The Surfer

So disrespectful is the schedule to the integrity of the County Championship – for which the winners will receive £500,000... – that some will have completed four matches before the daffs are over, with all the impact of the weather, and half the programme by the time the football World Cup kicks off. It is as if the County Championship, which should provide the breeding ground for future England Test cricketers, has become the stale bread surrounding a cash-cow filling of Twenty20.

The IPL pursues revenues at the expense of other valuable resources: Test cricket, but also domestic cricket, the inevitable breeding grounds for young talent. In its grubbing for money, in fact, the IPL is dismissive of anything old-fashioned, anything aesthetic; even the four seconds between one ball and the next, held sacrosanct through more than a century of cricket, have been sold for inconsequential advertisements. Meanwhile, owners buy teams for staggering quantities of money and with the fuzziest possibilities of recovering their investment; they desire only to dice up the risk and sell it in parts to sponsors and other companies, a practice that should surely sound familiar to us today.

It was hoped beforehand that the majority of the national players would get regular game time in the IPL so that it would serve as ideal preparation for the World tournament. However, the opposite has transpired, with the likes of AB de Villiers, Mark Boucher and JP Duminy spectators in the IPL.

Coming to Leicestershire as captain gives me a clean slate. I've come here to do a job which I'm more than capable of doing. I'm going to prove that to myself and my team and become a good leader. The key will be to judge the situation right. Is it time for me to put a hand around their shoulders or give them a rocket up the arse? I need to get that right but I'll still tell the truth. I'll call a shovel a shovel and a pick a pick.

Gathering himself at the start of his run-in with three walking steps, he would approach the wicket with nine mastodontic strides. Arrived at the crease, his left arm would be flung up high, while his body — pivoting on a firmly braced left leg — adopted the classical sideways-on position. The right arm, high at the point of delivery, would follow through to describe almost a full circle.

In a sporting era where materialistic rewards were few, his playing career was the very epitome of service, a foreign word to most modern players. His 236 Test wickets were the most ever taken by the time he played the last of his 51 Tests in 1955.

Michael Lumb is the latest to be called up as a catch-all opener, in the footsteps of such discards as Vikram Solanki, Darren Maddy, Joe Denly, Matt Prior and Luke Wright to name but a handful. It's possible they have landed on a correct combination, but impossible that this has come about through careful planning rather than blind panic.