The Surfer

Julien Fountain, the former fielding coach for Pakistan's Test cricketers who also played baseball for Great Britain, is recruiting American players to a scheme he calls Switch Hit 20 -- aimed at taking the inherent aptitude and athleticism of ballplayers and training them in the nuances of Twenty20 cricket. "I'm not trying to take players away from a baseball career," says Fountain, who had tryouts with the Royals, the White Sox and the Mets, before coaching some of cricket's top international teams using skills learned in the ballpark.

It is Test cricket which could be squeezed out of the Indian TV schedules altogether to the point of extinction, save perhaps the iconic Ashes and domestic India Test Matches (if they can by then find any opposition.) Indian broadcasters privately predict and even welcome this outcome. Their focus, and financial investment, is on the World Cup of 2015. India will probably do well in front of massive domestic TV audiences. But the destruction of Test cricket, the highest form of the game, would in the end destroy the game itself.

With a father immersed in music, one wonders how young Banks took to cricket. He credits it to his uncle Val: "I enjoyed both music and sports from a young age. I played soccer and baseball as well. My uncle Val Banks was a very good cricketer in his own right and he represented Anguilla as a cricketer, was an administrator within the Leeward Islands as well as the West Indies setup. Before his role in administration he really spent a lot of time teaching and encouraging me with the game. I actually lived with my uncle and my aunt for a couple years when my mother was working on her Masters and my father was in Europe."

Meanwhile, his father isn't happy. Every day, at dinner, young Munaf is asked to quit playing cricket and join him at work. And eventually go to Africa. "I would just stay silent; my mother would tell him to let me play." For Ikhar, a village of poor cotton farmers, Africa was the passport out of poverty. Every year, a youngster or two would land up at a friend, relative or acquaintance's house in Zambia, Mozambique, South Africa or Zimbabwe to find work in a factory or a shop. Patel had an uncle in Zambia and so his future seemed set in stone. "You can't blame my father. No one here really knew that cricket had this kind of scope. That I can even earn money from this."

The tension between the formats, which both Philby and Preston touch on, is not an exclusively English condition. Far from it. Clive Lloyd, who now seems to resemble a great grizzly bear as much as he does the cat from which he once got his nickname, complained last week that "this T20 competition" has "messed up" cricket in the West Indies. The players, Lloyd says, are going after the money: "It doesn't seem playing for our country is paramount." The example he gave was Andre Russell, who, at the age of 26, has played 17 first class matches, and 130 T20s. He's just told Lloyd - the WICB's head of selectors - that he doesn't want to play Test cricket, because his injured knee won't let him. "It's such a waste that we have a guy who could be a great cricketer who is now not thinking of playing both formats."

It was almost certain that the J&K team would not able to make it to the Ranji trophy because of the catastrophic floods. Cricket is junoon (passion) in J&K. It's because of this junoon that the team was able to re-group and buckle-up themselves to prepare for the match. J&K state has had fanatics of Cricket but seldom fans. Cricket bats made of Kashmir willow are very famous across India. Even Sachin Tendulkar's first cricket bat was made of Kashmir willow. BCCI and state administration must try their best to preserve this passionate game in J&K. Will they succeed? That is for time to tell us.