The Surfer

Skipper Darren Sammy, poor fellow, has not been able to be of such aid [as one of the discarded seniors could have] to his young charges, struggling as he is even more than them with bat and ball. Captain after captain over the last decade has said similar things [after a loss]. But, nowadays, the need to "make things happen" is urgent. Why? Because West Indies cricket is full of greenhorns as the cowboys of the old West would have said: young, undeveloped talent searching for direction but not yet finding it.

The exclusion all at once of the three most senior batsmen, Sarwan, Chanderpaul and Gayle has made an already bad situation worse. Good sense would suggest that such an imbalance be rectified by at least the re-introduction of Sarwan for the ODIs, and he and Chanders for the Tests.

It’s all about context. At a time when commentators were heralding the death of one-day cricket, the World Cup proved that there was still life in the old format. There were plenty of nail-biters, many of which featured England. Each game had a meaning, a subtext and a reason for being. Something which a 7-game series between New Zealand and Zimbabwe may lack. While the World Cup final had most of us riveted, can the same be said for the last 50 Sri Lanka-India games, which probably took place in as many weeks? If we keep repeating the same battles and lowering the stakes, cricket will be shorn of its meaning.

Malinga definitely had his reasons to give up the flannels for good. He was fit enough to bowl four hours, that too slit in two-three spells, with a sufficient break between games, but he wasn’t sure if his knee could take the workload of the tough five-day routine of a Test match in England. But despite their long experience of playing the game, the Lankan administrators failed to get this cricketing logic. They took it personally. It was a rejection, they believed.

Murali Kartik, still the finest left-arm spinner in the country [India], revealed he had attempted bowling the doosra — here a left-arm spinner gets the ball to spin into the right-hander — at the nets and managed to pull it off from only 10 yards. “You require hyper-flexible wrist and shoulder to send down this delivery from 22 yards. And I do not believe this is possible without a degree of bending and straightening of the arm.”

A doosra could be a potent weapon against a left-handed batsman who could be forced to hit against the spin. And against a right-hander, the short-leg and the leg-slip could come into play.

At the end of the sixth over in their game against Rajasthan yesterday, Kings XI were 77-1. It would be easy to pass this off as symptomatic of one of the many warping forces T20 is applying in its first era. Yet it hints at something more fundamental. In distilling the game down to an extreme form, conventional wisdoms will be challenged.

But how did the usually low-slow Kotla, so frustrating for batsmen, become a belter? It's because Saturday's game was played on a side track and not one of the three centre wickets. The centre strips are bare without a speck of grass and have been low and sluggish ever since they have been re-laid in 2010. "The grass just refuses to grow on the centre wickets. It could be because of the layer of soil underneath or due to wear and tear. Wickets on either side have a healthy coverage of grass," DDCA's grounds and pitches committee chairman Venkat Sundaram said.

“I’d love to go see a full game actually,” said 45-year-old Karen Knights of Raymond, Maine. Knights was with her husband Rodney and 13-year-old daughter Megan on a day out to discover baseball history when they came across the Swinging Away display. The entire family was quite intrigued by the differences between baseball and cricket.

Three matches into the current season the County Championship already appears to be undergoing a generational changing of the guard, showcasing not just the much lauded endeavours of Reece Topley – a 17-year-old fast bowler from Essex who is currently the leading wicket-taker in the country – but a thickening posse of young English batsmen with their eye on an early-season Test spot. The present may be racked with financial strife for many counties but the future seems likely to benefit from the breath of regeneration percolating around even the most leathery of dressing rooms.

But it is also irritating that the public in this country are deprived of the excellent spectacle that is a 50-over match on a dry pitch, when the right schedule is so easily attainable: start the season with the championship, go into 20-over cricket in June then 50-over cricket in July, and finish off with the championship, instead of squeezing in CB40 matches at every spare moment.