a resentment. Winning a place in an international side is a challenging thing, and once there performance is everything. Membership of a team should never be a sinecure, or a meal ticket.

Think of a Maasai warrior and the image that comes to mind is of a tall, strong man with a spear hunting lions in the African bush. But thanks to a South African woman named Aliya Bauer, the image of a Maasai warrior crunching a cricket ball through cover might soon accompany it. Seven years ago Bauer was posted to the village of Il Polei in Kenya to work on a research project about baboons. Without a TV, she was suffering from cricket withdrawal. Her solution - teach the local people how to play. Writing in the Guardian, Andy Bull describes the birth of the Maasai Cricket Warriors and its impact on the community.

Better yet, being the person she is, Bauer has been using the cricket programme to target social problems in the Maasai community, such as the spread of Aids. The Maasai are traditionally polygamous, which has contributed to the syndrome's growth. "The teachers also taught us how to incorporate HIV/Aids awareness into cricket and coaching," Nissan says. "I now integrate HIV awareness into cricket. I teach the ABC approach – Abstinence, Be Faithful and Condom Use. Abstaining from sex is like a batsman abstaining from hitting balls in the air so he is not caught. Being faithful to ones partner is like how batsmen must communicate to decide whether to make a run or not. And use of condoms is like how batsmen must protect their wickets.”

Osman Samiuddin, writing for the National, anticipates much change on both batting and bowling fronts, especially in Test cricket. The bowlers, he says, might come to the forefront once more, after the glut of runs in recent years.

[Venkatesh] Prasad, now an Indian Premier League (IPL) coach, noted his greatest challenge with bowlers was ensuring that their thinking - that eight runs conceded in an over, with one boundary, wasn't bad - was not embedded when they moved to different formats. It is the unsaid flip side of this that is our concern here, of batsmen who feel invincible because they hit more boundaries than ever before but actually become more vulnerable precisely because of that ...

The tributes continue to pour in for Peter Roebuck, often touching on how hard it was to get to know the man behind the writer. In the Guardian, Vic Marks writes movingly about a “complex man with a brilliant mind”.

To me, Roebuck was a passenger or driver on countless tortuous trips around the country looking hopefully and often haplessly for the team hotel; in the car he was impatient and garrulous. As a roommate, he was opinionated, usually very confident in the merit of those opinions and never dull, yet capable of self mockery and as prone to self-doubt as any other cricketer.

In the Telegraph, Derek Pringle says Roebuck ‘s complexities meant he was destined not to lead an easy life

Suicide is something Roebuck, 55 when he died, predicted would never take him, though those who had known him since his youth were less certain.

In his foreword for the reprint of David Frith’s book on cricket suicides, Silence of the Heart, he wrote: “Some people have predicted a gloomy end for this writer. One former colleague said so to my face in September 1986. It will not be so. The art is to find other things that matter just as much as cricket, which stretch you just as far.

Chloe Saltau, who worked with Roebuck, describes in the Sydney Morning Herald how generous he was to young writers.

Also in the Sydney Morning Herald, Time Lane recollects an instance when Roebuck was caught wrong-footed, but even then he wasn’t wrong.

Paul Newman, in the Daily Mail, says that Roebuck’s death is the “last great mystery of a complex and often tortured life that was full of questions and very few answers".

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan writes on his blog about meeting Roebuck as a young reporter covering his first Test match in Bangalore, and says that Roebuck's most enviable quality as a writer was his ability to capture the quintessence of a momentous event.

Neil Manthorp, on www.supersport.com, writes about being intimidated by Roebuck's eccentricities and falling out with him over the issue of Zimbabwe's return to Test cricket.

Former Australian spinner and ABC Grandstand commentator Kerry O'Keeffe has a heart-warming tribute for Peter Roebuck, who died in South Africa on Saturday. O'Keeffe recalls Roebuck's love and knowledge of the game, and shares some lovely anecdotes about his radio colleague for 11 years.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Greg Baum tries to piece together the parts of a man whom not very many new.

He was complex, intense, taut, edgy, opinionated, a little manic, mostly cheerful, sometimes broody. He was a contrarian, not for the sake of it, but because he always had another view. He spoke quickly, in a clipped tone, needing to get the thoughts out so that more could follow; his broadcast voice was his street voice. He did not do small talk, ever.

In the same paper, Malcolm Knox also attempts to explain the man beyond the writer.

There was a carapace of Roebuckness that not even his best friends could get through. It was the one remnant of his English upbringing that he couldn't shake off. He was instinctively generous - through counsel or guidance or financial aid, or more formally, through friends in coaching or the LBW Trust, a global charity for which Roebuck was a driving force. When he knew he was needed, generosity was his reflex. He helped more than he knew. Yet he was embarrassed by emotions and a hard man to convince of his own good deeds. He made us laugh very much more often than we could make him laugh.

In his blog on cricketnext.com, Gaurav Kalra regrets that he did not become better friends with the man he calls “keeper of cricket's morality”

Peter viewed cricket from the prism of a larger world-view. He argued vociferously for Zimbabwe's exclusion from the world game, pointing repeatedly at the seedy corruption among its administrators. He lawyered with passion for the continued presence of minnows in the World Cup, despite their abject performance in the sub-continent.

Also in the Sydney Morning Herald, Patrick Smithers compiles a selection of vignettes from a memorable writing career.

Read our collection of tributes here.

England's and India's dominance over each other in home conditions proves there is no team good enough to lay a genuine claim to being world-beaters, Sanjjeev Karan Samyal writes in the Hindustan Times.

An example of what former greats think of current standards was witnessed during the Lord's Test this summer. Desmond Haynes was holding court after the third day's play, the battle having been kicked off between the top two ranked sides in the world. A group of eager fans asked him to compare the action on hand with the all-conquering West Indies team in which he played. "The wicketkeeper is collecting the ball below his waist. Even in the final session of the day, our 'keeper would be collecting balls consistently at shoulder height," the former opener summarised

People have always moved back and forth between countries for work. But when it happens in sport, particularly in the case of national teams, it is most sharply noticed. The current England side, for example, has a number of players, including the Test captain Andrew Strauss, who were born in South Africa, and jokes about the team’s composition abound. In the Wall Street Journal, Richard Lord writes that the global flow of cricket talent into Test-playing, cash-rich nations has benefitted England, India and Australia in particular.

But what the talent drain from South Africa to England does show, yet again, is that players are following the money—in England, India and Australia. That doesn't just affect domestic teams: it also affects international teams in a very direct and obvious way. South Africa, currently rivalling England for the top spot in world cricket, isn't affected as much as nontest-playing Ireland, for example. If an Irish player wants to test himself at the highest level, he has to move to England and qualify to play there. So far batsmen Morgan and, less successfully, Ed Joyce have crossed the Irish Sea in this way; Morgan has had a tentatively encouraging start to his test career, and a barnstorming start to his limited-overs career.

The offence taken at a comment about Sachin Tendulkar in Shoaib Akhtar's new book has been more than a bit excessive, writes David Hopps in the Guardian. Also, why this attitude of practiced indifference from the ECB about the Champions League T20 isn't the way to go.

The ECB is perhaps suspicious that a successful Champions League could be the first stage in the clubs becoming more powerful and causing the gradual erosion of international cricket. It looks at the dominance of football's Premier League, and the damage that this can do to England's national side, and fears that such a shift could do untold damage to the priorities and the finances of English cricket. It would be a distressing outcome, but there is no evidence that the danger is a real one.

Is it necessary to target the USA in an effort to increase cricket's global appeal? Would it make more sense to target countries like Afghanistan, Ireland and the Netherlands? Richard Browne addresses these questions in the Sunday Leader.

Is there any need to bring America into the cricketing inner circle? It is of course a financial decision, TV advertising could for example be huge, but there is more than enough money swirling about in cricket at the moment, it is after all a game. Changing a nations psyche just seems to a big a job, the thought of 30,000 American’s turning up to watch some cricket is just too fanciful.

The Economist's sports blog, Game Theory, uses several parameters to analyse what the game's second-most popular sport after football is. Does cricket's huge following in the subcontinent qualify it as a contender?

An alternative test would be how many people can recognise a star player. This would give the individual sports a boost, since stars like Roger Federer and Michael Schumacher have their faces adorned on billboards around the world—although I also refuse to believe there is a single person on the subcontinent who would be unable to put a name to a picture of Sachin Tendulkar (27m Google hits, pictured above). And there are probably undiscovered Amazonian tribes that could finger David Beckham (67m).

Matthew Hoggard says doing away with the runner rule does limit the opportunity for "comedy cock-ups" and wonders why nightwatchmen - he was one during his time - haven't been banned either. Read more in the Independent.

The International Cricket Council (ICC) could have struck another blow for bowlers this week by banning the use of Nos 9, 10 and 11 as cannon fodder on occasions when top-order batsmen don't fancy doing their job because it's a bit dark or there are only a few minutes to go before close of play.

Fortunately, I no longer have to worry about nightwatchman duties because, first, I'm captain (and I can order someone else to do it), and secondly, because I'm a specialist six-hitter these days (more of that in a minute, I promise).

Runners provided some of the most quirky and comic moments on the cricket field but the suspicions of abuse may have prompted the ICC to ban them, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian.

It is a debate that has been rumbling on for several years, brought to a head perhaps by the issue not of pulled muscles or, say, a foot damaged by a special from Lasith Malinga, but of cramp, something particularly highlighted in a Centurion Champions League match between South Africa and England a couple of years back, when the South African captain, Graeme Smith, cramping after scoring a century, was refused a runner, AB de Villiers, by Andrew Strauss who reasoned that after a long innings in hot conditions, a batsman is going to be drained and that it wasn't that serious anyway.

Labour disputes currently threaten to derail the seasons of two out of the four major sports in the United States. With this potential sports void looming, Michael Schur and Nate DiMeo decide to watch the World Cup semi-final between India and Pakistan on DVD to see if cricket could fill the hole in their sports lives. On Grantland.com, they provide a rather funny blow-by-blow account of their experience.

Shahid Afridi, we learn for some reason right now, is the leading wicket-taker in the tournament. I am suddenly overcome with a wave of love for Shahid Afridi. All of his demonstrative nonsense suddenly feels like intensity to me. All of his cajoling and firing up of his teammates seems both warranted and necessary, in a game that moves this slowly, yet has this much at stake, national-identity-wise. He has a kind of universal athlete intensity gene which I admire. I know nothing of the man, really. He might be a terrible person, or a tax cheat, or a serial adulterer, but at work, the man wants to win, and his team is not really helping out.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I am very much rooting for Pakistan. I want to see Shahid Afridi happy.

Chris Gayle and the West Indies board are locked in battle with neither side willing to back down. Simon Katich has slammed Cricket Australia for dropping him, while the BCCI are adamant that the DRS will never be used in any series that requires them to accept it. The problem, writes Makarand Waingankar in the Hindu, is that the game is being overtaken by big egos that are more concerned with their own interests than the larger picture.

And when John Hampshire, the first Englishman to score a century on debut at Lord's in 1969 against the mighty West Indians was dropped after the next match, he preferred to accept the decision of the selectors rather than call for a big press conference like Katich did by blasting all and sundry.

A glance through the records of Wisden and there are dozens of cases of players who had genuine reasons for hitting back at the selectors but unlike Katich none of them did.

In the Guardian, Andy Bull looks back at one of the more well-known sentences in world cricket: “You’ve just dropped the World Cup”. Both Steve Waugh and Herschelle Gibbs have since said those weren’t Waugh’s exact words, and Bull attempts to uncover how and why the myth took flight.

It is easy to imagine how he allowed the press to run with the idea that he told Gibbs that the catch had cost his team the World Cup. "I liked the quote," he said later, "I think it is quite funny." It added to his aura, suggesting that he had such granite-willed self-belief in his own ability that he could predict Australia's eventual victory even though they weren't even in the semi-finals yet. And, of course, it suggested that he had a certain mastery over South Africa in particular, that contests between the two would, inevitably, be bent to his will.

From Javed Miandad's audacious bullying of Essex, to a gritty Nasser Hussain ton, Rob Bagchi and Rob Smyth, writing in the Guardian, pick half a dozen knocks to savour.

In a sense, all batsmen are doomed. They walk to the crease knowing that their innings is finite, and that it could end at any moment. It takes a very special person to relish that situation, but that's how Javed Miandad played. He had the mentality of a fugitive, content to live on his wits no matter how great the risks. In fact, he needed those risks in order to thrive.

This week has not been sports administration's finest hours, says Dileep Premachandran, writing in the National. It makes you wonder, he says, how much better teams like Pakistan and Sri Lanka - who have had decent onfield results recently - would be with a competent administration in place.

The ICC suffers as a governing body because it remains at the mercy of its constituent boards. The recent decision to limit the 2015 World Cup to the full-member countries was simply a case of turkeys voting against Christmas.

FIFA, for all its financial misdeeds, still has the authority to step in and interfere when a national association is out of order. The ICC doesn't appear to have any such mandate and that lack of teeth has seen administrators run amok in countries like Zimbabwe and Pakistan.

Gautam Gambhir’s injury and late exclusion from the ODI team to the Caribbean, a team he was going to captain, has led to much hand wringing over players choosing to play in the IPL at the expense of international cricket. An editorial in the Indian Express defends Gambhir’s decision, and says more players will be forced to make these kinds of choices as the cricket calendar fills up.

As the cricket calendar gets ever more packed — and the BCCI is responsible for scheduling both the IPL and international series — players will be forced to take calls with more stark choices than the injured Gambhir has. And it’s not just about the money. Top sportspersons seek the best stages, those that are the most competitive, to establish their dominance. When in pursuit of longevity as competitors they pass some tournaments, the decision should be seen for its rationale — for an athlete’s choices define her greatness — and not as a pretext to pass judgment.

In the same paper, Nihal Koshie warns that Suresh Raina could be the next casualty of all the non-stop cricketing action

Since the start of the last edition of the IPL, Raina has been on the road constantly. He's boarded an estimated 72 flights in between featuring in 109 match days, including Tests, ODIs, T20 Internationals, IPL and the Champions League.

He is one of the fittest players in international cricket, but it is a miracle that he hasn't broken down over the past 12 months. It remains a wonder how Raina has escaped being a causality of the non-stop cricket circus, quite like the man he is replacing as skipper for the T20 and ODIs in the West Indies -Gautam Gambhir.

There were two acts of sportsmanship in a recent game between Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Chris Read walked when he thought he had been caught but the fielder had dropped the ball. Read, who was out of his crease, was then run out but Yorkshire captain Andrew Gale withdrew the appeal and let Read bat on. With so many dangers lurking just beyond the boundary, such men are the tonic cricket needs, says Ted Corbett in Sportstar Weekly.

At a time when cricket is in a lot of trouble it is good to see such ancient ideals as fair play being remembered and Gale, who is being considered as a Test batsman and a long way in the future as Test captain, has done his chances of a bright career no harm at all by this single action.

He has only been in charge at Headingley for one season but good reports of his leadership are everywhere and in a world in which change for its own sake seems to be the rule he ought to get himself measured for an England blazer soon.

Peter Roebuck, in the Hindu, says while the IPL is growing in stature globally, that should not mask significant setbacks in other parts of the game. The recent ructions in Sri Lanka and the West Indies, the lack of interest in domestic cricket in Bangladesh, and most of all the shortening of the South Africa-Australia Test series are all ominous signs for the global game, he writes.

But cricket is not in its right mind. Instead it has been taken over by apologists whose thoughts turn to the frenzied mob and the bottom line. None of them has sufficiently considered the bigger picture. Probably the game can be uplifted only by those currently consumed by its dazzle because they have its ear.

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.

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.

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?

Too much cricket is making it hard to tell the difference between one game and the next, and ruining the appeal of even the sport's biggest events, write Ravi Krishnan and Anushree Chandran in Mint.

The World Cup has 49 matches spread over 43 days. That’s 8 hours of cricket daily over a month—a tad less than the 51 matches played over 47 days in the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies. No sooner does it end, that the IPL begins. With 10 teams playing 74 matches over 51 days, that’s another 222 hours of cricket.

One place where you probably wouldn’t expect to find a game of cricket is Croatia, but, as Neha Puntambekar describes in vivid detail in the same paper, the Croats play cricket too.

Take cricket, for example. It too has had to adapt to the local rhythm. So the ground sits between twin vineyards and a World War II airstrip, old wine barrels double up as scoreboards, the game starts only after the day’s fifth cup of coffee, and a six means yet another ball lost in the neighbour’s vineyard. Yes, things are different, but that’s half the fun.

I’m here with my husband Vivek, a part of the Zagreb XI playing the local team for top honours in the Croatian league. Since everyone chips into the team effort, I am the official scorer. It’s not a bad job on a hot day. I sit under a tree with my score sheets and a cool drink, hoping for a hint of valley breeze.

Patrick Eagar, the ''godfather of cricket photography'', is hanging up his camera after four decades of stalking the boundary ropes looking for that perfect image. Most of the time he found it. Peter Hanlon takes a look back at Eagar’s career in the Sydney Morning Herald.

His chosen media - shooting for magazines and books rather than newspapers - have suited his gentler approach. ''A modern picture editor in a newspaper, all he wants is a really good celebration photograph to put on the front or back page, the bowler with his hands up and mouth open. You go to a Test match and end up with five days of celebration pictures, but you haven't got any narrative. What actually happened? Who took the catches? How?''

Studies of great players underscore his point. Eagar is pleased Steve Waugh likes the image of him batting at Lord's in 1989. It is the second Test, England is yet to capture Waugh's wicket, and here is why: right toes grounded behind the crease, knee on turf as left leg is thrust seemingly halfway down the pitch. Elbow points skyward, eyes are fixed on the ball beneath baggy green cap, bat is angled such that contact sends the ball to ground. Jack Russell awaits the chance that never came; their evening shadows accentuate an image of impenetrable batting perfection.

Cricketers playing their first Test or series at home are likely to have better results and more successful careers than those debuting away. Read this article in the Economist for more.

A strong debut seems to lead to a shinier career. Every additional ten runs scored in a debut series adds an extra five runs to a player’s career average. The effects of initial success are similar for bowlers. One possibility is that a good start builds confidence and experience that boosts future performance. A bad start, in contrast, is not easily forgiven: selectors appear to discard potentially high-ability players who had the misfortune to debut abroad.

Rizwan Ali of the Associated Press was at the first ever cricket match at the Asian Games, played between the women’s teams of China and Malaysia. Ali says the fans in the stadium were confused by the rules but China may just pick up a medal in the sport after India decided not to send a team to the Games.

The Chinese spectators were so unaware about the rules of the game that they waited for the announcements — made both in Chinese and English languages — before they cheered their team. They rarely broke that trend, even waiting for the announcement before putting their hands together during the seven boundaries scored in the home team’s innings and six wickets fell. The announcements of “One run to China” and “boundary for team China” were loud and clear. Somehow the cheers went off inexplicably after the 10th over when China was 54-3. “Probably the crowd has gone confused like me,” said one of the ever smiling volunteers, who did not want to be named.

Barney Ronay, in the Guardian, pays a unique tribute to Sachin Tendulkar - copying his signature wristy flick for a strike-rotating single while playing air-cricket, with an imaginary bat and ball.

Air-cricket is instinctive: I have a friend who finds himself automatically playing a perfect, straight-bat air-defensive on entering any crowded room. Plus, you can only ever really play air-cricket shots that have "belonged" to cricketers you have loved. I still have a pirouetting Alec Stewart air-pull. Plus, brilliantly, I now have an air Tendulkar. It's a signature shot too, the wristy flick to leg for a strike-rotating single. Hand me an umbrella. Give me a wooden spoon. This is what you'll get. I have no higher form of praise.

Sport has many examples of players being brutally frank about their feelings through tweets. Now, it seems, the cricket authorities may be considering formal regulation, perhaps even banning players altogether from networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Cricketers, above all, should know that if you tweet in haste, you are liable to repent at leisure, writes Chris McGrath in the Independent.

Now, it seems, the cricket authorities may be considering formal regulation, perhaps even banning players altogether from networks such as Twitter and Facebook. In celebrities, all this stuff has an additional, commercial dimension of self- promotion. But its abiding impetus remains the same as for everyone else: self-absorption. And it is too much to hope, clearly, that those who condense their mental processes into 140-character spasms can reliably comprehend the bigger picture – whether that relates to their own image, or that of their sport.

Asian cricketers have a long tradition of playing county cricket. Sachin Tendulkar was Yorkshire’s first overseas player. Farokh Engineer gave Lancashire his best years. Javed Miandad turned out for Glamorgan and Sussex. But these days fewer and fewer of them can be seen plying their trade on English soil. In the Guardian’s Sports Blog, Dileep Premachandran bemoans this trend and says Asian cricketers would be better served by eschewing the IPL in favour of the country game.

Forget the quality of the opposition. Forget the paltry crowds. Think instead of a variety of venues, and an itinerary that puts the emphasis on match fitness rather than looking like a Manpower model. One week, you could be batting on a placid pitch where boredom is the biggest threat, and the next week will find you struggling to put wood on leather as the ball swings and seams prodigiously in overcast conditions.

As a slow bowler, you could revel one week on a dry surface and then get belted the next as the ball moves little off the straight. It adds up to the kind of well-rounded education that every young professional needs.

Cricket and baseball have long had a complicated relationship. Fans of one have generally tended to dismiss fans of the other. But the two sports have been growing closer in recent times, and while baseball might owe its origins to cricket, it is now influencing how cricket is played, writes Scyld Berry in the Telegraph.

Australia's cricketers owed their primacy as the world's Test and one-day champions partly to their American baseball coach, Michael Young, who taught their fielders to corner the batsman like a hunting pack; and this summer he was seconded to Somerset.

A generation ago, fielders did not dive; now they swoop, fling, leap and pirouette, before firing the ball over the stumps with a flat throw of no more than one bounce. Baseball has brought athleticism and choreography to cricket.

When Ian Bell limped out to bat as the last man standing between Bangladesh and a first ever win over England, he joined a long line of injured warriors who have put their country before their body. Writing in the Guardian, Rob Bagchi runs through the list of those who have toughed it out and wonders whether such acts of courage are worth the risk in this age of endless cricket.

The appearance of an injured batsman is a rare enough sight in Test cricket but I struggle to remember even one example of it in one-day matches. So numerous and throwaway are the fixtures that you assume the results in the long term matter as little to the players as they do to the spectators and not worth the risk of participating while hurt.

Even in Tests, the potential hazards seem too great. Nasser Hussain sometimes gritted his teeth to complete a match when one of his frequently broken "poppadom" fingers suffered its latest injury but discretion usually resurfaced in time for him to sit out the subsequent games until they had properly healed.

Peter Roebuck, writing in the Hindu, says that with seasons overlapping increasingly these days, cricket needs to face the challenge of retaining its popularity in countries where soccer also flourishes. And the next World Cup presents an excellent opportunity to do that, he says.

Pride and Miraculous, two of my sons, went to the match and afterwards sent a message that said simply “Kaka!” As far as they were concerned, the chance to see him in the flesh was not to be missed. Could even Sachin Tendulkar have created remotely as much anticipation? And it was not a Test match.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Greg Baum looks at the governing bodies of cricket and football and says the ICC and learn a few things from FIFA.

Though it has made concerted efforts in recent years to expand its horizons, essentially cricket remains a game of the old Commonwealth. As such, the ICC's members, though undoubtedly diverse, are linked by history, by culture, by language. It is a game for which people care deeply, but other than on the Indian sub-continent does not stir up fervour as soccer does. You would think that, as such, it is a relatively easy sport to run.

Yet, somehow, the ICC regularly seems to be in turmoil. Perhaps because it is smaller than soccer, cricketing power - read: money - easily becomes concentrated in one place, and the rest of the world finds itself paying obeisance there. At present, it is India. Soccer has several power bases. Far from tearing the game apart, they appear to hold it in tension.

Cricket remains the most controversial of games. At times it is hard to remember that it is only a game and supposed to be fun. The Afridi controversy, the pitch invasion at the WACA and the argument over John Howard as a candidate to serve as the ICC’s deputy president in 2010 can make the followers of the game despair. Cricket needs to stop thinking defensively and cast itself as breeding ground for diversity and toleration, writes Peter Roebuck in the Hindu.

But, then, cricket stopped being merely a recreation long ago and instead became both an industry and an expression of national pride. Once its leading nations became independent it was only a matter of time before they began asserting themselves.

A layman may wonder what difference does the ball make, especially when the shape, size and weight remain the same, but let me assure that there's a massive difference in how different balls behave in the air and off the surface, writes Aakash Chopra in the Hindustan Times.

Let me begin with SG Test ball. It has a more pronounced seam, which stays that way for almost the entire length of the innings. It helps the quick bowlers release the ball in an upright seam position, as it doesn't wobble much after releasing, and helps the spinners grip the ball better and get more purchase off the wicket as the seam grips the surface well. The ball doesn't swing much when new, but starts swinging when one half becomes shinier than the other. As the shine stays longer, it enables quick bowlers get the swing and slower bowler the drift. The quicks who `release' the ball instead of hitting the deck are more successful with the SG ball as they can get it swing and seam the whole day. The Kookaburra ball, on the other hand, also has a pronounced seam, but it fades away quickly.

	It's the eyes. Those damn eyes! © AFP

As much as he loves a handy dark alley in which to hide, Luke Tagg draws the line at finding himself face to face with certain cricketers in the dead of night, with nobody but Dead Gran to hear him scream. Writing on boundaryrider.com, Tagg picks one cricketer from each Test playing nation who he would least like to meet in that dark alley. It is his fervent wish that you never meet them there either.

This one is a complete no-brainer. In case you haven't figured out why Viru may be a problem in a dark alley, allow me to elucidate: He'd hit you. With his bat. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again. He just wouldn't stop hitting you. If you died it would make no difference - he'd just keep hitting you and hitting you and hitting you and hitting you, until even your corpse begged for mercy.

Peter Roebuck observes the interesting trend of ‘switchovers’ – his moniker for batsmen who choose to bat with their wrong hands. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Roebuck notes the increasing number of left-hand batsmen who are natural right-handers and a few such as Sachin Tendulkar and Michael Clarke who went the other way, a phenomenon that heralds the need for a “coaching revolution”.

Consider the call-ups for the Perth Test match. Narsingh Deonarine bowled some tidy off-breaks with his right arm, and batted left-handed. In that regard, he was following in the footsteps of Shiv Chanderpaul and Chris Gayle. According to the Cricket Australia season guide, 12 of the 30 Caribbean cricketers named as candidates for the tour are switchovers. It is an extraordinary statistic demanding an explanation.

Cricket has always been regarded as a two-handed game but all the manuals insist on placing the stronger hand at the bottom of the willow. The mood is changing. Already Langer has broken ranks. He believes his mixed method helped him. Asked on ABC Radio how he'd advise a five-year-old child with a stronger right hand to bat, he replied, ''left-handed''.

Whatever their transgressions on the field, invariably it is their opponents who end up paying a price. Somehow or the other, teams playing against the Aussies seem to invite the match referee’s wrath, writes Anil Kumble in the Hindu.

In the Delhi Test against us, my last, the one that earned Gautam Gambhir a ban for having a go at Watson, the same umpire and the match referee were officiating. At that time, the umpire Billy Bowden didn’t see it fit to report Simon Katich who had later obstructed Gautam and the match referee Chris Broad too didn’t bother to act on his own or follow it up with the onfield umpires even though it was very much evident on TV. And as on that occasion, the provocateurs got away in Perth too, with Haddin and Johnson receiving minor reprimands. There doesn’t seem to be any punishment forthcoming for someone who provokes and that to me is against the principles of natural justice.

The much argued-over concept has relevance in the context of a long and rich history that informs the game, argues Robert Griffiths, QC, in the Times.

The word “spirit” is key. It connotes more than a formalistic application of laws. It conjures up more than the playing of a game in accordance with its rules. It extends to not only how a game is played, but the context of the game itself.

The International Cricket Council will not be faulted if they change and call themselves the Indian Cricket Council, because it has now come to pass where the ICC has a penchant to dance to the tune of the BCCI, says an editorial in Sri Lanka's Sunday Observer.

The ICC should have had the backbone to stand straight and tell the guys who were against it, that they are the ones running the game and calling the shots and that the Referral System stays and be played accordingly. But what did the ICC do.? They were as meek as lambs and without a murmur bent backwards to please the cricketers who objected to that system, like they did during the Australia- India series when the Indians threatened to pull out of the series if action was taken against Harbhajan Singh.

	"Imagine if they changed the ruling and someone was killed" © Getty Images

Following up to Sir Viv Richards' interview with the Observer yesterday, in which the legend lamented the wearing of helmets and body armour and the effect it has on some modern batsmen, Alan Tyers writes on Cricket365.com that it's hard to see how helmets could now be outlawed. You can't un-invent technology, and it's inconceivable that the ICC could forbid the wearing of something that could save a batsman's life, he says.

Of course, Sir Viv, who famously never wore a helmet himself, has got more right to speak than almost anyone else alive about the matter. But it must have made batting a bit easier, knowing that you had Andy Roberts, Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner et al on your side - not just because you didn't have to face them - but because you knew that they could return with interest any punishment that their Windies batting colleagues received. Maybe if he'd had to play for England in the 1980s against the West Indies he might have considered, even for a second, the merits of the lid.

Malcolm Conn says in the Australian the World Cup is still too long and remains cluttered with meaningless matches.

The tedious format of the International Cricket Council's showpiece may have been changed and reduced by a week but the schedule released for 2011 in the subcontinent is another damning example of television ruling sport. While the missionary zeal of opening the tournament to lesser nations may have been well-meant in the comfortably paced, almost amateur 1970s, the hectic nature of modern international cricket has made matches against the minnows irrelevant.

Conn also writes about Jane McGrath Day, which will be held during the Sydney Test to raise money for breast cancer care.

Mike Atherton doesn't think cricket occupies a higher moral plane to other games. Nothing in its history suggests that it does. In his column in the Times, Atherton attempts to articulate what the game means to him, and begins by describing two images that first come to mind.

When Patrick Eagar was on a “booze cruise” during the tour to the West Indies in 1974, he passed Accra beach, Barbados, as the sun was setting and saw a game being played with, as it turned out, a young Gordon Greenidge.

The other image is of three urchins playing a game of street cricket in Mumps, Oldham, with a dustbin for the wicket and the narrow, cobbled street for a pitch. It suggests that cricket was once, more so than it is now, an essential part of the fabric of the British way of life.

The ICC Champions Trophy had its fair share of incidents which re-opened the debate on fairplay and the Spirit of the Game. Mike Atherton suggested that the preamble to the Laws of Cricket is superfluous. John Woodcock feels that it may need rewriting and Simon Barnes that cricketers are in need of clarification about the game’s moral code. Christopher Martin-Jenkins, writing in the Times, says it is the law in question that needs tweaking, not the preamble, or the spirit behind it.

Once an umpire feels that a few pointed comments have become an attempt to undermine a batsman’s concentration, he is provided with a clear course of action. The preamble, no less clear and concise, also leaves little room for doubt about what is and is not acceptable. It is true that it is pretentious in referring to the game’s “unique” appeal because its beauty is in the eye of the beholder and not everyone reveres it. Nor is cricket different to any other sport in needing honourable conduct as well as a set of regulations.

As experts weigh in on Mitchell Johnson's bowling woes Harsha Bhogle, in the Indian Express, recalls a comment made by Wasim Akram. According to the fast-bowling legend, bowlers nowadays are pure lazy and are happy with whatever they are being given on a platter. Troy Cooley, who was credited as the mastermind behind England's devastating use of reverse swing during their 2-1 series triumph in the 2005 Ashes, has been under the scanner as he attempts to get Johnson back to his best. But how much can one man do, asks Bhogle.

Good cricketers become great when they hone their instinct, when they study the opposition they have to compete against rather than wait for notes or video clips to be handed to them. And that is why this is not Cooley's test but Johnson's test.

It has been a hundred years of cricket's governing body. Commemorating a century if the ICC , Tehelka, the Indian weekly magazine, has attempted to deal with a history which is encyclopaedic, a history that generates an intense passion.

Despite 100 years of a tumultuous journey, cricket still thrills millions, says ICC president David Morgan looking back on the century that shaped international cricket.

Cricket’s survival lies in its social meaning, not business opportunities, says Brian Stoddart, author of Saturday Afternoon Fever. The writer believes the men who matter should cut some of the top-tier games and focus on local clubs.

Tradition is a powerful force in most cultures and protecting tradition in cricket is important in order to guarantee it a future. Most tours now, however, do little to stimulate local interest. Ashes tours of old, in both England and Australia, had a series of state and county matches that were well-attended and gave good exposure to a wider range of players. They attracted more people to matches at cheaper prices. Tradition comes at a premium these days – a ticket to a day at the Lords test now costs more than $100. We need to have more people watching at lower prices if cricket is to remain a relevant and accessible sport.

In the same edition former ICC president Ehsan Mani says the IPL and Twenty20 cricket are changing how the game does business. It is a case of overkilling the golden goose?

MCC president Tony Lewis asks, is there place for the game's original custodians in the Twenty20 world of today?

Adam Chadwick, curator of the MCC musuem, says the history of the gentleman’s game must be compiled and chronicled.

Tehelka's editor Tarun J Tejpal says cricket today reflects the frenetic, fleeting nature of our times.

It is tight, tinselly and explosive – designed, in an age of hype, marketing and advertising, for television. In an age devastated by the whims of the mythic audience — the collective spectator — it pursues the spirit of entertainment above the spirit of excellence and contest. The bowler is no longer Hadlee or Holding. He is just a bunny boy who sets up the sixers that the helmeted batsmen can send flying into stands of screaming fans. In an age leached of all centralities, in which 24-hour news has made everything a blur, it caresses at no memory, merely fuels desire. Millions of my generation can recall, 30 years later, every great innings of Sunny Gavaskar, every great spell of Bedi and Chandra. Not one of today’s will be able to tell you what happened in the match between India and Australia month before last.

There are still plenty of people to fight back and say Test cricket is a much better game than any of the shorter formats, but that is just a matter of opinion, says Simon Barnes in the Australian. There is no ducking the matter - Test cricket is under threat. Its decline has begun. Perhaps extinction is inevitable.

Let's strive for a little objectivity. What does Test cricket have that the shorter forms don't? Tests last longer. A Test series is the stuff not of an afternoon but an entire summer. Its plot lines are longer and more intricate. The examination of character is more leisurely and more searching. Test cricket asks more questions. It brings us more duels.

In an interview to Sharda Ugra of India Today, the ICC president David Morgan talks about various issues regarding the future of cricket - the primacy of Test cricket in the face of Twenty20, the changes mooted to spice up Tests, the survival of the 50-over format and the Champions Trophy, plus the prospect of more freelance players in the T20 leagues.

Let me take you back to India's last tour in the UK in 2007. There were seven ODIs and at the Oval, India were 2-3 down and India won a marvelous match at the oval on a beautiful sunny day and the ground was packed. It was 3-3 and there were Indians throughout the UK who wanted to buy tickets to the last match a few days later here. And for anybody to say that fifty over cricket is finished internationally, they only have to look back to that seven-match series. It was electric, wonderful, skilful, and of course it provided a whole day's entertainment as opposed to requiring two T20 matches to provide the same duration of entertainment.

Harsha Bhogle, who has gone from radio to television commentary, fears commerce is driving us towards cricket becoming that little something we see between advertising. He admits that advertisements pay for his livelihood yet believes we are reaching a stage where administrators, as custodians, need to draw a balance between propagating sport and selling it. Read on in the Indian Express.

If we price the product so high that the buyer has no choice but to recover his cost with advertising at every opportunity, we run the risk of diminishing the spectacle of sport for those that follow it. We cannot make the watching of sport clinical when it is meant to be enjoyable. So here is a debate that is crying out to be heard; one forum for people who sell rights, for those that buy them and for people who watch the final product.

In the Times, Adam Gilchrist talks about his celebrated habit of 'walking' and its orgins. Gilchrist plays hard, is fond of a sledge, speaks bluntly - but he has had this moral code since childhood that it is wrong to dupe the umpire, writes Patrick Kidd.

"Back in Australia in a second XI game for New South Wales, I got a thin edge, didn't walk and went on to make a hundred. I felt so bad afterwards that I went to apologise to the bowler, who was a 38-year-old veteran. He said, ‘Don't worry, this game obviously means more to you than it does to me.' And I thought, ‘Yeah, but still. At what cost?'” From that point, he decided he would always walk if he had hit the ball.

Cricket is growing increasingly lucrative, and the players don't seem to mind it, despite the adverse impact on Test cricket and the danger of dwindling national loyalties, writes Greg Baum in the Age.

Gayle helped to popularise T20 cricket, then progressively to refine it. The Bash for Cash is the latest and most exciting form yet, known as One-one, or — imaginatively — O1. "One ball each," explained Gayle. "Minimalisation to the max. Takes out all the tedium and dreariness. Game's over in no time. The kids love it." Symonds loved it; all he ever wanted to be growing up was a kid. Brett Lee was not so sure: he bowled a no-ball and went out in the first round.

Graeme Pollock, one of the finest left-hand batsmen the game has ever produced, believes that cricket has become too financial. Speaking to the Independent's Peter Bills from his home in Johannesburg, Pollock says he's not one for Twenty20 and says 50-over cricket changed Test cricket because players started hitting over the top.

Does Pollock still like just watching cricket, surely one of the great pleasures of life for the sporting male? His reply surprises me. "I don't get the same pleasure. Cricket has become far too financial and I am not a 20 overs a game guy. If it wasn't for the big money, I'd be surprised if any of the guys said they enjoyed 20/20.

"It's a huge money making thing but it's just a slog and it's out of proportion to the game itself. I was talking to Barry Richards about it and he said, why not just have a bowling machine and see who can hit the ball the furthest."

In the Hindu, S Dinakar wonders whether the specialist wicketkeepers are a dying breed and if the modern-day game places too much importance on depth in batting.

Someone like Bhagwat Chandrasekar, a freakish legspinner, posed searching questions to ’keepers. Farokh Engineer (66 catches and 16 stumpings in 46 Tests) — an aggressive batsman and a flashy ’keeper — says, “Nine out of ten times, Chandra did not realise which way the ball would spin. Chandra really gave it a rip. His wrist would almost turn around completely. “Keeping to him called for split second coordination. His quicker delivery was really quick. The one that darted through the leg side could provide a stumping opportunity. You had to be quick and alert.”

With Rahul Dravid in world-record catching territory, Andrew Stevenson, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, takes a look at the worth of the slips.

Some reckon it looks as easy as shelling peas. You stand in the slips, the ball comes your way, you generally don't have to move, you make the catch and the batsman begins the long, slow march to the dressing room. While few who've ever stood in a slips cordon for a Test match would rate it easy, Cricket Australia fielding coach Mike Young has the bar up much, much higher. "I truly believe slips catching in Test cricket, mentally, is the hardest thing I've ever seen in sport, when you consider you're out there all day and that you've got to be ready every ball.”

	The verdict's out on referrals © Getty Images

The ICC is now discovering that the umpire referral system, thought it had merit, isn’t the solution to every moment of discontent in the game. The world criticised them for not using technology and now that they are, they are being criticised for everything that comes along with it.

Speaking of outcries against the system, the extraordinary language used by a newspaper in New Zealand against the Indian manager, calling him a 'goon' is certainly unacceptable,

These are two issues Harsha Bhogle focusses on, in his column in the Indian Express.

I don’t think anyone was referring to the last meaning but to call anyone a thug or a gangster is not on. It reminds me of the words used by visiting journalists against Indian umpires from the days when there were no replays. It shouldn’t have been acceptable then and it cannot be acceptable now. Have we gone beyond disagreeing with people without calling them names?

Staying with the referral system, to see the umpire’s decision - and the reaction of 25,000 fans - overturned, negates the excitement and expectation of the game, points out Arthur Turner in Sport24.com.

The excuse that that technology is not always foolproof must be dispelled once and for all. If the ICC wants to make use of technology they must go all the way with it, if not, rather abandon it. This quasi approach will not work and is only complicating matters further.

Mihir Bose, the BBC's sports editor, writes in his blog that the ICC never has, and never will, have the powers to come up with a solution, let alone impose it. While the world waited to hear how the cricket's governing body would deal with the security threat posed by sport being targeted for the first time since the Munich Olympics in 1972, the ICC told us where the next Champions Trophy, a 50-over tournament that many feel has outlived its usefulness, will be held. The trio that effectively run cricket, says Bose, is India, Australia and South Africa. But India, the economic powerhouse, needs to show it can live up to universally accepted international standards in terms of timing, location and security arrangements.

WV Raman writes in his column for Sportstar that the decline in the quality of pitches can contribute to the decline of cricket. The pitch is an integral part of the game, says the former Indian batsman, and as such the quality of pitches needs to be good if a game of cricket has to provide real entertainment to the public.

There is some merit in the ICC wanting pitches across the world to be reasonably similar but I believe the idea behind this is to eradicate under-prepared pitches that the countries in the sub-continent sometimes dish out for Test matches. However, there is still room for every nation to retain its uniqueness when it comes to the nature of pitches that international matches are played on.