The Surfer

By and large it has made for sharper cricket. Few things are more tedious that the sight of a front foot bully belting the ball around on a pitch as scary as an Enid Blyton story. At least these slightly unreliable surfaces have forced batsmen to think. Shot election and placements have been important, and these count amongst the game's hidden delights.

The ordeal begins from trying to procure a ticket. Typically, the queue at the counter begins to take shape with the first spectator reporting at 5 in the morning — at some places, people even camp overnight.

It was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, as the prime minister, who embarked on the policy of looking west to the Arab world for bonding and the obvious financial benefits that would accrue to Pakistan by being a player in the petrodollar economy of the Arab states, even if they were run by despotic autocrats. In 1974, Bhutto hosted the heads of Muslim states in Lahore for the Organisation of Islamic Conference summit, which included such adversaries as the reigning sheikhs of the oil-rich Gulf and Arab revolutionaries like Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat. The occasion was chosen to elicit support for Pakistan’s nuclear programme, as India was all set to go nuclear, and Gaddafi fitted the bill. In a grand ceremony at the Lahore Stadium, Bhutto announced the renaming of the cricket ground after the man whom he came to call one of his best friends.

The Aussies are still in a rebuilding phase and are there for the taking. It's not the Australian team of a few years ago when they were the best team in the world by a long way. They've come back to the pack now. Sure they still have some world class players, and have only lost to New Zealand twice at the World Cup, but the Black Caps should have all the confidence in the world to beat them.

If Ireland, say, were next on the agenda for Strauss's men then the weight of expectation would be on them again. As it is, most people are going to make them long-odds second favourites against India on Sunday and, in many ways, they will have nothing to lose as they try to convince everyone that their efforts during the first half of the Netherlands game were not a true reflection of their ability.

Perhaps it is overstating the case to say that associate and affiliate nations at large have any ambition to play beyond T20. For the majority T20 could well be the right way to go. But since their first World Cup participation, each of Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh have achieved Test match status and Ireland aim to join them. And in the future, do you think that China, a nation that receives all the cricket transmission offered by the Star TV footprint, and which is said to be gaining a rapid interest in developing the game, would be content not to join them?

The World Cup is the only event where non-Test countries can rub shoulders with the best in the business. And they have repeatedly dreamed of that one shot at worldwide recognition, of replacing the “minnow” label with one saying “giant-slayers”.

Indian TV news channels and crazed cricket fans will drink from that cup of good cheer if only Dhoni’s Devils (moving on from Kapil’s) realise Sachin Tendulkar’s dream of bringing home the World Cup. If they don’t, it’s going to take more than a cuppa to calm them down.

A few — Tony Cozier, Sanjay Manjrekar, Nasser Hussain, Michael Atherton — are very good. But to listen to the majority, however, is to be subjected to the banal, sterile witterings of imbecilic ex-players whose foremost achievement since retiring from the game has been managing to avoid eating their microphones.