Sourav Ganguly, also known as the-one-who-really-wound-up-the-Aussies, has disappointed fans of mental disintegration by revealing that he arrived late for a toss with Steve Waugh during the epic 2001-02 series merely because he had left his blazer behind.

"There is a tradition that both team captains have to sport the team blazer while going for the toss,” Ganguly said on a television show. “On that particular day, I did not get my blazer and it took time to get hold of it. That was the reason for the delay.”

Waugh had criticised Ganguly for repeatedly turning up late for the toss during the Tests and one-day series. Ganguly had said at the time that there was a lot to do in the mornings. “... knocking up, talking to the selectors, that I may have been late by a few minutes."

So much for keeping team plans under wraps. Phil Hughes told the world of his omission for the third Test at Edgbaston via Twitter and his manager Neil d’Costa has admitted it may have been jumping the gun a little.

"Disappointed not to be on the field with the lads today," Hughes posted several hours before the Australian team announcement. "Will be supporting the guys, it's a BIG test match 4 us. Thanks 4 all the support!"

D'Costa explained that Hughes sends him his ‘tweets’ then D’Costa passes them onto “the IT guy” who uploads them into Hughes’ page. It’s a case of when’s a twitterer not a twitterer.

"I look after the Twitter for Phillip and we were certainly under the impression [the timing was okay] because of the time change," D'Costa told Sky Sports News.

"I'm in India and I was dealing with all the stuff through Australia. Unfortunately I am probably the fool in this situation."

Asked whether Hughes could be in hot water for revealing team details before the toss D’Costa added. “I’ve spoken to Cricket Australia and they are pretty comfortable with it.”

The twist in this twitter tale could still be come, though. With the delayed start at Edgbaston neither side has needed to name their final XI yet. Who knows how Australia’s plans might chance before play actually starts. Is Hughes in? Is Hughes out? Stay tuned to Twitter to find out.

At 1-0 down, Australia would love to have Shane Warne in their Ashes squad. Instead, he's been beating up on England at the card table. An Australian team led by Warne beat an England team led by Darren Gough in the inaugural 888.com Poker Ashes.

Warne's team featured Dean Jones, Damien Martyn, Jeff Thomson and some online qualifiers, while Gough had in his corner Darren Gough, Dimitri Mascarenhas, Matthew Hoggard, Robert Key, Min Patel, Gladstone Small and Peter Such. Australia won 3-1.

And as the result of a side bet between the captains, Gough spent the first day of the Edgbaston Test at the ground in an Australian shirt. “Goughie’s been a good sport," Warne said, "but you would think that he would know by now not to back himself against an Aussie."

There isn’t much that Brian Lara hasn’t done on a cricket field but taking part in a Twenty20 match is one of them. He played 131 Tests and 299 ODIs but no Twenty20s – international or domestic. That will change next month when Lara leads a Trinidad & Tobago side against a West Indies XI in a charity Twenty20 match.

The West Indies XI will be led by Chris Gayle, who had opted out of the series against Bangladesh because of a dispute over player contracts with the West Indies board. The proceeds from the event will go to the Pearl and Bunty Lara Foundation, West Indies Players Association's Development Fund and other players' charities.

The Ranji Trophy has now found a new home in Ireland. Maharaja Ranjitsinhji will be honoured as his name will be used in a match played between an Irish and an ‘Indian’ team in Dublin. The tournament is the brainchild of Anne Chambers, an Irish author who wrote a book on Ranji's 1924 visit to Ireland.

The match will be played at the 417-year old Trinity College in Dublin.

P.S Raghavan, who took up the task of making the tournament a grand event, said the series will be "a big event within the context of the growing ties between India and Ireland."

"It is in commemoration of Ranji's ability to cross-over racial boundaries that on the publication of my book - Ranji: Maharajah of Connemara - I made available a trophy of Irish silver to be played between an Irish XI and a team comprising Indian nationals living in Ireland," Chambers told IANS.

Darren Gough has become the latest celebrity to be caught up in a £80m “Bernie Madoff-style” scam. The former England bowler and Strictly Come Dancing winner and a member of his family have reportedly been swindled of nearly £1m in an alleged Ponzi fund run by fraudsters and aimed at top sportsmen and television stars.

Sources close to Gough said he was "devastated" after finding out his money had gone down the drain after the phony scheme collapsed, the Daily Mail reported. A member of Gough's family confirmed Gough and his brother-in-law, Paul Kratovil, were said to be among those hit by the alleged fraud. "I rang Paul after seeing reports of the scam. He and Darren have been caught up in it all," she said. "I don't know how they found out, but there are supposedly lots more people who do not realise they have been stung."

Police have twice arrested the suspected mastermind of the alleged fraud, Kautilya Nandan Pruthi, Financial consultants Kenneth Peacock and John Anderson, 43, both from Virginia Water, Surrey, have also been arrested.

Kevin Pietersen was asked to invest but refused, his spokesman confirmed.

Sussex will take on Hampshire in the Friends Provident Trophy final on July 25 but they will be without the support of their mascot, Sid the Shark, who will not be allowed into Lord’s in keeping with its traditional atmosphere.

Sussex fans were not pleased with the decision and set up a petition protesting against the move. "It was quite a surprise to hear that Lord's would not let Sid in,” Dave Brooks, Sussex chief executive told Sky Sports. "He enjoys great support among all the Sussex fans at Hove, and it is clear they want to send a message to the authorities that this decision needs reversing."

Clare Skinner, the MCC's media manager, said "Lord's has a no fancy dress policy in place for all matches and this applies to anyone entering the ground, including mascots.”

The Queen meets the players during the lunch break © Getty Images

The Queen’s visit to Lord’s on the second day of the Ashes Test caused problems for the MCC when it was discovered the committee-room drinks cabinet did not include any Dubonnet, Her Majesty’s tipple of choice. A steward was dispatched post haste to nearby St John’s Wood High Street where he managed to find a bottle, but the drama did not end there. According to the Mail on Sunday, the steward had a battle to get through the security at Lord’s – the notorious Green Team - who insisted on enforcing regulations on bringing bottles of alcohol into the ground. Eventually, common sense prevailed.

Later on, after lunch, an aide quietly informed the Queen it was time to go to which she reportedly replied: “Oh, but I might miss an Australian wicket”. A committee member quietly pointed out she was Queen of England and Australia. The Queen laughed and said: “Yes, you do have a point”.

The Duke of Edinburgh, no stranger to gaffs, was also present wearing his MCC egg and bacon tie (he was president of the club in 1949 and 1975) but he managed to put his foot in his mouth when he asked Australia’s coach: “Are you the scorer?”

	Henry Allingham at the Oval in 2006 © Getty Images

The widely-reported death of Henry Allingham – who at 113 was the world’s oldest man – sees the passing of the last man alive to have actually seen WG Grace bat. In 1903, aged seven, he went to The Oval to see Surrey play London County. "I saw WG Grace bat, you could always tell who he was by his long beard,” Allingham recalled in 2006 on his next visit to the ground, 103 years after he had last been there. “He scored quite a lot that day but I can't remember how many.”

There was a minute’s silence before the start of play on the third day of the Lord’s Test for Allingham, who was one of the last surviving World War One servicemen.

The Sunday Times notes that the Ashes summer is being celebrated by tourism body VisitEngland unleashing a series of new perfumes on the world “to capture the essence of the country”. Among those is one called “Cricket Ball”. The marketing blurb does not mention if this odour de ball is of the brand-new-out-of the-paper version or the flogged-all-round-the-park-for-80-overs variety. Cricinfo’s reviewers will be down to Boots for samples as soon as the Lord’s Test ends.

As advertisements go, the one for the post of CEO of the Netherlands cricket board (KNBC) is hardly designed to whet the appetites of candidates. In fact, it all but screams out ‘don’t bother to apply’. The Dutch have had two CEOs in the last few months, with the most recent, Andre van Troost, barely having time to pick his office furniture before he quit.

The latest advert from the board, as flagged by Cricket Europe, starts with the gung-ho comment that it was “required by ICC regulations to advertise this position once again. Hence the following advertisement”. It’s downhill from there, but in case anyone was still interested, the description concludes: “Attention is drawn to the fact that there is already an established candidate.”

It’s a sure-fire certainty that Andrew Flintoff is set to absolutely rake it in as he steps away from Test cricket to concentrate on one-dayers. He remains arguably England’s most marketable cricketer, one of those few cricketers whose name and face is familiar even to those not so enamoured with cricket.

His lowest, wettest moment as a cricketer – pedalo-gate in 2007 - is set to earn him and his charity a bucket load of cash, too, in a new advert for men’s deodorant. Flintoff will appear in a viral advert seen pedalling through rivers and canals after a bunch of Australians try to sabotage his transport in getting to an Ashes Test, by swapping his car with a pedalo.

The pedalo will be auctioned on eBay, the proceeds going to support Flintoff’s charity, the AF Foundation, and the video can be seen at The Guardian.

When James Franklin dismissed Chris Rogers in Derbyshire’s second innings against Gloucestershire in Cheltenham in the County Championship, the significance of the occasion slipped everybody’s mind, including the bowler's. Four overs later, realisation finally dawned. Franklin had earlier dismissed Tim Groenewald and Steffan Jones off successive balls to round off Derbyshire’s first innings before dismissing Rogers first ball in the second innings, thereby sealing a staggered hat-trick. "I had no idea I'd taken a hat-trick until the umpire reminded me about four overs into my spell," Franklin said. "I've taken one before in Test cricket (against Bangladesh in 2004) but never in first-class."

It brought back memories of another staggered hat-trick during an IPL game in 2008 between Kolkata Knight Riders and Chennai Super Kings at the Eden Gardens. Like this one, it went unnoticed initially. Chennai’s Makhaya Ntini snared two in two and took the third off the first ball of his next spell. The bowler found out only during the innings break.

Fresh from his exploits at the recent World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, in which he progressed to the third round of the competition, Shane Warne is all set to show off his card tricks in the forthcoming “Poker Ashes”, the first round of which will be televised tonight on Sky Sports at 10.30pm.

Sponsored by 888.com, the format pits two teams of former Ashes cricketers against one another, with Warne captaining the Australians, and Darren Gough leading the line for England. “We’ve got home advantage and the best poker players in English cricket flying the flag,” said Gough. “It’s going to be a long flight home for Shane and co after a cricket/poker double this summer.”

As the 12th man who braved the collective wrath of the Australian team, Bilal Shafayat presumably has quite the story to tell. Sadly, we won't be hearing it anytime soon. Speaking to Cricinfo on Tuesday, Shafayat revealed he had been instructed by the ECB to stay schtum on the glove-gate saga that so raised the ire of Ricky Ponting.

"I'm under strict orders," he said. Admittedly, much of his exchange with Ponting would be unprintable on a wholesome website such as this but, rest assured, The Buzz will not rest until the Gary Pratt of a new generation is heard.

	Shane Warne couldn't sustain his winning run at the World Series of Poker © 888.com

Shane Warne could finally be on his way to England to commentate on this summer’s Ashes for Sky Sports, after he was last night eliminated in the third round of the prestigious World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

He may, however, need a couple more days to recover from what was, by all accounts, a traumatic way to bomb out of an event that could have netted him up to US$10 million had he progressed all the way to the final table on July 15.

Having gone into the third round with a very healthy stack of 173,700 chips, and 24th in the overall standings, Warne suffered what is known as a “bad beat” and, according to pokernetwork.com, his challenge “collapsed quicker than the English batting order.”

“Warne flopped a flush only to see his opponent improve his set to a full house on the river,” reported the website, “and shortly after ran his pocket eights into an opponent’s pocket aces." And in cricketing terms, that is roughly as unlucky as being given out lbw off an inside edge. Twice in one match.

It sometimes seems as though Richard Branson is taking over the world. When you see an image like this you realise that, should aliens have landed in the past couple of days, they might assume Branson is the president of Earth.

As the opening Test began in Cardiff, Branson hijacked the Sydney Harbour Bridge to send a message to Ricky Ponting. "Good luck Ricky. You'll need it. Dicky X," the message read.

It came via a 25-metre projection of the billionaire, whose Virgin Media has launched a Fifty50 campaign, whereby the company will donate £1000 to charity each time an England player scores a half-century during the Ashes.

Naming streets after cricketers seems to be the latest way of recognising their achievements. Four months after Shivnarine Chanderpaul Drive, comes Umar Gul road. To acknowledge Gul's brilliant performance in the World Twenty20, the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) ministry for sports, culture and tourism in Pakistan has inaugurated a road in his name.The inauguration ceremony was held at the Peshawar Cantonment, in his hometown on Tuesday, and was attended by many, including Gul's family members. No word yet though on the speed limits...

When Andrew Strauss and Ricky Ponting meet in the middle on Wednesday for the toss, there could be no call of heads or tails when the coin is flicked.

The ECB commissioned the Royal Mint, whose home is in Wales, to produce a commemorative medal for the 2009 Ashes. But on closer inspection, there is neither a head or a tail to be seen. Instead, it pictures a batsman presenting a solid forward defence on one side, and npower's logo on the reverse.

A spokesman for Royal Mint told Cricinfo that the side showing the batsman will be called heads, but don't discount one of Ponting and Strauss yelling “npower” to delight their sponsors. The gold medals are limited edition and yours for £1595.

Though Warne and McGrath have rolled back the years with some traditionally ridiculous pre-Ashes banter, the build up to the 2009 Ashes has been uncomfortably genial. But that hasn’t stopped Mitchell Johnson’s mum from wading in, slamming – for want of a more appropriate, non basketball-sounding phrase - both Cricket Australia and Johnson’s lady, karate kid herself and belle of the ball, Jessica Bratich.

All is not well chez Johnson. "I get a text on Mother's Day and a text on my birthday," she sobbed to Australia’s Herald Sun. "The last time I actually spoke to him was when the beach cricket was here (and) Dennis Lillee told him he had to ring his mother, so Mitchell rang me that day. It has been like this since Jess came on the scene.”

Poor Cricket Australia have been hit a double blow by two forthright ladies – Bratich last week, and now Johnson’s mum, Ms Harber.

"For the wives and the children I think it is great that they support them and send the over there, but who are these girlfriends? They are just girlfriends,” Ms Harber said, in a string of quotations that sounds more like a script for Neighbours. "Mitch met Jess and since then she has flown off to South Africa, to England and the Bahamas. She gets all these trips, she gets flown there, accommodation, food and all of that."

Johnson is aware of his mother’s comments but has refused to reply. Wise man indeed.

Those who have slammed Cricket Australia for allowing WAGs – that sorry acronym to describe wives and girlfriends, which can’t help but sound derogatory and infantile – should watch out. Jessica Bratich, Mitchell Johnson’s other half, has come out fighting in their defence, and she’s no walkover. She is in fact a black-belt in karate.

"The boys are away four and a half months," she retorted to the former players and critics who have attacked CA. "Mitch goes from there straight to South Africa so they're actually away for six months. I think it's a bit ridiculous to think we're not going to go over there and support them."

One of the critics is Michael Slater, though his comments are slightly devalued given that he divorced his wife during the 2001 Ashes tour. He also drop-kicked Cricket Australia for allowing wives and girlfriends during the pre-Ashes camp at Coolum.

"In terms of the preparation,” he said, “when you're coming up with your strategy you don't need the partners there.”

During England’s horrific tour in the last (and quickly forgotten) Ashes tour in 2006-07, many criticised the presence of the WAGs who, they felt, had a detrimental impact on England’s performance. The same was said during Australia’s last trip here, and the same will be said again on this tour.

Australia’s captain Ricky Ponting is behind the WAGs all the way. “After a long day in the field,” he said in 2007, “it's great to be able to get away from cricket and freshen up that way.”

Steady on…

For those who seek omens at this stage of the build-up to an Ashes campaign, a fairly sizeable one was on display at Barnes Cricket Club last week, when England beat Australia by 28 runs … in the inaugural Blogger’s Ashes. The match was a 30-over-a-side affair, arranged by the men behind the Village Cricketer and Cricket with Balls blogs. England batted first and made 202 for 8, with Ed Craig, deputy editor of the Wisden Cricketer, top-scoring with 34 and scoring a direct hit on a lady sunbathing in a nearby garden. Australia, in reply, were rolled over for 174, with Patrick Kidd of The Times taking 3 for 25. The event raised more than £1000 for the Everyman Male Cancer Campaign.

John Howard must be spitting out his tea in disgust at the comments of his successor as Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd. Howard is the ultimate cricket tragic and his green-and-gold tracksuit will no doubt be his outfit of choice during the upcoming Ashes series.

While Rudd is also a cricket fan, he this week teetered dangerously on the edge of being labelled un-Australian – one of Howard’s favourite terms – when asked in a radio interview who was his favourite athlete. Rudd surely would say Don Bradman … surely. Or at least an Australian icon from another sport.

But this was Rudd’s response: “I can't go past Garry Sobers. There you go." Rudd cited Sobers’ unbeaten 254 for the Rest of the World at the MCG and his six sixes in an over of county cricket. “I thought, this guy has got the gift, the gift of the gods about him," Rudd said. "So there you go, he's not an Australian. Garry Sobers."

It's almost grounds for impeachment. At least Rudd knows he’ll always be welcome in Barbados.

While the thousands of Australians living in Britain scoff and laugh at the "heatwave" sweeping the nation, it gives cricket fans a good chance to expose themselves to dangerous levels of sun while catching a taste of the Ashes on the big screen. The ECB's hugely popular Cricket in the Park events will be available across the country throughout the Ashes, ensuring that the country will once again be gripped by the Ashes wherever you might be.

The venues are as follows:

• Southampton, Hoglands Park - Fri 10 and Sat 11 July (during Cardiff Test)
• Liverpool, Sefton Park - Sat 18 and Sun 19 July (Lord's Test)
• Cambridge, Parkers Piece - Sat 1 and Sun 2 Aug (Edgbaston Test)
• Derby, Markeaton Park - Sat 8 and Sun 9 Aug (Headingley Test)
• London, Regent's Park - Sat 22 and Sun 23 Aug (Brit Oval Test)

Though Aussies might laugh at pasty poms blistering like tomatoes on a barbecue, a quick trip 10 metres underground on the Tube ought to remind them just how sweltering the conditions can be. And in 2005, so entranced by the series did the nation become, that London Underground even updated some of the scores on the archaic screens while passengers waited for the next train.