Dubai Sports City (DSC) opened the world's first purpose-built sports city. Hosting a range of innovative technologies and showcase some of the best facilities in the world, DSC Cricket Stadium was one of the first of the facilities to open in early 2009, which boasts of state-of-the-art facilities and be lit by more than 350 floodlights.

The lighting system has been installed all along the rim of the roof of the stadium, creating the illusion of a 'ring of fire' when lighting the field of play. The design replicates natural light and facilitates good visibility for players at any time of the day by preventing shadows from being cast on the field. The stadium is by far the most advanced of its kind in the world and the International Cricket Council (ICC) was involved at all stages of the design process to ensure that the stadium meets the relevant specifications for hosting international cricket fixtures. ICC officials, including Malcolm Speed, the CEO, and Ray Mali, the president, at the time visited the construction sites at the stadium and the ICC Global Cricket academy. David Morgan, who succeeded Mali in June, was equally pleased. He had particularly mentioned that "Even at this stage of construction, it is very clear that it will be a significant stadium which will have its own charm."

The first ODI was played between Pakistan and Australia on April 22, 2009 marking a new beginning in UAE as an International venue for Cricket. The first real Test match was played between Pakistan and South Africa in November 2010. This was played to a packed stadium, something unusual to a soccer crazy nation.

The Umpire Decision Review System (abbreviated as UDRS or DRS) is a technology based system used in the sport of cricket. The system was first introduced in Test Cricket for the sole purpose of reviewing the controversial decisions made by the on-field umpires in the case of a batsman being dismissed or not. The new review system was officially launched by International Cricket Council on 24 November 2009 during the first Test match between New Zealand and Pakistan at the University Oval in Dunedin. It was first used in One Day Internationals in January 2011, during England's tour of Australia. The ICC had made the UDRS mandatory in all international matches but it later decided to end the mandatory use of DRS and now it will be up to both the teams to mutually agree on DRS use. However, the ICC's executive board made it clear that the DRS would still be part of all ICC events and that they support the use of technology and would continue to work on its development. On 29 October 2012 The International Cricket Council made amendments on LBW protocols, increasing the margin of uncertainty when the ball hits the batsman's pad.

Components
There are basically three components in UDRS, although Snickometer is no longer used.

1. Hawk-Eye or Eagle Eye or Virtual Eye: ball-tracking technology that plots the trajectory of a bowling delivery that has been interrupted by the batsman, often by the pad, and can determine whether it would have hit the wicket or not.

2. Hot Spot: Infra-red imaging system that illuminates where the ball has been in contact with bat or pad. Hot spot's success rate is found to be 90-95%. New cameras were used in Border-Gavaskar series in 2011-12 for viewers, which were vastly superior to those that had been part of the DRS in the past.

3.Snickometer: which relies on directional microphones to detect small sounds made as the ball hits the bat or pad. This system has since been scrapped and is no more in use.

Cricket Australia began experimenting with the virtual reality technology for its batsmen to maintain the team's number one position in the world. The technology with the players, padded up and waiting to bat, to rehearse their innings using images gathered from the middle, and projected, life-size, back into the pavilion.

The builders of this technology believed that if the system worked, it would mean that a player like Michael Hussey can go out to face Muttiah Muralitharan having already got his eye in against him in real time, with the ability to re-play deliveries he found difficult.

"A batsman could pick up the cues in Murali's bowling action on that particular day so they know when it's coming," said Marc Portus, Manager of the Sports Science unit at Cricket Australia's Centre of Excellence.

A team of Australian researchers says that the cricket bats that sense and reduce the shock vibrations from a fast ball may soon be enhancing cricketers' performance. A team led by Associate Professor Sabu John, an expert in smart materials from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, is developing a new hi-tech cricket bat handle. "We want to get the ball to come faster off the blade after impact," John told ABC Science Online. He said that it's apparent that while a very stiff bat would do this, it would also cause harsh vibrations for the batsman. "So we have to have a fine balance between comfort for the batsman and energy back to the ball."

Keeping it sweet
"The bigger the sweet spot, the more forgiving the cricket bat becomes," said John. John and team want to expand the "sweet spot" of the cricket bat, the area on a bat that can hit a ball hard yet not cause unpleasant vibrations for the player. Tennis racquets and golf clubs, once made of wood, are now made of materials like carbon fibre and titanium that increase the size of the sweet spot. But John said age-old rules insist cricket bats can only be made from wood. To get around this, John has found a loophole in test cricket rules. There are specific restrictions on the bat blade but not the handle. Traditional cricket bat handles are made of cane with rubber for absorbing shock. John and team have developed a new handle made of a carbon fibre shell containing a polymer insert that absorbs vibrations. The researchers are also hoping to use sensors to help control vibrations. While commercial sensitivities prevented John from revealing the exact details of this sensor system, he said it would be along the lines of the "active vibration control system" currently used to control vibrations in tennis racquets, skis and baseball bats. "I got the idea from baseball bats," he said.

Good vibrations
The active vibration control system in baseball bats involves using piezoelectric materials integrated with software, said John. The system generates voltage in response to vibrations and can also move in response to voltage. Depending on where the ball hits the bat, and its angle and speed, the bat gives out a particular pattern of vibrations. The active vibration control system interprets this, either generating waves in the opposite direction cancelling out the original vibrations, or absorbing the shock waves by converting them into heat energy. The energy can even be converted to light energy, which could light up a bat handle.

John hopes the hi-tech handle, together with some changes to the shape of the blade, within the dimensions allowed under cricket rules, would expand the cricket bat sweet spot. The researchers have already shown they can take out the vibrations using the piezoelectric system in the lab but they are now trying to see if they can do so using a computer model of the whole cricket bat. They also hope to have prototype handles for cricketers to test early next year.

John said he couldn't be sure test cricket would accept the new bat but will present it to authorities after field tests.

"We're trying to go with the laws of the game and hope they will accept it," John said. The Australian Research Council, cricket bat manufacturer Kookaburra Sport and Davidson, a company that makes sensors, support the research.

There was a time when a charge of chucking involved more stigma than almost anything else a player could do wrong. It was easily more serious than not walking, or claiming half-volleys as catches, or running out a batsman who had been tripped over. It was more humiliating too. From backyards to international venues, bowlers who couldn't bowl were looked down upon, their place in the game questioned.

Nowadays umpires don't call anybody for throwing during a match. While a batsman given out lbw even after he has hit the leather off the ball is punished immediately for standing his ground for five seconds, chuckers cannot be asked to stop operating. There are various tests, reporting processes and remedial measures that have attached a sense of mystery to the process and watered down the stigma. The umpire retains the power to call a bowler for throwing, but that's just to prevent misuse - say, baseball-style pitching, or a part-time bowler deliberately chucking at a crucial juncture of the game.

Frankly the game didn't have much choice. For years, decades, centuries, the umpires relied on the naked eye - some still consider it the best method - to call bowlers for throwing. Not in recent times, though, after biomechanical tests revealed it is humanly impossible to bowl without any flex in the elbow. The actions most orthodox to the naked eye were found to be technically illegal. The ICC had no option other than to assign limits for the straightening of the elbow after it passed the shoulder in the delivery action: 10 degrees for fast bowlers, seven and a half for medium-pacers, and five for spinners.

Also in the '90s came Muttiah Muralitharan, whose unique elbow, wrist and shoulder challenged the veracity of what we saw. More startling revelations surfaced from retrospective biomechanical tests in 2004. Some of the cleanest bowlers from the past seemed to have been flexing their elbows beyond the limit, and finally, in November 2004, the ICC set a uniform 15-degree limit for all bowlers.

Given all the complex calculations involved, the umpires only name the suspect actions in their post-match reports, following which various tests decide the offender's future. Most come back with improved actions, and stay under scrutiny. Some are asked to not bowl a particular delivery; for example, Johan Botha and the doosra.

For the time being that has settled the issue and made room for the doosra, the offspinner's googly, which experts reckon cannot be bowled without chucking. The world today is more tolerant of suspect actions. Bishan Bedi is not pleased, Murali is. To Murali and other modern offspinners the doosra is an art form. To Bedi and other traditionalists, among them Australian coaches who want the teaching of the doosra banned, in their country at least, it is an act of cheating. There is reason enough to believe both sides have cricket's best interests at heart. Both have reason to believe what they believe. Whoever said cricket was a simple game?

At first the Twenty20 Cup was viewed with the sniffiness of a maiden aunt at a shotgun wedding, but as with all the best shindigs, even the fuddy duddies soon found themselves tapping their feet to the beat.

The concept had been dismissed as a gimmick when it was launched in the spring of 2003, and worse than that, a marketing gimmick, for it was Stuart Robertson, the ECB's head of marketing, who was credited with coming up with the plan, ostensibly as a reaction to tumbling county audiences. But even before the first fortnight-long season was done and dusted, it was abundantly clear that a revolution had been spawned in the shires.

The ECB executives at the official launch in Kensington turned up looking hip and trendy (and distinctly uncomfortable) in their open-collared shirts, and this awkward attempt at melding tradition with innovation continued around the grounds, where pop and samba bands, jacuzzis, and speed-dating were just some of the attractions on offer, as brand-new audiences were lured through the turnstiles by whatever means possible.

It didn't take long, however, for the cricket to recapture centre stage - and for all the glitz and glamour of subsequent initiatives such as Stanford and the IPL, that fundamental truth has propelled the format towards the stratosphere.

The inaugural Twenty20 Cup was won by Adam Hollioake's Surrey, who were at the time the finest limited-overs outfit in the land, and whose nine-wicket victory over Warwickshire at Trent Bridge was completed at 9.35pm, at the end of the longest day of cricket ever staged in England.

The star of the show was instructive as well. For all the fears that a 20-over slog would turn bowlers into cannon fodder, it was the medium pace of Jimmy Ormond that trumped the big-hitters. With his line, length and modicum of movement, Ormond was the very antithesis of a glamour-puss, but his match-winning figures of 4-0-11-4 proved from the start that it is a bowler's game after all.

Most revolutions have a striking, photogenic face: Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, Vanilla Ice. One-day cricket's was bloated, harsh and moustachioed. But Mark Greatbatch's place in history, as the first pinch-hitter of real substance, can't be denied. Four years before Sanath Jayasuriya there was Greatbatch, flogging bowlers over the top, sweating out a period of dismal form, taking New Zealand beyond their wildest dreams in the 1992 World Cup.

Pinch-hitting, facilitated by the 15-over field restrictions - only two fielders allowed outside the circle - that first appeared in South African domestic one-dayers in the mid-1970s, were adopted by World Series Cricket in 1977-78, and eventually standardised in 1995, overturned one-day norms and mores.

The key overs were now 0-15, not 41-50; the new ball, once the implement with which bowlers held court, was now a batsman's weapon. The inevitable killing of the golden goose meant a silly season of unlikely openers - Phil DeFreitas, Matthew Hart, David Brain - but elsewhere on the ranch were even more profitable progeny: a breed of middle-order strokemakers led by Sachin Tendulkar and Mark Waugh were promoted to show that the best way was to go through the circle with finesse, not over it with force.

But while the first 15 overs got eminently watchable - if it's run-scoring that you wanted to watch - the middle overs remained dull and predictable, with batsmen biding time till the death. So to spice up overs 20-40, Powerplays were born in 2005: The field restrictions were mandatory for the first 10 overs, after which the bowling captain could decide when to apply them for another five-over period.

The odds were stacked against the bowlers, but not heavily enough for the ICC, who in 2008 brought in the batting Powerplay. Many thought this would break bowlers' spines, but that hasn't quite happened, and batting sides haven't quite consistently mastered the art of just when to take their Powerplay, often losing wickets in a clatter in an attempt to up the rate.

As cricket grew into a high-stakes sport, there was an increasing need for a neutral authority to oversee matches. Third-country umpires were fine to ensure impartial decision-making, but there were factors beyond their ambit: ground conditions, player facilities at a venue, and most importantly the tricky matter of keeping players from infringing the ICC's code of conduct.

Enter the match referee, an ICC-appointed official, and usually a former international player of repute. MJK Smith from England was the first appointee, when he officiated in the first two Tests during India's tour of Australia in 1991-92. On December 28, 1992, Aqib Javed became the first player to be suspended for a match by a referee when Peter Burge punished him for showing dissent against the umpires during an ODI in Napier. Essentially, cricket became more policed. It needed it.

But a high-stakes sport also needed greater accuracy in decisions. It was the advent of television, and in particular the slow-motion replay, that really began to undermine the authority of the umpire, exposing his every mistake. It became apparent that some kind of electronic back-up had to be made available to umpires, and in 1992 there appeared for the first time a third umpire or TV umpire, who could be consulted only for the decisions: run-outs, stumpings and boundaries.

The third umpire was a boon to fielders - fittingly it was Jonty Rhodes who claimed the first dismissal by this means, when South African umpire KE Liebenberg adjudged that he had run Sachin Tendulkar out in the first Test on India's tour of South Africa in 1992-93. Not only was the full value of the direct hit now felt, referrals to the third umpire also added a sense of theatre, with thousands of viewers waiting with bated breath for the red or green light to blink.

Somewhere along the way - between Paul Terry's broken arm and Mike Gatting's pulped nose - the West Indies pace quartet of the 1980s picked up a reputation for intimidatory bowling. Other teams, when they weren't complaining about the blows inflicted on their bodies and psyche, started to point at West Indies' over-rate, which sometimes crawled along at just 70 a day.

Something had to give, and when it did it tilted the balance completely the other way. In 1991, the ICC introduced the "one bouncer per batsman per over" rule in an attempt to end the intimidation, and buck up the over-rates. Flat-track bullies rejoiced but fast bowlers, already condemned to bowling on shirtfronts in most parts of the world, weren't amused, and vociferous protests saw the law amended in 1994 to incorporate two bouncers per over. One-day cricket took much longer to listen to the bowlers' pleas, and it was only in 2001 that once bouncer per over was allowed.

Cricket had live television in the 1980s and the sport did use satellites. What Sky's live broadcast of the 1990 England tour of the West Indies achieved, however, was to make cricket's world both flatter and smaller but also suddenly very, very precious.

Just as Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket forced the establishment to re-examine cricketers' wages, the Sky broadcast marked the beginning of cricket's evolutionary economic leap. A slightly eccentric sport, played at the highest level by less than a dozen nations, took the first steps towards becoming a million-dollar business, built on the back of an ambitious and rapidly growing private television industry. Impoverished home boards suddenly found a new source of earnings in tours by frontline dollar-waving nations.

Saqlain explains it simply as "God's gift", but whether god-given, or as some suggest, a result of a kink in the elbow, the doosra has changed the well-established notion of offpsin as primarily a restrictive form of slow bowling.

When the numbers of those wanting to control cricket television began to grow, it led to open bidding for rights, and their values began to climb.

If Sky set it all rolling, the next significant step came from the opening up of the Indian cricket television market in 1993. It was when the BCCI realised it could earn revenues by selling its broadcast rights to someone other than the government-owned national broadcaster. And that the bureaucratic broadcaster didn't really have to be paid to telecast live cricket in India. Indian cricket was freed of government monopoly by an Indian Supreme Court order passed by two judges at 2am on the day a one-day tournament called the Hero Cup was to begin. Two years later, an unknown company called WorldTel bought rights to telecast the 1996 World Cup for the unheard of sum of US$10 million. More than the staging of the event in Asia, it was this satellite TV deal that first established that the financial treasure house of the game had moved eastwards.

Along with bringing cricket from all over the world into our living rooms, the satellite TV industry and its subsidiaries in the 1990s led to a mushrooming of what can only be called comet-cricket events. These were scratch ODI tournaments that popped up during the cricket calendar, featuring three or more teams. The lone constant was the presence of either India or Pakistan, ideally both, to attract the subcontinental diaspora into the actual venue and to keep the South Asian TV audiences hooked. Some of these events took place in mainstream cricketing nations, but the epicentre of offshore cricket was the Gulf emirate of Sharjah. Canada, Kenya, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur were also hit upon as alternative venues.

In the 1990s over 40 such comet-cricket events took place. Satellites whirling about above the earth kept track of every ball of these eventually meaningless contests. So did the illegal bookmaking industry. Until Hansie Cronje's phone was tapped.

Reverse-swing is cricket's irresistible force. Appropriately for such a murky subject, we cannot be entirely sure of its origins, beyond the fact that it was developed in Pakistan, possibly as far back as the Second World War, as a response to parched pitches. A little further down, its lineage is clearer: it was patented by Imran Khan and Sarfraz Nawaz right - although Imran also credits Australian Max Walker for it - and mastered by Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis. Hand in hand with the legspin renaissance, it revitalised cricket in the nineties.

Cricket's response to such an unknown science was first fear (allegations of ball-tampering), then ignorance (as seen in the dirt-in-the-pocket affair involving Michael Atherton). But as time has gone on, more has been understood about the mechanics of reverse-swing: pace and full length are prerequisites, as is a fast arm and a relative lack of height; additionally, a bone-dry outfield is also of help. As the name suggests, it reverses the norms of orthodox swing bowling: while one side of the ball is kept shiny, the other must be made as dry and rough as possible, which is why the old ball became such a deadly weapon. Beyond that, it's hard to explain, though some balls "go" better than others. Readers are the reverse-swinger's ball of choice.

Reverse-swing has also enabled bowlers to be entirely self-sufficient, needing no help from pitch or umpire (height is not a factor in lbw decisions that result from reverse-swinging yorkers). Both Wasim and Waqar have taken over half their Test wickets through bowleds and lbws. Ultimately reverse-swing has meant more collapses, more hat-tricks, and as Scyld Berry has pointed out more results: tailenders are simply not equipped to handle a ball boomeranging in at their toes.

In his 1979 book, "With A Straight Bat", World Series Cricket's chief administrator Andrew Caro looked forward to a Lord's banquet some 15 years later at which the toast was Caro's boss - "Sir" Kerry Packer. He imagined the Duke of Edinburgh gesturing to a portrait of the television mogul on the Long Room wall - between those depicting Sir Pelham Warner and WG Grace - and proclaiming that "without Sir Kerry, cricket would not have pulled its finger out".

The banquet never happened, and probably won't, but it might still be justified. Cricket has gone decades in which it altered less - considerably less - than in the two years of WSC, the professional cricket troupe Packer backed with his Nine Network in mind. Night cricket, coloured clothing, helmets and drop-in pitches were pioneered. Cricketers, paid like star sportsmen for the first time, became more aware of their worth in the marketplace. Administrators, wakened to the value that the media imputed to their sport, came to recognise television rights as an important revenue source. Mass marketing, embodied in the pop chant "C'mon Aussie C'mon", devised by admen at Mojo, took root in cricket and never went away.

The saga began in May 1977, when it was revealed that Packer had recruited the 35 best international cricketers money could buy for a series of matches to be screened by Channel Nine. The Australian Cricket Board had denied him exclusive broadcast rights for cricket, and he had decided to roll his own. The board fought a successful holding action in that first summer, 1977-78. The national team, rebuilt from young talent that Packer had not recruited, beat India 3-2; WSC, meanwhile, struggled to find an audience, despite its galaxy of talent, grandeur of design and gaudiness of promotion.

The summer of 1978-79, however, found roles reversed: while an inexperienced Test side was routed by England, WSC went from strength to strength. Packer's promotion was directed towards making WSC look more like official cricket rather than less, his Australian team more truly the representative of the people than its establishment equivalent; and the Chappells, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh were a persuasive unit. Establishment resistance crumbled: Packer got his exclusive rights and more.

In hindsight, there is a historical inevitability about all the changes WSC wrought. They'd either already been dabbled in, or become factors in rival sports. What precipitated events was the availability of cricketers for a bargain price - it was learning how peeved Australian players were by their paltry wages that convinced John Cornell and Austin Robertson, WSC's architects, to take their proposal to a receptive Packer. Even WSC's investment in the popularity of one-day cricket was hardly a blinding flash after 1975's World Cup. So the important aspect of WSC was not simply the changes, but their speed: cricket has never changed so far so fast. It happened at a pace, in fact, that could never have been accommodated by cricket's existing institutional structures. We toast you, Mr P, even if Lord's won't.

There is no cricket like Test cricket, it is true; yet it was left to the packaged formulation of one-dayers to provide to the game its most anticipated event. The idea was first believed to be conceived by Ben Brocklehurst, chairman of the Cricketer, in 1969, and MCC put together the first World Cup in 1975. Tony Cozier wrote at the time that it was "perhaps the boldest and most ambitious innovation the game has known since the legalisation of overarm bowling" -words he now considers hyperbole, but which nevertheless make a point. Limited-overs internationals were, after all, only 18 matches old, all of which had been played in bilateral series only.

The first Cup, held in England over two weeks between eight teams and eventually won by West Indies in a classic final against Australia, aroused vast interest. The profits, though small, were encouraging: essentially it was validation of the new paradigm, the one-day paradigm. Even so, recalls historian David Frith, the tournament was by no means assured of perpetuation in the cricket calendar. That it did establish itself, with every Cup becoming much larger than the previous in virtually every respect, reflects the way the game itself has grown.

The one-day game is cricket's biggest paradox. Unequivocally, it is the lesser game, yet, indisputably, it has made the most difference. At one level, one-day cricket can be accused of debasing some of the core values of cricket; at another, it can be credited with adding robustness and dynamism to the sport and helping keep it contemporary. Traditionalists squirm at its corrupting influences; yet it is undeniable that it has made the most traditional version of the game, Test cricket, sharper, more competitive and more appealing to newer audiences. The surfeit of one-day cricket is a problem, yet the game would be financially unviable without a generous dose of it. By a distance, it is the most significant development in cricket in the 20th century. Incredible then that the first one-day international was a chance happening.

Though the idea of one-day cricket was conceived in the late fifties by a committee instituted by MCC to arrest the decline in attendances at county matches, and the Gillette Cup, a tournament comprising 40-overs-a-side matches was born in 1963, it was not until 1971 that the first one-day international was played. Like the first-ever Test, it was played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground between England and Australia. It was even meant to be a Test: the match had been washed out and a 40-over game was conceived to compensate the spectators, but it took several meetings between Don Bradman, the chairman of the Australian Cricket Board, and Cyril Hawke, the president of MCC, to agree on official status for the game. Forty-six-thousand spectators watched Australia win by 40 runs, and cricket's most powerful idea took concrete shape.

The most radical departure from time-honoured norms was immediately obvious: one-day cricket had no place for a draw. Equally significant was its influence over the manner Test cricket was played. For newer generations of players weaned on a steady diet of one-day cricket, the draw became, if not entirely dishonourable, an increasingly unappealing proposition. The pace of the game quickened considerably, players became more athletic, they ran harder-between the wickets and after the ball, they leapt and they dived, they gave up pristine whites for bright team colours and the sun for the halogen. Cricket, a connoisseur's preserve for more a century, became a spectacle for Everyman.

It wasn't without a cost, though. One-day cricket was blatantly discriminatory against the bowler and a series of restrictive measures-a fixed quota of overs, fielding restrictions in varying degrees, a cap on bouncers-seriously undermined his potency and made run-making relatively easy. Hearteningly though, one-day cricket hasn't turned into an unqualified haven for mediocrity: barring the odd Bevans, the greats-the Richardses, the Tendulkars, the Akrams-have dominated both forms with equal majesty; and despite fears that spinners might be belted out of the game, bowlers like Warne, Murali and Kumble haven't only survived, but been match-winners.

Although the amateur era in England ended in 1962, the question remains in a slightly evolved form worldwide. It is the one asked during the 1960s by CLR James: "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" The amateurs of old England had jobs outside cricket, or in the case of a privileged few had enough inherited wealth so that they did not have to work. The best of them - Douglas Jardine to name but one - played with even greater enthusiasm than professionals for the very reason that they did not play every day. The majority, though, weren't very good and used county cricket as "a bit of a lark" during their summer holidays.

Outside England, in every other Test-playing country, only a handful of cricketers managed to make a living from the fees they earned for playing first-class and Test cricket - until World Series Cricket arrived in 1977. Many a player had found a decent job because his employer was keen on cricket and liked to have him on the payroll with all the prestige that came attached. But as a rule the only full-time professionals were to be found in England until a generation ago.

Inevitably the amateurs of the past had a wider background and experience than the cricketers of today who go from school through age-group sides to cricket academy to full-time cricket without seeing anything of life outside grounds and dressing rooms. And this new regime seems to be necessary in today's game, for players will otherwise be left behind - such is the international standard.

But is such a narrow upbringing the best for a player's mind? Well, the jury is still out. But for the moment we can judge that batsmen like Sachin Tendulkar and Michael Vaughan seem to be none the worse for having played cricket all their lives with few other interests outside sport.

Captaincy, however, is another matter. Here the limited evidence suggests that the best captain has a wider range of personal experience and therefore of sympathy than the full-time career pro. In England, the era of Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain, who were amateurs in the sense that they went to university before becoming full-time pros, has gone. Vaughan and his probable successor Marcus Trescothick have been full-time cricketers almost all their lives. Can such people be as imaginative, skilful at man-management, and effective as Frank Worrell, Jardine, the Nawab of Pataudi and so on? Let us wait and see.

Ray Illingworth, the former England captain, played most of his career on uncovered pitches, and was a big fan. "They produced better batters and bowlers," he wrote in his autobiography, arguing that bowlers learned to exploit helpful conditions and batsmen honed their techniques.

Uncovered pitches in England were phased out in the 1960s - something Richie Benaud blames for the decline of the wristspinner. Since then, with the exception of some indecently raging turners at Northampton, the only luxuries afforded English bowlers have been greentops, leaving mediocre seamers to grab all the wickets and spinners to fight over the scraps.

Another side-effect of covering pitches has been the normalisation of batting conditions all round the world. During the 1936-37 Ashes series, Australia responded to a classic sticky dog - created when a wet pitch is exposed to the sun - in Melbourne - by reversing the order. It worked a treat: Don Bradman came in at No. 7, scored 270 and Australia won by 362 runs. These days, the batsmen are more pampered, and such innovation isn't necessary. Which makes you wonder how much Bradman would have averaged had he been born 50 years later.

A Lord's Ashes Test is always special. But 1938's was more unique than most: it was the first cricket match to be shown on television. At 11.29 on June 24, a little over six months after the birth of Kerry Packer, Ian Orr-Ewing handed over to Teddy Wakelam, sat by a couple of cameras on the top tier of the Nursery End, to begin commentary as Ernie McCormick bowled the opening over to Charlie Barnett.

Coverage of cricket has inevitably evolved - remember those old videos where every second over was viewed from behind the wicketkeeper? - and has been fundamental to Packer and to the development of one-day cricket in particular. Now we have double-ended coverage, Hawk-Eye, more than 30 cameras, stump-cams, stump-mikes, Snickometers.

Yet in some ways the advances have been a double-edged sword: television holds too much clout for the traditionalist's comfort, an example being the sacrifice of a decent contest to accommodate day-night matches during the 2003 World Cup. Good outweighs bad, though: anyone in any doubt should shove on a video of Botham's Ashes, of Sachin batting, of Warne and Murali at their most magnetic. Television has brought cricket's distinctive magic to parts that no other medium can reach.

Young folk may challenge the claim, but the 1932-33 series between Australia and England remains the most sensational Test series of them all. People were more easily shocked in those days. Cricket was still a fairly polite game. The code of honour was strictly and readily adhered to by everyone, so when Douglas Jardine unleashed his hostile fast attack of Harold Larwood and Bill Voce, who bowled short on and outside the line of the leg stump, there was outrage. Five or six short-leg fieldsmen waited to catch the ball from batsmen desperate parries, with a couple of leg-side outfielders ready for the imperfect hook.

The principal target was Don Bradman, whose run-making over the previous three years had transformed the record book. "Our Don" was Australia's most treasured asset, a source of pride and a comfort to his legions of fans in desperate times of unemployment and economic hardship. England needed to subdue him. Jardine's strategy was to restrict him by means of Fast Leg Theory. (This aloof and somewhat shy man scorned the Australian term "Bodyline".) And he succeeded. The Don's average was cut to a mere 56, with only one century.

But the cost to England's image was catastrophic. Here was the revered Mother Country playing dirty. At that time the intimidation and the concentrated field-setting were both within the letter of the Laws. But as even some of the English players privately recognised, they were contrary to the spirit of the game. The tourists won four of the Tests, losing only the second, on a slow Melbourne pitch where Bradman coupled a duck with a splendid, hardworking century.

It took a long time to heal the injured feelings, which had even concerned the governments of both countries. Subtle unwritten pledges were extracted that the Australians would not be subjected to Bodyline during their 1934 tour, and in due course the Laws were tightened in an effort to prevent any repetition - though not soon enough to spare India from assault by other England fast bowlers under Jardine's control in 1933-34.

Thereafter bouncers were widely regarded as unsporting and unwanted - until, that is, the Second World War changed everything. In the late 1940s Bradman had Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller at his disposal, and the bouncers flew again. Yet even those blistering sessions were but an attenuated preamble to what happened in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Then, with four hefty fast bowlers at his disposal, one West Indies captain after another let them loose all day. The survivors of the original Bodyline series marvelled that there was no public riot, for it had come close to that at Adelaide in 1933, when two of Australia's batsmen were felled. Yet now, in a period of 20 years, West Indies fast men sent 40 opposing batsmen to hospital. To repeat: our fathers and grandfathers were shocked more easily.

Cricket commentary on the radio dates from 1922, when one Lionel Watt was armed with a microphone and sent to the SCG to report on a match between two New South Wales XIs. In England, Plum Warner was the pioneer, doing the honours at an Essex v New Zealand game in 1927.

The next level was broached with the "synthetic " broadcasts of the 1930s. During the Bodyline series, the BBC deigned to provide no more than potted scores. Stepping into the breach, French radio station Poste Parisien hired former Australian allrounder Alan Fairfax, put him in a Paris studio, fed him detailed reports of play by cable and had him report the game in the present tense as if he were actually watching.

Synthetic radio's finest moment, though, came in June 1938, when cricket fandom was forever changed by four men in a Sydney studio. Every over, a rudimentary written description of the play was cabled in from England. Four commentators-Alan McGilvray, Vic Richardson, Monty Noble and Hal Hooker-translated these into a breathtaking ball-by-ball commentary. A pencil striking wood replicated the thwack of leather on willow; a gramophone recreated the cheers and jeers of a faraway crowd.

Bradman-obsessed Australians listened all night long. Cricket was, and would henceforth remain, at the cutting edge of sports broadcasting. Every subsequent whizz-bang innovation-from cameras at both ends to super-slo-mo replays to Hawk-Eye-is indebted to those synthetic broadcasts.

When he developed the googly in 1900-it was originally intended as a party piece to amuse his team-mates-Bernard Bosanquet brought mischief and deception to a hitherto straightforward game. It was two years in the making, and his first successful googly bounced four times before hitting the stumps. "It is not unfair," he said, "only immoral." With his first delivery in Australia, Bosanquet clean bowled Victor Trumper with the wrong'un. Any attempt to put egg on face-flipper, doosra, slower ball, effort ball, reverse sweep-owes its existence to the Bosie.

In time the delivery became synonymous with subcontinental wizardry: Abdul Qadir, who revived the art dying after Bhagwath Cahndrasekhar, was perhaps the best googly bowler of all. Ironic then that it was developed by an Englishman, and that the most famous googly of all came out of the back of an English hand. Yet they kept on struggling without clue against the googlies bowled by Qadir, Shane Warne, Anil Kumble, and even the modestly successful Danish Kaneria. The wrong'un is cricket at its most artistic, yet for art a price must be paid: if Eric lies had never learnt to bowl a googly, Don Bradman would surely have finished with a Test average of 100.

The doosra did for offspin what the googly did for legspin more than a century ago: it invested a humble art with a touch of mystery and intrigue. Over the years offspinners had bowled many variations - the floater, the drifter, the under-cutter - but the trick was either confined to not spinning the ball, or at most swinging it away with the arm.

But the doosra - meaning "second" or "other one", in Hindi and Urdu - first mastered by Saqlain Mushtaq and then used to great effect by Muttiah Muralitharan and Harbhajan Singh, was the first instance of a ball that turned away off the pitch with an offbreak action, thanks to a cheeky tweak of the thumb and forefinger.

Saqlain explains it simply as "God's gift", but whether god-given, or as some suggest, a result of a kink in the elbow, the doosra has changed the well-established notion of offpsin as primarily a restrictive form of slow bowling.

If Ranji is popularly remembered today, with regard to his cricket anyway, merely as the most mystical artist of them all, it does desperate injustice to his influence upon the science of the game.

Ranji fundamentally furthered the craft of batting to an extent that nobody, not Bradman or anyone else, has since managed. It was not out of a desire to appear exotic, but because of a natural handicap, allied with what Ranji himself wrote of that pioneer WG Grace - "to make utility the criterion of style"- that he opened up the region behind square on the leg side as a legitimate area for making runs.

The genesis of the "leg-glance", as it came to be known, is a fascinating tale. Dan Hayward, Ranji's coach at one time, pinned his pupil's rear foot to the ground in order to correct his proclivity to move out of the line of the ball and play towards point against fast bowling. Yet as the left foot, by force of habit continued to make its way across, Ranji was left in a twist with the bat on the wrong side of the front foot, so that twirling his wrists to deflect the ball fine seemed the natural way out.

Backward of square on the leg is now a vastly productive - and apparently obvious - area of scoring, but back then, as historian HS Altham wrote, "Ranji was a law unto himself." Batsmen simply did not play across the line, and captains rarely ever posted more than two men on the leg.

The wonder for many was the astonishing speed Ranji generated on this stroke, and against deliveries with varying lines and virtually any length: a testament to his hand-eye coordination, and as his dear friend and illustrious team-mate CB Fry remarked, the facility "to move as if he had no bones".

Not only this. Ranji was the first international cricket star of colour. Though never a flagbearer for either his race or his country of birth, India, Ranji's overwhelming success and popularity transmitted the message into the world's consciousness: this need not be a white man's game, nor one played in some God-ordained manner. Till this day, Asia produces the wristiest strokemakers of all. It was Ranji who began it. "When he batted a strange light was seen for the first time on English fields, a light out of the East," Cardus wrote of him. "It was lovely magic..."

The earliest bowling was underarm, although that wasn't always quite as genteel as it might sound. The early cricket historian John Nyren wrote of David Harris, who propelled fast underarms from somewhere near his armpit for Hambledon in the 1780s: "How it was that the balls achieved the velocity they did by this mode of delivery, I never could comprehend." The next step, around 1800, was to roundarm bowling. By legend this was started by a woman, Christina Willes, whose voluminous skirts meant she couldn't lob the ball underarm. It's a nice story, but is generally thought to be fanciful these days. What is true is that Christina's brother, John, was no-balled for roundarm bowling in a match at Lord's in 1822: in high dudgeon he jumped on his horse and galloped off, vowing never to play cricket again.

By the 1860s, roundarm bowling was the norm, but the bowlers were trying to sneak the hand above the shoulder, as what we would recognise today as bowling developed. In 1862 Edgar Willsher, playing for England against Surrey at The Oval, was no-balled for overarm bowling. Like Willes before him, Willsher left the field, although he doesn't seem to have had a horse handy to ride off into the south London sunset. The match resumed next day with a new umpire, and overarm bowling took hold as bowlers began to understand the possibilities. Two years later overarm bowling was legalised - which is why cricket historians usually date the start of "modern" cricket to 1864.