The Surfer

Players are ranked across each format by selectors Mike Hesson and Bruce Edgar, with tests receiving twice the weighting of one-day and twenty20 internationals. The 20 highest aggregate scores are offered national contracts.

Even if Williamson is fourth on that list, he would earn an NZC salary in the vicinity of $175,000 with the top ranked player banking around $195,000.

Add international match payments, an English county contract and a gear endorsement deal and the forecast of Williamson's earnings in the coming year calculates to more than half a million dollars without having to don the gaudy colours of any international Twenty20 circus. That anoints him as a poster child for cricket purists.

Neither of England's opening bowlers, James Anderson and Stuart Broad, will be fully fit for Lords. They cannot be. Anderson bowled 59 overs in this match and Broad 54. That is more than 300 deliveries per man. Each ball they charge in 20 yards, jump into their action and land at the crease, putting a force six times their body weight through their knees and ankles. You cannot recover from that in three days. Your body aches for a week after effort of this intensity. Never was it more obvious that bowlers are seen as cricket's expendable labourers.

Think about it. When was the last time you saw England batting with the sort of gay abandon on display yesterday morning? When was the last time England were this much fun to watch?

Even worse for Cook, this Indian reprise came in the context of the debate over his captaincy. So why did he remove Ben Stokes from the attack, even though Stokes had taken two wickets from the Pavilion end, and turn immediately to Liam Plunkett's brave but futile attempt at Bodyline from around the wicket? Why didn't he turn earlier to Moeen Ali's off-spin? Or even to Sam Robson's rarely seen leggies?

That would have been the cue for Graeme Swann in past summers. Seventy-three of his 255 Test wickets were tail-enders, at 11 runs apiece. Without him, England reverted to Jimmy Anderson trying yorkers and Plunkett going round the wicket and aiming at the body. The combination of the pitch and the resolution of the batsmen neutered both.

Change of pace is a bowling option England have rarely embraced in Test cricket. It is a strange omission considering the number and variety of slower balls they purvey in one-day matches, and one that exasperates bowling coach David Saker. Broad and Anderson have at least two different slower cutters at their disposal - required to inhibit big-swinging batsmen - yet overlook them in Test matches. The pre-match planning never factors it in.

"So I started with a series of balls that moved away from the off stump and this was followed by an in-coming effort ball on the legs. And all through the plan Dhoni had placed Rahulbhai (Rahul Dravid) as the leg-slip. Pietersen fell for the plan. After being starved of his favourite shot, he flicked the faster in-coming ball," he says before revealing the anti-climax end. "The ball fell just short of Rahulbhai. Had it travelled a bit more we could have got a big wicket." Pietersen, on 49 at that point, went on to score a double hundred.

The way I play my cricket, my subconscious mind works more than the conscious mind. And for me, it was never about consciously grasping things from the captain but subconsciously taking in certain personality traits or qualities from every individual that was part of the team. When I started to play for India, I was extremely lucky to have a very good bunch of senior players around me to inculcate things from. What they taught me cannot be restricted to the captaincy box because it was much more than that. What I learnt from them was how to be humble, how to conduct yourself when you're successful and how to figure your way out of tough times. Captaincy is a very small aspect of my life as a cricketer and their impact on me as a person has been much bigger.

Flower was not in England for a single ball of the two-Test series in Sri Lanka. Still employed by the England and Wales Cricket Board as the technical director of elite coaching, he was attending several conferences in the United States. One was about the creativity of athletes in extreme sports. "Some of these athletes are brilliant at what they do, highly skilled, but crucially a lot of them have never been coached," Flower said. "Their environment was all about learning from their mistakes and their peers without formal coaching - and there may be lessons to be learned there.

When you are short on confidence and runs, rather than looking at the ball you wonder where you will get your first run. You start thinking about the gaps, what if the ball swings away, what if it comes in, what the bowler is going to do. There are so many things happening in your mind that even if you want to focus on the ball the mind will not allow you to."