The Surfer

Team spirit, eh? Generally I’m with former Tottenham striker Steve Archibald on this one, even if his description – “an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of victory”– has become a hackneyed cliché. But then cricket is essentially an individual sport played in a team environment. Selfishness often sits comfortably within its dressing rooms. The Australians spout their propaganda about mateship, that machismo forged by miners and bushmen in the harsh conditions of the late 19th century, whereby a man had to do everything within his powers to stand by his mate. But I have only really seen that tightness in rugby dressing rooms.

From a cricketing point of view, firstly, there is likelier to be a heavy competition for places, a larger responsibility towards your side, a professional dressing-room and franchise atmosphere and since corporate ideology is largely result-oriented, it could assist incentivize performances, which is in stark contrast to the existing system, which almost presents itself as a formula a captain needs to rehearse, rinse and repeat to win the Ranji Trophy.

For reasons best known to themselves, England have gone on a bonding session for four days. Apparently they are not fed up with the sight of each other after a season which began in April, or February if you count the Bangladesh tour. If it helps to devise plans to ensnare terracotta urns, all well and good. England have their best chance for decades of retaining the Ashes in Australia. They last did so in 1986-87 when Mike Gatting's side were not tipped to keep the prize won in 1985 by David Gower's side.

This will not be easy because Australia being Australia, they are developing a new team of their own. They may spring on England some new fast bowlers like Josh Hazlewood, only 19, and Peter George. Hazlewood's cause for a dramatic debut has been diminished by having to withdraw from the squad to tour India because of a stress fracture to his back.

We take the dirt track and stop in a square that is the entrance to the enclave. Two narrow, winding streets lead off at a right angle. All the houses have low boundary walls and identical name plates stuck to them. The streets are paved and clean. No open sewers and no stench of cow dung. Many of houses are single-storied and all are small but neat and well presented. Amir's house is at the far edge of the enclave with open fields on two sides. A Pakistani flag embellished with golden border is flying on a pole fixed on the rooftop — a symbol of pride for Amir's father, Mohammed Fayyaz, for having served in the Pakistan army. He retired as a sepoy.

If England are going to fit Morgan in, obviously someone else will have to make way. The men to look at here are the No2 and No3 in the order, Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott. I think Cook should be the man who is dropped. I have written before about the qualities Cook brings to the team apart from his ability as a batsman. The management clearly like him as a character and see him as a good influence on the team. But the runs Trott has scored in international cricket since he came into the team outweigh those criteria. On top of that the one major concern I would have about the English batting is their propensity for sudden collapses. They have not managed to shake off this habit, as we saw again and again in both the recent Test and one-day series. Trott, like Morgan, seems to be a cool player in a crisis, with a steady temperament and an ability to handle pressure.

Graeme Swann is the No 1 spinner. He is the most improved cricketer in the world and has had another good summer. For me he is the key to the Ashes. If Swann is successful, England will do well in Australia. I believe that because when it is hot and sunny in Australia and England are bowling on flat wickets, he is going to bowl a lot of overs. Australians sometimes struggle against good off-spinners, so he will play a massive part ...

What cricket cannot afford to do is write off Pakistan as a lost cause before properly recognising that it is not in a position to hand down such arbitrary moral judgement; not, at least, without acknowledging that the richest part of its empire, India, is also beset by terrible doubts about its freedom from spot- and match-fixing and that even such a sturdy sports nation as South Africa was unable to escape one of the worst examples of corruption in the history of any sport.

However, unless there is a catastrophic absence of form during the three warm-up matches in Perth, Adelaide and Hobart we can name the XI for the first Test in Brisbane as those who played the last Test of the summer at Lord's, with the inclusion of Ian Bell in place of Eoin Morgan, who will nonetheless be in the party.

While same-sex marriages have become routine events across the civilised world, homosexuality in professional sport remains a forbidden frontier ...

My problem with the Champions League begins with the concept. Memory being notoriously short, here's a quick history lesson: In 2000-'01, you had a tournament in Perth called the "Champions Cup" played towards the end of the Australian domestic season, which was loosely modeled on the FIFA World Club Championship, and was meant to discover the best domestic one-day side in the world. Mumbai, Kwazulu-Natal, Central Districts and hosts Western Australia featured in the tournament, but soon after its debut it was sadly disbanded. My guess is it didn't work as well as the organizers hoped it would, and the whole 'international domestic cricket' schtick wasn't as commercially viable or capable of generating as much spectator interest as the organizers believed.

I've generally agreed with Imran Khan on this: You can't kick out a team just because of two or three bad apples. But we're seeing now what happens when accusations are bandied around with no thought for their consequences. Would Jonathan Trott and Wahab Riaz have had their dust-up before the start of play yesterday if Butt hadn't accused England of throwing the Oval one-dayer? Possibly.