In the Hindu, K Gopinathan recalls snapping a photo of Richard Hadlee taking his record-breaking 374th Test wicket at Bangalore in 1988.

“Thank you for capturing the special moment,” Hadlee wrote on the photograph. Then Kuggeleijn rushed into the room saying he too wanted a signed photograph.

Twenty-five years later, I met Sir Richard at Friday's press conference. The great man remembered. “Yes,” he said, “You got it from a top angle, it has become history.”

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.

Jonathan Liew, a member of the Daily Telegraph, is put on Stuart Broad's diet for a few days, and tells the tale. The diet is great if you are a fast bowler, he says, or if you like the taste of pureed grass ...

The first delivery arrives in a handsome hessian box. Soulmate give you three meals and two snacks per day, to be eaten roughly three hours apart. In total, this provides about 2,000 calories, although this can vary from diner to diner. Cyclist Ed Clancy, for example, will receive about twice as much. Eagerly, I dig in. The mango and blueberry yoatie – oats smothered in yogurt – is fine; the chicken and peanut salad is particularly impressive, the meat fresh, tender and utterly lean. A pot of nuts, seeds and raisins is less enjoyable – generally, I try not to eat anything you could buy in a pet shop ...

In a review of Imran Khan's autobiographical book Pakistan, A Personal History, the Economist says that the impression left for the reader is of a man who is likeable and sincere, but not much gifted at understanding the motivations and plans of those around him.

But even by his own record, Mr Khan comes across as naive, short on the cunning displayed by Pakistan’s brilliantly awful politicians, who milk funds from the state to keep control of their regional fiefs. More important, he still looks unable to organise. He talks grandly in his book of Pakistan’s desperate lack of strong institutions, arguing that these are what made Western countries flourish. Yet judge by how his own party has failed to develop over the years, and Mr Khan seems to have little gift for building any structure that goes beyond his personal brand.

Sachin Tendulkar recently moved into a new house. The occassion prompted plenty of media coverage and involved both the media and fans camping outside his apartment building in the hopes of a sound bite or a glimpse. Among Tendulkar’s new neighbhours is the writer Dilip D’souza, who runs his eye over the proceedings in Caravan.

“Sachin is God”, reads the T-shirt that many fans surprisingly wear. One, muscles rippling beneath the words, actually had two women with him as he craned his neck to see what he could see. Fifteen minutes he was there—I know because I waited too, for my daughter’s school bus—as one woman spoke on her phone and the other filed her nails. Just a building, I couldn’t help saying as I walked past, just a man. The nail-filer flashed a smile no less condescending than a truck driver’s had been, months earlier. “Yes, but this is Sachin’s biggest fan!” She raised her voice enough that Tendulkar’s security guard—another new man—turned to look: “The BIGGEST!” Yes, but what was this biggest fan doing? He stood immobile, immovable, uncannily like a giant praying mantis clothed in white and suffering a neck problem.

The recent one-day series between England and India in India drew surprisingly sparse crowds, especially for the last two games. The site of half-empty stadiums in Mumbai and Kolkata suggest that perhaps there is a saturation point for cricket in the country and that the principle of if you play them, they will come, no longer holds true. In the Hindustan Times, Pradeep Magazine says the fans are sending a clear message to the game’s administrators.

One can’t remember in recent living memory seeing stadiums half-empty in a one-day international. To see vast empty spaces in Wankhede and then Eden Gardens only means that the overkill of cricket is having its effect and the spectators are finally saying enough is enough

Rohit Mahajan visits Virender Sehwag's newly opened school, the Sehwag International School, in a village in the northern state of Haryana. Mahajan writes in Outlook that the campus is spiffy - "23 acres of paradise children could be residents of if their parents can pay Rs 2 lakh (around $4100) every year" - but the school has had to deal with villagers who are angry as they feel the land for the school was leased out at less than market rate.

The village has leased 23 acres to Sehwag’s Krishna Drishti Educational Society (KDES) for Rs 51,000 a year, for 33 years, with an yearly increase of 5 per cent. When just 11 acres of the same land was leased to a village resident after an auction, it brought in Rs 94,000. But then, the MoU between KDES and the village panchayat stipulates that five per cent of seats would be reserved for children from Shilani Kesho, and that they’d be exempt from paying tuition fees, admission fees or any school funds. Sehwag, inaugurating SISJ on October 9, raised the student quota to eight per cent.

Ian Thornton, in the Guardian, writes about the Compton Cricket Club which hails from one of the most deprived areas of Los Angeles and counts ex-gang members and even officers from the LAPD among its ranks.

The story of the Compton cricket club is a fascinating tale, and one the club hopes to tell soon through a book and a film. The story started when British film producer Katy Haber moved to Los Angeles in the early 70s to work with Sam Peckinpah. Haber counts Straw Dogs with Peckinpah and Blade Runner with Ridley Scott among her numerous production credits. In 1995, she founded the Compton cricket club's forerunners, the LA Krickets, with her friend Ted Hayes. The Krickets were a group of homeless young men, skirting the edges of crime and all that crime brings. Hayes is a famed LA social activist who started the Dome Village homeless community in the city's downtown core, and whose primary address at one point was Marvin Gaye's back garden.

In the same newspaper, Barney Ronay writes of the experience of watching The Titans of Cricket event at the O2 arena in London which involved several big names in the game.

Pritish Nandy, writing in the Mumbai Mirror, says, as brilliant as Sachin Tendulkar is, he doesn't deserve a Bharat Ratna. Nor can we take away Shoaib Akhtar's right to be heard, no matter how outrageous his views.

A not exactly accurate quote about Sachin attributed to him by some sections of the media ensured that his book launch in Mumbai never happened. Two political parties took credit for forcing the cancellation. The CCI gave some feeble excuse. This is increasingly becoming the tragedy of today’s India. There’s simply too much of free floating outrage — that politics finally exploits.

Even if Shoaib was critical of Sachin’s ability to play fast bowling or win a match, I would have loved to hear why. It’s an interesting point of view and every point of view has a right to be heard, engaged. If we disagree with Shoaib, as I am sure many of us do, we could have argued with him, disproved him. In any case, cricket history doesn’t bear Shoaib out.

The Independent's Brian Viner caught up with Makhaya Ntini and Glenn McGrath at the Archbishop Tenison's School in Canterbury, while Andy Roberts and other fast-bowling greats had a bit of a bowl against the pupils. More here.

With a casual half-stride, the only kind of run-up of which he remains capable, Andy Roberts zipped a plastic ball off the tarmac with enough speed and accuracy to clatter two of the three plastic stumps behind a 14-year-old still in the process of playing his stylish forward-defensive prod. Big gleaming grins signalled the appreciation of the watching Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose ...

" ... it bloody kills me [McGrath] to say it, but I can't see too many teams getting close to England. They've got a great bowling attack, and in the last [Ashes] series our boys [Australia] just weren't doing the basics well, weren't landing two balls in the same spot. But when you lose seven senior players in a two-year period, that would destroy most teams ... " Looking slightly less far ahead, I asked McGrath whether he was pleased to be going to that evening's dinner. "Yeah, it's great to get the intelligent players together," he said. I told him that I'd attended the batting version in 2008. "That," he said, po-faced, "would have been pretty dull."

It's been 25 years since the second tied Test was played in Chennai featuring India and Australia. Key players in that Test look back on that game. More from the Hindu.

“We could have won it; we could have lost it. At the end, it was a fair result,” says Ravi Shastri, who stood devastated as last man Maninder Singh fell leg-before to Greg Matthews. Though both the Indians still believe that there was nick, umpire V. Vikramraju thinks otherwise.

Osman Samiuddin, writing in the National, looks back on the magic that was once cricket in Sharjah, as the venue prepares to make a comeback on the global stage.

When Abdulrahman Bukhatir was studying in Karachi and falling in love with the game, his hero was Hanif [Mohammad]. So when he subsequently returned to the Emirates, Bukhatir naturally patronised the game among the growing population of subcontinent expatriates in numerous, smaller ways until, in 1981, came the big moment ...

Bukhatir took [Asif] Iqbal to a vast plot of land, empty of life but full of sand. It was October. "Bring me two teams," Bukhatir told Iqbal, "and everything will be up and running for March ..." On that land near the Sharjah Club ... grass was grown and an all-weather synthetic surface fixed on top of the usual cement turf. Scaffolding was set up for spectators. They were not expecting many. Iqbal used his network to pull in, essentially, the entire first teams of India and Pakistan: the Sunil Gavaskar XI and the Javed Miandad XI. On April 3, 1981 everything was ready. Nearly 8,000 came ...

"It is a very tough individual sport within a team game and I love watching it," says All Blacks star Conrad Smith, who played cricket right till he started university. Wynne Gray in the New Zealand Herald finds out more.

"I know enough about cricket to understand it is a cruel sport. I would never judge anyone who plays it. The mind games in that sport are cruel ... as a batsman you get one chance. In rugby if you make a hash of something you get a chance at redemption."

Tom Alter, writing for Firstpost.com, looks back on Farokh Engineer's career. Engineer, he says, still has the swagger, the bravado and enthusiasm with which he played the great game back in the old days.

He was light-years ahead of his time; he had style – that swaggered, buttons open, collar up style – long before Tong Greig and Viv Richards made it popular. He did an ad campaign – Brylcream, before Dhoni was born, he batted with complete abandon before even the one-day game had been dreamed of in India. He made England his playing home when just to get to England was a miracle – he played for India while playing very little domestic cricket, in the era where to play Ranji Trophy was the rule and when he stumped someone, especially if it was Alan Knott, he led the whole stadium know of his magic.

Cricket currently represents the most fascinating and complex, given its three formats, laboratory for future industrial action, writes Osman Samiuddin in the National. And gradually, the increasing tension between owners and workers seems unavoidable, and maybe growing industrial action, too, and feels, Osman writes, queasily like an inevitability.

The scene is changing. Money, and lots of it, is flooding in, unevenly and mostly to privately-owned clubs in Twenty20 leagues in different countries rather than to national boards.Individuals, such as Andrew Symonds, Chris Gayle and Lasith Malinga, recognise the change and are beginning to prioritise lucrative club deals over national representation.

A recent Fica survey puts this trend into numbers. Nearly a third of the players questioned said they would retire from international cricket prematurely to pursue careers with club-based leagues such as the Indian Premier League (IPL); 40 per cent said that given the higher pay in such leagues they could foresee a day where obligations to leagues could take priority over obligation to national boards.

Hadley Freeman, writing in the Daily Guardian, has a tongue in cheek look at what's come over Shane Warne these days.

Leaving aside the fact that he appears to have morphed from the chubby, frosted-tip rogue that he was for several decades into Dale Winton's blond brother, all with the help of nothing other than the Estée Lauder moisturisers his girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley happens to shill for, it's the man himself that concerns me ...

I have been informed by the Guardian's lawyers that I am not allowed to talk about the eyeliner and Botox that Shane clearly is not using. I am, however, allowed to wonder where a man even buys a tan sweater vest such as the one Shane wore for his little golf game. Surely, I thought, looking at his matching tan trousers, his humiliation must now be complete. And then, proving that in the celebrity world of self-abasement there really is no such thing as "bottoming out", Shane started tweeting Ping Pong, otherwise known as Elizabeth Hurley's parrot.

Gergo Racz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says cricket isn’t as popular among the Hungarian youth as football, water polo or handball, but the Hungary cricket league has been making headway over the years.

[Hungary] aims to become an affiliate member of the International Cricket Council in 2012. The Hungary cricket league has been in existence since 2007, with seven teams and about 150 adult players. There’s also a national squad, where two of the players are women.

Jacqueline Smith, writing in the New Zealand Herald, says Tangiwai, a movie named after the country's biggest rail disaster, is as much the tale of how cricketer Bob Blair braved the news of his fiancee Nerissa Love's death to bat for his team in a Test against South Africa.

He eventually got her letter, posted from Taihape - the final chapter in their tragic love story. She would meet him off the boat and they would be married, she wrote. But first, he needed to concentrate on hitting a six for his country ...

It was Christmas Eve, 1953. With 151 dead, many more injured, and a lump in the back of the throat of the nation that would last for generations, the site was renamed Tangiwai, or river of tears.

On the occasion of the 79th anniversary of Hedley Verity's 10 for 10 against Nottinghamshire, Andy Bull writes that while 79-year anniversary seems an odd one to mark, a story like Verity's needs only the slenderest of excuses to be retold. It is likely it will never be beaten and carves his name in the record books as immutably as upon his grave. More from the Guardian.

Nobody had a better record against Don Bradman than Verity, who dismissed him eight times in 17 Tests. "With Hedley I am never sure," said The Don. "You see, there was no breaking point with him." There can be no higher compliment to a cricketer than that.

One question became a recurring theme, for Amol Rajan, while he doing research for his book Twirlymen- The Unlikely History of Cricket’s Greatest Spin Bowlers - why do Indians like to spin? How can it be that one nation produces no bowlers of genuinely express pace, but a conveyor belt of spinners of the calibre of Gupte, Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Prasanna, Venkataraghavan, Kumble, and Harbhajan, and all in the space of a few years? Here's more in the Open.

It is a complex interplay between cultural and natural factors. But above all, it is because the very essence of spin bowling is victory by deceptive means—and the intellectual agility at the core of that is in turn the very essence of Indian civilisation.

When the ICC pulled the plug on the use of runners last week, a unique cricketing character
breathed his last writes Sandeep Dwivedi in the Indian Express. A modest man who loved to stay in the background, the ‘third batsman’ brought joy, tears and hearty laughs to the cricket
field. Thanks for the memories, says the author.

Whatever said and done, the runner sure did add another dimension to the game, making cricket’s narrative all the more richer. He had to judge the power of his batsman’s shot, making a split second decision on whether to take the single or not. The batsman banked on the runner to give optimum value to his strokes. Like in life as in sport, when a man’s fortunes depend on someone else, drama isn’t too far from the scene.

In the same newspaper, Siddhartha Sharma looks at some classic cases in cricket history featuring runners. (And here's our own XI of best runner stories).

In the Sportstar Ted Corbett relives the time when men like John Arlott, Brian Johnstone, Alan McGilvray and Don Mosey were giving cricket its worth, explaining the game to the uninitiated, and offering as fair a verdict on its rights and wrongs as is humanly possible.

It was 1948, the year of a severe thrashing by one of the greatest Australian teams that I became fascinated by the descriptive power of the men without pictures, reporters who clearly loved every minute of what I realised must be an ideal life telling anyone who would listen just what was happening in the wonderful world of sport.

I can remember their phrases to this day. “His name is Fred Titmus and he is on his way to the wicket, marching like at a good pace like a light infantryman, which is only appropriate since he is on leave from his Army unit.” That is just one line from the Arlott book of thrilling words.

He claims he's always been "crap" at cricket, but knows exactly what makes cricketers desirable. Hollywood actor Hugh Grant, who participated in a charity cricket game last week, explains his relationship with cricket to George Parker in the Financial Times.

“I did play a few times for the first XI at school, but I disgraced the side,” he says. “I pretended to bat but couldn’t. I dropped catches – that was my speciality."

He grew up in an era when solid English batsmen like John Edrich and Geoff Boycott would grind out the runs, almost taking root in the dusty soil as they scrapped and prodded their way to big scores. Didn’t he find all that a bit boring? “No, I rather liked that,” he sighs.

The Times of India draws up their list of list of players who can either strum a guitar or ride the octave with the same felicity as essaying a cover drive or hurling a bouncer.

Brett Lee The Australian fast bowler is all set to release his first single with his new rock band, White Shoe Theory. Earlier the Kings XI Punjab player was part of the band, Six & Out, that also included his brother Shane. Lee can play both the bass and acoustic guitar and loves to jam with offie Jason Krejza. During the 2006 ICC Champions Trophy, he also recorded a duet with the legendary Asha Bhosle, “You’re the one For me”. It peaked at No 2 on the charts.

Verdict
Two stars out of five.

Graeme Swann The pugnacious 32-year-old offbreak bowler is the lead singer of a rather erotically named Nottingham-based band, Dr Comfort and the Lurid Revelations.

Verdict
Let us go by what fellow band member, former Nottinghamshire spinner Andy Afford, says about Swann: 60% frontman and 40% singer.

Bat-maker James Laver of Laver & Wood talks extensively to PakPassion.net about how the timber's grain effects a bat's lifespan, the Mongoose and, among other things, how picky Sanath Jayasuriya could be when it comes to his bats.

Essentially it comes down to the fact that tightly grained bats (12 or more) perform better initially but do not last as long. Bats with what we refer to as the optimum number (7 to 10) last much longer. This is important for our bats as they are known to continually improve over time. Obviously, the longer a bat lasts, the more opportunity it has to develop. Therefore tightly grained clefts may perform well to begin with but after half a season or so bats with fewer grains will begin to out-perform them.

...One of the pickiest was certainly Sanath Jayasuriya. I made a bat for him in 1998, which lasted him roughly four hours and 200 runs! Ever since then he was insistent on making every bat I made for him as close as possible to that specific one. It was difficult at times to get the bats identical but I enjoyed the challenge.

The world's oldest surviving first-class cricketer, Cyril Perkins, is still smiling at the age of 100, says Simon Briggs, writing in the Daily Telegraph.

Perkins was a left-arm spinner, and a handy one at that. “I remember watching him bowl,” says my Telegraph colleague Simon Parry-Crooke, who was an aspiring leftie in the Seventies, “and he had this incredible control: he could just drop the ball on a handkerchief.”

Uday Gharat became an official scorer at the Mumbai Cricket Association during the 1990-91 season and since then has recorded over two hundred Indian domestic games, as well as 30 ODIs and 9 Tests. Gharat became a scorer by accident. As a cashier at the Bank of Baroda, he was unable to establish a regular place in bank’s cricket team and turned to scoring to stay involved. In the Indian Express, Bharat Sundaresan explores how technology has changed Gharat's trade.

Having devoted a major part of his last 22 years to cricket scoring, Gharat now also conducts annual courses for those aiming to follow his path at the Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA). And while insisting that he has never once committed an error during his illustrious scoring career even during the pre-laptop era, he can’t help but reiterate the comfort that technology has brought about in his area of expertise. “These days, even a mistake can be revoked by a single click,” he says.

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."

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.

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."

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.

Bharat Sundaresan, writing in the Indian Express, catches up with Sri Lanka’s video analyst Sanath Jayasundara and gives us a peek into what Jayasundara’s job is all about.

On the face of it, Jayasundara’s is a highly enviable job. Not only does he have the vantage point in the entire stadium—the dressing-room—he also gets to mingle with the cricketers. But Jayasundara will tell you it’s no cushy vocation. It requires immense concentration, along with considerable knowledge of intricacies of the game. More often than not, he is the first to start his day and the last to wind up. And he is easily the busiest man in the camp, setting up cameras at the practice grounds or sitting in meetings with batsmen and bowlers.

“During a match, I am with peering into my laptop from the first ball to the last. I am often oblivious to the atmosphere around me as I have to capture every delivery in detail. My work continues even after the match is over and I get to celebrate a win only much later in the night,” Jayasundara says.

From writing an essay in the sixth grade inspired by Pakistan's semi-final loss in the 1987 World Cup, to covering Pakistan cricket, Osman Samiuddin, writing in the magazine Tehelka, tracks how cricket became more than just a sport to him.

Cricket became a commitment but also a guided tour of the country, a way of getting on the inside. I wasn’t a foreigner entirely, or particularly rootless. I was very familiar with Pakistan, but not fully a part of it, like a friend perhaps, at a family function. What folk are like, how the country runs, how things get done; the interaction between those who run and who do the running; power structures; how the young and old deal with each other, the wheels on which bureaucracy moves; ethnic, sectarian faultlines; urban and rural ones too; broader ones between conservatism and liberalism; class divides, corruption, patronage, nepotism and the personal connection.

Andrew Alderson from the New Zealand Herald visits the MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai and looks at how the school has groomed generations of pace bowlers to represent India and others in international cricket, helped in no small measure by the presence of former Australia fast bowler Dennis Lillee.

The humble surrounds and spartan accommodation embody the school's ethos that excellence in fast bowling is generated from thorough preparation, hunger and toil. The school is based on a site no bigger than a large playground or about a quarter of the size of a large test match ground like Eden Gardens in Kolkata.

Now 61, Lillee visits the school around three times a year for a fortnight at a time, generally in February, June and September. His reputation as a classical fast bowler can cloud the fact he is also an astute coach fascinated by the minutiae of the art of swinging and seaming five-and-a-half ounces of leather.

On his website, Adam Hollioake says modern sport is too policed by its officials, modern players too often tow the party line, and that this state of affairs is also because of the modern media.

Example 1998 Dhaka ICC trophy match vs South Africa, I suffered a massive loss of fluid and almost wound up dead. Due to this I experienced massive dizziness and outer body experiences. When asked to describe it by the media, I could have said the party line, “Yes it was tough but that’s what playing for your country is all about” instead I chose a little more risqué approach and came out with a throw away very tongue in cheek comment about feeling like I was as high as a kite. Everyone in the room knew what I meant (they weren’t idiots) but one particular moron went away and I ended up on the front page ‘Adam Hollioake in Drug Scandal”. I mean please! Yes you got your headline well done. But now you have ruined it for everyone. Now I will give you cliché nonsense. Why, well because professional sport brings its own pressures and we don’t need to be bringing more upon ourselves.

Angus Fraser, in the Independent, recounts instances of players venting their anger, the consequences of which include broken windows, verbal volleys and thrown bats. This, after what Ricky Ponting did after his run-out against Zimbabwe.

Mike Atherton was usually quite controlled after getting out but on one occasion, after a particularly poor decision in a Test in Port Elizabeth, his temper got the better of him. It was England's 1995-96 tour of South Africa and the players were constantly weighed to gauge how much fluid we should take after a long period in the field. Because of this, a set of scales were always by the dressing room door.

We could tell Atherton wasn't happy as he walked into the changing room and moments later we heard a loud crash and twang. We knew the scales had copped the brunt of his frustration. After a couple of minutes the silence was broken by a slightly embarrassed request call to Wayne Morten, the England physiotherapist. "Wayne, Wayne," came the weak call, "could you come here please?" It turned out that Atherton had booted the scales so hard that he had broken the big toe on his right foot.

Shefalee Vasudev, writing for the Indian Express, says Imran Khan is as fit as can be at 59 with a high intensity workout routine, one that women in the vicinity can’t take their eyes off.

The gym’s performance stakes were raised by Khan, they couldn’t just benignly displace a weight or two while he grunted and growled and worked 130 pounds on the lateral pull-down machine.

Remember Rudi Bryson? The express quick, who once tormented Shane Warne with ball and bat, now owns a suite at SuperSport Park, where he serves drinks with a flourish. Aditya Iyer of the Indian Express catches up with him.

Flipping a vintage whiskey bottle around his head, he grabs it near his shoulder in one motion, before the concoction is neatly poured into four shot glasses without a spill. The impressed customers leave a happy lot to their seats, before his bartending skills are put on display yet again with bottles of ale, cider, beer and other hard liquors. As his clients soon growl with hungry stomachs, he switches his apron for a chef’s toque. A few minutes later, he joins the satisfied bunch at their majestic view to watch a game of cricket at Centurion.

Emma John in the Guardian says the WACA in Perth is a shrine to malevolence, but is not the only world sporting cathedral to inspire fascination and fear.

It turns out that stadium visiting is a highly contagious behavioural pattern and, before you know it, you're standing outside Eden Gardens in Calcutta, pulling sad eyes until a kindly steward agrees to let you in for a peek, and the most precious item in your jewellery box is a small pouch containing bits of turf from Barbados, Sri Lanka and Old Trafford.

Javed Miandad, the former Pakistan captain, is directing the Chinese team’s preparations for their debut international appearance at the Guangzhou Asian Games.He tells Uthra G Chaturvedi in the Indian Express that China could be the surprise team of the Games.

The Chinese are very quick learners. Their complete devotion to mastering anything is simply awesome. Something that is missing in Pakistan and India.

A thoughtfully selected all-time XI can spark off debate, which can be very educating, says Ayaz Memon in the Mint. Continuing the season of selecting such XIs, he comes up with eleven players who overcame serious illnesses or diseases to leave their mark on the game.

In the semi-final of the 1981-82 Ranji season, with Karnataka left-arm Raghuram Bhatt spinner coiling webs around Bombay's batsmen, Sunil Gavaskar walked out as a left-hand batsman to negate him in the second innings. Gavaskar went on to score an unbeaten 18 and save Bombay from outright defeat. Akshay Sawai of the Open magazine looks back at what is probably Gavaskar's most unusual innings.

Gavaskar says, “The ball was turning square and Raghuram Bhat was pretty much unplayable on that surface. Since he was a left-hand orthodox spinner getting the ball to turn and bounce sharply away from the right-handers, I thought that the way to counter that was by playing left handed where the ball would turn and bounce but hit the body harmlessly (without the risk of getting out leg before wicket).”

“I could understand the adverse reactions,” Gavaskar says. “It was felt that it was done in pique, but it was nothing like that at all. I felt I had zero chance against Raghu batting right handed, and since the match was already decided in Karnataka’s favour, I tried the tactic. If the match was in the balance, I certainly would not have batted left handed. Also, please remember I batted left handed only against Raghuram Bhat. When a right hand spinner (B Vijayakrishna) came along, I switched to batting right handed again.”

Venkat Ananth and Akshay Sawai of the Open magazine go behind the scenes to find what cricketers do, speak, and most importantly, eat, during the lunch break.

Asked to name the big eaters in the current dressing room, Rohit Sharma says, “In the Ranji Trophy team, it would be Abhishek Nayar, and in the Indian team, Irfan Pathan.” Sharma himself is known to be a food enthusiast.

Nayar also figures in Agarkar’s list of dining table heavy-hitters. Vengsarkar names Shastri and Sachin Tendulkar. Bevan says, “The big fast bowlers were the best eaters. Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie... they didn’t mind a feed.”

In the Guardian, Roy Greenslade explains why he thinks the News of the World sting which led to the breaking of the spot-fixing controversy was justified.

Was there a genuine public interest in exposing (alleged) sporting corruption?

I like sport and I like cricket. I support Essex and England. I understand the desire to win and the passion it arouses in both players and spectators. Sport is meaningless if it is fixed because it is, at its heart, all about competition. Otherwise, there is no point to it.

People who do not like sport may well take a different view. They may see it as nothing more than a branch of the entertainment industry and, as such, fixing what happens is no big deal. So where, they might ask, is the public interest in exposing it? Though I have also grown increasingly cynical in recent years about corruption in sport (such as the use of performance-enhancing drugs), I cannot agree.

I do believe that there is a genuine public interest in exposing sporting corruption (though I readily concede it's less important than, say, political and financial corruption).

The glamour and glitz around the IPL proved that cricket in India is not just a sport anymore: it is now a brand, often endorsed by celebrities who are far removed from the world of cricket. Amrit Mathur writes in Hindustan Times that the Champions League is set to take this trend to the next level.

The IPL is a mass brand that appeals to everyone because of the exciting cocktail of cricket and entertainment it serves. The Ashes is different it is classy, exclusive and decidedly upmarket.

Whether the same holds for creating interest for events is somewhat less clear. The advertising for next month's Champion's League in South Africa is focussed more on Amitabh Bachchan than MS Dhoni or Sachin Tendulkar. It is uncertain what the megastar is supposed to do. Is the purpose to increase viewership or is he trying to attract sponsors?

Writing in the Guardian, Mike Selvey lets us in on an unexpected discovery from Warwickshire allrounder Bob Wyatt's autobiography - that Douglas Jardine was not the first person to use the controversial leg theory.

Far from being an innovative idea, the principle of bodyline, although not called that of course, had been around and exploited for at least four years previously, and maybe before that. Wyatt himself, and others, were actually on the receiving end of it. Wyatt was to be Jardine's vice-captain in Australia, and although he is generally thought of as being opposed to the use of bodyline, it doesn't quite marry with his own account, which says: "I think Jardine was fully justified in using him [Larwood] as he did."

The caveat was that it only worked because of Larwood's unique combination of extreme pace and accuracy. "The ill-feeling it caused was not good for cricket," Wyatt adds.

The Lord's pavilion is hosting an unusual exhibition - one which celebrates the similarities and differences between cricket and baseball - two sports that have for long been disparaged by fans of the other. John F. Burn of the New York Times reports on how the exhibition "conveys the unmistakable theme that what many Americans view as their national game was originally an English sport, played by children nearly 300 years ago".

Curators say, baseball — or base-ball, as it was known then — originated in England at least as early as the first decades of the 18th century, perhaps even earlier, and was taken to the United States by 19th-century immigrants.

The exhibit also makes the case that cricket, played in America from as early as 1709, was America’s principal bat-and-ball game until the eve of the Civil War, with thriving cricket clubs in many major East Coast cities, including New York, Brooklyn, Newark, Boston and especially Philadelphia.

Saraswathi Vaidyanathan, 87, has been following Sachin Tendulkar's career since he made his international debut at the age of 16. Such is her passion for Tendulkar's game, that she has no difficulty rattling off his records and achievements, even with the ball. Read on for more in the Hindu.

Sceptical of the statistics available on the Internet this octogenarian keeps track of her favourite cricketer's achievements in her own way. Tiny scraps of paper with all the scores painstakingly written in neat handwriting are tucked away along with other prized possessions that include a couple of books on the cricketing genius gifted by her grandson. She secretly pulls out a few bits and shows them to me ensuring I handle them with care. All of a sudden, she chuckles. Saraswathi's face is bright with enthusiasm as she narrates another incident. “After the1998 Sharjah Cup, Shane Warne said he used to get nightmares about Sachin. Sachin ko ‘Man of the Series' ke liye car mila.”

There's always good humour when Navjot Singh Sidhu's around. His political aspirations seem to have got a lift lately and Ajith Pillai imagines his secret diary in Outlook magazine.

“Surprise him, Navjot,” an inner voice told me, “surprise him like Murali foxes batsmen with his doosra.” I pondered for a while and then saw the (100 watt) light. “Learn some Marathi, good fella, that will astonish him,” I told myself. So, pronto I rung up Raj Thackeray. “Maharaj, you have to help me with this one. If not, I will be like a drowning man who left his straw behind in the dressing room,” I pleaded.

Brendon and Nathan McCullum became the 10th set of brothers to represent New Zealand in cricket last year. James Ihaka in the New Zealand Herald catches up with the two proud parents, Stu and Jan.

The young Dunedin boys would play the game religiously with their mates in their backyard or on their St Kilda street - often until after dark. But in trying to emulate their heroes, who included their dad, himself a former Otago opening batsman, the pair would sometimes incur the wrath of their parents or those next door.

With the Fly Emirates XI gaining the services of a proper ringer - Shahid Afridi - for the inaugural Emirates Airline Twenty20 competition, Andy Bull in his blog on the Guardian website recalls similar roles played by Ian Botham, Geoff Boycott and Kevin Pietersen.

It was not so long ago that Kevin Pietersen turned out for Newick CC, tempted into playing by club captain Piers Morgan, who dispiritingly won KP over by offering a brief encounter with Simon Cowell in part exchange (The Spin wonders if Emirates got Afridi so cheaply). Pietersen's off-spin was carted for successive sixes by a 42-year-old businessman named Mark Symonds, though KP did at least clean bowl a cocky student who had attempted to switch-hit him over long-off.

Twitter is fast becoming the best way to stay in touch with what your cricketing heroes are up to, says Anand Vasu on his blog on the Hindustan Times. He adds it's the best way to build community as well.

Check out Rahul Bhatia's photo feature in Open magazine on how cricket balls are manufactured at the Sanspareils Greens (SG) factory in Meerut, India.

An editorial in the Guardian emphasises the importance of extras in keeping players on their guard on the field. The heavy penalties associated with lapses prompt greater discipline, and the runs earned by a team - and not the individual - by way of extras, is a reminder that the playing XI is greater than the sum of its parts.

Sundries – as some Australians still quaintly dub them – are not some optional add-on, but are integral to the sport. If wides went unpunished, bowlers would be free to protect their side's total by sending the ball out of the batsman's reach. Byes, meanwhile, keep wicketkeepers on their toes, and punish the field as a whole for allowing the ball to drift away from the action, which would be a dulling waste of time.

The question of whether sportspeople are more prone to depression has been touched on without any great revelation. With regard to Marcus Trescothick's programme during the Champions League in India, it scratched the surface of a complex subject. Robin Scott-Elliot in the Independent tries to dig deeper by presenting a few other instances across different sports.

On the 25th anniversary of India Gandhi's death, Sandeep Dwivedi in the Indian Express speaks to former India players who were in Pakistan when news of the assassination broke.

As Dilip Vengsarkar entered the 90s while approaching his first ODI hundred at Sialkot during the 1984 tour, he saw Pakistan's motor-mouth Javed Miandad coming towards him from third man. There were a couple of thoughts that crossed Vengsarkar's mind. He wasn't sure if the movement on field was skipper Zaheer Abbas's ploy to put pressure on him by posting a close-in fielder. On second thoughts, he feared it was just Miandad indulging in his old trick of initiating a provocative dialogue with a well-set batsman between overs.

The Indian business newspaper, Mint, has an interesting write-up looking at the decline of the restaurants opened by Indian cricket's biggest names.

The Mumbai restaurant named after the man many Indians consider to be the best cricketer to have ever set foot on a cricket pitch, Sachin Tendulkar, has closed for business and may well make way for a night club.

Tendulkar’s, as the restaurant was named, isn’t alone in its fate. In New Delhi, Sehwag Favourites, promoted by a man who still sometimes opens the batting with Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, has also shut down and the cricketer is locked in litigation with his business partner. And former India captain Sourav Ganguly’s restaurant in Kolkata has seen its popularity waning.

The recent departures of coaches - Andy Moles (New Zealand), Peter Moores (England), Robin Singh and Venkatesh Prasad (India) - suggests that players are wielding greater clout in decision making. Makarand Waingankar finds out in the Hindu.

It’s part of the coach’s job to understand the mental make-up of players so that they accept the methods and give their best, but the coaches complain that players refuse to accept the advice of coaches even when their own methods are not successful.

Gone are the days when Ray Illingworth, who was the one-man selection committee and also the coach of the England team, would act like a dictator. Modern players want more of a say in strategy planning.

Former Wisden editor John Woodcock defends the notion of the Spirit of Cricket, which has come in for much derision in recent times. He insists that Paul Collingwood shouldn't have been given out when he caught short by Brendon McCullum in the Champions Trophy league game as the batsman had never intended to take a run (Collingwood was subsequently recalled by New Zealand captain Daniel Vettori). Read on in the Times.

I had a small part in framing the preamble to the present Laws of Cricket, described by Atherton as a lot of well-meaning guff. There was more of it in its original form, but it was still intended to send the same message. Mike may well be right, and perhaps it does need rewriting. On reading it again I think he is right and that he might like to have a shot at it himself.

But I am sure it is as well to have something of the sort, even if we all know really what is meant by the spirit of the game. Even now, is chivalry not the word that says it all?

Paddy Upton's dossier in which he encouraged Indian players to indulge in sex before matches has become a hot topic for debate in the sporting world. But should we be asking the question, 'Is sex good for sports?' or should be inverted to 'Is sports good for sex?'? In the Times Matthew Syed writes that sex is surely the end and not the means.

Countless PhD theses have been written detailing the allegorical significance of sporting conquest: how triumphing in these contrived duels is a demonstration of alpha qualities — virility, strength and the like; attributes that are deeply implicated in what biologists call “reproductive value”. Some may even argue that sport’s entire appeal is metaphorical; that it is an invented world in which the Darwinian struggle is played out graphically before our eyes, wrapped in a veneer (often wafer-thin) of civility. It is, if you like, the human equivalent of peacocks strutting or deer rutting.

Mike Selvey has announced his retirement from all cricket, including games played on excursions. The decision, as he writes in his blog in the Guardian, was prompted by a failed attempt to sledge his son in a Dads v Lads game.

One day he might need counselling, for it must be an unnerving experience for a young boy to have his parentage questioned by his own dad. He laughed again. I resolved to bounce the crap out of him. Even at my best I rarely bowled bouncers, and then only to people who didn't hook and just ducked. It was an inexpensive game I played to keep Mike Brearley happy when he thought I wasn't being sufficiently aggressive enough and it never cost runs.

	The monotony of the middle overs in ODIs gave rise to Twenty20; the post-match ritual awaits a similar excision © Cricinfo Ltd

Suresh Menon in his column on Dreamcricket.com believes the post-match ceremony, with its sheer monotony, has lost all meaning as both the interviewer and the interviewee take up a holding position.

The Man of the Match a) Is happy for his team; after all, individual performances mean nothing (but I will hang on to the cheque, thank you) b) Will always carry memories of this match with him c)Realises the importance of winning at this historic ground d) Put the ball in the right places (if he is a bowler) or was grateful for the support of the other batsmen e) Knew from the start that his team was going to win, although there was that hiccup in the middle overs f) Accepts everything as part of something he calls the learning curve.

Shane Warne has spent the past couple of days pondering ways that cricket could be improved, and has come up with a six-point plan that he outlines in the Times. It includes one particularly bold move.

End one-day internationals This is a big call, but cricket evolves and the 50-over game has passed its sell-by date. It’s amazing to think that after the Ashes series England and Australia play seven one-day games, which take about a month. Sorry, but that’s just greed on the part of administrators. From now on, we should be playing Tests and Twenty20 internationals, with a Twenty20 World Cup every two years.

Australian supporters - the Fanatics - have confessed to having set off the fire alarm in England's team hotel on the opening day of the Headingley Test. The players got out of the hotel at 4am and had to wait 20 minutes before firemen would let them back in. In the morning England were bowled out for 102. Though one does not necessarily lead to the other, the Fanatics claimed they had done their bit for Australia. Is that the new role that fans have appropriated for themselves, Suresh Menon asks on dreamcricket.com.

Is everything fair game – from fraudulent messages that cause players mental agony to blackmail to threat of physical violence? All in the name of “doing their bit” for the team? Just ahead of a Ranji Trophy match years ago, some “fans” attempted to beat up Tamil Nadu’s star all rounder Robin Singh to prevent him from playing. But he escaped, and although shaken played the match. Is that the direction in which fandom is heading?

Simon Wilde proposes a new means of making Test cricket more competitive, calling for a world Test championship with knockout stages at the end of the tournament, and with each innings limited to 110 overs to eliminate the possibility of a draw and determine a definite winner. Read his article in the Times.

Some games under this system might finish in what some would deem an unsatisfactory way but there are plenty of Test matches at present that are totally unsatisfactory - witness the recent Barbados Test in which bat dominated ball and a draw was clearly the only possible result from a very early stage. As a spectacle it was a travesty but under this plan batsmen-friendly pitches might still produce exciting games.

Why do cricket balls really swing? Is it because of the overcast conditions, the humidity or the cloud cover? Science has something else to say. Mark Henderson, The Times Science Editor, with the assistance of Nasa, offers a study in contrast to the established belief of swinging certainties. Read the piece in the Times.

“What the commentators, cricketers I much admire, have been saying about swing is plain wrong,” he [Rabindra Mehta, a NASA scientist] told The Times yesterday. “They’ve been talking about the clouds, how the new ball won’t swing until the lacquer has come off, and it’s just rubbish.”

Contrary to common belief, there are three types of swing bowling, not two, he said. Seam position and bowling speed are critical to achieving all of them, but overcast weather conditions are not.

Kookaburra apparently spend $600,000 to work with Melbourne professor Roger La Brooy and his team at RMIT University to develop a "superbat" whose carbon handles allowed hitting further with less effort. Even Gray-Nicolls jumped on board. But there was to be no major sporting revolution and the battered bat with a barren handle now sits in a Melbourne office cluttered with robotics, NASA printouts and bulky tomes on aerospace engineering. Nick Walshaw finds out more in the Daily Telegraph.

The modern game heavily favours batsmen, and the statistics prove it. In this context, was Allan Donald right in asking for ball tampering to be legalised? Mike Atherton, who has had epic battles with the South African fast bowler, feels that Donald's opinion is worth discussion, but is not the right way to go. In the Times, Atherton, however, argues that while batsmen have become more aggressive of late, bowlers have gone into a defensive shell.

In the 1950s the average runs per wicket was 30.1 and 6.8 per cent of scores were more than 500. This stayed relatively constant until the turn of this century, which has seen a sharp spike to 34.1 and 8.7 respectively. Runs per hundred balls have never been higher than now.

Expectations of runscoring have soared. When Australia began the final day of the Lord's Test, already five wickets down and needing to score more runs in the last innings than any other team in first-class history, the bookmakers were willing to go only so far as 5-2 on an Australia victory.

Players often appeal even when they know that the batsman in not out. The question of playing within the spirit of the game is repeatedly used by captains, but how often do they comply with the spirit with their own actions? Harsha Bhogle, in ExpressIndia, says there is hardly a cricketer who hasn't bent the rules a bit during his career.

You cannot go down the other path and take a fielder's word either. I'm afraid in sport, nobody's word counts for much. Some cheat less than others but nobody passes the acid test: appealing when they know the batsman is not out. And that is why, while batsman are entitled to feel disappointed when a decision goes against them, we need to ask if they ever did an opposition batsman in by misleading an umpire.

Edward Marriott speaks to former England captain Mike Brearely, one of the country's senior-most psychoanalysts, about the inextricable bond between Test cricket and psychoanalysis and their relevance to a world which demands quick results. Read the interview in the July issue of Prospect Magazine.

Today—at the start of a new Ashes series, arguably the most intense of all cricketing encounters—both long-form psychotherapy and long-form cricket seem in decline. In a quick-fix world there appears to be less tolerance for approaches—whether sporting or psychotherapeutic—that take time. In May, Chris Gayle, the West Indies’ captain, said that he “wouldn’t be so sad” if test cricket died out. Gayle, like many big stars, has made a fortune from the Indian Premier League, and clearly prefers the shorter Twenty20 game. The meagre 4,000 tickets sold for the opening day of the second test against the West Indies on 14th May seemed to indicate that English crowds, too, shared some of his feelings.

Both Test cricket and psychoanalysis are out of tune with a world that demands quick results. Former England cricket captain Mike Brearley, now Britain’s leading psychoanalyst believes, that it is a big loss. Psychoanalysis according to him “tells stories in similar depth, with repetitions from different points of view. And these things take time, as does Test cricket. Edward Marriott has more in Prospect magazine.

Certainly, despite its genteel reputation, few games are as psychologically arduous. On-field aggression is rife: former Australian captain Steve Waugh once described his sledging techniques as “mental disintegration”; while South African batsman Daryll Cullinan was so distressed by Shane Warne’s intimidation that he took time out for therapy, only to be greeted on his return with the words “I’m going to send you straight back to the leather couch,” from his tormentor. Long foreign tours have also seen intense homesickness suffered by players like Steven Harmison, and contributed to Marcus Trescothick’s breakdown and resignation from the England side in 2006.

Andrew Flintoff is fighting hard to be fit in time for the Ashes, much like Rafael Nadal, who is struggling with an injury ahead of Wimbledon. Both belong to the same breed of sportsmen, stars who give it their all when they play the game. In the Telegraph, Ed Smith takes a look at how trying too hard can bring its own problems.

Both injuries are structural rather than accidental: they are long-term, perhaps even inevitable injuries. No one, given Flintoff's muscular action, can slam down his leg on slabs of hardened mud, over after over, day after day, year after year, without putting immense pressure on his joints.

Prem Panicker, in his blog Smoke Signals, pays tribute to the unsung heroes who rarely get the credit they deserve for their impact on the outcomes of cricket matches.

Conventional wisdom is that fielding – especially in context of teams such as India, stereotypically lethargic in the field — has really come into its own only in modern times. Really? Think of a close catching cordon that reads: Syed Abid Ali, Sunil Gavaskar, Ajit Wadekar backed by S Venkatraghavan at gully and Eknath Solkar – that short leg specialists’ specialist – in the leg trap, aided and abetted by Syed Kirmani behind the stumps. Now name me a modern-day Indian equivalent to match that line up. [And since Mark Waugh's name came up in Rob's post, compare contemporary Aussie lineups against one that reads the Chappell brothers, Ian Redpath, Doug Walters, Paul Sheehan and Ashley Mallett, and try to top that cordon for close catching.]

With thousands of cricketers chasing fame and riches in India, it is inevitable many are left disaffected and depressed after failing to fulfill their ambitions. In this week's cover story in Outlook, the magazine's staff investigate the subject by speaking to players such as former Uttar Pradesh fast bowler Obaid Kamal, who was saved from suicide because of the Islamic injunction against it, and Sumit Kundu, a former Haryana Under-17 captain who slipped into depression after failing to make the state U-19 team.

The magazine also has a piece by the author of the masterpiece on cricketing suicides By his own hand, David Frith, which looks into why there has been an increase in the number of cricketers taking their lives in India in recent times.

The Divine Comedy's front man, Neil Hannon, and Dublin singer, Thomas Walsh, have recorded an album of cricket songs called The Duckworth-Lewis Method. There haven't been too many successful cricket songs, the BBC's Colin Paterson examines why.

Also read Cricinfo's look at cricket's contribution to world music here and here.

As Twenty20 continues to grow in popularity Makarand Waingankar writes in the Hindu that Test cricket needs restructuring if it is to remain the game's premier format. He suggests imposing an over-limit on each side's batting, 125 overs for the first innings and 100 overs for the second innings.

... bifurcation of overs will make the moves of the teams more aggressive. The most important factor will be to show urgency in scoring runs without losing wickets.

The team would have to have wickets in hand to launch into attack in the last 20 overs. Bowlers will have to be aggressive especially in 90-120 over block. This will definitely make some fascinating watching.

The young Afghan cricket team may have achieved major victories, but their countrymen still distrust them, writes Reza Mohammadi in the Guardian.

If you tried to get inside Afghan society, you'd discover some interesting reasons for this lack of enthusiasm. The first is that the players are not only all Pashtun but also come from the east of the country. In Afghanistan's tribal society, the team's success was interpreted as a sign of Pashtuns' special privileges in the social and political spheres. Afghans, who tend to perceive everything through racial and tribal filters, do not regard a team whose members belong to a single ethnicity as a team representing the nation.

Rather than bemoan the occasional three-day game, we should enjoy the variations in conditions that set Tests aside, writes Lawrence Booth in the Guardian.

Last week, after six straight draws at Lord's, England beat West Indies inside three days. Their bowlers barely had to land it outside off before another nick was flying to the cordon. Chris Gayle and Ramnaresh Sarwan, who in the Caribbean resembled Don Bradman's grandson, were both dismissed twice in a day. The temptation was to bemoan an undercooked West Indian side - the usual lament when a touring team loses the first Test - and wonder whether England's seamers will be up to scratch on more testing offerings later in the summer.

Tony Lewis, one half of the Duckworth-Lewis team who've come up with the D/L method, says the system itself isn't so difficult to understand, but few are interested to know more about it.

If you trawl the Internet cricket chat sites you will see there are many correspondents who can provide succinct and sensible answers to bloggers' questions on how the D-L method works. The method can be easily understood if one is prepared to spend a few minutes studying the D-L pages of sites such as Cricinfo.

Read the full interview, which appeared in Daily News & Analysis, here.

Descendants of a hero in Nelson's navy, who established one of cricket's most unlikely outposts on the island of Vis, are returning to the remote Adriatic island to take part in an historic cricket match. The Telegraph's Alastair Jamieson writes on how Sir William Hoste encouraged locals to play cricket with his crew and how his family, which includes a vicar, a minor cannon and an HSBC employee from Hong Kong, are forming a Hoste XI which will play the locals.

Anachronistic, perhaps, but personalities like Henry Blofeld will be missed in this clinical new era of sports reporting, writes Scott Murray in the Guardian.

Compare and contrast Blofeld's carry-on to the way modern sports hacks operate. Recently, in a story rather less shocking and surprising than 11 professional cricketers mustering just over a run per man between them, a former Newcastle United footballer took over as the manager of Newcastle United. This meant action stations on Rolling 24-Hour Breaking Quotes service Sky Sports News, whose chuck-everything-into-the-pot news agenda can be summed up with the pithy maxim: if it spews from Sam Matterface's face, it matters. Mustering levels of gravitas not witnessed on television since Walter Cronkite slowly took off his spectacles to announce the death of President Kennedy on CBS in November 1963, the Sky anchor STARTED TALKING IN CAPITAL LETTERS, THEN BOLD, THEN WHEN THEY MOVED ACROSS LIVE TO ST JAMES PARK, BOLD ITALICS. WITH THREE EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!

Cricket has inspired many a people to break into song. Andy Bull lists 11 of those in the Guardian:

Half Man Half Biscuit have made a greater contribution to the sports pop music canon than any other band. I can't believe I just typed that sentence. Anyway, despite the respective merits of Let's Not (Vanburn Holder), and Hedley Verityesque, the best of HMHB's efforts is surely this ditty about bumping into England off-spinner Fred Titmus in the corner shop.

Also read Cricinfo's XIs on cricket's contributions to the world of music here and here.

When he was seven years old, Abhimanyu Yalamanchili lost his left hand in an elevator accident. Now 19, he has been a regular in the Andhra Pradesh junior teams for several years. Devendra Pandey relates the inspiring story in the Indian Express:

When he first decided to play serious cricket in his home town Bangalore, Yalamanchili encountered a series of problems. “Whenever I tried to bowl fast, I used to lose my balance and fall down,” he recalls. He was given no chance by most coaches in the region. But one of them, Amit Pathak was convinced that Yalamanchili was ready to do the hard mile, and took him under his wing. “He introduced me to a physio Badrinath who prepared some special exercises for me. He made me work on my body to get the right balance while bowling and bat ting,” he says. Later, Pathak altered his bowling action by reducing his run-up and the two spent long hours together to get his balance right. The revised action was straighter, with a modified follow-through. Fielding was a big problem area as well. “I knew that if I had to play top-level junior cricket, I had to improve myself in every aspect. During the off-season, I underwent rigorous fielding sessions,” says Yalamanchili.

The Kookaburra ball gets ridiculously soft after very few overs and kills the game dead once the swing has gone. The Duke and the SG stay harder longer, but they react differently to similar conditions in, say, the subcontinent or England. The answer lies in producing the ball that which bowlers can work and good batsmen can profit, writes Mike Selvey in the Guardian.

... it should not be beyond the wit of manufacturers, backed by the pocket of ICC, to make a series of prototypes using larger cores, artificially made if necessary, with tighter winding and a leather that will suit all conditions. Something that will deteriorate gradually but not to excess, offering orthodox swing at the start, reverse later and grip for the spinner.

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

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

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

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

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

	How many Ayes? How many Nays? © Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greatness is a function of longevity and of the ability to take pressure, says Suresh Menon on dreamcricket. He wonders at the ability of players like Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting, Rahul Dravid and Muttiah Muralitharan to stay motivated despite having scaled the highest of cricketing peaks.

How do they do it? How many of us have worked in the same office for 20 years, and done the same things on auto pilot? Another day in the bank, another month selling computers, another year thinking up advertising slogans and we are ready to scream. But at least the rest of us do it away from public gaze; our mistakes are discussed in a closed circle, we might just miss out on a salary increment or a bonus, and soon it will be forgotten. But these players have to deal with living their professional lives on the front pages of newspapers, their every move dissected and discussed on television.

Writing in The Guardian, Duncan Campbell laments the state of the English cliche. Why, oh why, must everyone in public life "step up to the plate" when the vast majority have never been near a baseball game. What's wrong with "going into bat" instead?

George Orwell warned us about all this more than 60 years ago. In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, he wrote about the dangers of "a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves". He suggested that "many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning ... a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying".

Vic Marks in the Observer says although cricket seems to be in troubled times, one must keep in mind lessons learned from the Packer revolution.

The traditionalists feel under threat again, but maybe the Packer experience tells us not to fret too much. Change can be beneficial and the advent of the IPL, along with so many other incomplete Twenty20 schemes, is hastening that change. Before Modi had his bright idea there was plenty wrong with the international calendar: too many sterile fixtures at Test level watched by nobody; too many ODIs, whose results are forgotten within hours. There is now a better chance of changing all that.

The true dimensions of athletic genius are not revealed in numbers and ranking points, Nirmal Shekar writes in the Hindu in light of the ICC's recent gaffe over rating the greatest players.

Of course, a bunch of bored schoolboys armed with a calculator and with access to www.cricinfo.com might have surely done a better job than the honourable experts to whom the ICC chose to hand over the job. As an exercise in ranking the finest players in history, this one was as arbitrary and subjective and flawed as it could have possibly been.

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While, predictably, most of the ire directed at the ICC from these shores was caused by the ‘injustice’ done to a little man from Mumbai who the ICC masterminds slotted in at No.26 in the list of batsmen, my own reaction on spotting a familiar name at No.59 in the list of bowlers bordered on temporary insanity — I just couldn’t stop laughing.

If people thought Kevin Pietersen's ego made him an unfit captain, they should have seen The Wangler, says Harry Pearson in his blog on the Guardian website.

Walter Hammond was so self-absorbed he was practically a black hole, yet he led England in 20 Tests, and lost only one series. Besides, anyone who has ever played club cricket will know that in the vast majority of cases captaincy brings with it certain privileges, not the least of which is selfishness. I once played under a captain known to one and all as The Wangler. When it came to dedication to his own cause, The Wangler made Kevin Pietersen seem like Mother Teresa. The Wangler batted at No4, fielded at first slip and, like a cricket version of John Lewis stores, was never knowingly under-bowled.

South Africa’s stirring series triumph against the world champions killed the last of Australian cricket’s modern dynasty. If Mohali and Nagpur set their pedestal wobbling, Perth and Melbourne have reduced it to a heap of dust. From that day on, Australia have been stripped of bragging rights, sniggering rights and most certainly of hectoring and preaching rights to the rest of the world. Sharda Ugra in her blog on the India Today website believes cricket’s older natural order has probably re-asserted itself.

Even while delighting in the quirkiness of a fellow with a French name and a fast bowler with a sense of humour reducing the macho Australians to rubble and rabble, it has been strangely uneasy watching them flail about. The natural order of things dictated that Australia at least fight back from reverse or adversity, but cricket’s natural order for the last 15 or so years has been irrevocably altered.

With almost a decade of international cricket under his belt, Virender Sehwag stands at an interesting juncture of his career. With Sourav Ganguly and Anil Kumble already hanging their boots and the likes of Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and VVS Laxman expected to leave in a year or two, the dasher will be an important link between past and the future. Amit Gupta in the Mumbai Mirror has more.

Among Kapil Dev's best moments in cricket are his debut against Pakistan in 1978, captaining India to the 1983 World Cup win and becoming the world record-holder for the most number of Test wickets in February 1994. He speaks to Lokendra Pratap Sahi in the Kolkata-based daily, the Telegraph, on his 50th birthday.

As the new year begins, Dileep Premachandran hands out gongs for 2008 on his blog, the Doosra. Sachin Tendulkar dominates: his century in Chennai which helped chase down 387 against England is named the best Test innings, and the unbeaten 117 in the first CB series final is rated the best one-day innings.

On the BBC website, Oliver Brett lists out six players to watch out for in 2009 - one player from each of the two teams touring England in the summer, three up-and-coming players on the county scene attempting to break into the national senior side, and a member from the England women's team.

On sportinglife.com Myles Hodgson tips Yorkshire allrounder Tim Bresnan to make the major impact over the next year.

During his last incarnation as an England player during Fletcher's reign, Bresnan averaged just 17 with the bat from four innings and had an economy rate of 6.76 per over. Since then, however, Bresnan has turned to former England fast bowler Darren Gough, his county captain at Yorkshire for the last two years, and also took advice from Australian seamer Jason Gillespie during his time as overseas player at Headingley during 2006 and 2007.

England women's captain Charlotte Edwards looks back at a phenomenal year for her and her team and hopes to cap it off with a World Cup win in 2009. She speaks to the ECB website:

"This year was different and we played our best XI in every game. We are also lucky that a few of the team are hitting their peak, like myself and Tayls. Others have really come on too, like Caroline Atkins and Beth Morgan. Lydia Greenway has emerged as a world-class player. We have a great balance in the team. We have players who are maturing and youngsters who just want to go out there and play. They have no fear at all."

Lawrence Booth, in his blog in the Guardian, puts his spin on some of the highlights of 2008, such as Jason Krejza's 'lucky' debut, and Shivnarine Chanderpaul's 'unnoticed' brilliance.

The Invisible Man Award for Most Under-Rated Cricketer on the Planet

Before Shivnarine Chanderpaul made a first-ball duck in Napier recently, his previous nine Test scores had been 86* (v Sri Lanka), 118, 11, 107*, 77*, 79*, 50 (all v Australia) and 76 and 126* (v New Zealand). His Test average for 2008 was 101. But then we shouldn't be too surprised: in 2007 he averaged 111. And yet how many people would include him unthinkingly in their World XI? If England think their next six Tests are going to be a breeze, they can think again.

Paul Holden, in his blog Sideline Slogger, picks out some of New Zealand's highs and lows of the year.

There is no more glorious sight in sport than that of a cricket paceman steaming in to bowl, with his slips at the ready, and the batsman at their mercy. However, with Twenty20 and its vast incomes circles, you might wonder and worry that the fast bowlers of this world are an endangered species. Chris Rattue in the New Zealand Herald hopes to see a renaissance of personalities who can sustain pace in the game.

What's wrong with having a tie anyway. Nothing really. Gayle's roughhouse treatment of Daniel Vettori in the Super Over in the first Twenty20 at Eden Park had the New Zealand captain, understandably, taking a dim view of it all. David Leggat in the same paper takes a closer look.

Stephen Brenkley is optimistic about the future of Test cricket in his review of the year in the Independent on Sunday.

At Edgbaston in August, Graeme Smith of South Africa played a captain's innings of admirable control and discipline to ensure his team won a Test series in England for the first time in 43 years. It was masterful. But for sheer human drama it was surpassed by Sachin Tendulkar's 41st Test century in Chennai which gave India an emotional victory following the horrific slaughter in Mumbai a fortnight earlier, a win that for four days had seemed certain to elude them. Once more, its nerveless control was its most extraordinary feature.

Sachin Tendulkar, India and the beguilingly-named Balapuwaduge Ajantha Winslo Mendis lit up 2008 but England's bedding in with Sir Allen Stanford has caused nothing but embarrassment, writes Steve James in the Daily Telegraph.

India and South Africa are challenging Australia's No. 1 spot, while England are a tier down, according to the Observer's Vic Marks who decides to pick a World XI from these teams without including an Aussie.

The year began with a family feud that threatened to tear apart our tiny community. It ended with two events of utter warmth, of romance and brotherhood, writes Harsha Bhogle on ESPNStar.

The events at the Sydney Cricket Ground were immensely forgettable. Teams raged against each other, supporters seemed to take up arms and allegations of racism were in the air. It seemed, on the surface at least, that it was a cricketing issue, umpires might have got it wrong and the definition of the spirit of the game grew increasingly far-fetched, but it soon grew into a much bigger problem ...

It was a series that may not, need not, have been played but England showed a largeness of heart that cricket must never forget. What a lovely change from England teams of my growing up years that moaned, complained and spoke condescendingly about the people that were hosting them. In one gesture, England made more friends than they could have imagined.

Its that time of the year. People are looking back at 2008 and picking out high points and low of a year that, like a Shane Warne musical, had it all. ONE Sport's Chris Matthews runs a review of the year that was, which you can read here.

The Indian Cricket League contract and upcoming beach cricket commitments give off a whiff of superannuation, but Chris Harris is a long way off being retired from the domestic cricket circuit. In addition, he also expects to be named in the Canterbury team for its State Shield campaign which begins with a match against Otago. Hamish Bidwell in Stuff.co.nz has more.

Nayan Doshi created a storm much before Monty Panesar captured England’s imagination. Today, far away from the national team, Doshi is looking to settle his own future, having returned to Saurashtra, with whom he made his first-class debut eight years ago, before shifting to county cricket. Though he’s yet to break into Saurashtra’s first XI this season, he's is hoping for another spin to his story. G.S. Vivek in the Indian Express finds out.

What a pity it is that Australia and South Africa no longer play full Test series against each other, says Peter Roebuck in the Sydney Morning Herald. Although the concurrent cricket seasons in the countries are partly to blame, he prefers a longer contest any day.

Three matches, three rounds of golf, three rounds of three minutes, three sets, three days, three acts, none of it works, none of it is complete. Three matches whet the appetite. Too much depends on the first result because the losers are under immediate pressure. Three is better than two, which is not that hard, and otherwise is entirely unsatisfactory.

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Test cricket needs to wake up. Night matches, cheaper tickets, faster over rates, fewer silly delays and so forth have parts to play in the revival. But in the end there is nothing to beat a five-match series between two strong sides. Cricket needs to stage proper Test series. The rest is negotiable.

Quite unlike their footballing cousins, cricket players can’t put a foot even slightly out of place on the field without being charged for some or other indiscretion under a wide-ranging code of conduct. Surely, in modern sport (and indeed in society as a whole), this is an attribute worthy of high praise? Ryan Bubear in iafrica.com has more.

Yet in cricket, a batsman who merely shakes his head (sometimes almost imperceptibly) after getting another roughie from the umpire is charged for dissent, fined and sometimes even banned! Never mind the fact that the ball was missing a second set!

And if a bowler even points a finger to the pavilion, guiding the dismissed batsman back to his seat, he is hit with a Level 1 offence and a fine of up to half of his match fee. What’s so vile about a quick send-off? To me, that’s good TV!

On November 30, USA clinched the CC Americas Division 1 title with an 87-run win over the Cayman Islands at Brian Piccolo Park, thus finishing their campaign unbeaten. In Dream Cricket, their manager, Imran Khan, recalls each match accurately and offers a little of the USA's perspective.

The concept of bits and pieces cricketers is a thing of the past in limited-overs cricket and it's time to develop multi-dimensional cricketers with substantial skills in more than one discipline, writes Harsha Bhogle in the Indian Express. He suggests that India's National Cricket Academy should step up in this regard and hold batting camps for bowlers.

This development of a second skill has long been practiced by good companies who, for example, get excellent software engineers to learn communication skills which will come in handy later on in their careers. I believe cricket is ripe for such specialised second skills coaching. It might have been a hindrance all along when the academy didn’t have either the desire or the manpower to do anything significant.

	No more monkeying around for spectators at Eden Gardens © Getty Images

The declining crowds at Test matches has been a talking point of late. Although many may infer that lower attendances indicate the reducing popularity of the longer format, Shiloo Chattopadhyay offers an interesting observation in the Kolkata-based Telegraph. He describes the usual atmosphere at Eden Gardens when Tests attracted packed houses:

Come to think of it, very little of pure cricket was discussed or even consumed. How could we? Most seats on this block (others were worse) were at third slip or wider. Making out whether a ball is outside the off stump or the leg stump was difficult till one saw the wicketkeeper collect. We would mostly applaud the gross — a boundary or a wicket. Indeed, not many of us had the cricketing acumen to appreciate a defensive stroke on the back foot that made a chest high ball drop docilely at the batsman’s feet. On top of it India seldom won any matches those days. So, to the vast majority of us, cricket was an excuse for a winter picnic in the Maidan.

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Some decades back, the cricket authorities in Bengal — especially its current supremo — felt that such peripheral enjoyment was detrimental to the game of cricket. So Eden Garden was concretised. Annual members were shunted to the other end of the ground. The space given for seating a spectator was brought down to the bare minimum. Toilets were made unusable. Drinking water was impossible to find. Food was expensive and scarce.

All this was done with one objective — make the spectators as uncomfortable as possible so that they have nothing else to concentrate on except the cricket. After all, spectators cannot be allowed to open hampers to eat food when the great Tendulkar is square driving McGrath. The authorities were successful. Most people stopped having fun in Eden Gardens — because they stopped going there.

Brett Geeves was stranded on 99 not out for Tasmania last week. He wasn't happy, as he outlines in his blog on the Tasmanian Cricket Association website.

It’s a feeling that can't be explained. I have an analogy that might help put it into context. You are one piece away from finishing the 20,000 piece jigsaw puzzle your grandmother brought you for Christmas. I know what you’re thinking - Just give me the cash for Christmas ... kicking me in the shins would have been a better present! Anyway, you're one piece away from finishing the worst Christmas gift ever and it’s nowhere to be found ... Where the (expletives) is it!!?? For hours and hours you've toiled away, and you're one piece away from mastering the puzzle!! You ask questions of yourself. What have I done to deserve this? Why me? Who can I kill? Why does the MCG catering staff continue to give us these macadamia nut low fat muffins? Where are the chocolate ones?

He also says Tasmania's Sheffield Shield form has been disappointing. "It would be nice to spend a full day with the thongs on watching Hilf [Ben Hilfenhaus] attempt to do the Kidz Biz Crossword in the Herald."

Geeves is not the only player who has been blogging lately. Here's Iain O'Brien, the New Zealand fast bowler and genuine tail-ender on batting in the second innings at the Gabba.

So, I'm in, Mitchell Johnson with the ball in hand. I lasted one quick ball from him in the first innings. First ball, quick, full, and I defend it. Next ball, bouncer, oh s..., I hate bouncers, I duck it, and get under it well. I stood straight back up and stared straight back at Johnson. I wasn't go to show him nothing. "Whatever pal, you can bowl quick, but I'm not taking a backward step." That was a thought of course, I wasn't going to start to get into verbals with them.

Cricket is in worse trouble than the financial markets and nothing seen at the Gabba is going to brighten its mood, says Peter Roebuck in the Age.

Cricket yearns for a gripping struggle played to a high standard between well-matched teams. This Test has been accident-prone and mostly second-rate.

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As every month passes, the position deteriorates. Test matches are rearranged to accommodate dubious 20-over shenanigans, bound to attract as much interest among bookmakers as supporters. Players grizzle about their load and then accept lucrative offers to play an extra month. Matches are staged between uneven sides supposedly in the name of spreading the game but actually to create the illusion of competition. And the show will go on. Cricket is becoming little more than showbiz. With so many snouts in the trough it can hardly stop. A game needs to be loved, not raped.

On sport24.co.za, Rob Houwing is appalled by Bangladesh's slow over-rate on the first day of the first Test against South Africa in Bloemfontein.

Isn’t it high time the ICC finally put its hitherto lethargic foot down?

I believe the solution is for the umpires to more forcefully police, hour by hour, the over rate and insist on a minimum of 14 for each one – and if that is not met, then how about adding 20 or 25 penalty runs on each offending occasion to the batting team’s extras tally?

What cricket needs in order to better itself is a clock. Read more on Smoke Signals.

When the clock winds down to 00:00, if the bowling team has not completed its quota, then it will be punished (in any number of reasonable ways - which will be discussed separately). There is a simple way to do this : if there is a delay caused by the bowling team, the clock continues to run. If the delay is caused by the batting team, the clock will be stopped. Similarly, for actions of umpires, fall of wickets, ball going out of the ground etc… the clock will be stopped. Seems simple enough, but there are a couple of twists here : once the clock is running, the bowling team is free to deliver the ball, the batsman’s readiness or otherwise be damned.

	The flock of spinners that were supposed to have been inspired by Shane Warne have found his example too tough to emulate © Getty Images

Ten years ago, when the Australian team was at its most dominant, it became fashionable for the rest of us to believe that the Australian way was the route to take for those who wanted a share of their hegemony, writes Ray White, the former UCB president, in the Witness.

The message the world received was that you had to be something special to make the Australian team, so rich was the country in its deep seam of talent. Yet this was not the story coming from the Aussies themselves. For some years, they have been warning that their cupboard, while not resembling Ma Hubbard’s, was running out of quality stock.

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The truth is that serious talent cannot be prescribed. It was Australia’s fortune that a huge crop of gifted cricketers came along at the same time, just as it did in the West Indies in the 1980s and in South Africa in the 1960s and ’70s. Such bounty is uncommon, but does seem to happen from time to time in countries where the flowering of talent is assisted, not hindered.

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It is always a mistake to assume that a great team is evidence of a structure that can perpetuate success. A good structure such as that in Australian cricket will, however, ensure that barren periods are relatively short. Those who have been waiting for years to beat them will have to make sure that they do not fluff the opportunity that is now so manifest. Unlike the West Indies, where structures are close to collapse, the Aussies will not hang around waiting for something to turn up.

In the Age, Greg Baum offers a bleak assessment of cricket's future. In short, he says: "Test cricket is screwed".

Yesterday, it was Cricket Australia's turn to announce an IPL-style, "city-based, franchise-owned", involving New Zealand and South Africa. The players welcomed it. Two years ago, players' advocate Tim May condemned the ICC's expansion plan, warning of mass burn-out of players. But that was before the IPL and all its zeroes arrived. Now May thinks growth is good, even great.

Invariably, when asked how each new tournament will be fitted into the schedule, administrators reply that it is simply a matter of "finding a window", sophistry for "wherever". At the going rate, other than the scoreboard operators when India is batting in Delhi next week, the busiest man in cricket will be the ICC's glazier.

Where is it all going? At the ICC this week, to the usual place, committee. Future tours program? "Report back." Test championship? "Report back." Sri Lanka bails out of England? "A wink is as good as a nod …"

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The ICC has its head in the sand, which in Dubai is not so surprising. So does the players' body. Test cricket draws crowds only in Australia and England, and that is not enough. In television terms, one Test used to be worth four one-dayers. Now, two Tests are worth one one-dayer, hence England's skewed schedule in India. Test cricket is screwed.

Rob Smyth includes the Kent and South African cricket teams among his list of six great sporting losers in his blog on the Guardian website.

	Simon Taufel researches grounds, cities and airports before an overseas tour © Getty Images

In an interview to Nitin Naik in the Times of India, Simon Taufel saysit's not necessary to play at the highest level to become an umpire. In 2008, Taufel won his fifth-successive ICC Umpire of the Year award.

Being able to read the game and have a feel for it helps. Being able to anticipate play and having empathy for what the players are going through is very important to be a good match manager. You don't need to play at the highest level to be a good umpire, you just need to be a good student of the game and realise it's a players' game.

On his fitness routine:

Basically I do 8 to 12 cardio sessions a month depending upon travel and umpiring work. Then I add 6 to 8 strength sessions and report back to Jock every month with my maximum heart rate numbers from every session so he can track progress.

Match day is a low-key routine. The end of the day is more important when I do my warm down. This is normally a 30-minute walk or 15-min run or 15-min swim with a full body stretch. It helps circulation and allows me to be back fresh the next day.

In the Daily Mail, Lee Clayton joins Ian Botham during one of his charity walks, and discusses how he [Clayton] fared.

I managed to last nine miles at his shoulder, walking at a pace of 4.5mph, which is around three times normal walking speed.

I'm not sure what hurt first - burning calves, sore shins, aching thighs or screaming feet.

'A man ran with us on Sunday with his two sons,' Beefy reports. 'Fourteen years ago, he was given no chance of survival; that's why I do this. The pain you feel is nothing compared to what these people endure. We're making a difference.'

And he won't be quitting - a 25th anniversary walk is being planned for 2010.

Tony Becca, writing on Sports Jamaica, lauds the ICC's decision to disallow the practice of players using "comfort breaks" during matches.

It is now left, not so much to the managers, the coaches and the match referees, but more so to the umpires. They are the ones who will decide what "extreme circumstances" are and the hope is that, in the interest of the game, they will be strong and firm.

"Extreme circumstances" should be emergencies, the call of nature and nothing else, and that should involve just a few minutes off the field.

"Extreme circumstances" should not include those who are unfit and who need a break after bowling a few overs or after chasing a few balls, those who, because of their fitness, should not have been selected, or those who, despite being professionals, are simply too big, too much of a star, to stay in the field for any length of time.

If coaches are held accountable for a team's performance, then perhaps they should be the ones appointing the selectors who choose the team, writes Daryll Cullinan in the Weekender.

One of cricket’s peculiarities is its persistence with selection panels. In this age of professional sport and accountability, I don’t know of any country where the coach is solely entrusted with picking his team.

In most professional sports this is the norm. It must be one of the most frustrating things for an international cricket coach knowing the judgment and opinions of others can significantly influence the success and failure of his job.

Cricket365's Tim Ellis enlightens us on the meaning of some cricket phrases which have gone out of fashion.If you want to know what a "full moon" or a "lobster" is, head here.

"WATCH OUT"
A truly marvellous old term meaning "to field". What better way to imagine halcyon days of yore on the green fields than revisit this scene from an 18th century letter by one Reverend White:

"Little Tom Clement is visiting at Petersfield, where he plays much at cricket: Tom bats; his grandmother bowls; and his great-grandmother watches out!!"

	Fans gather in front of the big screen © AFP

Cricket’s sheer length and complexity makes it one of the most tele-friendly games on the planet, writes Boria Majumdar in the Financial Express. He says that cricket's rise in India is connected with the television boom in the country.

Television created conditions for cricket to become a central component of new notions of national identity and consumer spectacle. The advent of satellite television pushed this linkage further and the advent of ESPN in 1993 contributed much to making cricket into India’s secular national pastime. When television capitalists searched for ‘national’ public in their quest to create a ‘national’ market, they ended up with cricket as the lowest denominator of Indian-ness. Satellite television is a cultural arena where the idea of India is debated and fought for every day and its focus on cricket since the 1990s has reinforced the centrality of cricket as a pan-Indian marker of ‘Indian-ness’. This is a two-way process and world cricket itself has been transformed by the massive infusion of capital from Indian television. The enormous money that television has generated for cricket has also transformed India into the spiritual and financial heart of the global cricket industry a process that needs to be applauded by every Indian sports fan.

Andrew Symonds and Shaun Tait may have different reasons to quit the game at the international level temporarily, but the one thing in common is that they have been unable to manage the pressure, writes Makarand Waingankar in the Hindu. While the Australian system is good at solving the problem by getting the player back, the mentoring is missing, the Indian system lacks solution to the mind problem and the mentoring.

In a system that churns out a huge number of participants, teenagers suffer from an expectation syndrome. The pressure of expectations pushes a player into a discomfort zone as the competition grows. Obviously performance tends to get affected. Now with IPL, huge sums have added to pressure, and players not used to such sums have lost focus. And when a player loses the focus, things go awry. This is where mentoring is very essential to guide the behaviour of a player.

	Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was part of the Allahakbarries © Getty Images

Winning is great, but losing can be an awfully big adventure, Richard Brook suggests in the Sunday Star Times. He takes the example of Sir James Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, who was also an enthusiastic cricketer.

He was once asked to describe his bowling and replied that, after delivering the ball he would go and sit on the turf at mid-off and wait for it to reach the other end which, he said, "it sometimes did". Sir James loved the game so much he formed his own side and named it the Allahakbarries, in the mistaken belief the Arabic term "Allah akbar" meant "God Help Us".

...

He installed himself captain of the Allahakbarries, of course, and had specific instructions for team-mates, especially when Bernard Partridge, an illustrator from Punch magazine and the unfortunate sufferer of a lazy eye, was bowling. "Partridge, when bowling, keep your eye on square leg," advised Barrie. "Square-leg, when Partridge is bowling, keep your eye on him." Another of his tips was to never practice on the opponent's ground before the match, because, he said: "this can only give them confidence".

Others in Barrie's side included Arthur Conan Doyle, AA Milne, PG Wodehouse, EW Hornung and Rudyard Kipling. To think, in one team, the creators of Sherlock Holmes, Dr Watson, Peter Pan, Tinkerbell, Winnie the Pooh, Eyeore, Raffles, Jeeves, Wooster, Mowgli and Baloo. It must have made for some wonderful after-match repartee

	Village cricket at West End, Esher in Surrey © Martin Williamson

The Daily Telegraph selected the best ten among readers' entries for cricket grounds that are quintessentially British. David Robson writes:

If the England cricket team were as spoiled for talent as England is spoiled for picturesque cricket grounds, it would never lose another match.

Test cricket is played in some of the most beautiful places on earth, from Barbados to Cape Town, but no Test Match ground can hold a candle to the real thing - the English village green, unchanged in centuries.

Bridgetown Cricket Club in Somerset, located in the Exmoor National Park, was adjudged the winner.

It was the eccentric detail that made this little ground, accessible by a wooden footbridge over a river, sound so heart-warmingly English. "There is a swallows' nest in the dressing-room, a wrens' nest above the front door... showers non-existent, though it is possible to take a dip in the river Exe to cool off after the match...a boiler fired by gas bottles for that most essential cricketing ingredient - tea." You can almost hear the kettle whistling as the players plod off the field.

Click here to read about the other grounds.

	How could I drop that? © Getty Images

A recent scientific study may explain why fielders might struggle with deliveries coming right at them. More in the New York Times:

“Binocular vision is quite good for working out where objects are in space,” said Andrew E. Welchman, the lead author of the study and a lecturer at the University of Birmingham in England. “Because you have two eyes, the brain can take signals from each and compare them over time, averaging them. But when you have an object coming toward you, the differences in the information you get from the left and right side are more subtle,” and this makes the decision on location and speed more difficult.

Had America remained a British colony for as long as India, they would be playing Test cricket these days. After all, the fixture between the US and Canada predates those between England and Australia. Christopher Martin-Jenkins in the Times reflects on whether the Americans can learn to love cricket.

“The New York Cricket Club was a splendid idea,” one of the peripheral characters says in Joseph O'Neill's engaging, poignant, subtle novel Netherland, recently nominated for this year's Man Booker prize. “But would the project have worked? No. There's a limit to what Americans understand. The limit is cricket."

Andrew Anthony interviews the author in the Observer.

'I was stuck in Canada and my plane ticket didn't take me back for another couple of days, so I read for a day and I read a book that really helped me called Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. She is the sort of person who spends 20 years writing a novel. It was so slow. Nothing really happened and it was so attentive just to sentences. And I suddenly thought, why don't I write exactly what I want to write and to hell with the plot points.'

He junked the second half of the book and started again from scratch. The result is a gorgeous, ruminative prose in which every sentence feels written, not typed. Comparisons have been made to F Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby, and the poignant echo of that book can be clearly heard in a number of passages. The elegy is not commonplace in the modern English novel. There are examples, like Alan Hollinghurst's exquisite The Line of Beauty, which is also reminiscent of Gatsby, but on the whole it's an American form, inextricably tied to what Mehta, in relation to Netherland, called 'the compromised beauty of the American dream'.

John Buchanan, the coach of the Kolkata Knight Riders, gave a presentation on leadership and success in Kolkata on Friday. He says creating a learning environment, identifying the right people, and having the courage to back your judgements are just some of the steps necessary to achieve success. Read more in the Kolkata-based Telegraph.

	This photograph may have won an ICC Global Development award, but does it qualify as an achievement for Chinese cricket? © ICC

China bends its knee to no one where individual pursuits such as diving, weightlifting and shooting are concerned, but it has not yet got the team thing. The Asian Cricket Council's website indicates where the mission to inculcate “shen shi yun dong” (“the noble game”) into the hearts and minds of the Chinese stands: against a population of 1,321,851,888, it lists zero turf pitches, zero cricket clubs, four cricket grounds and a blank next to the name of the national captain.

There are 153 coaches who have a “Level 1” certificate, which allows them “to assist more qualified coaches developing aspects of coaching under direct supervision”, but there is no information on how many better-qualified coaches there are to supervise them. Still it is good to know, under “recent achievements”, that China won the Global Development awards photo of the year in 2005, a sweet, staged picture of three Chinese children playing soft-ball cricket on the Great Wall of China.

	The six shots that unfortunately remain the highlight of Malcolm Nash's career © BBC

On August 31, 1968, Garry Sobers hit six sixes off Malcolm Nash in an over, and nearly 40 years on there's still a doubt over the ball (or balls?) that sailed over the boundary. The issue is raised in a new book Six of the Best – Cricket's Most Famous Over, reports thisisnottingham.co.uk. Read more here.

On the same website, Sobers reveals his mindset:

"As Malcolm prepared to bowl, I remembered the two versions of how to get quick runs. Everton Weekes used to tell me that if I kept the ball on the ground no one could catch me while Sir Learie Constantine preferred the alternative, saying if you hit it up in the air and out of the ground nobody could catch it anyway. On that occasion, I chose Lord Constantine's version."

WalesOnline reports that TV would have missed the moment, had it not been for Cardiff-born TV producer John Norman.

Poor Nash's career is mostly remembered by this one incident, but he wasn't totally disappointed, another report on the same website suggests.

“They’ll make a movie,” he said.

“What will they call it?” a teammate responded.

“Gone With The Wind?”

Ivo Tennant looks at the occasion in the Times.

In Rizwan Cheema, the man of the tournament for the Tri-Series between West Indies, Canada and Bermuda, Canda has unearthed a player of startling potential, writes Faraz Sarwat in the Toronto Star.

A club player from the Toronto leagues with no exposure to first-class cricket, Cheema had never faced bowling as quick as that of the West Indies duo of Daren Powell and Jerome Taylor, both of whom can nudge the speedometer past 90 miles per hour. Cheema said it took him a couple of balls to get used to the speed, then he set about playing his natural game. "I don't care who the bowler is, I just look at the ball and if it's there to be hit, I'll hit it." It's a simple enough philosophy, that made sense in the match against Bermuda (34 off 24 balls with three sixes) but against the West Indies it could have been suicide. Yet on Friday, Cheema smashed the West Indies for 89 runs off a mere 69 balls with ten fours and six mighty sixes and then in the final on Sunday, played another scorcher, hammering 61 runs off only 41 balls, with three sixes and eight fours, half of which came off a single over from Powell. Overnight Cheema has become Canada's most dangerous batsman. No other player including Davison has announced himself with such a bang in Canadian cricket. It is early days, but Cheema's stats after three matches are staggering, with an average of 61 and a strike-rate of 133.

There are times when it's not a good idea to put out your B-team, writes Emma John in the New Statesman. John cites the disappointment of British women's 4x200m freestyle team at the Olympics, where the B-team failed to make it past the heats. However, she points out that some sports take it to an extreme, as in cricket, where several countries are nervous about the upcoming Champions Trophy in Pakistan.

If forced to send a team to the tournament, England will likely send a bunch of second stringers. Clearly, Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen are irreplaceable, but I think that if I were one of those getting on the plane, I would be a little disheartened to know that I was, well, so much more expendable than the other players.

...

And if England's wannabes were to win the Champions Trophy in September, how many would be invited to play against the billionaire Texan Allen Stanford's West Indies all-star team the following month, and possibly pick up a $1m winner's cheque? Very few, I suspect.

Marcus Trescothick has become the third cricketer this year after Lou Vincent and Shaun Tait to reveal that they were suffering from stress-related illnesses. Their speaking out needs to be appreciated, writes Mike Atherton in the Times.

No doubt there are still some old-timers who shake their heads and tut-tut about the softness of the modern game and its participants. Those, however, who truly remember what it was like may recall times when they, too, trod perilously close to the line. Diagnostics and the better support systems on offer are light years away from what was available to previous generations, but that is not to say that problems did not exist. From my own era, if they were honest with themselves, Graham Thorpe and Phil Tufnell would surely admit that, at times, they were in no fit state to be batting and bowling in the backyard, never mind playing for England.

He continues …

I would have thought that it would be easier to keep going in some kind of private hell, grinning to the world and playing up to the myth of invincibility that generations of sports writers encouraged, than to admit to their problems. Their speaking out is to be admired, especially since it may convince others in similar circumstances to do the same and to seek help before it is too late.

Scotland take on England for the first time in a one-day international on Monday and have their county players available. But that isn't always so, and it's an ongoing battle for Associates, especially Scotland and Ireland who have a players on county books. Kyle Coetzer will make his ODI debut against England and has had to wait until now because of his Durham career. In Scotland on Sunday, Mark Woods looks at the issue which is threatening the creditability of Associate cricket.

It is a conflict that the International Cricket Council plans to end. In return for a vast increase in investment in the second-tier Associate nations, the full members who control the sport want to see progress on the field. However, it is unfair to judge a sub-strength side. Coetzer missed last month's crushing eight-wicket loss to New Zealand, while a fortnight ago, Ireland saw in-form Middlesex batsman Eoin Morgan pull out of the World Twenty20 qualifiers at the last minute. He wanted to miss a day's play to turn out in a televised Pro40 tie. The Irish said no. A week later, he was called into the England Lions' squad. Was there any doubt he'd turn up for that? Not a chance.

In cricket, China is the next India. At least, that is the view of Cricket Australia, which is taking a leading role in teaching the Chinese to play the game and sees the world's most populous nation as a vital frontier in the sport's expansion plans, Chloe Saltau in the Age.

	David Gower thinks that was taken cleanly © Getty Images

It is amazing there are not more off-field confrontations similar to that between the England captain, Michael Vaughan, and South Africa's AB de Villiers, Angus Fraser says in the Independent on Sunday, given the close proximity of the opposing dressing rooms at most venues. Fraser recollects one such rare flare-up.

There was an ugly incident in a one-day international I played in Barbados when Gladstone Small, one of the nicest men to play cricket for England, pointed to the dressing room when he dismissed Gordon Greenidge, the rather angry West Indian batsman. At the Kensington Oval the dressing rooms are divided by a narrow walkway, and at the end of the match an England player stuck his head in our room to inform us that an irate Greenidge had Small by the throat

Both Vaughan and de Villiers were at the centre of controversial catches, both of which were given not-out after being referred to the third umpire. In the Sunday Times, David Gower says he thought Vaughan's catch off Hashim Amla was clean, and feels perhaps the player's word should be taken.

My view was that Vaughan had caught it. Sky tried before play yesterday to demonstrate how the ball can look to be on the ground to the long lens when in fact it is safely in a fielder’s hands. The method of Vaughan’s catch, with a dive involved, left it open to suspicion that the ball might have just touched the grass. In our commentary box there was little agreement. I can sympathise with the third umpire and understand there was enough doubt for him to deny the catch.

So here is the key question: should we return to the days when players were trusted to say if a catch was good or should we be heading for greater use of TV pictures to help in the decision making? The answer has to be a bit of both, including selective use of the latter, which could be extended from its current scope to include a second look to check on whether a batsman has hit the ball for a catch or inside-edged it when the arms are up for an lbw appeal.

	Jacques Kallis, in the more traditional vanilla by Hummel, cleans up an Ian Bell sporting the bright Mr Whippy white by Adidas © Getty Images

While England trot out at Headingley togged out in bright Mr Whippy white by Adidas, South Africa are in more traditional vanilla by Hummel, which is the subject of Rob Bagchi's article in the Guardian.

The latter, particularly, seems a strange marriage - the chevron merchants first gaining prominence with Alan Ball's white boots in the early 1970s and Denmark's "we are red, we are white, we are Danish dynamite" Euro 84 strip worn by Preben Elkjaer and Soren Lerby.

...

They are not the first half-forgotten brand to latch on to cricket in a bid for renewed prominence. Admiral, manufacturers of iconic kits for England and Leeds United in the 1970s thanks to their close ties to Don Revie as well as that infamous "chocolate" Coventry City away strip, recently finished an eight-year contract with England that put them back on the radar after two relatively moribund decades.

If cricket works wonders for retro brand chic, this trend will surely continue. Give it five years and Bangladesh will be decked out by Patrick, Sri Lanka by Bukta and New Zealand by Stylo Matchmaker. Old labels never die, they just change sports.

	Protests during the rebel tour of South Africa © Cricinfo Ltd

Jim White in the Telegraph focuses on Out of the Wilderness, a three-part documentary in which Sky's Charles Colville retells the story of the South Africa's sporting isolation. White says:

What is somewhat dispiriting about Colville's investigations is how many of the rebels remain unrepentant. At least John Emburey admits he went solely for the money. Colin Croft, on the other hand, casts himself and his fellow rebel West Indian side as cricketing Rosa Parks, there to show racist South Africans that the black man could play cricket as well as the white and thus helping to accelerate the end of apartheid. Perhaps Croft should talk to Peter Oborne, the author of the definitive book about the D'Oliveira case, who tells Colville that the tourists "should never be allowed to forget they were giving comfort to a wicked, barbarous regime".

But it was Gatting who finally demonstrated how far a cricketer's moral compass can go awry. By 1990, when he led a tour to South Africa, no one could claim ignorance. The moment he signed up, Gatting was subject to unrelenting opprobrium. At a press conference, he was hectored by a journalist who wondered how he would spend his blood money ("fancy a yacht, Mr Gatting?"). Unlike even the West Indies team whose presence was greeted largely by sullen disappointment among black South Africans, Gatting arrived in Pietermaritzberg into an organised maelstrom of demonstration. Indeed, his very presence highlighted the growing absurdity of a dying regime: a month after his tour was abandoned in embarrassment, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the swift gallop to normality was unleashed

There's plenty of confusion in India and Pakistan about the rules that govern anti-doping measures in the world of sport in the wake of the Mohammad Asif scandal. The Hindu lists out the various myths and realities of doping.

Myth: A Therapeutic Use Exemption (TUE) is the way to dope.

Reality: True, a TUE gives an athlete the chance to take a prohibited substance in certain medical conditions, but a TUE is granted by a panel of experts only after satisfying that such a medication is absolutely necessary for the athlete’s health and there is no substitute. For example, an athlete applying for a TUE for an asthma medication is expected to produce results of a series of tests and if the authorities are not satisfied the competitor may be subjected to on-the-spot tests to verify whether he actually suffers from asthma and the TUE he is carrying is in order.

	Monty Panesar hogs the attention at Lord's © Getty Images

Wimbledon has its Henman Hill and yesterday afternoon Lord's had its equivalent: Panesar Lawn, reports Richard Hobson in the Times. The MCC have installed a big screen on the Nursery Ground - the stretch of grass behind the Compton and Edrich Stands - and on a good-day for lazing around, one man stole the attention.

Panesar continues to grab the popular imagination but, as the game moved well beyond its halfway stage towards the climax of today, he started to resemble Henman on semi-finals day. He tried, tried again and then tried harder, but for all the optimistic whoops, balls narrowly missed the edge or fell short of fielders.

A delay between the real-time action and transmission on the screen created a double echo whenever Panesar bellowed one of his famous appeals. First would come Panesar's roar, then a chorus from the 25,000 or so watching live and another cheer from those following the big screen.

Sean Morris, the new chief of the Professional Cricketers' Association, is trying to negotiate a share of the new spoils for the England team while preserving the soul of the game. He spoke to Martin Baker in the Independent.

As a journeyman county cricketer himself, who went on to various jobs in the leisure promotions world before joining the PCA, he certainly feels his members deserve a bit more money: "Players are central to delivering the future of the game. We have to work with the ECB and the BCCI [Board of Control for Cricket in India] in a world market nowadays. As the players' representatives, we must play a more effective role in securing financial rewards, but we've also got to for players coming into the game."

...

Meanwhile, although he welcomes the "massive opportunity" provided by the short form of the game, Morris is determined to preserve five-day test cricket, which he and 90 per cent of his members regard as the ultimate form of their sport. "We have a responsibility to protect the game we've got. Test matches in this country bring in £50m to £60m per annum. It would be stupid to kill off the skills required for test cricket [which aren't easily acquired in the limited-overs game]. That would be killing the golden goose."

Now in Israel as part of a unique Israel team with several Jewish cricketers, Jonty Rhodes says he's excited by the talent in a country with no cricket culture. In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, he says the book Exodus by Leon Uris really drew him to the country.

"My knowledge of Israel comes from the 'Exodus' and how tenacious and determined the people here are to have transformed the desert into this thriving economy. It's genius, and the people here are tenacious to be able to make a living in a really harsh environment."

Eden Gardens, India’s largest cricket stadium, is readying for a nip-and-tuck before the 2011 World Cup. But will it be any better? The Kolkata-based Telegraph investigates:

The tournament is two-and-a-half-years away but the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) that reigns, with the army’s boots on the throne, over Calcutta’s most famous patch of green has only a foggy idea of which apple to pluck for the Eden or which snake to let loose. Architects have not been spoken to, a budget is not in place. Prasun Mukherjee, the CAB president who took charge in a blaze of publicity around this time last year, said: “The land belongs to them (the army). We cannot start construction unless the lease is renewed.”

While that is true — the application for renewal has been lying with the defence ministry for over a year — Eden Gardens has already fallen behind the Wankhede stadium in the nip-and-tuck run. Wankhede has already submitted its plan to the Board of Control for Cricket in India, hired an architect and set its budget at Rs 100 crore.

The Telegraph's Simon Hughes writes about the Loughborough University's scientific study on helmets.

In a project financed in part by the government, in part by the ECB, Loughborough's sports technology institute - an organisation that works with sporting bodies and manufacturers to produce cutting edge equipment - has been subjecting various helmets and gloves to a severe assault. In a transparent box a typical betting helmet is positioned on the head of a mannequin which is screwed onto a steel post. Balls are fired at the helmet from close range using a bowling machine.

The speed is about 65mph, similar to that of James Anderson bouncer once it has reached the batsman. The process is recorded by cameras filming at 10,000 frames per second. Once slowed down the images are similar to those ads featuring crash-test dummies. A similar process is used to test a glove on the hand of a prosthetic arm.

Just how important is education in a sportsman's career? Brian Moore writes in the Telegraph, writes that better educated athletes are easier to coach, understand quicker and have a longer attention span. They make better team players and leaders. He gives the example of the controversial run-out of Grant Elliott at the Oval, when several England players failed to think sensibly and alert Paul Collingwood to reconsider his decision to continue appealing. Education teaches you to think independently, but unfortunately it wasn't evident that day.

One of the reasons why the Australian Institute of Sport has been phenomenally successful is that it insists on its athletes studying properly alongside their training regimes. They have no difficulty ensuring athletes study because it is a captive market; all the athlete wants to do is play sport and they are prepared to do whatever is required of them; including reading books.

In the Times, Stuart Broad says he loves Test cricket, despite his friends telling him all the time that it's boring. He also talks about his formative years and relationship with his parents.

“To be fair, my mum's been the one who watched most of my cricket when I was younger. She is the one who carted me around the country. She'd be sat there in a deckchair all day watching and then drive me home. So she's the one who has always watched my development.”

Paul Holden, the Sideline Slogger, comes up with 10 topical questions on cricket, including ICC's new lunch rule following the abandoned match between England and New Zealand at Edgbaston. He provides answers as well:

Will the new lunch rule make a difference?

Under the new rules, even if Collingwood had played hardball and disagreed with Vettori over the need for another helping of Edgbaston macaroni cheese for his boys, the match referee would have been wheeled in to make a call.

Who was the original switch hitter?
One of the most boring batsmen alive in fact: no, not Geoff Allott, Shoaib Mohammed, Alastair Cook, Rahul Dravid, Trevor Franklin, Chris Tavare or Mike Brearley - none other than Jacques Kallis, who hit two unorthodox sixes in a match for Middlesex at Uxbridge during his stint as their overseas player in the nineties.

	Kevin Pietersen's stroke of genius © Getty Images

It is a sign of genius that a player can make the laws of a game look foolish while not obviously cheating, says Michael Atherton in the Times on Kevin Pietersen's switch-hitting. He offers a solution to the conundrum that the lawmakers face.

So what can MCC do to not discourage such wondrous feats as Pietersen's on Sunday, but at the same time maintain the integrity of the game and intrinsic fairness to bowlers? Well, it could consider the following: that a fielding side should not be penalised once the batsman decides to switch-hit. That is to say, once a right-handed batsman has changed both grip and stance to become in effect a left-hander, the bowler ought to be allowed to bowl both sides of the wicket, without incurring a wide, and, taking that one stage further, he ought to be allowed to get leg-befores by pitching both sides of the wicket as well. At a stroke, the kind of genius we saw on Sunday would not be prevented, but would be discouraged by the subsequent advantage accruing to the bowler.

Blogging on the Guardian website, Richard Williams feels Twenty20 is the perfect stage for switch-hits.

My solution would be to take full advantage of the emergence of Twenty20 cricket, a form of cricket for which Pietersen himself has expressed an almost excessive enthusiasm. For Twenty20 only, improvised switch-hitting would be permitted. A batsman would be given out leg-before if, in the umpire's opinion, the ball would have hit the stumps, no matter where it pitched. A wide would be given for any ball pitching outside lines of longitude drawn six inches from the stumps on both sides of the wicket. And the fielding problem would be solved by making captains set symmetrically proportioned fields, with four men positioned on each side of the wicket and one "floater" to be deployed ad libitum. Oh, go on, try it.

Read what Michael Holding and Richard Hadlee think about it in the Telegraph. Also, don't forget to read the views of Cricinfo's panel of experts.

Will players ditch their counties in favour of the big bucks of cricket's Champions League? Jonathan Agnew in BBC Sport says plenty such questions need answering in cricket's latest mega event.

What about England's one-day cricketers who are unavailable for almost all of the domestic Twenty20 which starts on Wednesday? They will probably be free for the Champions League and I suspect will be keen to get their hands on the prize money.Will Peter Moores release them and, if so, what effect will that have on team spirit within their county team?

In the Sunday Telegraph, Scyld Berry wonders whether county supporters will buy into the aspirations of their team and turn out in large numbers, now with $5 million up for grabs for the world Twenty20 champions.

The sum of prize-money for the Champions League far exceeds the $2million touted when the idea was first proposed. The lid of Pandora's Box has been opened; the expectations of domestic cricketers have been raised as never before; attitudes will change as the object of the exercise is now major money. It may prove to be something of an understatement when Clarke said: "The ECB Twenty20 Cup will be even more fiercely contested this season in the knowledge that the two teams who reach the final will qualify for the Champions League and the chance to win $5 million."

An Irish-born author, Joseph O'Neill, has written a novel set in New York City post 9/11 and the central theme which binds the novel is cricket. Titled Netherland - the name a pun on the main character's Dutch nationality - the book has been described as the 'wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Centre fell'. The book was inspired by an encounter with a Pakistani seeking to build a cricket stadium in New York, 9/11 itself and O'Neill's own involvement in playing cricket in the city.

'When I told publishers that I was writing a novel about cricket in New York people just shook their heads and walked away. There was not so much a bidding war for it as a bidding peace. Only one publisher was interested.'

Read on in the Observer

Canada’s Globe and Mail looks at how cricket is catching on in Toronto. It also quotes Cricket Canada’s chief executive, Atul Ahuja, who plays in the Markham league:

“People are very bullish about the appeal of the sport. It's going to catch on in Canada. The beauty of the game is it's such a great way to bring people together. Lennon said, ‘All you need is love.' I say, all you need is cricket.”

The Australian’s Tim Albone looks at cricket in Afghanistan and finds their coach, Taj Majik Alam, desperate for his side to qualify for the 2011 World Cup and with bigger things to worry about than rain delays:

Alam has been threatened by a suicide bomber for not picking a particular player, one of the star bowlers has been shot in the chest and his training facilities amount to four nets.

The piece also contains a link to Albone’s video documentary of the team’s bid to make it to their first World Cup.

	"If you make decisions, then the game will move forward at the right pace and you’ll be on track" © Getty Images

Speaking to Kolkata's The Telegraph, the 45-year-old Crowe says that captaincy requires one to articulate thoughts and ideas and handle people well. Interestingly, he also ranks the current Test captains and reveals that he learnt from Ian Chappell and Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy. And that Stephen Fleming was the captain who impressed him most.

The Indian selectors, in particular, have made a smart move by appointing Dhoni as the one-day captain… This will allow him to grow into the full job step by step… Dhoni has charisma and has a manner… He’s learning from the Sachin Tendulkars… New Zealand Cricket should’ve done the same thing as India instead of rushing and giving Vettori everything all too soon. Fleming could’ve been the Test captain for a couple of years more. Definitely one year, if not a couple… England have Paul Collingwood in the ODIs… He’s a fighting cricketer, yes, but is tactically inept… Tactically, I haven’t seen a worse captain but he’ll try and make up for that by fighting performances.

The MCC is in the news as it contemplates changing the laws relating to the make-up of bats. In the Australian Peter Lalor looks at the recommendations to limit the amount of carbon in a handle.

The law will state it must feature 90% cane, rubber and glue. However, Gray-Nicolls is already one step ahead and has developed a bat which replaces the rubber with 10% carbon. The company said it believed the handle for the Fusion II was within the proposed new law.

Read Cricinfo’s story on the changes here.

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

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

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

In the Daily Telegraph, he writes that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

	Deal or no deal: Is Shane Warne bluffing? © Getty Images

Shane Warne has put his cards on the table and will play professional poker instead of county cricket. Joe Hachem, a world champion at the tables, says in the Daily Telegraph Warne is pretty good at his new pursuit and his face is hard to read.

"Shane has that competitive nature and that's what makes him a champion," Hachem said. "He brings that competitiveness to the poker table. I said to him in the early days that he had what it takes to be a professional.

"He's also got the poker face now. When he first started out I told him he was giving off too much facial expression. But now he is very hard to read."

Even by the game's customary standards, it has been a traumatic week, writes Peter Roebuck in the Sydney Morning Herald. Three senior West Indian players putting lucrative club cricket in India before the national team, doomed attempts to suppress the unofficial ICL, a KPMG report into Zimbabwe, the return of Darrell Hair, Charl Langeveldt's pulling out of South Africa's tour of India.

Clearly they [Chris Gayle, Ramnaresh Sarwan and Shiv Chanderpaul] represent the worst of West Indian cricket, the greed, vanity and vapidity that has ruined a great tradition. Sack the lot and find some youngsters eager to serve. West indies cricket can hardly get any worse. Already the team belongs on the second rank. Money does not talk, it swears.

Paul Holden asks if the Mumbai Indians is the worst IPL team name, whether John Bracewell is on drugs, whether India are taking over the world game and more in his blog Sideline Slogger:

Sri Lanka this week adopted Canada from a cricket development perspective - perhaps NZC could send the Indian board our CV and get us in consideration to become their foster child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

	© Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cricket took a step forward to being included in the Olympics yesterday when it was officially recognised by the International Olympic Committee, Adelaide Now reports.

The earliest cricket could be seen at the Games is 2020.

As it will not have spent the mandatory two-year provisional status by the time the 2008 Beijing Olympics are over, its case will be reviewed following the 2012 London Games.

The Olympic program is determined seven years ahead of every Games.

"Both (sports) showed a lot of activity and work with youth," IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies told reporters after the first day of an executive board meeting.

Other fully recognised sports include rugby, golf, squash, bridge and tug-of-war. Provisionally recognised sports include sumo wrestling.

With the arrival of Twenty20 and several obits being written on the 50-over game, Harsha Bhogle feels that Test cricket will remain in robust health. The stands may not be full but people know the scores, great performances are lauded, victories are celebrated and statistics greedily devoured.

To my mind, the reason Test cricket will never die is because it gives people the opportunity of fighting back. A mistake is not the end of the world, players stand firm against the tide and sometimes turn it back with old-fashioned grit. Test cricket is not retro, it is still contemporary and even modern cricketers look forward to playing it.

In the same piece in the Indian Express, he suggests that 50-overs cricket can follow the rules of Tests by splitting the innings into two overs of 25 overs each to add more spark to a dying format.

	Kieron Pollard, wielding a baseball bat, was a smashing success in Havana © Trinidad & Tobago Express

Mike Haysman, in his column in SuperCricket writes about his visit to Havana for his television show and the baseball exploits of Kieron Pollard, the new Trinidad and Tobago sensation. Pollard, holding a baseball bat for the first time, faced up to Pedro Medina [he is also referred to as Lazo], who was a member of the Cuban national team for 19 years.

Keiron was looking as though he was taking this all in his stride as his typical West Indian gait took him to the batting box. Five minutes later he had not laid bat on ball. He had swung from the hip at every thunderbolt that thudded into Lazo’s catchers’ glove. It was close but no cigar. A smile was slowly appearing on Pedro’s face. Keiron’s eyes grew wider with each delivered strike.

The speed generated by Lazo was quite remarkable. It must have been intimidating from Keiron’s perspective as well, knowing that his pin point accuracy could intentionally be slightly and dangerously adjusted at any chosen moment. Still Pollard swung but still no connection. I could see in Lazo’s eyes that he was enjoying this currently one sided challenge.

And then it started to happen. Pollard found his range. The odd fly ball and foul signalled that the wheel was starting to turn. Before long Keiron was making solid connection and the by now swelled gallery was muttering Spanish words of appreciation. The odd nods of approval were delivered my way by Pedro and Lazo also complimented Pollard.

	Kumar Sangakkara was at his sublime best at the Bellerive Oval © Getty Images

Peter Roebuck, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, felt Sangakkara's dismissal could not "erase the memory of the wonderful innings".

Sangakkara was superb. While Sanath Jayasuriya was contentedly clubbing the ball around the ground, he was able to advance at his own pace. In the early hours of his resistance he played a stream of sweetly timed strokes, placements through cover, glides off his pads and assaults on misdirected spinners. When necessary he defended alertly, eye on the ball, biding his time.

The Australian's Michael Davis lauded Sangakkara's sportsmanship.

Kumar Sangakkara proved himself a true champion by shaking hands with South African Rudi Koertzen after the game despite a woeful decision by the umpire that cost the Sri Lankan the chance of making a historic double-century.

Glenn Mitchell, in his ABC Grandstand Blog, also praises Sangakkara.

Too many times the sporting headlines are filled with elite sportspeople's misdemeanors.

It seems it's more palatable to expose the flaws rather than highlight the grace.

Today at Bellerive Oval, Sri Lanka's Kumar Sangakkara embodied what we want to see from our sports champions, and he deserves to be heralded for his batting brilliance and his extreme grace.

	Sri Lanka's Sunday Times makes its point

In Sri Lanka there is widespread anxiety that the public might miss out on a landmark when and if Muttiah Muralitharan breaks Shane Warne’s record of Test wickets. The Sri Lankan board has written to CA and Sri Lanka’s Sunday Times published a silhouette figure with its cricket coverage with a caption: "This space is dedicated to what would have been an action picture of the Test match in progress in Brisbane. The black figure is courtesy of Cricket Australia."

The subject has attracted comment across the globe. In the Gulf News, Gautam Bhattacharyya wrote:

Cricket Australia, one of the most progressive and professional bodies to run the sport, is now being termed as 'greedy.' It's very much a subject of debate, but what is certain is that they have set a rather dangerous precedent now.

In Jamaica’s Gleaner, Tony Becca points out that sports needs the media.

Cricket at all levels has been surviving because of sponsors, for sponsors' presence is key. And if the media, if the newspapers are not present, neither will the sponsor's product or service. Sport has become big business, but it has become big business partly because of the exposure and the coverage it receives from the media - and none more so than cricket.

Greg Baum makes a similar point in The Age:

This, though, is not about marketing. Mostly, cricket shares a mutually convenient relationship with media; cricket sells papers, papers sell cricket. It is true of other sports and other media

The Times of India's Partha Bhaduri takes off on the Indian board's stance.

There’s no denying the fact that such demands could spill over into written content as well, apart from changing the way the Internet functions and is regulated.

Narottam Puri, writing in his column in cricketnext.com, provides a historical overview of the evolution of cricket commentary on radio, and on the subsequent decline of the same.

History tells us that Test cricket began in Australia in the late 19th century when Australia played England. Few know that it was also in Australia that radio commentary originated.

This occurred in 1922 in a Testimonial match for Charles Bannerman [Test cricket’s first centurion] at the Sydney Cricket Ground, the first commentator being a gentleman named Lionell Watt. BBC introduced sport commentary in its repertoire only in 1927 when Teddy Wakelam did the commentary of an England Vs. Wales Rugby match. Wakelam was soon to be drafted to do first Football, and then Tennis at Wimbledon.

The same year, i.e. 1927, the first cricket commentary was broadcast on BBC in the Essex Vs. New Zealand match at Leyton. Plum Warner, ex England player became the first to do cricket commentary. He wasn’t a success and was replaced by F.H.Gillingham who as John Arlott wrote "had the ill luck to be announced for his first quarter hour when rain prevented start of play. He struggled on to fill his time out of nothing, proceeded to read out the advertisements on the hoarding."

Neil Manthorp, writing in Super Cricket, provides a fascinating account of the sights and sounds of Pakistan, along with a description of his meeting with a salesman in Lahore.

The only specific shopping commission I had was for pashmina shawls, a speciality of the region. Made from cashmere, silk or wool - or a combination of two, or even all three - it was an impossible task [for me, anyway] to work out which were 'the real thing.'

Having attempted to bargain with stall holder Ashraf and his seven-year-old nephew, Ephraim, it soon became apparent that it was not a fair contest.

Ephraim was there because he knew more English than his fiercely bearded uncle but it made little difference.

Ashraf knew immediately that I was his for the taking. Having secured three shawls [all of which felt as soft as cashmere to me] for the princely sum of Rs. 110, Ashraf looked a little crestfallen - and revealed his knowledge of English wasn't as sparse as he made out. "You only tourist today, nobody come here now. Business no good."

And with that he handed me another shawl with the words: "Take and give your friends, you tell that is good place here...Smith must come to see."

Microsoft, the American multinational computer corporation, has backed cricket to woo Indian employees as this Reuters piece, carried in the Sydney Morning Herald, highlights. Competing against fast-growing technology companies in India offering jobs with handsome pay raises and quick promotions, Microsoft has to work harder these days to attract and retain the best and brightest Indian engineering talent. And one inititative has been Microsoft's cricket program - comprising four teams that compete against other local teams - that is seen as a valuable tool in keeping the company's largest minority group happy.

Andy Zaltzman, writing in the Times bemoans the lack of young superstars to fill the void left by the ageing giants who are nearing retirement.

A generation of record-breaking, game-changing greats is gradually taking its leave of the sport, leaving in its wake a potential superstar drought that could threaten the very existence of multimillion-pound television deals.

According to the LG ICC rankings, of the world’s top 15 Test batsmen, only Kevin Pietersen is under 29. On the same day ten years ago, only Steve Waugh of the top eight batsmen was over 29. Eight of the present top ten bowlers are in their thirties. In September 1997, seven of the top ten were under 30. And of the top ten ranked batsmen and bowlers in one-day international cricket, only Lasith Malinga, the Sri Lanka pace bowler, is under 25.

Is the Duckworth-Lewis method as complicated as it seems? No, says Frank Duckworth, one half of the old firm. GS Vivek of the Indian Express caught up with him and Duckworth goes on to reveal that the method of calculation is likely to change to suit the trends of the modern game.

Frank and Tony are great friends who live 60 miles from each other; occasionally they travel halfway to a pub to share a pint of beer and talk. It’s not casual conversations; it’s calculative to the core and serious.

Siddhartha Vaidyanathan too caught up with Duckworth for an informal chat in Bristol over a week ago.

Brian Lara's niece was abducted during a gunpoint car-jacking and police believe when the robbers found out who she was they tried to get a ransom.

Police found Adanna Lara, 21, gagged and locked in a room with her hands tied behind her back .

Read more in the Trinidad Express.

	Npowering or ... not? © Cricinfo

Ah, the Npower girls. You’ve got to love them, don’t you?

Tanya Aldred in The Guardian muses over their continuing appeal, but questions if the concept is not just a little outdated:

It just all seems a little bit 1970s, not such a long way from being draped over a car bonnet, promising the spotty youth in accounts the drive of his life.

The Npowered-up piece referred to in the article is here.

Christopher Martin-Jenkins believes that a modern tendency has been responsible for demeaning the game’s fundamental spirit. At Lord's on Monday (July 16) he delivered the Cowdrey Lecture, and The Times featured extracts of what he had to say.

Cricinfo recorded 29 million page views from 7.5 million visits to county cricket alone in 2006 - and has already had 19 million this season so, despite the rain, they expect the figure to be exceeded. Obviously because a great many people want to find out the latest scores. Sadly, if they are on the move in their cars they can listen for them in vain; and when they are given it often seems to be as a breathless afterthought following the big story that Scunthorpe's millionaire chairman has denied rumours that their controversial manager Bruno Boscovic is going to be sacked. Or, more to the point, some utterly mundane comment by Jose Murinho such as he thinks that Chelsea have the players to win the Premiership. What a surprise. The media has been conned to a dangerous extent – if you value the variety of life - into becoming a sort of spin machine for the all-pervading, all-powerful Premiership.

	Brett Lee: Member of an increasingly rare species © Getty Images

"Whatever the aesthetics of watching spin bowling, I maintain that for the pure adrenalin of cricket-watching there is no finer sight than that of a thoroughbred fast bowler on song, hurling himself into the fray against batsmen of the highest technical and mental calibre," says Mike Selvey in The Guardian.

Where are the genuine pace aces? There is Lee certainly, Harmison when he can be roused and Shane Bond when fit. The three slingers - Edwards, Shaun Tait and Lasith Malinga - are rapid, but that is about it really, isn't it? Some would argue that the volume of cricket conspires against those who want to bowl on the very edge of physical exertion, but I don't buy that: if you can bowl fast, you do. Nor does the state of pitches around the world offer a clue, for the dullest surfaces of them all produced Imran Khan and, together, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, the most prolific pace bowling combination the game has seen.

Michael Henderson, writing in The Daily Telegraph, has slammed spectators at Old Trafford for their behaviour during the recent Test.

“Good as it was to see the ground full last weekend, too many people had come to admire themselves. This is not a problem exclusive to Old Trafford. The narcissism encouraged by television, which likes to identify 'colourful characters', and people 'having fun', is evident everywhere. It just seems more apparent in Manchester, where the heavy-handed stewarding continues to offend regular patrons.

“What can be done about the increasingly unpleasant atmosphere inside Test grounds? Not much, I'm afraid. Where once spectators were sober observers (in both senses of the word), immersed in the game's history, we now have thousands of people for whom a Test match offers a splendid opportunity to get riotously drunk, and possibly the chance to disrobe and charge on to the field of play.”

Henderson, who has a track record of taking swipes at Old Trafford, writes that when Shiv Chanderpaul completed his half century “thousands of revellers ignored his achievement, preferring to hurl their beer trays higher and higher. The only ground where these high jinks do not take place is Lord's, where MCC members are often mocked for being snobs. Anybody who was at Manchester last week would say that snobbery has much to commend it.”

I think we can assume that the vast majority of Cricinfo's readers have a degree of knowledge about the game (and, in some cases, an actual degree). But your friends might not, so why not buy them a cricket dictionary for their mobile phone?

The Hindu's Nirmal Shekar looks at the fading careers of modern era cricket's two biggest batting superstars, Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar, and asks the question: merely because we believe that sporting icons should say goodbye in their pomp, is it fair to nudge Tendulkar and Lara off the stage?

Read on to see if you agree or disagree.

Batsmen may be happier and safer wearing helmets, but, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, they prevent fans seeing the batsmen's faces, which, market research has found, makes it hard for them to relate to the players.

But, as Philip Derriman notes, it’s not all gloom.

If they're bad for TV, they're about the only thing in cricket that is. In other respects, cricket is a broadcaster's dream. It lasts all day; the main action is concentrated in a smallish area; it's essentially a one-on-one (bowler-against-batsman) contest; the game lends itself to endless analysis by commentators; and the short breaks between overs are ideal for slotting in commercials.

The USA’s ABC News reports how China has used the World Cup to score diplomatic points over rivals Taiwan. The Chinese involvement in building various stadia in the Caribbean has been well documented, but it appears the knock-on effect has been more wide reaching:

China gave Antigua a $55 million grant to build the Sir Vivian Richards Cricket Stadium. It gave $30 million to Jamaica for a new Trelawny stadium. St. Lucia has both a cricket and a football stadium courtesy of Beijing. The 70,000 people of Dominica have received the aid equivalent of $1,600 per person in the form of a cricket grounds, new drains for the capital and better roads.

The immediate reason for this largesse is Beijing's determination to diplomatically isolate Taiwan. Says Harry Sung of the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington, D.C.: "Their top priority is to isolate Taiwan. Most of the remaining countries that recognize Taiwan are located in the Caribbean and Latin America."

China's cricket diplomacy led to two West Indian countries, Grenada and Dominica, derecognizing Taiwan as an independent country. Of the remaining 24 countries that recognize Taiwan, four are in the Caribbean and two of these play cricket.

This video amused us. It’s very silly – just a compilation of clips to the words of a 12th Man tune, but well worth a squizz.

Next month's World Cup in the West Indies will be the most thoroughly policed cricket tournament ever staged, writes Scyld Berry in the Sunday Telegraph.

In the Sunday Telegraph Mike Atherton jumps on the Big Brother bandwagon and also draws on the recent Herschelle Gibbs controversies to say that cricket is the ultimate reality show.

Players have long known that their every move – every suspicious thrust of hand in pocket, every touch of nail on ball – is open to scrutiny. The more recent advent of stump microphones, intended to bring the sound and fury of the game to the viewer, means that a player's words, and therefore his thought processes and character, are open to scrutiny, too.

Meanwhile, this week England announced the seven-man panel who will try and work out what when wrong during the Ashes series, a few other things besides. The chairman is Ken Schofield, the former chief of the PGA Golf Tour, and in the Sunday Telegraph Scyld Berry tries to find out a bit more about him. However, he says that even this review committee is unlikely to be radical enough.

When Schofield said he brought passion alone to the party, he was not quite correct. Parallels and analogies are not always useful but this one might well be. Working out of a small office at the Oval, where he met men of Surrey like May and Stewart, Schofield built up the European Tour in the same way that English cricket has to grow if it is to match Australia's

Here’s an unusual piece from The Sunday Telegraph, but one which is well worth a read. Michael Atherton unveils the process behind ghosted columns (where a journalist talks to a player whose opinions then form a column) and suggests that there are probably more risks than rewards for the players. He looks at Sajid Mahmood, among others, who got into hot water with the ECB for his comments about not being bowled enough.

Privately, Mahmood has complained that he was 'turned over' by his ghost. Unsurprisingly, the paper disagree and since the ghost in question is an excellent young journalist, who would have known the sensitivity of the issue, it is unlikely. The thoughts on Flintoff's captaincy may well have been paraphrased but they would have reflected the gist of the conversation. Being 'turned over' is as easy a get-out clause for a player, as for the journalist who, when confronted by an irate player, blames his editor for manipulating his copy.

The next time that Mahmood was scheduled to do a column, his phone was switched off for six hours. When the ghost finally got hold of him (from Kuala Lumpur, of all places, which sums up the whole business) Mahmood complained that he was tired and had nothing to say. When pushed, he asked that his exact words be used for the column.

Australia are once again moving away from the pack in international cricket and John Buchanan, the coach, has said it is down to the rest to catch up. However, in The New Zealand Herald, Greg Barns argues that if the ICC is to really push forward with its idea of expanding the game it is time for a divisional structure in Test cricket, so that teams have promotion and relegation to focus on.

So how about taking a leaf out of soccer's book and adopting a tier system in which teams are relegated and promoted. One of the reasons why soccer is so popular across the globe is because it operates on this basis. Small countries like Ecuador and Croatia have an opportunity to win World Cup qualifiers and then be "promoted" into the World Cup finals every four years. One way to do this would be to create divisions of countries. Australia, England, India, South Africa and Pakistan and perhaps Sri Lanka would be a natural premier division.

Cracking story courtesy of This is Nottingham of how eco-friendly Ben Foster got more than he bargained for when testing his newly-invented biodegrabale box against Notts speedster Charlie Shreck. The box worked fine, but Foster hadn't reckoned on covering his eye-balls, fnarr fnarr, and took a painful above the eye after Shreck dug one in short. "I am pretty sure it was an accident":said a sheepish Foster afterwards, before adding: "The box stood up well".

	Cricketers may look and sound better on the field than behind a lectern but over the years there have been some cracking cricket speeches by non-professional cricketers © Getty Images

As prime minister, Menzies became famous for timing his overseas travel to coincide with important cricket matches. That practice was obvious even in 1938. In his VCA speech, Menzies noted that by some extraordinary circumstance, prime minister Joseph Lyons had asked him to go to Britain that year to confer with ministers "about something or other", and that he had sent word to the conference organisers asking that they keep the full list of the Australian cricket fixtures next to their inkwells

In language that may inspire a few of the current Australian line-up, Denton urged Border not to retire prematurely. "You'll know the right time to get out. There'll be any number of telltale signs. One day, for instance, you'll call for a runner and they'll send out someone with a walking frame. Or maybe one day you'll find yourself prodding the pitch — not to smooth out any bumps, but to look for a nice, soft spot where you can have a nap. Or you may simply find yourself going for a quick two, turning for the second run, and then completely forgetting why it was you were running in the first place."

Remember Hamid ‘Banjo’ Cassim, the key figure in the match-fixing scandal of 2000? Ajay Shankar, from The Indian Express, caught up with the 'Biltong man' in Pretoria.

Cassim quickly steers the subject to his “friends” in Indian cricket. “I have great respect for Kapil Dev. Paaji is my hero. How is Ajay Jadeja? He was a good friend. And Mohammed Azharuddin? He is a great guy, it’s unfortunate that everybody turned on him. I knew Ali Irani (former physio) very well too, I hope he is fine."

Following last week's tremendous news that Billy Birmingham (pictured) is releasing a new 12th Man album, it has been revealed that he will be imitating Kerry Packer - a man who, in the height of his powers, Birmingham failed to recognise.

When 12th Man creator Billy Birmingham was once told by Nine Network cricket commentator Tony Greig that Kerry loved his work, his first response was “Kerry who?”.

“It goes down as one of my greatest faux pas,” says Birmingham in Sydney promoting his latest album.

[...]

Benaud interrupts Packer midway through a high stakes poker game with God asking for advice now Nine’s chief executive, Eddie McGuire, has “boned” the commentating team and replaced them with Birmingham “because he can do all the voices”.

“It’s kind of a weird recording — life imitating art, imitating life,” he says.

More at the Border Mail

	Billy Birmingham relaxes © SMH

The Sydney Morning Herald caught up with Birmingham as he put the finishing touches to the double CD.

Here's the drum on the new 12th Man album. Richie Benaud is so peeved with Eddie McGuire's cost-cutting decision to sack the entire Channel Nine commentary team - and hire Billy Birmingham to do all their voices and cover the Ashes series himself - that he forms a band called Richie and Da Boyz who do a remake of Birmingham's song Marvellous in a bid to get their own back against a man who has forged a career out of taking the piss out of them.

And it’s apparent that Birmingham in the flesh is as irreverent as his characters.

I'm all over the place like a suicide bomber's sandshoe … There's so much material. The drama has been trying to cut it all down so it fits onto a double album … It couldn't have happened in any other country. We're a nation of sports nuts and piss-takers and all I've done is combine the two.

Here's something a little different to break up all the Ashes talk. It's an interesting piece from The Australian which talks about cricket's role in the development of rugby league in Australia.

Australia's top cricketers were reduced to receiving allowances, while the ABC began to build up financial reserves from Test match income. The change left cricket in a similar situation to rugby union, which was experiencing a groundswell of discontent over the fact the NSW Rugby Union was raking in large profits through gate-receipts from the unpaid labour of their footballers.

Matthew Hoggard is doing a video tour diary from Australia for The Times. He's sent over three so far, all well worth a look, and available on YouTube.

Touring sides are increasingly bloated with personnel these days. For all the coaches, trainers – masseurs, even – that litter the dressing rooms, England can now add a resident poet, David Fine, from Bakewell in Derbyshire. Come January, batsmen's concerns might revolve around their stanzas, not their stance...

He will write 25 poems, one for each day’s play of the Ashes, following funding from Arts Council England.

"Wordsworth, Tennyson, Betjeman, Housman, Chesterton and Hughes have all gone out to bat for cricket, in verse.

"A line is a ball, a rhyme perhaps a wicket.

"In the stands, this is reflected by the 41 chants and songs in the Barmy Army's Barmy Harmonies for last year's Ashes Tour," he said.

The BBC have the full story.

A scientific study claims that top batsmen can predict the sort of ball a bowler is going to deliver before it even leaves his hand.

A report by Dr Sean Müller of RMIT University in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology states that the best batsman can predict how a ball will swing and where it will bounce well before it's airborne.

"[Experienced players] can pick up ... cues that the intermediate and novice players don't or aren't sensitive to."

So Australia’s throng of fans, cheerily known as the Fanatics, have a songbook for the Ashes to combat England’s notoriously boisterous and equally cheery Barmy Army. The Courier Mail have a list of songs England can expect to “enjoy”, including:

Monty Panesar's Useless
Tune: My old mans a dustman

Monty Panesar useless, a poor old English chap
& when he's not spin bowling, he's visiting the quack.
He's useless in the covers, he's useless in the slips
And when he straps the pads on, he'll pass out with the yips

And...

Ode to a British girlfriend
Tune: Living Doll, Cliff Richard

Got myself a yawning, boring, pasty, nagging, whinging pom
Got to do your best to leave her just cause she's a whinging pom
She's got a lazy eye & big fat thighs from all those chips & pies
She's not the only boring, pasty, nagging, whinging pom

Oh dear. No word yet from the Barmy Army and what their song list might be…

Over at The Corridor there's a sneak preview of a collection of cartoon-postcards called Postcards from the Sledge, based on famous sledges in cricket. Beach, the artist, has kindly donated a copy to Cricinfo and we'll have a review of the cards for you very soon.

	Adam Gilchrist with nine-year old Mangesh © Getty Images

Steve Waugh started it. Now, it's Adam Gilchrist making a difference. The stark divide between some vast riches and devastating poverty in this country tugs at the heartstring of all Australian cricketers when they visit here. Gilchrist took it upon himself to sponsor a young impoverished boy in Mumbai, giving him an education he could never have dreamt of.

"The smile on his face said it all when he was able to meet me. Regardless of whether I was an international cricket player or ran my own local shop it meant little to him.It was a look of great gratitude to meet the person that is helping his family and his life."

Read the ful piece in The Courier Mail.

In India for the Champions Trophy, Neil Manthorp witnesses the harsh realities of life for the several thousand pavement dwellers in Mumbai and writes how such scenes bring out a person's benevolent side.

The pavement is wet from the thunderstorm the night before. But it is also far cleaner than the rest of the street because it is the home of half a dozen families. They are required to clear it for the benefit of passers-by between dawn and late evening, but there is no mistaking that it is their home. Or, 'home'.

Read the full piece in Supercricket.

Clayton Murzello meets who he says is “one of the most fascinating, yet unknown enthusiasts of the game”, a stamp collector who has amassed more than 30,000 cricket stamps in three decades of collecting. Read the interview in Mid-day, a Mumbai daily, here .

Bob Woolmer's recent suggestions to legalise ball-tampering in order to even things out between batsmen and bowlers may not be in the best interests of the game, writes Bob Simpson in Sportstar. The trend of batsmen leaking runs at will has coincided with the decline in bowling standards.

But why, after 100 years plus and in an era which is claimed to be the most scientific and professional ever, do bowlers need outside aid and changes to the law when, for over a century, Test bowlers have used guile, skill, hard work and the mastery of line and length to obtain results? Is it that the modern bowlers have lost all these abilities?

The way forward is for bowlers to keep it simple, like Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, who've each fetched over 500 Test wickets by just sticking to the basics.

	When Sachin Tendulkar smiles, the world smiles with him © AFP

Cricket fans better stay tuned in as we can expect a long season of action and drama, with the Ashes series and the World Cup ahead, as well as Sachin Tendulkar's return to form, writes Peter Roebuck.

By next April, a hundred issues will have been settled, a thousand rumours will have been heard — some of them almost true — fifty conspiracy theories will have been mooted, none of them well pitched.

Read the full piece in The Hindu.

It's 20 years since India and Australia played out a titanic contest at Madras, only the second tie in the history of Test cricket.

The Times of India revisits the day and speaks to Maninder Singh, the last man to fall, who maintains that he got an inside edge and was wrongly given lbw.

On the other hand, Mid-day, a Mumbai-based tabloid, chats with Vikram Raju, the umpire who delivered the verdict, who sticks by his guns: "My decision was clean as a whistle".

Also read Cricinfo's coverage of the events - Eye-witness accounts from Bobby Simpson, Dean Jones, Greg Matthews and Ravi Shastri. There's also an interview with Dean Jones, who had no hesitation in terming the Test as one that 'marked the renaissance of Australian cricket'.

	The coach... according to Warne © Getty Images

This winter, England will tour India and Australia with as many as five coaches, and that is not counting the physiotherapist, masseur, doctor, media managers and security advisers who will accompany them. When England toured Australia in 1982-83, neither team had a coach.

The old days might not have been the way to do things, but Pringle goes on to suggest we might gone too far the other way ...

What Warne is really saying is that great players don't need coaches, and he is right. Certainly the most gifted players of my acquaintance, Ian Botham, Vivian Richards and Brian Lara, were instinctive and possessed great flair. The only advice they listened to came from their inner voice. Coaching, by contrast, is about advice based on method and analysis, things anathema to pure talent.

It all comes under the umbrella of team preparation which some coaches, perhaps justifying their hefty salaries, have pushed to the limits of acceptability. While computer and video analysis are considered standard now, wacky ideas such as the use of earpieces between coach and captain (a Bob Woolmer idea subsequently banned by the International Cricket Council) and studying the Art of War by the ancient Chinese general, Sun Tzu (another Buchanan initiative), have invited derision and not just from the press.

Hardly a week goes by these days without someone excitedly claiming that cricket is about to take-off in China. Now it emerges that ICC chief executive Malcolm Speed will be in Beijing next week to find out how the land lies.

The China Cricket Association has unveiled a strategic plan that has 60,000 schoolchildren playing cricket in three years and 150,000 in five years, with Beijing, Shanghai and Dalian the hubs for promoting the game. Mandarin editions of the Laws of Cricket are now available in China while Australian cricketing officials have visited the country to conduct coaching courses.

But perhaps the real reason that cricket’s bosses are so keen on China was found in a remark by Syed Ashraful Huq, the boss of the Asian Cricket Council when he told DNA Sport that if China participated in future World Cups then “lucrative commercial windfalls would follow”. He added: “As soon as China breaks through, I foresee the total global revenues for cricket increasing by up to 30 to 40%."

As Gordon Gekko said in Wall Street: "Greed is good, greed is right … greed works."

It’s widely accepted that cricketers are a barmy lot. But even by those standards, four people who decided to play an impromptu game on a sandbank on the Skate Bank in middle of Scotland’s Moray Firth can safely be described as barking. One of them was quoted in The Daily Telegraph as saying:

The charts have not been updated since 1918, so there was a chance that it had moved or shrunk. However, we decided it was worth investigating. My brother would not allow me to take his proper cricket gear, but we found a small bat and a tennis ball and set out to play the first game on the sandbar for 80 years.

Unfortunately, their energetic bowling and their enthusiastic celebrations were mistaken by a member of public on the shore more than a mile away as signals for help and a rescue helicopter and a lifeboat were launched to rescue them!

Surprise surprise. The legendary Sunil Gavaskar is thinking of making a foray into blogging. Gavaskar was the star guest on the second day of BlogCamp, India's biggest blog unconference.

I look around and I see almost everyone here sitting with a laptop in front. I belong to the transistor generation. My columns even now are written in longhand.

The Indian board has nominated three umpires for ICC's Panel and Suresh Shastri is one of them. Returning to international umpiring after eight years, Shastri speaks to The Indian Express about what lies ahead.

"I am not young but at the same time I cannot be called a veteran too. There are many in the Elite panel who are 55-58 but there are still good. I think, as you go ahead, you tend to handle pressure better. One thing I have learnt in these years to stay in control of the proceedings, and in these times, it’s important."

Quite apart from being Superman, what does a coach really need to be given that he himself never has to face a ball, asks Harsha Bhogle in The Indian Express.

Mike Haysman joins the long line of experts who back the move to legalise ball tampering:

The skill of a bowler to make a cricket ball perform in an unconventional way to deceive the batsmen is an integral part of the game. That ability separates the best from the average and only the best can influence a game by perfecting the art. Constant deviation does not guarantee habitual success. Why should a bowler not be allowed to further display his skill, utilising means naturally found on a cricket field? By the way, bottle tops have never been discovered loitering harmlessly at extra cover, waiting to be stealthily employed!

What to learn more about Mike Haysman? Read Robert Houwing's profile in Cricinfo.

In The Times, former Wisden editor Tim de Lisle highlights the fact that cricket's international merry-go-round is not only hard on the players, it's also pretty environmentally unfriendly. He recalled that while editing Wisden Cricket Monthly a few years ago, he commissioned an investigation into the mileage of top players:

"We named the first winner — Australia's Ian Healy, who had done, from memory, about 70,000 miles. Within a few years, the winner (by then Stephen Fleming, of New Zealand) was doing 100,000 miles. International cricket’s total emissions, for a relatively small sport, must be colossal."

"Open an Indian magazine and the chances are you will see Sachin Tendulkar sharing a little of his personal cachet with a motorbike. And administrators in the subcontinent still think it’s OK to give the man of the match a bike or even a car. Not even the umpires are immune. Fly Emirates, say their shirts, which is demeaning to them and damaging to the planet."

A remarkable story in The Daily Telegraph of a man who put his approaching fifty ahead of the minor point that he was having a heart attack at the time.

"The old runs were a little bit lacking and I have been struggling to perform this season," he said. "But I was having a good game and found it too easy. I was getting sixes and fours and was feeling really good about my game. I think I was a bit of an idiot really. I should have stopped straight away because it could have finished me off there and then."

Only one of the teams refused to play on after the Right Reverend Geoffrey Creese gave a controversial LBW decision and went home (but not before offering to pay for the uneaten teas!). As the local Forester newspaper reports, it's not just Darrell Hair who has problems ... and at least he doesn't have to give the sermon the next day.

As the captain of the Rev Creese's side said:

"He doesn't always get it right, but he's not biased ... he calls it as he sees it."

While the very suggestion that anyone might have been ball tampering causes outrage, Darren Berry in The Age says that it is rife - and what is more, that it could even enhance the game.

"A few months ago NSW fast bowler Nathan Bracken was censured after his comments about ball tampering. But what he said was absolutely true. Bracken said that during his time in English county cricket, his team, Gloucestershire, loaded one side of the ball with saliva that was thickened and sugary after sucking on mints. The result was for the ball to start moving through the air in an unnatural manner. The sexy term for this is reverse swing. This practice and others go on in most matches around the world."

While Berry does not advocate the use of industrial sanding machines to scuff up the ball, he raises some intersting points.

"What does it matter if the ball is thrown into the ground early to rough it up? Let the bowlers scratch the ball with their fingers if they wish; it is a skill that arguably adds to the game."

He concludes that with the game so heavily biased in favour of the batsmen, with limits on bouncers per over and improved bat technology, why not even the battle.

"Ball-tampering is rife in world cricket and the easy way to fix it is to loosen the law."

Dean Jones's remark was uncalled for, even by his standards, but Peter Roebuck feels strongly that while Jones needs to serve his punishment, he should be welcomed back to the community. Roebuck argues that people should direct their anger against oppression of more harmful proportions.

Headstrong but fundamentally generous, the tone of his remark was out of character.But it was a momentary lapse. Let anger be reserved for the violence that destroys lives, and for words intended to hurt.

Read the full piece in The Hindu

If by any chance you should find yourself in Canada this weekend, and more specifically in Toronto at 4.30pm on Sunday, then head down to the South Asian film festival at the NFB who are screening the film Cricket and the Meaning of Life.

The film was voted the winner at the Reel-to-Reel Ontario festival and, as the name suggests, it’s not just a film about cricket – it’s about life itself.

A sobering story from the Sun of a 16-year-old pilot who died when his Cessna light aircraft crashed on a cricket pitch in Southend, Essex. It seems that Sam Cross deliberately steered the plane away from houses as it was coming down. One eyewitness said:

“I suspect he deliberately pointed the plane to make sure he didn’t hit anything. Half an hour earlier the field would have been full of children coming home from school.”

Half the year has drifted by already, and Kevin Mitchell's thoughts are turning towards the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards. For precisely the reason that there have been no personalities to speak of in any of England's major sports. Cricket, rugby, football? Nope, nope, nope.

This time last year, of course, there were a whole team of possibles lining up. They all wore white and they would go on to take part in what Richie Benaud described as the best Ashes series he had seen. There were heroes from one to 11 in the England cricket team. Not so many now. If they retain the Ashes this winter, they will be back in contention, but they have had a fairly ordinary time of it since sending Ricky Ponting's men home so chastened last September

Young Ugandans with disabilities taking part in a programme that aims to teach them a sport little known to many Africans, and help shatter overwhelmingly negative perceptions of disability on the continent, writes Daniel Wallis.

Now the Surfer is going to try its best to stay away from Shane Warne and chopper gags… but it is sorely tempted to after it hears the news that Warne is to fly in by helicopter to deliver the match ball for Saturday's FA Cup final between Liverpool and West Ham in Cardiff. Warne is the first Australian in history to have such honours. Lucky boy.

Cricket is a game to be relished not an account to be scrutinised, writes Peter Roebuck

Cricket needs to extract itself from the cold embrace of its statisticians. Over the last few seasons these calculators on two legs have wielded an inordinate influence ... In recent weeks, these dismal creations have complained about Jason Gillespie and the authenticity of the World XI matches played last October. The fact that no sensible person cares a hoot about matters of this sort passes them by.

As the discussion over player burn-out rumbles on, greed could kill the golden goose warns Rohit Brijnath in The Hindu.

Players are not robots, you can't pump in a few litres of nationalism and a gallon of money and ask them to keep playing. They have the right to complain about "too much cricket,'' even if the odd complainant has a belly that makes you wonder whether it's more a case of "too many jalebis.''

Matthew Engel, the editor of Wisden, and his wife Hilary have launched a charity in honour of their son, who died of cancer last year aged 13. The Laurie Engel Fund aims to help rebuild the cancer ward at the Birmingham Children’s Hospital. The Telegraph’s Robert Philip listens to Matthew talk movingly about the need for a new ward, his recollections of Laurie and about a campaign which has already had pledges from Chelsea FC and a promise from Bunbury Cricket Club to stage a cricket match.

"The oncology - a word I had never previously encountered, even in Scrabble - ward is a so-called modern wing of a Victorian hospital," Matthew explains. "It was built circa 1990 when the National Health Service had no money and it's a really cheap and nasty job which everybody hates.”

Read the original, heartbreaking article relating to Laurie's death here.

A subsequent letter to The Guardian sums up the article perfectly.

The warmth and tenderness he so evidently felt for his cherished son was conveyed with a poignancy beyond measure. Somehow, he managed to combine this intimacy with a description of clinical detail that made my head reel. And yet, as he and his family clearly did not ask for sympathy in their darkest hour, not once was it solicited in his writing. Quite remarkable, and quite humbling.

This day, 30 years ago, India's batsmen, led by Sunil Gavaskar and Gundappa Viswanath, chased down a mammoth fourth-innings target of 403 at Port of Spain, setting a stunning world record. Mid-day, the mumbai based daily, revisits the great chase. Also, click here to read KN Prabhu's eye-witness account.

It’s not just in the sporting arena where great acts take place, finds Peter Roebuck, as he meets some ordinary people performing extraordinary deeds around Johannesburg during his time there for the Wanderers Test.

Cricinfo's All Today's Yesterday reminds us that this day, seven years ago, Brian Charles Lara played the innings of his life.

Surpassing a 501, a 375, a 277 or a 213 takes some doing, but this humble 153 not out against Australia in Barbados was the stuff of genius. At one point West Indies had been 98 for 6 in the first innings, still 392 behind Australia, but Lara's performance - nobody else on either side made 40 in the second innings - led them to 311 for 9 and an unforgettable one-wicket victory.

Click here to listen to the audio commentary of the great match. Listen to an extremely excited Fazeer Mohammad as he takes us through the final tense minutes. An eight-minute audio and worth every second of it. As Sambit Bal wrote once - But for light and song, for bliss and glory and for lifting the soul, who else but Brian Lara?

© Cricinfo Ltd

People are being encouraged to sign up today for their Thames Pathway Walk on Sunday, May 21, and help people in the area affected by cancer.

Phil Tufnell said: "I think that Walk Wonders is a smashing idea and I will definitely be pulling my boots on to raise funds for Macmillan Cancer Relief. You don't have to be mega fit why not get a gang together, go walking and enjoy the walk along the Thames?"

Kenya's Daily Nation caught up with Maurice Odumbe and he talked about his life after being banned for associating with bookmakers. These days he stays away from cricket, preferring to read and play golf.

“I am in transition. Cricket was my life, you know, and I can’t just wake up one morning and forget about it ... I was born to enjoy myself. Why should I be miserable? Life is too short. Live and let live and don't have enemies. It's not worth it.”

Dean Jones recounts a hilarious anecdote about his epic knock in the famous tied Test at Madras. Read Ted Corbett's tour diary here

This day, 19 years ago, Sunil Gavaskar, in what turned out to be his last Test, produced a master class against Pakistan on a crumbler. However, it didn't result in a win, Gavaskar fell four short of hundred, and India fell 16 runs short of the target. Click here to read HS Manjunath's write-up on the match

Harsha Bhogle, in a tribute piece to the little master, wrote about his legendary powers of concentration.

That 96, his last Test innings, was a masterpiece played on a mass of rubble trying to impersonate a pitch. The spinners were making the ball turn at right angles and jump past the nose. "I thought I would get 10," he [Gavaskar] later said. Mohinder Amarnath once told me that he thought his partner was in a trance. In a rare interview Gavaskar admitted that he never kept the ball out of sight, following it all the way from the slips to mid-off to the bowler's hand. And he swears it is true that he did not know what his score was when he was batting, for the mind was only focused on the ball, on the next ball. When Javed Miandad apologised for sledging at him during the legendary 96 at Bangalore, he smiled back saying he had no idea what was being said. He hadn't heard it. When Javed Miandad apologised for sledging at him ... he smiled back saying he had no idea what was being said. He hadn't heard it.

Some cricket-mad types in Estonia have taken to the ice to play the glorious game.

Just to prove that it’s snow joke (ouch, sorry), you can see a clip of ice cricket, as provided by the Reuters news agency, by clicking here.

[Thanks to Jamie Allaway for the link]

The Daily Telegraph has a remarkable report on how cricket is making a big comeback in Cuba after disappearing for almost 30 years. It seems that Fidel Castro is worried young people on the island are becoming too Americanised and wants Cuba to feel more affinity with the Caribbean.

In the late 1990s, the game was confined to the traditional east of the island, but it soon spread to Havana, where there are more than 500 players now. "Thanks to someone in Argentina, we've got the rules of cricket translated into Spanish," Miss Ford told a journalist.

In the past couple of years, as gifts of equipment poured in from other cricket-playing nations, the potential for the sport percolated through to the powers that be.

The travel writer, Simon Calder, dusted off his bat to take part in a very special cricket match, staged to help India's tigers

Pads: what a tiger does, and what I strapped on. It was my turn to bat. As I stepped up to the wicket, I hoped that the sun, and the opposition bowlers, would ease off a little on the heat

The world's most populous nation - China - is embracing the great game. Read the report in the Sydney Morning Herald here.

Also read about how Britain is giving its support to a new cricket revolution in Cuba.

A new cricket blog has been launched today by the weblog publishing company Shiny Media and our very own Will Luke's editing it. It’s called The Googly. As you’d expect with a name like that, it's an irreverent look at cricket and its nuances, by professional writers - including Gideon Haigh.

English and Indian schools are to link up to talk about cricket and learn about each other’s cultures as part of the Chance to Shine initiative. Read about it on Rediff here.

The BBC's Test Match Special messageboard has been closed today following a torrent of racist and abusive messages, as reported in today's Times:

Part of the site was suspended after the BBC received complaints that a number of users were sending insulting religious messages and promoting terrorism on the South Asian section of the Test Match Special website.

A trail of messages described as “absolutely sickening and reprehensible” is being investigated by the BBC in an attempt to trace the authors.

We had an unfortunate period of downtime which lasted 48 hours and affected all our blogs. We're back live again, so will start ploughing through the news here at The Surfer once again.

Well, not strictly goalkeeping, but he's coaching Forest Green's footballers:

Forest Green boss Gary Owers told BBC Radio Gloucestershire: "Jack has got an interest in the goalkeeping side.

"He is taking it very seriously and it is not a gimmick. Hopefully he can bring something to our goalkeepers and the lads like having him around."

Spring clean: Andrew Strauss and Geraint Jones roll up their sleeves at Bexley CC © Getty Images

The ECB’s NatWest CricketForce project is about to get underway for the fifth year running … and it’s not too late to get your club involved.

CricketForce encourages the game’s enthusiasts to give something back to their local community club by volunteering to undertake major renovations to clubhouses and grounds, as Andrew Strauss and Geraint Jones did last year, when they helped to spruce up Bexley CC in Kent.

To see how your club could benefit from the scheme, find out more here.

What do Evo Morales, the Iranian government and the Board of Control for Cricket in India have in common?

Easy. All three are challenging the status quo and being condemned by the establishment and their minions for so doing.

Fazeer Mohammed in the Trinidad and Tobago Express defends India's stand on the Future Tours Programme,pointing out that the ICC are still in a state of denial about the transition of power.

Mike Atherton comments in the Sunday Telegraph that modern players are increasingly ignorant of the players that came before them. This was highlighted recently by Virender Sehwag. After his 254 against Pakistan, he admitted not knowing "Pankaj Roy and Vinoo Mankad, the two Indian openers whose record opening stand of 413 Sehwag and Rahul Dravid fell three runs short of breaking." Atherton, a history graduate, feels the game's past is an important aspect of its future:

Therein lies the importance of an understanding of the past for today's sportsman. It won't make him a better player, but it gives him a link with both the past and the future; it provides some context and some meaning, so that, long after the bones have stiffened and the eyes have gone, it still matters. He is simply one link in the chain.

The Australians tend to look over their shoulder more than we do. The cult of the baggy green, the presentation of honours by former players, the lionising of The Invincibles and the custom by which a current player must give a talk on a former are all part of cherishing the past. They also go too far. When the 2001 Australians sat at Wimbledon in their baggy greens, it was enough to make you puke.

When the last two touring parties paid their respects at Gallipoli and the Western Front, they did so too conspicuously. Rather than respecting fallen heroes, it looked as if it was intended to polish their own image.

The ramifications of the departure of
Andy Moles as Scotland’s coach continue to rumble on, with a report in the Scotsman on Sunday claiming that he was sacked rather than resigned, as Cricket Scotland’s media department maintain.

Following the blandest of media releases on Friday, no-one at Cricket Scotland appears to have been able to give a firm reason for Moles’s departure and few seem to believe that it was of his volition.

But the article by William Dick indicates that it might not have been because of player unrest, as most reports have suggested. “It has emerged that there were concerns about various aspects of the coach's performance from early in his reign, begging the question why it took bosses so long to act.”

Cricket in Afghanistan has a bright future, as The Observer Sport Monthly magazine reports.

Not everyone is a fan of the Supersub rule. However, it does have at least one supporter - Clive Lloyd. Read what he has to say here.

Shoaib Ahmed celebrates Brian Lara's ascent to the top of the run-scoring mountain and traces the progression of the record down the years.

Trevor Chesterfield writes about how Sanath Jayasuriya's injury should have been handled better and takes a look at batsmen whose career ended because of injury.

Harold Larwood’s main weapon of the Bodyline tour was the ball, but a bat he used in the infamous 1932-33 series has sold at auction in England for £5200. See Larwood's profile here and check out his Test statistics.

Peter Badel talks to Shane Warne, Brian Lara and Andrew Flintoff about how they handle fame, and the pitfalls that come with it.

Sanjjeev Samyal speaks to Darren Berry, one-time understudy to Ian Healy, who is upset at the quality of wicketkeepers today. He says:

The name of the game is sacrifice glovemen for better batsmen — Andy Flower, [Adam] Gilchrist and Geraint Jones, who is terrible, — which is disappointing. Keeping has become a secondary option. Now, the selectors look at how many runs he can score.

Berry's advice to selectors everywhere:

Pick the best wicketkeeper and the best people to ask would be Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh, because those are the guys who are going to suffer.

Peter Lalor of The Australian writes on the potential of television:

Broadcasters have done a great job translating the excitement of live one-day cricket on to the box. Cricket's next technological revolution, if there are more games like this, might involve channelling excitement from the loungerooms to the arena.

China are the latest country to embrace cricket, as Forbes.com reports. Read Cricinfo's take on this story, here.

One played cricket for Zimbabwe and currently coaches England; the other turned out for England and coaches Pakistan. The two will go head to head soon as England travel to Pakistan for a Test and one-day series. Check out Steve James's interview with Duncan Fletcher - titled "English cricket's reluctant hero" - in the Sunday Telegraph and also read Stephen Brenkley's chat with Bob Woolmer in the Independent, as he plots to make life gruelling for the English tourists.

As for the Indian coach ... well, let's just say he has a bit more on his plate at the moment.

R Kaushik of Deccan Herald meets Tatenda Taibu, the Zimbabwe captain, and finds out what goes on within the mind of a 22-year-old leading a weak side. While talking about off-field pressures, Taibu says:

Obviously, you just try and control the controllables and forget about what you can't control. If you try and control things that you can't control, your mind will have excess things to worry about.

Read on here.

Also check out Cricinfo's interview with another African captain - Graeme Smith talks to Nagraj Gollapudi.

Harsha Bhogle comments in The Indian Express on the nineties made by Gautam Gambhir and Rahul Dravid yesterday:

These nineties often draw unreasonable comments for it is what has been achieved rather than what has been missed that is often of the essence. Centuries are happy landmarks, they are indicators of good batsmanship but we worship them too much for they can sometimes become an exercise in self-indulgence.

Indeed. And yet, the difference between 102 and 100 will always be far less than that between 100 and 98. They're only numbers, but we're only human.

Brian Lara has “one of the greatest days of my life” when he meets Nelson Mandela and gives him a bat with the message “I love you President”. Mandela felt Lara was “a handsome young chap”. See what it was all about here.

G Rajaraman of Outlook magazine traces a tale that has developed into Bollywood masala - involving a bar girl, betting and cricketers. But are the cops anywhere close to the right trail?

Welcome to The Surfer.

It was inevitable, sooner or later, that Cricinfo would start its own blogs. In the first of a series of them, we present The Surfer. This blog, as the name indicates, will aim to showcase interesting cricket writing across the internet. These will encompass features, interviews, opinion pieces, debates -- anything that we find stimulating reading.

The Surfer will replace our popular feature, Best of the Web, as it does what that did and more. It will be managed by Siddhartha Vaidyanathan, Jenny Thompson and Peter English, with occasional guidance and help from Amit Varma. We hope you enjoy it. Feel free to email your feedback to surfer@cricinfo.com.

And watch out for our other blogs, coming soon.

We all know that this is a good age for batting, a shirtfront of an era, as it were. Kunal Ganju, in a piece titled "Batting through the ages", reinforces this belief with a couple of graphical illustrations.

Also see these two pieces on the same subject from Cricinfo's archives: "Bowling's dark age" by Gideon Haigh; and "Is there a crisis in cricket?" from 23 Yards.

In an essay in the London Review of Books titled "Cricket’s Superpowers", David Runciman contends that the Ashes is not cricket's biggest rivalry. He writes:

The rivalry in international cricket that counts at present is the one between Australia and India. If this were geopolitics, then Australia would be the United States, the one unquestioned superpower for over a decade, used to getting their own way ever since they saw off their rival superpower, the West Indies, in the early 1990s (the West Indian cricket team, like the Russian state, now seems to be in a condition of permanent and rather squalid decline). India, meanwhile, would be China, the superpower of the future, with all the resources needed to beat the Australians at their own game – the manpower, the talent, the raw nationalist passion – so long as a way can be found by their often corrupt and incompetent administrators of harnessing these obvious advantages. And England? England would be the EU: once the centre of the world, but currently engaged in an urgent and not always pretty attempt to modernise in order not to get left behind.

Read the full piece.

(Link via email from Ish.)

... could be bigger than the Ashes by the end of this century, writes Will Buckley in the Observer.

Cricket has so many theatrical moments, characters, plots, sub-plots, twists, sub-twists ... Why, wonders Sarah Crompton in The Daily Telegraph, is there a dearth of suitably awe-inspiring fictional depictions of the game?