The Surfer

"I had a decision to make but nothing shocked me with Lou. That might sound crazy but the reason is: I really get him. When I met him he was all over the place. It made me dizzy. The first meal we had out together he'd got the bill before I'd finished eating. He was stressed, drank a lot and often cried."

Do television commentators do any homework? Are they interested in the individuals in the middle or are the players they describe just interchangeable names on some Platonic team sheet? Virtually every commentator in the world is now a distinguished ex-cricketer; are these retired champions meant to embody totemic authority, to exude experience into a microphone, or should they pull information and insight together to tell us something that we can't see or don't know already?

If they asked me [to captain] before the 2015 World Cup then I wouldn't be able to do it. If the Board asked me after the 2015 World Cup and the offer came with clarity about my role and the appropriate support then I would think about it. I feel I'm the sort of captain who can produce good players without being selfish. I've never been selfish and have always put the team ahead of individual aims.

The transformative impact on associates and affiliates that cricket being in the Olympic Games will have is significant. Many countries will only provide government funding to Olympic sports, and in some cases that could be quite substantial. Countries that currently get something of a pittance from the ICC - less than $50,000 for most members - could find themselves getting astronomical sums from their governments.

Funding could be tens - possibly hundreds - of times what they get from the ICC. The financial dependence that some associates have on the ICC would vanish overnight. But maybe that's the point - if almost all of your money comes from one organisation, you're not going to do much to rock the boat.

What distracts you more a batsman - the verbal attack or a subtle change in the field or bowling tactic?
When I am not in a good mindset, it means that I am not mentally feeling well about what I am going to do in the match. When that happens, I'll get riled up by anything that happens on the field. It might be verbal, or a change in the field or bowling. But when I am in that mindset, I don't care what fields are set or what is being said to me, who is bowling, whether he's coming over or around the wicket or is bowling a bouncer or whatever. That's because in my head things are very clear. That's all I need for my preparation. It's very hard to attain that zone and you need to be very calm and relaxed in how you approach a game.

So it fairly warmed the heart last Thursday when the new ICC chairman, N Srinivasan, addressed the media for the first time after taking over and, in the course of about 15 minutes of a tightly controlled interaction, was - let's put this kindly - a little loose and easy with the truth four times. Imagine the disorientation had he not.

Even if Mr Srinivasan is in the eye of the storm, he has not forced these decisions on Indian and international cricket. There is a larger institutional buy-in. Even when Lalit Modi, now Mr Srinivasan's foe, was riding high in the BCCI establishment five years ago, he was openly suggesting that cricket's hierarchy needed to be reorganised and that the ICC Future Tours Programme required a re-visit. It was becoming inevitable over the past few years that the BCCI's commercial clout in cricket needed to be formalised. Any BCCI leadership would have urged it.

Even if, as Srinivasan says, he is proven to have done nothing wrong, the fact that other members of the ICC endorsed him for the chairmanship hardly inspires confidence in their collective desire to stamp out corruption from the sport.