The Surfer

Westfield's crimes would probably have remained undetected if it had not been for his inability to keep his secret quiet. There was no fake Sheikh or £150,000 tabloid sting in this case. Westfield confided in a team-mate, who followed anti-corruption guidelines issued to all cricketers in England and reported the matter to the management at Essex.

One problem for India is that their hosts have become smarter at preparing pitches to suit their bowlers more than the Indians. Just as they expect turning pitches in India, there is a conscious effort from opponents to leave grass on wickets. They know it's an ageing batting line-up and that new players are finding their feet in the international arena and hence will find it hard in the conditions. This has been a clever ploy and the Indians will have to find a way to tackle that.

You don't want to take in four fast bowlers and find out late in the Test your attack is crying out for variation, particularly if you're bowling last. Pitches don't need to turn for spinners to make an impact. Offspinners have been successful in Perth before, drifting the ball away from the right hander into the breeze. The Fremantle Doctor can blow quite strongly coming up from the south-west and you need bowlers who can use it rather than fight it.

Two things have held Ishant back -- inconsistency and misfortune. His style has contributed slightly to his lack of luck: his natural length, not as full as most seamers, causes more plays-and-misses than edges; the angle of his stock delivery suggests it's going down leg, even if it isn't, and umpires are wary of giving 'lbw' decisions. But Ishant isn't wicket-lucky; he has to do more for returns others get easier.

Now part of that summer has been populated by the Big Bash with 32 well publicised, fabulously hyped matches over six weeks. Okay, that’s nowhere near all of the summer and it’s only a short slice of what the entire duration if the A-League entails. But it is, nonetheless, a new highly appealing product smack in the middle of the football season and one with the potential to eat into the A-League’s capacity to draw fans.

Born in a small village called 75-FB near Sargodha, he was brought up and educated in Lahore. He was lucky that a proper mentor was at hand at home as his mother, a teacher by profession, guided him in his studies. He studied hard and since most of his family members were in the education sector, he got little support when he picked up a bat and a ball.

Of course, to suggest that the selectors use this Zimbabwean series as the chance to pick a handful of untested players and see whether they're up to the task would be foolish. The Black Caps can't afford to be chopping and changing their line-up all the time. What I'm suggesting, however, is that they identify a number of "up-and-comers", pick them for the Zimbabwe series and then, regardless of how they perform, persist with them through the South African series that follows.

A generation ago, the subject was more the nature of a trivia question: which New Zealand cricketer was born in Nairobi? Dipak Patel. Now there has been something of a surge, with six of the 72 provincially-contracted players born in Zimbabwe or South Africa, and Durban-born BJ Watling one of 20 nationally-contracted players. Others such as Roald Badenhorst and Carl Cachopa (Central Districts) and Craig Cachopa (Wellington) are also playing matches in various formats. The quantity of African players is apparent but their quality is also worth noting.

Ever in denial, there are those in India who say MS Dhoni’s team is paying for the pressure of awaiting Tendulkar’s 100th. The pressure, if any, should be on him. Why should it bother the rest of the team, all 10 of them? Funnily, it doesn’t seem to have affected Tendulkar’s form. In four Test innings in Australia, he has two 50s, one 40 and a lowest score of 32. He’s batted with appeal and authority.

The problem has been elsewhere. Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid make up — along with Tendulkar — perhaps India’s greatest batting order. The other four have hit one 50 each in the past two Test matches. Failing in three innings out of four on a tour as tough as Australia isn’t going to help you take your team too far. The trouble is there — it’s not in whether or not or when Tendulkar hits his next century. Why has the rest of India decided to feel the pressure and nervousness on Tendulkar’s behalf?

Observations indicate pace bowling's resurgence could be a trend; at least in places where grass grows willingly. Evidence of pace bowling dominance has come with the wickets taken in the last five series. In the first test of the Australia-India series, quick bowlers took 88 per cent of the wickets; in the South Africa-Sri Lanka series up until the end of 2011, it was 76 per cent. The Australia-New Zealand series saw 80 per cent of the wickets fall to pace, whereas it was 83 per cent between South Africa and Australia.

... Perhaps the most telling example of the demise has been Rahul Dravid's recent lean trot. The batsman known as "The Wall" has looked more post-1989 Berlin than China against Australia, getting bowled three times in two tests, including between bat and pad twice ... Dravid is not alone among the world's batsmen. Blades of willow looked redundant at times in 2011 when you consider teams passed 400 runs in a test 24 times out of 141 innings (17 per cent). Added to that is the fact seven of those 24 innings came from the world's No1 team, England. Compare that to 2010 when teams scored 400-plus totals 45 times in 164 innings (27 per cent).

As a collective unit during the Cape Town test match the South African players displayed the ruthless approach that they are searching for on a regular basis. They executed their disciplines well and, apart from a few blemishes in the field, the coaching staff will be happy with the way that the test unit finished off the domestic summer.

Dropped from the national team and axed by NSW, off-spinner Gavin Robertson fell from being a respected athlete to a 31-year-old father who depended on social welfare payments to feed his family because he couldn't get a job - and it was humiliating.

He'd kill time by sitting alone on a park bench tormented by the void that appeared to be life after cricket. Robertson was frustrated to realise he'd invested so much energy into representing Australia in four Tests and 13 one-day internationals that he hadn't prepared for the day when his sporting career ended.