The Surfer

At the age of 30 Afridi still bats like the 16-year-old who hit the fastest-ever ODI century in his very first international innings. Reckless, irresponsible, idiotic, there is not another player in the game who is as much fun to watch. He is a proper swashbuckler, a cricketer who, as I wrote last year, bowls leg-spin with the cunning of Cardinal Richelieu and bats with the foolhardy panache of all three Musketeers rolled into one.

Clarke accepts that cricket, perhaps more than any other sport, reflects this country's gaping inequality, with laundered fields and pavilions at private schools while Tye labours ina series of meetings to see an Astroturf strip laid in his school's local Ordsall Park.

"It is fair to point to the divide," says Clarke, "although it is a wider problem than just cricket. Our job is to encourage participation, and integration of different ethnic groups, which cricket has a great ability to do because of Asian communities' enthusiasm for the game. We are having to address years of decay and deprivation, but we are making progress."

But Warne is not alone in assessing – given his conclusion of the likely scenario this winter – that Australia are not as good as they used to be and England are better then they were. Australia's bowling attack, like most around the world, still appears to lack a cutting edge, that magic ingredient given them for so long by Warne and Glenn McGrath. They will persist in playing a four-man attack which might yet play into English hands. Two of the quartet will almost certainly be Ben Hilfenhaus, who hopes to recover from a sore shoulder to play in Leeds, and Mitchell Johnson, the world cricketer of the year. But Hilfenhaus, excellent though he is, for his accuracy and late movement, is not yet McGrath (who is?) and Johnson is again going through one of his most notoriously inconstant phases.

They might be mavericks but I don’t imagine they are alone in their views. I suspect there are dozens, hundreds even, of players at various levels of the professional game who pay lip service to the primacy of Test cricket but, given a no-strings-attached choice, would ditch it quicker than you could say IPL.

T20's big threat is the one no-one is writing about. I realised it again when I heard a county coach saying something along the lines of, all the young players he now had coming his way 'just want to get in the gym, bulk up and smack the ball miles'. It's entirely logical that they should, too.

"Injuries come and go, but I have to stick to what has got me wickets. I am a wicket-taking bowler and I can’t compromise on pace."

‘1-7-2004’ is an important date, the day he made his Test debut against Australia in Darwin. Also inscribed is ‘28-3-2007’, the day he took four wickets in four balls against South Africa at the Providence Stadium in Guyana during a World Cup match.

“One of the main things is his father himself is a trainer, so he’s into gym from a very young age and he has been absolutely fit,” said Karnataka coach Sanath Kumar.

However the prospect of one nominated "super striker'' getting the chance to bat in the second bracket of overs having been dismissed in the first is as cheap and nasty as it is unnecessary. Batting is based upon the harsh but fair concept that one mistake can mean the end of the road for a batsman. So for one player to get twice as much opportunity as the rest is a scenario that clearly defies this most basic tenet.

Among the numerous arguments against the idea is that it will unfairly reward teams with insufficient depth - Chris Gayle's West Indies, for one - while there is also the matter of what would be done with scoreboards and records.

Strokes square of the wicket will need to travel about 66m to the rope, compared to up to 70m in the past. While that sounds as if such shots have less distance to travel, the reality is that Eden Park's former shape meant some boundaries were much shorter than that - and one in particular was only 51m away. The changes have given the ground a longer average distance to score a boundary square of the wicket.

Pakistan were bowled out twice by different part-time bowlers, Shane Watson in the first innings and Marcus North in the second. It is difficult to decide which was the greater transgression.

If the match told plenty that was already feared about Pakistan, it also gave something away about Australia, another source of limitless fascination because of the Ashes this winter. Bar a tweak here or there – the return of Brad Haddin behind the stumps, the replacement of the spinner – this is the team that Australia want to play against England. The evidence of Lord's is that England should not be afraid. Australia simply do not emanate the power that once seemed destined to last forever. They remain tough, capable cricketers but in almost every case it does not go beyond that.