The Surfer

I think one would want Michael Vaughan, Marcus Trescothick, Andrew Flintoff and Steve Harmison. Ian Bell and Kevin Pietersen were in both sides. The rest of the team would be Alastair Cook, Matt Prior, Stuart Broad, Graeme Swann and Jimmy Anderson. Which suggests a five to four balance in favour of this year's side. Note that such a selection omits Andrew Strauss, Jonathan Trott, Tim Bresnan, Chris Tremlett and Eoin Morgan.

What about team's preparation? They play one game at Taunton. Threefourths of the team comes from West Indies, the rest come from India having not played at all. It seems priorities are not right, as a team and individually. Is it too easy to make a million dollars and the advertisements on top of that? They are in a very nice position, your Indian stars.

One of the things about captaincy is when things are going badly you have to intervene more. You have to be more proactive, be more energetic. When things are going well, you can almost take a back seat and just fine tune the machine. When Ishant Sharma had that excellent spell in England's second innings at Lord's, having reduced them to 62 for five, if Ian Botham was doing it, you couldn't get the ball out of his hands and I wouldn't let him. You have to seize those moments, they don't come back. It was ridiculous to start with a part-time spinner after lunch. I would have started with Sharma and Kumar

The grave was uncared for, dirty, wild grass grew everywhere. No one bothered. Choking back tears and furious, Mansie who was as pushy as her father was not, decided to act. She attended a Cricket Legends Match in Bridgetown and made friends with many former famous players, particularly Walsh and Ambrose. After listening to her lament and anger on Marshall's grave, Walsh, asked her to meet Rev. Wesley Hall, former West Indian fast bowler, then a Senator, Minister and now a priest. Ambrose who joked that he did not talk to married women relented and lent his support! Hall, a Barbadian, who had officiated at the funeral was appalled and promised to remedy the situation.

Of the two, Bell is surely the better batsman, for he has a touch, a timing and a refined technique that are all foreign to Pietersen. But Pietersen, the wildest of wild cards, is the more unsettling opponent for any bowler. Once he starts hitting boundaries there is almost nowhere to bowl to him. Against Bell, a bowler can maintain some semblance of self-respect; against Pietersen, he can easily become ragged.

The best of Ian Bell, we saw here again, seems unstoppable now. It was remarkable enough that he should produce his 16th Test century so soon after his superb 159 at Trent Bridge. More striking still was the sheer quality of yesterday's performance.

India, too, has suffered a painful setback. Not that every defeat ought to cause a commotion. Someone has to win, someone has to lose. Just that some losses by their very nature tell a tale.

A few years ago another ailing cricket community put itself in the hands of outside forces. By 2007 English cricket was back in the doghouse as the team was trounced 5-0 down under. The Schofield report was instigated and its suggestions were adopted ... Andy Flower and Andrew Strauss were products of that report, or anyhow the desire that provoked it.

I should say this is based solely on pessimistic intuition. Ramprakash has another year on his Surrey contract. He has simply gone a little quiet in recent weeks. But still there are worrying signs. He has a single hundred this season. A while ago he was given out "obstructing the field", an incident that has an air of alienating weirdness about it. Plus Alistair Brown has just retired, another Surrey-tinged 41-year-old, whose bat in his mid-1990s pomp made an extraordinary cracking sound, like a man cleaving an antique pine front door in half with a single blow from a fairground strongman mallet.

With India seemingly in cruise mode, it seemed Fletcher simply needed to focus on man management. He needed to establish a rapport particularly with senior players and earn their respect so as to slowly gain the authority to rein in some of the more exuberant ones. Unfortunately he’s going to have to do some firefighting first. The coming months could prove extremely stressful.

Meanwhile over the next year Fletcher will get compared to every past coach, foreign and Indian. He is at the very least answerable to Kirsten’s apparition, to say nothing of the BCCI and countless disapproving fans. He must think, ruefully: did Kirsten really have to win nearly everything at stake, take India to the number one spot in Tests and then rub the World Cup trophy in everyone’s face like that?

So the story goes, Hilditch recently phoned a member of team management in Sri Lanka to inform him Aaron Finch would be left out of the Twenty20 team. When Hilditch was asked why, he said the selectors felt Shaun Marsh was a better proposition against destructive fast bowler Lasith Malinga. Malinga, though, was injured, and had been publicly ruled out of the series. The exchange suggests a scarcely believable lack of awareness, and while cricket insiders laugh in telling the story, its theme is a common one when the topic of selection is raised.

Whatever your standpoint on the remedial measures - to make coach and captain selectors, for instance - it is clear that Australian cricket will be run differently henceforth. As when a football club sacks its coach, everyone with his head above the parapets is nervous. But it does not finish there. Unlike at a football club, the Argus report puts the players squarely in the gun.

His presence in the tour party has exposed India’s bench strength, and his presence in the playing XI, ahead of the regular squad member Munaf Patel, has put a question mark on the team management’s judgement. Giving RP the new ball was just another one of Dhoni’s many puzzling decisions of the tour.

It took only one ball to lay bare India’s hopelessness. RP began with one way down the leg side, which reached Dhoni’s gloves after bouncing a couple of times. RP, who hasn’t played a Test since mid-2008, and whose last first class game was eight months ago, improved somewhat with his third ball — down the same line, but this time only one-bounce to the keeper.

Back to 1999, and I can recall a lower order of Andrew Caddick, Alan Mullally, Phil Tufnell and Ed Giddins — one of the worst tails in the history of Test cricket. Now look at the guys who come in after Eoin Morgan: Matt Prior, Bresnan, Broad, Graeme Swann, even Jimmy Anderson. It’s the kind of depth and multi-skilled line-up that Fletcher used to dream about. And that’s what England have become: 11 guys with no weak link.

Cooley, a Tasmanian who never played international cricket, was lured to England by his compatriot Rod Marsh and, after initially working with the ECB Academy, he soon became involved with the senior bowlers. In 2005, he helped mould Steve Harmison, Matthew Hoggard, Andrew Flintoff and Simon Jones into a formidable unit, using a blend of raw pace, seam movement and reverse swing to repeatedly dismantle Australia's much-vaunted batting line-up.