The Surfer

The two [Harbhajan and Ashwin] have similar figures this [IPL] season. Harbhajan has 13 wickets from 13 matches with an economy rate of 6.75, while Ashwin's 14 games have brought him 16 wickets while conceding 6.16 runs an over. Their strike rates are separated by a single decimal point. Dig a little deeper, however, and the differences become apparent. Five of Harbhajan's 13 wickets came in Mumbai's eight-run win over Chennai at Wankhede, and has gone wicketless seven times. Ashwin, on the other hand, hasn't picked up more than two wickets in any of his spells, and has failed to strike only three times.

"I still get flashbacks," he says of that day in Lahore when a dozen masked gunmen attacked them. "At first, the guys were saying, 'Why would anyone let off crackers at eight in the morning?' But then someone shouted: 'No, they're shooting at us – get down' ... Two or three times, lying on the floor, I thought, 'There is no way we're going to get through this.' There was no talking – just screaming and shouting. Whenever anyone got hit by shrapnel they would scream..."

The scars remain. During the World Cup, "we were on a bus in India and crackers went off. A couple of guys almost went down because it was the exact noise we'd heard in Pakistan."

Another pleasing factor in Kohli’s emergence has been his ability to take charge and hold his nerves in every situation he is faced with. On three occasions [in the IPL] already he has walked out to bat in the very first over of Bangalore’s innings. And on two of those, Kohli has started off with boundaries. Rather than let the pressure of the situation bog him down, he has managed to shift it onto the bowler.

‘You’re worried that this might be the series when you’re finally outed as a fraud and not up to playing at this level,’ he writes. It is a startling admission from one who is widely respected for his unflappable air. ‘With cricket, you have so much time to think about what is going to happen,’ Strauss explains. ‘You end up stewing over stuff that in other sports is over very quickly. It can be lonely in the middle but we are conditioned to deal with that.

I often worry with England sides that when we’re feeling a bit comfortable and happy with ourselves, it can be a bit of a danger time. But on this occasion I didn’t see it. I saw a lot of guys who were confident in the way they’d been playing, and determined to finish the series in style. I was very reassured by the way they were approaching things in the nets, with a quiet confidence, allied to a sort of inner drive. That’s a great recipe for success.

We all know that if Tendulkar decides to go after the bowling, he still can be very devastating. But right now he seems to be thinking like a captain – he worries about the rest of the batting not firing. When instead, he needs to go back to the basics, think like a batsman and perhaps take a leaf out of Sehwag’s book with the ‘see ball, hit ball’ approach.

It is a wonderful collection, beginning in 1928 when the Telegraph first introduced a daily letters section ... All the major controversies down the years are covered, from Bodyline to the D’Oliveira and Packer affairs to match-fixing.

Kasprowicz would have enjoyed the letter from Douglas J Wathen in 2009: “Sir, I don’t see why batsmen today accept being confronted by bowlers wearing gold necklaces and particularly sunglasses. When I played cricket no jewellery was worn. As batsmen, we liked to see the colour of the bowlers’ eyes. Would an umpire uphold my complaint today if I refused to face a bowler so adorned?”

Rahul Bhattacharya, the cricket writer who’s produced his first work of fiction after travelling in the region, isn’t hopeful. He suggests that cricket is not the choice of the times in the Caribbean. Cricket served its purpose in the 1960s through to the 1980s, when the sport acquired a larger, nationalistic meaning and purpose. “Cricket had a sort of purpose then in the pan-Caribbean nationalist project,” he says. “In the 1960s and ’70s, the colonies gained independence one by one. Black nationalism was gathering momentum worldwide. Their team was able to perform at a high level of excellence, and beat the white man.”

Cyber space is inundated with conspiracy theories and Kahn is being portrayed as having been set-up for sharing the humanist and ethical concerns of Jo Stiglitz and that the real target is control of the top job of the IMF.

Be that as it may, the labor of this comment is to draw attention to a less noticed but similar development that is doing the rounds on the IPL cricket social circuit which has deplorable connotations. I must hasten to add that this is not a comment on cricket, but about the insecure status of women in general in India and how certain societal attitudes and behavioral patterns are being tacitly endorsed in one part of glitzy India.

But there is no question that in terms of finding a potential long-term Test-match batsman, for which temperament is an important factor, the selectors have chosen the right man. As a result of his grounding in one-day cricket Morgan still has technical deficiencies that are unsuited to the longer forms of the game, particularly outside off stump, and these are areas that are sure to be exploited by Sri Lanka. But he has well-earned the soubriquet "Iceman" and the prospect of his coming in at No6 and batting as he did in Derby is a mouthwatering one – he may prove as much a game-maker as Collingwood was a game-saver.

In the reductionist approach of the average fan, cricket is all about hitting the ball hard and high the sound of woodwork being dismantled. Greatness here is a quantity that comes in the denominations of fours and sixes. Everything else – the joys of unique skills, the cases individual courage, the test of character in great fightbacks, in all, the combination of abstracts that make sport so beautiful — turned irrelevant.