The Surfer

One cabbie in Delhi even asked if I was going to watch India play Australia [there is a one-day game on 31 October]. When I told him I was about to watch the Daredevils, he just shook his head. At the next traffic light, he turned to me and said: "How can you watch these games? The [Indian] players are all split up. I wouldn't even know who to cheer for."

Better dress sense: Right now our parliamentarians (in their crumpled khadi whites) look like boring Test players. The new outfits will be bright, colourful, trendy and will look good on TV. Clothes, they say, maketh a man. It also maketh politicians. Incidentally, my dress code has the approval of ex-Rajasthan CM Vasundhararaje although she felt that I have to come up with something more imaginative than saffron bermudas for BJP MPs.

Dane is South Africa's legspin prodigy. She is a shade over 16 years old and she can bowl the leg break, the wrong 'un and the flipper. That's probably more than Shane Warne could do at a similar age.

But the usual English one-day weakness of a lack of power in the batting line-up cost Sussex and Somerset a chance of making any real impact in India.

Only five county batters featured in the top 50 strike rates. Luke Wright was the only Englishman to hit more than one six in the entire tournament and Wes Durston recorded the solitary county half-century.

Trescothick flew home from India last week with a "stress-related disease" and the ensuing knee-jerkery led to media outlets asking sports stars – ideally, his former team-mates – for their views. After all, they have experienced the "unique pressures" placed on our sporting heroes and are thus qualified to comment. But are they? Aren't they, in fact, the worst qualified to comment, having lived the life and, in their eyes anyway, having survived the strife? On Friday, one former footballer, speaking on one sports channel, opined: "It's especially tougher on cricketers as they are away for months at a time. No one likes being away from their loved ones. Obviously Trescothick suffers very badly in this regard." The inference was that the Somerset batsman was plagued by some intense form of homesickness. The same overture accompanied each and every report. Of course, the descriptions of Trescothick's condition had to be pithy because of space constraints. But in all the shallowness, the insult of him somehow being "weaker" was inevitably cast.

One of the most impressive things about Marcus Trescothick over the past couple of years has been his candour. When he was being badgered by the press just before the Oval Test this August he told us about the nightmare that helped confirm his decision not to pursue any sort of fairytale return to the Test team: how he dreamed that he was unable to get his cricket kit out of his bag while the rest of the side were ready and waiting for the team photograph. He did not have to share that with us. He could have just said: "I'm not available."

OPTION 1 Select James Franklin as a like-for-like straight swap.