The Surfer

In a sense Bopara leaves the selectors little choice. What kind of message would it send out now to prefer Morgan? Bopara scored an excruciating 16-ball duck in his first innings since deciding to force the selectors' hand with sheer weight of runs in county cricket, but in effect we know enough about him already. He may or may not be good enough, just as Morgan may or may not be. But it would be sound self-promotion if Bopara's stance - Test cricket over gold - were to be rewarded.

Domestic top orders have tended to be littered with journeyman and Black Caps discards in recent years, which is why it's nice to see fresh talent in the form of the 25-year-old right-hander [Brad Wilson]. Wilson's season highlight came in the form of a career-best 151 in a 274-run opening stand with BJ Watling that saw Northern chase down 385 against Wellington with just one wicket down.

At 31 for two in the final of the World Cup, and with India’s best batsmen dismissed, only the generation that had followed the Lord’s Test of 1971 had any doubts. We were prepared for the worst ... The younger ones didn’t flinch. My son leaned over and bet the price of a Dream Theater CD that India would not only win, but win easily. He is a fan in the age of Sachin Tendulkar — confident, self-assured and with faith in the cricket team. A completely different animal from his father who is wracked by uncertainty and carries too many memories of promise collapsing at the last hurdle.

Has an era finally ended? The era of Doubting Thomases and the-other-team-will-win certainties? The era when the dominant emotion at an India match was not anticipation but anxiety, and everyone believed that even if India had to score 10 runs in 10 overs with 10 wickets in hand, they would somehow manage to screw it up? When Virender Sehwag says today that he always backs the opposition, he means it as a joke, as a way of proving to himself the sheer absurdity of such thinking. Not so long ago, that was the way to bet.

While player fatigue is surely a factor, crowd or viewer fatigue is no longer a serious issue in the World Cup aftermath. Rather, the IPL comes as the perfect relaxant. While it will ensure that cricket fanatics will not have withdrawal symptoms in the post-World Cup scenario, it will also ensure that they don’t have to follow the matches with nerves strained and fists clenched. With nationalistic passions no longer of consequence, fans can just continue to savour the World Cup success while enjoying their dose of cricket entertainment on offer in the IPL.

In fact, the IPL could not have come at a better time. Had the World Cup been followed by a tri-series or a bilateral series, the expectations from the Indian team would have been at their peak. From the world champions, the fans would brook no failure ... In such a scenario, the IPL is the best thing to happen to Indian cricket.

Surely all those big [Ashes] numbers add up to a life-changing experience? "No," says Cook with a smile and a look of relief. "I've probably been recognised a few more times in the street or when out shopping, but that is about it."

While most of his Test colleagues played a one-day series Down Under and then went straight into the World Cup, the opening batsman returned to a somewhat less glamorous routine: batting in the indoor nets at Chelmsford, training, promoting Samsung's latest notebook baby and helping out on the farm owned by his girlfriend's family.

[In the small-town Indian, there is] an absence of a history of failure in the psyche — there never was much opportunity before the 1990s, and there was, consequently, no great failure. Dhoni’s life would have been successful enough if he’d only played cricket for the Railways and worked as a ticket collector ... Senior journalist Kumar Ketkar isn’t surprised at the emergence of the confident, small-town superstar. He believes it’s a linear growth that occurred due to two important developments of the last 40-odd years—banking and communications spreading their networks into the hinterland. "Something sensational like cricket had to come to make us aware of this reality, that small-town India is confident and surging ahead,” he says.

"They are different because they are original, as far as their cricketing style is concerned ... In places like Ranchi, Mahi [Dhoni] tells me that cricket facilities were a bare minimum. Look at him or Munaf now, they have their own playing style. Dhoni used to play football and that’s made him faster and stronger. Players from smaller towns sacrifice a bit more to develop their cricketing skills. They are more motivated about making it big."

The ICC World Cup may be over, the celebrations done, the accolades exhausted but the profits are still piling up. Not just in terms of money and other goodies being showered on our cricketers, but also the revenue generated by the event and the bonanza for the ICC, the BCCI, sponsors, advertisers, television channels and others who have jumped on to cricket’s money-spinning bandwagon. The total receipts for the ICC from the World Cup was Rs 1,476 crore while the cost of organising the event was Rs 571 crore.

Who, or what, are we celebrating? Our appreciation of Dhoni and his team's victory [in the World Cup] springs from our immersion in a spectacle created for our gratification. We were and are celebrating the idea of victory as filtered through the print [media] but most of all through television. And television trains its spotlight on the individual.

The fourth edition of IPL is a Bollywood fantasy, a carousel of music and lights and glamour moderated by “talking hairdos” in Neil Postman's memorable phrase who shall fill the numbed mind with useless “chatter”. What the IPL audiences will experience is one long commercial meant to reaffirm their self-estimation as Glamorous Indians.

It's important and the choice needs to be the right one. But when did New Zealand sport get so moribund that we can't even select a cricket captain without excessive handwringing and the creation of more steps than the Sky Tower? NZ Cricket CEO Justin Vaughan said recently that the Black Caps did not play again until towards the end of the year - so there was plenty of time. Yep, absolutely. Heaps of time. If you want to look like chumps.

In fact, Twenty20 can provide a big part of the answer to the 21st-century challenges of keeping the sport relevant to today's target market of 10-year-olds. Firstly, Twenty20's bright lights will attract them to the sport and then, if leveraged properly, it can provide the money to train them. So those responsible for the next steps in Twenty20's commercialisation have the tough job of designing a structure which creates value in the right parts of the system for the long-term benefit (or perhaps even the survival?) of the sport.

Cricket is finished as an international game, and hereafter faces a long and slow decline caused by a board that lacks vision and integrity, a board of knaves and fools that makes one-star decisions while staying in five-star hotels. Through no fault of the ICC's admirable employees, cricket has become a corrupt and worthless activity and deserves nothing better than the Indian Premier League, a format known for jiggery pokery, social excesses and cosmetic grins.