The Surfer

[Kaneria's] penalty has not only put Pakistan under the scanner yet again as a cricketing nation, it has also thwarted the efforts of the Pakistan Cricket Board and the current set of players to get rid of the stigma of repeatedly bringing the game into disrepute.

A personal view, a sympathetic one, was that Kaneria was in the mould of the great triers, not always bound to succeed and often left to presenting an unintentionally comic angle in his efforts to do so.

He revealed himself over years to be so earnest about his bowling, about breaking through as a limited-overs bowler, about wanting more Test wickets and to win more games, about net practice and gym sessions, even about his Essex career, that a life ban for corruption, on a personal level, has been more challenging to comprehend than the cases of Mohammad Amir, Mohammad Asif and Salman Butt.

Having embraced rotation, England should stick with it, whoever the opposition. It is the England management's most eloquent way of informing their bosses of the ludicrous schedules that are devised for their international cricketers. Understandably, Andy Flower and Andrew Strauss are reluctant to be too candid about those schedules since they might upset their employers. In public, Flower merely says they are "tough", which sounds to me like a euphemism.

Youngsters like Mathews and Perera could be motivated by the fact that they get to don the national colours at a young age and by the desire to stay at the top for a long period of time. But, it’s amazing how senior players like Sangakkara, Dilshan and Mahela Jayawardene, who’ve been playing for a considerable amount of time now, haven’t let their performance levels dip despite the problems surrounding Sri Lankan cricket. They’ve set a fine example for the youngsters to follow, and they should be proud of that. If presented by a similar conundrum in the future, there is a high possibility that the youngsters in the Sri Lankan side will circumvent such issues and deliver for their country.

While average speeds have increased, I don’t think the speed of elite fast bowlers at their most inspired or peak moments, when everything has clicked, has perceptively increased in recent decades. So average speeds, yes. Peak speeds, no. Tim Bresnan’s average speed during his England career, I would guess, is higher than that of Fred Trueman during his England career. Who the better bowler is, again, is another matter.

Since retirement, he has slipped into an unlovely television career of laddish challenge shows where people attempt to eat 10 cream crackers in a minute while paragliding in the Gobi desert with nothing but Joe Pasquale for company.

Something in the rhythm of cricket – whether the hurly-burly of a T20 or the less frenetic, sometimes plain slow, pace of a first class match – promotes conversation, that wonderfully natural exchange of thoughts that relies on one’s generosity to let another speak and then to take another’s point. So it’s no wonder that cricket has produced some of the best writing on sport – words seem woven into the game. The words started to appear differently in the late-90s, as screen replaced paper. We’d become used to ceefax clicking over every two minutes – “There’s Gooch’s 300!” – but now Cricinfo gave us ball-by-ball coverage of matches in heart-stopping F5 action!

John Arlott had the unique power to weave the sights and sounds of the ground and far beyond in an intricate picture painted with words. In many ways, his was not really the archetypical BBC voice. A heavy Hampshire drawl, often emphasised to bring out his uniqueness, took the traditionalists – Rex Alston among them – more than a while to get used to. Besides, he spoke from the purest recesses of his soul and never were emotions shoved away under the modulation of professionalism.

The blame lies first on the quality of pitches, about which there is little that Indian cricket has done, despite talking a great deal about it. Dead soil is dead soil and what they put into it does not seem to matter as our soil refuses to allow firm and true playing surfaces evenly around the country. More will probably be attempted now to set this right. But this is largely a Sisyphus-like tale of pushing a boulder up a mountain only to see it roll down.

It may be a good idea to have longer domestic tournament gaps, when all club games can take place and the players can decide which team they want to represent. This, while generating employment for a large number of cricketers and support staff, will also help create larger interest in bilateral/trilateral tours. The number of bilateral/trilateral tours could be limited to between three to five a year. Fewer tours in which the best cricketers of one country play against the best of another would bring the crowds back to the stadium for this type of cricket, for which audiences have been thinning due to the overkill prevalent now.