The Surfer

“We are OK but not as buoyant about our cricket as we were before the Pakistan series,” Trott says. “We have realised we are human and also have a better understanding of what we need to do. When you are going well, and keep winning, sometimes you need an odd bump in the road to show you where you need to improve."

This England team like playing West Indies as much as the modern-day child does a Nintendo DS. It is said that the strength of this West Indies team lies in its bowling, and its attack does have some pace, but just check the England team’s batting averages against this lot compared to their career averages. There will be little quaking in boots.

I appreciate that players can make decent money playing the IPL, so I would love to see the organisers and the ICC come together and try to find a window so that the IPL takes place when there is no international cricket being played.

This yet again underlines the need for professional, dispassionate, level-headed administrators at all levels of the game. The old-style autocrats who controlled the game for so long simply don't cut it anymore. The need for the kind of root and branch reorganization of the game's administration recommended by the recent Woolf Report – and promptly and predictably rejected by a number of those autocrats - has never been more urgent. This is not just an issue of there being transparency in the way the game is run; this is something that's necessary in order to keep the best players actually performing at international level. Look at soccer, where the domestic game has largely taken over, except for roughly once every two years when there's a big international tournament. Don't imagine that it couldn't happen in cricket.

West Indies won 2-1, although England deserved at least a draw and could have won the series. By the end of the series half the batting line-up were soldiering on with broken bones. Failure, if that's what it was, doesn't come much more heroic. And it was a fair trade to lose the series in return for the win at Jamaica. The memories of that Test will always keep us warm.

''I'm looking forward to going over there and testing my skills in those conditions. It can almost be a little bit easier at times when everyone knows the ball is going to wobble around a bit so if you do fumble a few everyone knows what's going on,'' he said.

I suspect for Ganguly the IPL provides a stage. The ideal platform to relish the thrill of competing again. To be at the centre of a contest and emerge victorious at the end of it. Perhaps in a hidden corner of that restless mind a regret gnaws away. Did he call time too early on his international career? Could he, like his great compatriot Rahul Dravid, have endured the stumbling blocks and played a few more years? Could he like VVS Laxman not have ignored the cynics and stubbornly soldiered on? Hasn't the spot vacated by him struggled to find a worthy occupant? I am only guessing here, but could it be that the IPL is Ganguly's last straw to clutch at after an unfulfilled international career. A career that, in his mind, had possibly another wind left?

Mitchell Starc's recent deportation from England highlight some of the pitfalls a county now has to face when hiring an overseas player in the 21st century. There are complex visa requirements and the player concerned must have fulfilled certain criteria – he has to have played a minimum number of international matches within the last year.