The Surfer

But at least Australia tried to play the ball. For the South Africans, their display of non-resistance suggested a serious mental block. For players of this quality to make such basic mistakes, the whole dressing room must have entered a state of blue funk.

In most other countries, being a pitch curator is a career option. You decide early, study the science behind the art, and spend time as an assistant before the ground is finally handed over to you. The job ensures enough money for a home and a car, and the responsibility that what you are producing is yours alone — no instructions from the board’s head honchos, no suggestions from the team’s captain, and no unreasonable last-minute requests from a spinner or an opening batsman that can’t be turned down.

The Future England Captain thing was something that Mike Atherton was stuck with from a young age and I'm not sure that being in charge of the team in Bangladesh should be top of Cook's list of priorities right now.

The worst thing that can accrue from those reactions from this Test series is to lull the West Indies Cricket Board regime into a false sense of security, into believing it can relax and do nothing to speed up the development of its young players, thinking those encouraging displays will blossom by themselves. Just like previous administrations did, when they expected world class players to fall from the sky when the Dream Team of the 1980s ended its superlative run on top of the world.

The answer to such things is to professionalise matters. It's the only way to bring in accountability. Under the existing system, the secretaries, curators, pitch committee none can be held accountable. Get the pros in, make them accountable and you will see the changes happening for the good.

In these quarters, O'Brien and Bond's decisions have been greeted with extreme disappointment, because the players have opted out of a golden opportunity, for them and their team. What was shaping as a terrific contest might now be a dud. That the great and the good around cricket seem so resigned to their departure, and almost supportive, makes it doubly disappointing.

But the biggest changes have come in the pace of the tour off the field. Part of the charm of the MCC film is cine taken by Trevor Bailey and others of the extracurricular fun. We see them, between matches, big-sea fishing, visiting the Victoria Falls, relaxing on the beach and hacking round a golf course. Colin Cowdrey plays the fool before the camera. Jim Laker, who had a deflating tour after his triumphant Ashes series the previous summer, spoons his way out of a bunker, fag in mouth, phlegmatic as ever.

His most important ally, however, is off the field. It is not a human either. It is Hawk-Eye. The increasing acceptance of the ball-tracking system is inducing umpires to give more batsmen out lbw. In fact, this decade is the first in the history of Test cricket when more batsmen have been dismissed lbw than bowled. Hawk-Eye first appeared on TV screens in 2001.

It's equally likely that they suffered, for a large part of the decade, at the hands of India's most successful captain. All through his career, Sourav Ganguly had treated opposition left-arm spinners with such disdain that there was a theory he didn't particularly rate them very highly. Ganguly himself says it was more to do with the presence of Kumble and Harbhajan, than his disdain for the art. But with India looking for match-winning options post Kumble, Dhoni has shown no reluctance to include them in his search for a successor.