The Surfer

Unfortunately, despite our cordiality now, I didn’t enjoy Vaughan as a captain.

What kept you going?

They would have quite liked to have kept their No1 Test ranking, their Test skipper and their best batsman, and they will be doing their damnedest to retain their ICC World Twenty20 crown very soon, but there has been a clear, if not publicly declared, focus on ODIs this year.

... Ian Bell has simply been a revelation. And Jonathan Trott trots on. Last winter I was having dinner with Atherton, Andy Flower and the team analyst Nathan Leamon. We got on to one-day cricket and Leamon might just have been about to explain England’s unique method of analysing players’ worth in ODIs when Flower piped up with “Don’t tell them that!” I did, though, ask Leamon where Trott scored in that reckoning. “At the top” came the instant reply. When Trott scores runs, England usually win. Enough said.

[Virat Kohli] is a true badass. You can pick a fight with him if you want. He is first going to abuse you, then he’ll bend his left knee, elbows raised, and caress you to the cover boundary. At the end of the day, he will apologize for dragging your family into this. Then he’ll do it again. If you do it again. Virat Kohli is also the single biggest reason to not give up on Sreesanth and the likes. Sreesanth is not going to be a better bowler if he is less obnoxious. Off field issues and Adonis complexes need to be addressed of course, but on the field, one must realize that the “santh” part of his name is purely for ironic relief.

Like any youngster, he loves the various eating spots and time permitting hangs out with friends. Such occasions are rare though. But don’t be surprised if you see this young man engrossed in a book. He is a voracious reader and committed to meditation twice a day. Nothing distracts Unmukt from his cricket. “Absolutely nothing can shake my resolve!” Unmukt has grown into an attractive cricketer and a credit to the game. Also, you can still find him leaving home early on non-match days for his training when most people would be snuggled in bed.

Retirement is such a personal thing. You’ve played and fought for your team and country with every sinew and ounce of effort, with pride and determination for all so many years. Through good times and the bad, through personal triumphs and milestones and meet with those two impostors, victory and defeat, almost on a daily basis.

For any champion those inner drivers are your constant companions throughout your career. They are with you at the start and they remain till the end. Through self-analysis and critique, it is these basic tools that will automatically begin to weigh upon a champion’s mind. And help him reach a decision. You know when you are not loving the game as you did or your performances are not meeting the standards you have set yourself. So the decision to retire becomes almost obvious and simple and the natural thing to do.

Was the Indian Premier League (IPL) too overpriced to begin with and by extension, a flawed business model? Consider this: A franchise has to annually pay one-tenth of the amount it bought the team for to the IPL. So if the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) were bought for $91 million, it must shell out $9.1 million each year. The salaries cap of $9 million per year means a franchise will not pay more than that amount to its players. And, according to a study, every year a franchise spends around $2 million on logistics during the tournament. That means CSK spend around $20 million every season.

His dismissal in the first innings at Bangalore resulted from indecisiveness. It wasn't the wrong choice of shot so much as that split second of inactivity while he made up his mind.In the second innings, he twice played the square drive against Tim Southee that suggested he had overcome his self doubt.

Yet, unusually for a man who once cut out all drives on the off side while making a double century in Australia, Tendulkar attempted to play across the line.This had nothing to do with his age or fitness - it was the dogged but dangerous attempt by a proud man to slaughter the demons within, and to be seen to be slaughtering them.

Following his unbeaten 48, a knock amongst some gritty others that gave India the series 2-0, Dhoni would go on to say of the pitch that he “was expecting Bangalore, but it was like Napier.” It perhaps was. Not just for the cold, windy and swingy conditions on a turfy pitch, but also because the Kiwis, led by Ross Taylor, often played like they were at home. In their own backyard. And for that Taylor should thank a set of young quicks who are bound to terrorise world cricket, sooner rather than later.

Tim Southee, Doug Bracewell and Trent Boult are not household names yet. But they will be — as they accumulate the experience that comes with playing a little more than a cumulative sum of 36 Tests. In the absence of Daniel Vettori, the very soul of NZ cricket and a man with 112 Tests (roughly amounting to three times the amount of the pace attack in Bangalore put together), the bright-eyed kids held their own.