The Surfer

This World Cup is a huge opportunity for prodigies like Sarfaraz to be so close to the big stage. He is always watching, always learning. It is a stage where reputations are made and broken, prodigies compete fiercely, superstars blaze opponents and homes across nations turn into mini-stadiums.

It is not the Aussie way for a captain to continue playing but he has a role to play by simply helping his team win cricket matches. He should drop down to No4 and maybe even eventually move to five in the order but I expect him to emulate what Sachin Tendulkar has achieved in the past two years. I have little doubt we will see Ponting play in the Ashes in England in 2013 and following winter in Australia. He has not had many serious injuries and once freed from the burden of captaincy, he should feel refreshed.

Following the World Cup I'm a lot happier with what I see from the Black Caps. Whether it's the John Wright influence or that they have finally taken ownership and pride in the fact they are playing for their country, I'm not sure.

Home they all come, heads above water, just. This wasn't a flash NZ side but good coaching and, one suspects, some tough love got them further than we thought possible.

That is the key match-up in the game. Murali has pulled a hamstring but he will bowl OK on one leg because it is his last match for Sri Lanka. It is amazing what that can do for handling pain. His off-spinner and doosra both turn a lot and unless the Indian batsmen pick him well they are not going to score off him. If he is allowed to tie them down they have got a problem.

‘Slinger’ Malinger is bowling fantastically well. Although his arm is low he delivers the ball from over the top of the stumps so that he is bowling wicket to wicket and that doesn’t give the batsmen any angles to play with. Even when he bowls length he is a good bowler and his yorkers are fantastic. With the old ball he can reverse swing it in at pace. Batsmen know what they are going to get but they can’t always play it

Several of the players could not have survived the scrutiny of orthodox-minded coaches. Luckily they grew up in a land without fixed ideas about bowling and batting, a country that has not read the rule book, and a nation that plays by its own lights.

As is almost always the case with Test captains, Clarke's success will be dictated by the strength of his bowlers and Australia have their weakest Test attack for 25 years.

Captains of bad bowling attacks must learn to be psychologists with patience by the bucket load ... Mary Poppins could have captained teams with Warne and McGrath.

The team is determined to give Murali - a great team player, a great friend and a really special man in every sense - a great farewell by winning the World Cup once again for him. We simply need to continue the very good cricket we are playing at the moment.

Each and every one of those 85 runs was a rebuttal to those who say he cannot do it when it really counts. Now he will have to do it again, in a World Cup final, in front of his home crowd in Mumbai. He needs one more century to become the first man to have scored 100 hundreds in international cricket. Do not even dare to dream it.

And yet, he nearly made a century and that was remarkable. A professional, we are told, is someone who does a job even when he doesn’t feel like it, and Tendulkar’s ability to carry on regardless said something about the kind of person he is.

I still don't have a finish line in mind and all I am focused on is being the best player I can be, a great teammate, an experienced leader around the group and a guy that my new captain can rely upon to give him something special.

When all hope appears lost would you get down on your knees and pray for Clarke to bat for your life or the country's honour? While his career figures are sound he has rarely been able to impose himself on an opposition or a series; the pressure on him will become only more relentless with the captain's responsibilities added to his kitbag.

Games are games, and games need good manners, cricket in particular. They need sportsmanship on the pitch and cordiality off it. It is that cordiality — and perhaps something more — that lies behind the welcome that Pakistani fans will receive in hospitable, outward-looking Punjab. It is that cordiality that underlines Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s invitation to his Pakistani opposite number to watch the match, and Yousaf Raza Gilani’s acceptance. Take the cordiality as what it is: the necessary accompaniment to a great sporting moment.

After appreciating a classic Tendulkar cover drive, in case an Umar Gul in-cutter makes way between the Indian opener’s bat and pad, he too deserves at least a few claps. And if Zaheer Khan loses the race to be the leading wicket-taker to Afridi, it would not be the end of the world. Zaheer and Afridi have done enough to be judged by their showing in one tournament.

He also concurred that this line of reasoning would not have cropped up at all had India won the Chennai Test against Pakistan in ’99 or the World Cup final in ’03; that the discussion would have had a different hue if India had won the Barbados Test in ’97, the Champions Trophy final in Nairobi in 2000 and the Test series in Australia in ’08.

Now here’s my theory on this line on criticism: Had Tendulkar played in an earlier era, these discussions would have simply not come up. Not many dwell on Sunil Gavaskar’s clutch moments, simply because India weren’t expected to win in that era.

Tendulkar has been part of Indian teams that have approached the threshold, slipped miserably on it before eventually shedding the monkey off their back. So unfortunately every India slip-up has been a Tendulkar-could-have-taken-us-home moment.