'Hey Srini, you heard what Bangalore's fans are going to be chanting this year? "Our uniforms may be an ugly shade of red, but at least we ain't saddled with Fred"' © Getty Images

Friday, August 27th
More IPL news, this time about the auction before last. I may not have entirely understood, but it seems that the big cheese at the Chennai Catastrophes attempted to rig the auction to ensure that he didn’t end up with Flintoff. The deal was that the yellows would make a pretend bid of $1.55m but would then graciously withdraw. But the plan went wrong and they were lumbered with the big man with the dodgy ankle. Understandably, Chennai were upset. I think that’s it.

I don’t really know, to be honest. I didn’t realise that auctions, let alone multi-million dollar auctions, were supposed to be the acme of transparency. This whole IPL business looks like one of those blazing rows in a soap opera that conceal an underlying heartache. Any minute now, someone will say, “It’s not about the auction, Lalit, you know it’s not about the auction!” I hope it’s some time soon, because this IPL stuff is like watching the business news. No, it’s duller.

Saturday, August 28th
Pakistan have gone in the brain, says Nasser Hussain. Again. It isn’t an elegant phrase, but we know what he means. Still, as someone who enjoys reading about the golden age of cricket, it was lovely to see a re-enactment of Edwardian fielding including some gentlemanly ushering of the ball to the boundary, a marked reluctance to bend down and a dignified, patrician silence. Shabash, Kamran? No, okay then.

Sunday, August 29th
I’m still in shock to be honest. Couldn’t even bring myself to turn on the television. Who cares about watching cricket? Unbelievable. The kind of thing that makes a man despair about civilisation, no, about humanity as a whole. What are we coming to when an 18-year-old can make a mistake like that, with their whole careers ahead of them? If I’d wanted anchovies on my pizza, I’d have ordered anchovies on my pizza. What is wrong with the youth of today? Give them a moped and a fancy crash helmet and they think they’ve made it.

Monday, August 30th
A second man has been caught on tape, bragging about another spate of fixing dating back 20 years. He claimed to have fixed the results of 52 Test matches and 68 one-day internationals involving England between 1988 and 2000 and to have links with up to 189 English internationals. “You needed to know a lot of players in those days, because they kept changing them. No sooner had I groomed one fast bowler, than a new guy came in. I was always buying new address books.”

“I can’t believe we got away with it, to be honest. As time went on, we had to find more and more elaborate ways to lose, but the press never cottoned on. They kept saying it was cyclical, or blaming county cricket or calling for a new captain. The players were well up for it. Sometimes they collapsed without me even asking them to. Calm down, guys, I had to tell them, you can’t do it every game, someone will start asking questions. But they never did.”

	Jesse does the seventies © Getty Images

Let there be no doubt, cricket is men’s work. Women may be able to bat, bowl and field as well as the lesser sex, but there is one cricket skill in which, by and large, men remain pre-eminent: the rapid production of facial hair. And one man in particular, one selfless hero, has just raised cricket’s masculinity bar a notch higher. That’s right. Jesse Ryder has grown a moustache.

At the moment, it is hard to tell which way Jesse’s ‘tache will go. It’s something of a mini-Boon, but by the time the Champions Trophy comes to an end, he may be walking around with a full Zapata under his nose. Or perhaps he might go in for the waxed Hercule Poirot, or possibly even a Salvador Dali. I’ll keep you posted.

Of course, as we all know, the moustache is the nuclear option when it comes to demonstrating one’s masculinity and it brings its own particular dangers. Admirable though it is, this extra infusion of hairy-lipped testosterone into the New Zealand squad could have repercussions. Indeed, I’ve suspected for a long time that we may be approaching a fashion black hole. Consider, if you will, Jacob Oram’s hair. At what point does deliberately messy become just plain scruffy? Before you know it, people will be sprouting sideburns, shirts will remain unfastened and we will be back in the dark, hairy, and above all ugly, seventies; a decade when even attractive cricketers looked like they’d spent their close season living in a ditch.

It was precisely in order to uphold the aesthetic purity of the modern game that I recently launched my latest campaign. I am proposing that tattoos are made illegal under Level 4 of the ICC Code of Conduct. We all know that there are only three kinds of people on whom tattoos look good: Maoris, Bronze Age tribesmen and 19th century sailors. On everyone else they look like the scribblings of someone who tried to cheat in their maths exam, failed and then forgot to wash off the evidence. It can surely be no coincidence that the two biggest troublemakers in international cricket - Andrew Flintoff and Brendon McCullum - are covered in inky dribble

If we don’t make a stand then commentators will be next, and before we know where we are, Nasser Hussain’s pitch report will end with him rolling up his trouser leg to show us something deeply personal. Someone needed to draw an imaginary line in the metaphorical sand. That person was me.

The ICC tend not to answer my emails these days, so I decided to go to the top. The modern globetrotting cricketer is a surly sort of cove and not easy to bring to heel. I needed the help of the only man they would listen to. I needed Lalit Modi.

As you might imagine, His Modiness is a tricky man to get hold of, but I find that if you grab him firmly by the BlackBerry, he eventually stops struggling. He was sympathetic to my request, but replied that he was in no position to take a firm stance on body art. To my mounting horror, he then began to slowly remove his shirt to reveal an enormous, slightly hairy, chest-size Lalit Modi portrait in ink and flesh.

I haven’t been able to sleep ever since.

	“Hello, I’ll be your Ronnie for the day” © Getty Images

In less than three weeks time, the inaugural Champions League Twenty20 tournament will begin. Naturally, I assume you will all be watching. In these parts, the whole shebang is to be broadcast by British Eurosport, something of a coup for a channel more accustomed to bringing us the Baltic Wood-Chopping Grand Prix and Snail Endurance Racing from Calais.

None of this is a problem. I’m a broadminded kind of guy; I can live with getting my fix of the pyjama game via a rickety studio in Luxembourg. Anyway, thanks to the marvels of modern-day capitalism, I have no choice.

No, what is troubling me is the news that England’s very own Freddie Flintoff is to be part of the commentary team. Now Fred is a nice bloke, he does a good line in post-match self-deprecation, and I understand he has some interesting things to say on the subject of post-millennial immigration and its impact on standards of service in the hospitality industry.

Nevertheless, for all of his merits, he has one fault that renders him a commentary liability. He sounds exactly like Ronnie Irani. This is no trivial objection. For the last six months, I have been running a support group for traumatised IPL viewers suffering the effects of Post-Irani Syndrome. The symptoms they describe are invariably the same. Victims report seeing a yellow haze that they slowly recognise as the Setanta studio. They hear a man talking. The voice gets louder. They can make out the words, “I tell you what…” Then they wake up screaming.

The thought of this much-anticipated tournament being played out to a sound track of Lancastrian platitudes is enough to keep me up in the early hours, gnawing my pillow with anxiety. We can only hope that Freelance Fred is not being paid by the word.