The Surfer

After you hit a century against CSK during the last IPL season, you stated that your hands were going really well. What does that imply? Some time back, I was batting well but I wasn't converting 20s into 50s or into big ones. I had a problem when I was on the England tour and the Australia tour (both 2011). Because of my eyesight, I had headaches and a lot of eye pain. I was seeing a lot of doctors also. In England and Australia, after every Test match I was going to eye-specialists and every time they were telling me that my eyes are absolutely fine. The doctors would say, "You are getting headaches because of migraine". After the Australia series in India, I saw my family doctor, Dr Harsh Kumar. He told me that I don't have an eye problem but I have power of minus 0.5. 'Mujhe door ka problem hai'. Then he gave me glasses and it took almost a year to adjust to them. And now I am batting well, scoring runs. Everybody wants to play for India. Hopefully I will get a chance to play for India again and retire gracefully. I'll try my best.

This is Not Cricket tells the story of two friends, an Italian boy and an Indian one teaming up together to rebuild their club, which used to be the strongest youth team in Italy before its collapse due to social and cultural issues. The Piazza Vittorio Cricket Club had strong political visions. They sympathized with anarchy and fought fascism of all sorts. I believe Fernando and Shince [the leading characters in the documentary] will hold the same political spirit and show everybody how sport can change life and, why not, society.

Even to a 10-year-old Benaud had an air about him. He was cool and aloof, but when I approached him cautiously to collect my first ever autograph he couldn't have been kinder and warmer. I was a fan from that day and followed his career closely, even modelling myself on him by becoming a leg-spin bowling all-rounder!

Even in recent times, Richie was very close to the current group of players and I was fortunate enough to spend some time over the years with him to just talk cricket. Regularly we would sit together and chat at the Allan Border Medal about attacking captaincy, spin bowling and many topics in between.

In a way, because his opinions so often became gospel, he was as influential as any cricket administrator of the post-war period. In Wisden Australia, Dr Greg Manning once denoted him "cricket's philosopher king".

This is the issue that cricket faces in America. If the sport is to grow beyond the niche following it has amongst immigrant communities it needs to develop an American identity, and despite being in existence since 1965 USACA has singularly failed to do that. Instead cricket remains "an underground sport", a term that was used to describe the sport by a senior USACA official in 2009. The reasons for cricket's stagnation is as much to do with USACA as anything else. They have been suspended from the ICC twice in the last decade and they are on the brink of being booted out again.

The residents of Puttamraju Kandriga owe their modern infrastructure to a chance encounter that Joint Collector Rekha Rani had with Tendulkar on a flight to New York last September.

Starc finished the World Cup as the No1 ranked bowler in ODI cricket, and the player of the tournament, with 22 wickets at an average of 10.18, a strike rate of 17.4, and an economy of 3.5. No bowler has ever had a better World Cup. No bowler, in fact, has come close to matching those figures. To find the last time the leading wicket-taker in the tournament finished with such a low average and strike rate, you have to go back to 1975 when Gary Gilmour took 11 wickets at 5.6 each in the two games he played.

It was the sort of ugliness the ICC had promised to crack down on in this tournament. Like footballers who used to run amok in grand finals until the penalties were doubled, Australia's cricketers seemed to take the attitude that in a World Cup final, as long as they won, no punishment - no matter how stringent -could hurt them.

Whether he was the quickest of his time is a moot point. Geoffrey Boycott, who faced them all, thought that Jeff Thomson and Michael Holding at their peak were the fastest. What set Clarke apart were two things. The first was his attitude at the crease. He was in a way unknowable; wordless, dead-eyed. All that was clear of his personality was the way he bowled - with bad intentions. Once, challenged by an umpire for repeatedly pitching short, he turned around and said: "It ain't no ladies game, man." The second was that his pace was accompanied by steepling bounce, and worse than that, an action that made it unpredictable.