The Surfer

Trott appears to have shed all needless adornments in the pursuit of his objectives, save for his extravagant preparation in the middle. It is a measure of the change in attitude towards him that his insistence on scratching out the crease, wandering down the pitch and excavating some more before being ready to bat, was once seen as an absurdly irritating piece of gamesmanship and has become an endearing affectation. That apart, Trott lacks style.

England’s extraordinary win at Cardiff, the first time they have won three Tests in a row by an innings since beating New Zealand in 1958, has produced a spike in ticket sales for the Lord’s Test, which begins on Friday.

He could be brilliant or ordinary, not so much because of his skills or prevailing conditions, but because of his mercurial temperament. At his best, he was no less than a genius; on several other occasions, he could be maddeningly mediocre, leaving fans, critics ” and one dare say even opponents - wondering at what might have been.

He roars with laughter when asked to imagine what it would have been like had he been born in this generation of cricketers. "There were no one-dayers then, only Test matches. One-dayers were looked at as entertainment and we batted like today’s batsmen slog in T20. Borde, me, Pataudi and others never knew then that we were such powerful hitters," he recalls. Durrani batted lefthanded, and he sees a bit of himself in Yuvraj Singh and Suresh Raina now, and jokes that some of his shots were the same, though there were no cheerleaders outside the boundary rope.

They reckon the Sri Lanka spinner Ajantha Mendis has got four different variations. But as far as I can tell, they all go straight on. It reminds me of lettuce. You've got cos lettuce, iceberg, Swiss chard and arugula - but at the end of the day, there's no getting away from it: they're all just lettuce.

Sri Lanka must be honest, put their hands up and admit that this was a disaster.

They clearly did not have their mind on the job, which is unforgivable. They may not have known when they would bat, but they knew they were going to have to at some stage.

Given that it started just days after India's World Cup win, the IPL was always in danger of falling victim to the morning-after feeling. Even players like Virat Kohli spoke of how weird it was to play against India team-mates in the opening week of the competition. Crowds struggled not only with feelings of satiation, but also with identity.

The shoulders are so much broader. His biceps stretch the short sleeves of his shirt. Too much gym work can damage a pace bowler; it can take away the suppleness and the whip of the action. But Tremlett, we must conclude, has the balance right. He does not have to say anything out in the middle to impose himself on the batsmen. His physical presence does that for him.

The BCCI uses the bait of money to lure the best players away from their domestic tournaments to the IPL. But it doesn’t allow its own cricketers to forego domestic tournaments and play T20 abroad. There’s resentment that it’s undermining world cricket, just what Packer’s World Series did some 30 years ago.

Not surprisingly, Misbah-ul-Haq's career seems to be following the same pattern. The only difference? Shoaib's decline was slow and steady as his pace slowed. Misbah's dips in fortune have been followed by inexplicable flashes of brilliance which have resurrected his career on many occasions.

But there was obviously something missing that made India's batting maestro determine that a month in the Caribbean and the prospect of a couple really big innings was worth passing up. Maybe it was the challenge. Maybe it was the sense of occasion. Maybe it was both. To put it bluntly: milking our bowlers on the way to a 100th senior international hundred in a near-empty stadium would have been the equivalent of Barcelona defeating Manchester United on a Sunday morning at the Aranjuez Savannah with ten men and two dogs in attendance and two vagrants sleeping at the back of the pavilion.

That means you have to be a quite flexible player and you have to be someone who can cope with a crisis. It's difficult to compare him to other England number threes, not least because they really haven't had a successful number three for a while. That's why they're very grateful to have him and I'm sure he will score a mountain of runs. England have been crying out for someone to bat like that and now they've got one I certainly wouldn't be criticising him.