The Surfer

Curators say, baseball — or base-ball, as it was known then — originated in England at least as early as the first decades of the 18th century, perhaps even earlier, and was taken to the United States by 19th-century immigrants.

The exhibit also makes the case that cricket, played in America from as early as 1709, was America’s principal bat-and-ball game until the eve of the Civil War, with thriving cricket clubs in many major East Coast cities, including New York, Brooklyn, Newark, Boston and especially Philadelphia.

“I think he’s probably been wanting to say it for a long time since I took his place. It’s nice that Thorpey’s got himself mentioned in a few interviews and that he’s done an interview. It’s probably nice for him to see his name in the papers, it’s nice, and it’s good. I couldn’t care what he says or anything else; it’s not constructive and probably no point saying it. I’ll be in his position in a few years time! He’ll talk about players who are in-form and out of form, but at least he’s got himself in the media, must be really nice for him!”

The single best thing about the tenure of Strauss and Andy Flower is that they have banished bullshit. Listening to Peter Moores explain away his team's poor performances you felt like you were taking part in a motivational seminar for middle-managers at a municipal leisure centre. You could go in, sit down, switch on a tape-recorder and hum Bob Dylan's To Ramona to yourself ("I can see that your head/has been twisted and fed/by worthless foam from the mouth") safe in the knowledge that 30 minutes later you would be typing up a piece about the need for consistency, good areas and missing pieces of the jigsaw.

It is not good for team morale to simply 'rotate' your key players as it leads everyone to believe that they have been dropped. Which, given Anderson's shoddy form of late, is entirely believable. If Anderson was being rested, which coach Andy Flower implied in his post-match interviews, then the fact that he spent most of the Bangladesh innings on the field as a workhorse substitute fielder is absurd.

The appearance of an injured batsman is a rare enough sight in Test cricket but I struggle to remember even one example of it in one-day matches. So numerous and throwaway are the fixtures that you assume the results in the long term matter as little to the players as they do to the spectators and not worth the risk of participating while hurt.

Even in Tests, the potential hazards seem too great. Nasser Hussain sometimes gritted his teeth to complete a match when one of his frequently broken "poppadom" fingers suffered its latest injury but discretion usually resurfaced in time for him to sit out the subsequent games until they had properly healed.

Cricket’s current first lady Sakshi, for instance—an alumnus of Welham Girls School in Dehradun, a hotel management graduate from Aurangabad, and a resident of Alipore, one of Calcutta’s more affluent pockets—enjoyed, according to Yudhajit, “a kind of exposure during her growing up years that was quite different from Dhoni’s”. Sachin Tendulkar, who did not complete college, went on to marry Dr Anjali Mehta, the daughter of an industrialist, and older than him.

In 1955, while Hudson was commentating for radio on a Yorkshire v Nottinghamshire county match, Fred Trueman was on a hat-trick with only a few minutes of airtime remaining. The incoming batsman, Cyril Poole, took an age to prepare for Trueman's next delivery, which, with only seconds to spare, had him caught at short leg. Hudson had just enough time to yell: "It's a hat-trick, back to the studio."

The experience made him determined to liberate cricket from its piecemeal scheduling that might see coverage move between three different BBC radio networks during a single day's play. Less than half of Jim Laker's record-breaking 19-wicket haul at the 1956 Old Trafford Test against Australia was broadcast. In 1957 Hudson persuaded his superiors, despite howls of protest from the music lobby, to allow Test cricket on to the little listened-to Network Three, the forerunner of Radio 3, and to broadcast every ball bowled.

Ireland’s usual captain William Porterfield, the hard-hitting batsman Niall O’Brien — the elder brother of Kevin — the wicket-keeper Gary Wilson and the fast bowler Boyd Rankin all missed the tournament in the Netherlands because of club commitments.

That Ireland did so well in their absence demonstrated impressive depth, in particular offering further evidence of the quality of two rising stars. Paul Stirling, a hard-hitting, heavyset batsman who will not be 20 until September, was Ireland’s highest and fastest scorer during the tournament.