The Surfer

Like Kevin Pietersen, I refuse to accept that I have a problem when batting against left-arm spinners. Unlike KP, I am sometimes forced to deny that I have a problem batting against right-arm spinners, left-arm fast bowlers, right-arm fast bowlers...

Now, it is not for me to offer Kevin any advice about the art of batting. Except this. If I was him, I wouldn't hit the ball into your foot when trying to drive expansively in the nets. It bloody hurts.

Kallis has just been dismissed by Ishant for 26. KKR are 52 for 2 in 7.2 overs. As the next batsman walks out, the coach gives him his target -- to try and get 30 more in the next four overs without losing more than one wicket. Kallis also stops just short of the dugout to give the new batsman, Manoj Tiwary, a quick low-down on the pitch: "It's playing true, not stopping, so you can hit the ball on the up -- but Ishant is getting some bounce. Watch for the new slower ball he has; he holds it with a cross seam."

Meanwhile Sangakkara has recalled the brief in the team meeting on Tiwary. He is a ‘bolter' - he likes to dab the first couple of balls and quickly take a single. With that in mind, Sanga brings his best fielder, Duminy, back to point positioned slightly back of square, because that is where Tiwary likes to dab it.

We all talk about Kevin Pietersen and left-arm spinners, but this was the 21st time in Tests Strauss has fallen to a left-arm seamer.

I would reiterate that England shouldn't make any rash decisions about Pietersen. He deserves to be shown the patience shown to others in the past: Ian Bell, Alastair Cook last summer, even Paul Collingwood in the winter.

The only relevant question is: what does this player tell us about English cricket? The more they tell you, the more English they get to be.

By this formula Dernbach is entirely English. He came to England aged 13 having only ever played rugby. His success tells us about Surrey schools and the county academy. Craig Kieswetter, on the other hand, a South African Under-19s player, tells us above all that South African cricket produces explosive adrenaline-cricket wicketkeeper-batsmen.

Of course, this is all no more than fan chat. Winning is everything and England have quite rightly picked their best teams. And for all this sense of a blurring of the lines, Test cricket will remain fascinating simply because it is Test cricket – albeit it is at its best when at its purest, methodology ranged against methodology, each part a chapter in the same larger story.

It's not just our tweakers who stand to benefit from his prophetic pearls. The softly-spoken but highly influential Pakistan great has urged the Australian selection panel to show patience and faith in their next spin selection or risk the post-Warne stagnation continuing even longer.

After the Cardiff denouement, Pietersen seemed almost to be in denial, slipping lightly over his problem while preferring to speak of the pleasure that fills the heart of every member of the England team when a colleague performs stupendously. It is a joy, Pietersen went on, enhanced by the certainty that if it is Trott or Cook today, there is every chance that it will be you tomorrow. Maybe it is so, maybe not.

[Pietersen] is not an orthodox technician but when he played in Bangladesh last year, and scored a Test match 99 against decent left-arm spinners on turning pitches, I felt he was aligning his hips to hit the ball through extra cover and mid-off rather than through midwicket, as he did in Cardiff. If you draw a line through the hips you want them going towards the non-striker at other end, but at the moment his hips are in line with midwicket. If your hips are not aligned straight you play more with your hands and your reach. The legs and feet follow so if the hips are in line everything else will go in the right direction.

As a result, you don't see many Sri Lankans who are great pullers. Someone like Ricky Ponting, brought up on quicker pitches, can pull back-of-a-length balls off the front foot, but you could see in the second innings at Cardiff, after the pitch had quickened up, that the shot wasn't an option for the Sri Lankans.

The ICC suffers as a governing body because it remains at the mercy of its constituent boards. The recent decision to limit the 2015 World Cup to the full-member countries was simply a case of turkeys voting against Christmas.

FIFA, for all its financial misdeeds, still has the authority to step in and interfere when a national association is out of order. The ICC doesn't appear to have any such mandate and that lack of teeth has seen administrators run amok in countries like Zimbabwe and Pakistan.

No one has summed up his skill and style better than John Woodcock, the celebrated cricket writer of The Times and the former editor of the Wisden Almanack, when he wrote these lines about Zaheer: “The most ruthlessly mechanical of them must have been the legendary Sir Donald Bradman, the most enduring was Sir Jack Hobbs with 197 first-class centuries, the most calculating may well have been Geoffrey Boycott, but none of them could have played with more ease and elegance than Zaheer whose batting gave as much pleasure in England when he was with Gloucestershire, as it must have done in Pakistan.”

On, then, to music. What's the last album you bought? Radiohead's new album

Not, Small Talk imagines, the ideal music to listen to before a match ... True. Before a game it would be something like Tool or Muse.