Hafeez, a reason to watch Pakistan bat

India cricket

Balwinder Sandhu: the offspinner with an inswinger

There are few Indian cricketers who have given back to the game as richly as Balwinder Singh Sandhu. Sandhu, who played an important role in India's 1983 World Cup win by dismissing Gordon Greenidge, turned to coaching after retirement and has coached teams at different levels in the domestic set-up. In the Times of India, Makarand Waingankar traces Sandhu's development as a cricketer and a coach.

The story of Ballu becoming a medium pacer is amazing to say the least. He was playing in 'D' division of a Mumbai Cricket Association tournament for Sind sports club. One day their main medium-pacer didn't turn up. The captain GT Punjabi threw the new ball to Ballu, who then was an off spinner! From that day, Ballu always bowled with a new ball.

Cricket history

CLR's wife remembers Beyond a Boundary

There are few books on cricket that have had as powerful and as lasting an impact as CLR James' Beyond a Boundary. Fifty years after its publication, it is still regarded by many as the greatest book on the game. Writing in the Guardian, Selma James, wife of CLR, shares her insights into a book that her husband "had to write".

Establishing early the interconnection between cricket and race and class divisions opens the way for Beyond a Boundary to fulfil its author's full purpose: to draw out other startling connections - cricket and art, life in ancient Greece, even rewriting English social history with cricket's great WG Grace as a crucial figure. As startling as his connections is the light he sheds on each - not only cricket but every subject benefits from shattering boundaries. We are invited to reject the fragmenting of reality, and to see its diverse interconnections without which we are prevented from ever knowing anything fully - including our own reality. What do they know of cricket, or anything, if it is walled off from every other aspect of life and struggle?

Brian Clough's cricket connection

English cricket

An appreciation of Graeme Swann

Graeme Swann's elbow surgery has drawn attention to his importance in the English side and also set people thinking about the big Swann-sized hole in English cricket that will appear once he retires. In the Guardian, Barney Ronay pens an appreciation of a talent that is uniquely orthodox in a rapidly changing game.

A Test debutant aged 28 he has become England's defining off-spinner of the modern era, able to attack or defend, contain or destroy, to dismiss with both rip and bluff. Plus there is the paradox of his glorious orthodoxy as a bowler. Elsewhere, finger-spin has become a poutingly sexed-up business, a mille-feuille of intermingled variations, from the zinging, waddling, slingshot conjury of Saeed Ajmal to the princely, short-form poker player Sunil Narine. Swann, though, is something else, a bowler who, for all his dad-rock hipster slouch, is essentially old-fashioned, his method diligently refined over many years in county cricket.

History

The life and times of the extraordinary Bob Crisp

The Wisden Cricketers' Almanack perhaps put it most succinctly: "Statistics are absurd for such a man." For Robert Crisp, had a remarkable life that went beyond the nine Tests he played for South Africa - from climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to surviving attacks on battle tanks during the Second World War and beating cancer later in life. In the The Spin, Andy Bull looks at one of cricket's great adventurers.

Jonathan Crisp says he has it on "very good authority from a lot of different people" that his father was recommended for the Victoria Cross, but Field Marshal Montgomery refused to allow it because Crisp was so ill-disciplined. He was demoted three times. But then he was also mentioned in despatches four times. Crisp was awarded the Military Cross instead. He was presented with it by King George VI, who asked him if his cricket career would be affected by the wound. "No sire," Crisp replied. "I was only hit in the head."

What the Australians think of Sachin

The Sachin Tendulkar Experience

A hero in a dystopian wasteland

Soul Man

Tendulkar: I hate him like I love him

The stories of Test cricket

Growing up with Ricky

A story about Sachin

Tribute

An elegy for Peter Roebuck

It has been a year since Peter Roebuck committed suicide in South Africa. A fan from Australia, Benjamin Golby, has written a song to mark the anniversary. "In Memoriam - P.M.R" is not an attempt at obituary for Peter Roebuck," said Golby, who is taking his Honours in Composition in Melbourne, having studied Music at the University of Western Australia. "Rather, it is a response to Mr Roebuck's death. This is what distinguishes an elegy from eulogy, in that an elegy is a personal lament rather than a detailing of its subject's qualities."

Golby wrote the song after attending a memorial service for Roebuck in Melbourne six weeks after the writer's death. "I had found Mr Roebuck's death difficult to comprehend and, when attempting to discuss it with friends, felt unable to express the confusion I felt regarding it."

In the song, Golby writes:

"Learnt of your death early on a Sunday morning hungover and consumed with my own complaints Soon after, my father telephoned touchingly to check I was okay, making sad warning Beside myself I had trotted down to the nearby oval, where I found solace watching the park cricketers"

"I feel like a charlatan saying this as a person who was personally unacquainted with Mr Roebuck but I felt the loss severely and still find it very troubling," Golby said. "I thought that this was an overreaction and was ashamed by my response until I realised that a great many others feel the same. His is not merely the case in Australia, where many felt a personal connection with Mr Roebuck through his commentary work on the ABC and the Fairfax papers. The English novelist Howard Jacobson expresses something similar in the opening paragraph of an article he wrote on the subject in the Independent.

"I assume that what is being expressed is not so much personal loss but that some dearly held idea or conviction, espoused by that person or achieving essence in them, is now lost. Fortunately ideas do not die with individuals. As has been expressed in many of the tributes written, Peter Roebuck's most significant contributions, excellence in cricket journalism and that cricket should be placed in the context of greater social and political issues, will abide."

Strauss' over-achievement

How an epic at Eden touched a generation

When Laxman batted, nothing else mattered

The wasted talent that was Ajit de Silva