The Surfer

There will be no emotional retirement. Cricket Australia would have to sack him, and that appears most unlikely because his experience is needed and the focus will immediately switch to the one-day World Cup on the subcontinent early next year.

Gnashing of teeth remained the overarching theme of the day. Back to The Herald Sun and Andrew Webster: "We can cop the hiding. We can swallow that England is better. We can even stomach the Barmy bloody Army. But what we want to know now is how Australian cricket, the national sport, will be recovered and rebuilt." And finally, a historical summation from Greg Baum: "Rarely since the First Fleet dropped anchor has Australia been so comprehensively claimed for England."

The statesman's cloth which has been sewn piece by piece around Ponting for much of the past decade fell away again when he took exception to a video referral involving a caught-behind against Kevin Pietersen which went in the batsman's favour. Ponting's disrobing revealed the Mowbray street fighter. The kid who would have given as good as he got playing Australian football against the men of Launceston in a previous sporting life. It appears as though the mounting frustration of a difficult summer all came bubbling out.

An Australian victory in this Ashes series would have only served to heighten Australia's belief that their system is going fine when it's clearly not producing young players of Test pedigree. They need an urgent review of their setup. If England win they deserve it. They banned wives from the tour where Australia took them everywhere. They chose an XI and stuck to them while Australia were forced to experiment. They arrived for this series even before Australia.

But that Australian team featured Allan Border, Geoff Marsh and Steve Waugh, apostles to lead their generation from the wilderness. None such impress in this team.

If the power brokers at NZC are that suggestible, I'd like to make the following strong pronouncement: that, in this time of flux, Paul Lewis should be hired by NZC; that he should travel the world with the team where his principal function would be checking out the best restaurants and bars and writing the occasional press release to assure all those gullible fans that everything is all right; oh, and that he be paid half a million goo-goos a year for doing so.

Keen readers of this column will have noticed a bit of a pause then. That was me, waiting for the phone to ring.

"You may call it [my style] buccaneering or 19th century but we thought outside the box. Please do not compare me to the English Premier League or to any other league. We are unique. I can sit here and say there's no other league like that in the world, every member actually makes money. How many teams in the English Premier League make money? Look at the balance sheets, practically all of them are in debt."

In sport momentum is crucial because it has an impact on everything. Even in preparation, Australia will be confident and have clarity about what they need to work on. England will be thinking that they have to do certain things better. They will be working on extra stuff to try to get everything right. England will have to turn it around very quickly.

What puzzles me is why Harbhajan's form or lack thereof is not considered worthy of greater debate; why he continues to be deemed an "automatic selection" despite three years of largely mediocre performances. Not so long ago, we used to question Anil Kumble after one bad series - where did that rigor, that analysis, go in the case of Harbhajan?

Simply put - what makes him the holy cow of Indian cricket? And how much longer will selectors blindly genuflect at that altar?

"If you achieve certain goals, winning looks after itself," Wright said. "Whether it's as a player or coach, at international level you've got to have a hard edge, that attitude that 'we're going to take them apart'."

That winter, West Indies toured Australia and under their first black captain in Frank Worrell, helped create not just a memorable series but one that remains a defining time in cricket history. No other sporting team have been embraced by the Australian public as were Worrell's men. In Brisbane they played out the first tied Test in the most dramatic fashion, before losing over the new year in Melbourne, winning in Sydney and drawing in Adelaide. 90,800 people attended the first day of the decisive match, at the MCG once more, a rain‑affected affair in which, amid some controversy, Australia scrambled a win by two wickets.