The Surfer

With a casual half-stride, the only kind of run-up of which he remains capable, Andy Roberts zipped a plastic ball off the tarmac with enough speed and accuracy to clatter two of the three plastic stumps behind a 14-year-old still in the process of playing his stylish forward-defensive prod. Big gleaming grins signalled the appreciation of the watching Courtney Walsh and Curtly Ambrose ...

" ... it bloody kills me [McGrath] to say it, but I can't see too many teams getting close to England. They've got a great bowling attack, and in the last [Ashes] series our boys [Australia] just weren't doing the basics well, weren't landing two balls in the same spot. But when you lose seven senior players in a two-year period, that would destroy most teams ... " Looking slightly less far ahead, I asked McGrath whether he was pleased to be going to that evening's dinner. "Yeah, it's great to get the intelligent players together," he said. I told him that I'd attended the batting version in 2008. "That," he said, po-faced, "would have been pretty dull."

I distinctly remember an under-16 match against Punjab in which one of the bowlers had a fully-grown beard. The player went on to play for India and that's when I got to know that he was four years younger to me, which means that he was only 12 when I played against him in that under-16 match. Is it biologically possible to grow a beard at that age?

Never has an English season started so early – for a century and more May was perfectly acceptable – and never has it finished so late. (The first hundred, incidentally, was scored for MCC by Rahul Dravid, who was to leave a deeper imprint later). There was plenty to cherish and savour in the filling.

I don't think there was a single budding teenage cricketer in the country who did not try to walk like him or have a stance like him. The open stance was unique since he had lost one eye and so opened his stance to get a better look at the bowler. We all tried to copy that but kept getting out bowled or leg before playing across the line. We couldn't copy his fielding since in that era he was pretty much a one-off who could slide and save the ball.

In a sense, Pataudi typified a 60s generation of romantic dreams, of chivalrous men and enchanting women who were enamoured with the idea of a Nehruvian India. If actor Shammi Kapoor redefined cinema in this period by wooing his heroines with passionate ardour, Pataudi changed the face of Indian cricket through his charismatic persona. He gave the sport a ‘star’ value, a new-found aggression that typified the spirit of a nation yearning to break free of its colonial baggage.

The wrong question has been asked. The issue is not whether the systems are 100 per cent reliable but whether better verdicts are reached. To my mind, more appeals are answered correctly than ever before. Of course, the new ways are not perfect — players will find loopholes, third umpires will err — but let's get on with it.

If the 1990s was a period when everybody in the England team seemed to have wandered in from a different movie – the parping slapstick of Phil Tufnell, the lonesome John Wayne heroics of Mike Atherton, the cannon-fodder bit parts of all those endlessly machine-gunned one-Test extras – Cork at least found a franchise sequel in county cricket. Here he ossified into a reassuringly timeless figure, a constant of the Ceefax page and the buried county scores panel, a kind of modern pastoral sprite forever nosing his walnut-trim six-gear Ford Mondeo saloon around some county ground gyratory system.

I too was a great fan of the cricketer, enough to base ‘The Century’, a short story from A Quiver Full of Arrows, on him. Not many people know that it was about the Nawab, considering the protagonist is a nameless character and appeared in a book with several other stories of fiction. But it was indeed a tribute to the cricketer I adored.

It won't be wrong to say that had there been no Pataudi, Indian cricket would have taken much more time to graduate into a combative, cohesive unit, which played to win and not lose.

Outwardly, Vaughan can point to progress in a number of areas and issues under his watch, with a more stable financial footing being secured, the weak US dollar aside. Internally, the former doctor performed some substantial surgery but it is arguable if the patient (NZC) is in any better condition.

“We could have won it; we could have lost it. At the end, it was a fair result,” says Ravi Shastri, who stood devastated as last man Maninder Singh fell leg-before to Greg Matthews. Though both the Indians still believe that there was nick, umpire V. Vikramraju thinks otherwise.

Bishan Singh Bedi, who knew Saxena since his junior cricket days, said he, “never saw anyone in Indian cricket who could jump out to spinners like Saxena. He could create terror for the opposition.Full post