The Buzz

England’s defense of the Ashes may still be 10 months away, but the opening salvo of the competition has already been sounded in the unlikely location of Flowerdale, a small town in Victoria which was devastated by bushfires last February. Even more unlikely were the participants, with Prince William, currently engaged in a royal visit to Australia, representing England while the Australian side featured four international stars, including Brett Lee and Matthew Hayden, and an unspecified number of small children.

The small community marked the Prince’s visit with a barbecue and a cricket match on the village pitch, and presented the young royal with an Australian shirt, with "William" emblazoned on the back. To his credit, on being presented with the shirt, William quipped: "Don't mention the Ashes!" In what is seemingly becoming the English way, he then clung limpet-like to the crease, seeing off a succession of deliveries from the determined young children and squeaking home to an unlikely draw. "I didn't get bowled," said the Prince, "but I did not exactly cover myself with glory either."

Having ended his lean patch by scoring 502 runs in six Tests this season, the smile is back on Michael Hussey’s face. One thing he isn’t too pleased about, though, is his nickname – Mr Cricket. It was given to him during his time with Northamptonshire and when a journalist addressed Hussey as “Mr Cricket” in Brisbane on Wednesday, he was quick to react. “I don't really like the nickname,” Hussey said. “But it's the sort of nickname that if you show everyone you dislike it so much they're going to keep calling you it. So I try and ignore it as much as possible.”

Delaying tactics by Indian captains are not new. Former India captain Sourav Ganguly famously angered his Australian counterpart Steve Waugh when he kept him waiting at the toss during the 2001 Test series in India. And now it’s the turn of India’s current captain MS Dhoni to adopt such tactics. Only this time it’s well-known Bollywood filmmaker David Dhawan who has been kept waiting. Dhawan’s film Hook Ya Crook, starring John Abraham, features a cricket match between India and South Africa in its climax, which is yet to be shot. And the reason for the delay? Unavailability of Dhoni’s dates. The climax was slated to be shot last year, but had to be delayed due to the recession. And while everybody seems to be ready now, it is Dhoni who is apparently unavailable for the time being.

Test cricket’s leisurely pace harks back to a bygone era, when there were no live television broadcasts, and radio commentary held sway. Even today, it has its ardent followers, the kind that faithfully tune in to BBC’s Test Match Special (TMS). Unfortunately, non-English followers of the South Africa series cannot access TMS since BBC does not have commercial rights to stream England’s away tours, to international audiences. All that is set to change, thanks to a group of amateur commentators who have started making waves, literally. Tom Clark is the producer of a radio commentary show, hosted free of cost on a website called Test Match Sofa. As the name implies, the self-professed arm-chair critics watch live action on television and say it as they see it. Clark is happy with the popularity of the show, which has sky-rocketed since the Cardiff Test match of the Ashes. “We’re living the dream of being a Test Match Special commentator but because we do not have the political aspect of keeping on good terms with the likes of Graeme Swann and Stuart Broad we can be a bit more irreverent,” says Clark. Sofa, so good.

Ricky Ponting’s Baggy Green cap has been delivered to Hobart ahead of Thursday’s third Test against Pakistan, after undergoing a much-needed facelift at the hands of Sydney seamstress Myung Park.

The cap is not the original that Ponting received on his debut against Sri Lanka at Perth in December 1995 – that was stolen on his return from a subsequent tour of Sri Lanka four years later. Nevertheless, he’s still owned it for more than a decade, and has worn it for 114 of his 141 Test appearances.

"They've had to shave a little bit off it,” Ponting told reporters in Hobart. “It's a little bit shorter in the peak but it's come back in good order, so hopefully I'll get the rest of my playing days out of that cap.”

"It looks different in appearance because of the peak being a bit shorter and they've pulled the coat of arms at the front down over it a little bit, so I've just had to almost massage it back into shape. It had been in a bag flattened and squashed and it looked a bit out of shape. I just had to massage it back into shape a little bit, but it's come up pretty good."

Feng Shui helped Geoff Boycott recover from throat cancer and now the former England legend has recommended the ancient art to Manchester United striker Michael Owen to help reverse his poor form. Owen has not scored a league goal since September and Boycott said he had written to him before Christmas, urging him to consult a Feng Shui expert. Owen, for the moment, hasn’t given him the boot yet.

“I wrote to Michael Owen a while back to say, ‘Look at this and see what you think’. “You need help from anywhere you can get it and you have to be open-minded about these things,” Boycott told the Daily Express. “He hasn’t replied to my letter yet but if he does I will put him in touch with some experts in Feng Shui and see where that takes him. During treatment for cancer, I got into Feng Shui and slept in different rooms, facing different ways as the Master who came here recommended. They believe that as you sleep you heal, so it is important your head is facing your own personal health direction. People who don’t know anything about it say it is rubbish, but it worked for me. I’m alive.”

Shane Watson’s current purple patch may have a lot to do with the Blues. With 722 runs in the 8 Tests where he’s opened, Shane Watson has been among Australia's most successful batsmen in recent series but to get there he’s had to overcome a string of injuries – including stress fractures, hamstring and calf problems. Staying away from the game wasn't easy but it was here that music, specifically the blues, became his therapy. A late starter – he apparently bought his first guitar at 24 – he’s making up for lost time and, when he’s not strumming the blues he’s reading up about the great artistes. "It's really been the music that hit home to me the most," Watson told The Daily Telegraph. "It's the best thing I've done in my life for a number of reasons. There was a time previous to that, that cricket was my whole and sole existence. I knew I needed some balance in my life. At times cricket was absolutely everything. I had nothing outside of cricket. That's been a big part to me, to discover things outside my obsession with being the best cricketer I can possibly be." His current favourite is the Clapton standard Crossroads, a fitting song for someone whose career is set to take off.

Six months ago in England it was Peter Siddle who was the next Merv Hughes, but now the weighty mantle has been passed on to Doug Bollinger. Hughes was called many things during his career as a mean fast bowler, including being nicknamed “The Fruitfly” by team-mates for being Australia’s greatest pest.

Now Bollinger is creating similar feelings in the Australian dressing room, while providing extreme on-field value with 18 wickets in his past three Tests.

“Doug is trying to become that Merv Hughes-style character, there’s no doubt about that,” Ricky Ponting said. “The exercises going on in front of Bay 13 [in Melbourne], trying to get the crowd all on side. He’s that sort of character, everyone loves Doug and we certainly love having him in the team. Not only with the ball, but also livening things up among the group. He’s not the quietest bloke going around, he’s always got something to say, and his voice is loud, so you don’t miss him."

Even the season of giving has its limits. News that British taxpayers pay around ₤3 million every year to teach criminals in Jamaica to play cricket has generated a huge outcry in the home country. The money was meant for foreign prisoners in British jails to be repatriated to their home countries but, in a mix-up more bizarre than anything involving Geoffrey Boycott and an exasperated strike partner, the money has gone to a completely different cause.

Cue outrage. Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, made this succinct point to the Daily Express: “Thousands of schoolboys up and down the country would love to have cricket lessons.” And Shadow Justice Secretary Dominic Grieve: “It is astonishing that at a time of austerity, with spending on probation in this country being slashed, ministers will pay £3million for cricket lessons for prisoners overseas.”

The loophole – stemming from the absence of a bilateral prisoner-transfer agreement that led to the resources being differently allocated – has, however, benefited the Courtney Walsh Foundation’s Second Chance Project, a charity set up by the West Indian great – and backed by Wes Hall and Jimmy Adams - that teaches cricket to young offenders in Jamaican prisons. Will their charity work now be hit for six?

When it comes to public speaking, Indian cricketers take the blandness of their tribe to new levels – there isn’t even offbeat humour to compensate for the vanilla statements - so there’s some anticipation over the launch of “official” personal websites by four top players. MS Dhoni, Virender Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh and Ishant Sharma launched their websites in New Delhi on Monday and took a volley of questions. To one, on whether what was posted on his website could be taken as an official statement, Dhoni’s reply was succinct: what the need was for journalists to go to his website when he spoke at a press conference every second day?

It’s a captive market; unlike in the west, Twitter has not caught on with Indian players either, so these four sites could be the players’ mouthpiece to the fans. Nonetheless, there is always hope that some of their off-record earthy humour – or even a bit of the wit from their better TV commercials – finds its way to their websites, even if they lack the obvious colour of a Warne, Pietersen or Gayle (whose tweets during the West Indies players’ strike were always worth a read).

The four websites are currently live but require tweaking before fully completed; Harbhajan’s looks the most entertaining. The only player to post a gallery of images, some captured by team-mates, Harbhajan looks set to keep fans updated with his off-field leisurely activities. Sample his lying in the middle of a road in Wellington or posing by the dockyards in Auckland. Will the fans like it? The eyeballs will tell the tale.