The Surfer

It was not difficult to stay motivated. It was difficult to keep scoring runs because every day is a different day, every bowling attack is different and every surface is different. Sometimes your footwork is good, sometimes your hands are going correctly towards the ball, sometimes you are thinking right but that's not how you will feel every day. But every day, you are motivated to do well for India. And that is why I care about cricket. If you care about cricket, the rest will follow.

At home, there is an unwritten law that if I do well and records are broken, we just distribute sweets at home and keep a box of sweets in front of God and move on. Let the others talk about what I have achieved and we focus on the next game. Right from my school days, we have followed that and that works even today.

I have always been able to keep things simple because my family has played a huge role. My wife, my brother Ajit, my mother, my other brother Nitin, his wife, my uncle and aunt whom I stayed with, my coach and everybody; it's a huge army that goes with me. I represent them in the middle but it is a huge team that works together. And last but not the least, my father who played a huge role in this.

It is not only the England players who have been denied the chance to enjoy their Test victory. It is the fans too. The end result is that a man who has just delivered one of the greatest solo performances in Ashes history finds himself being jeered. It is hardly Strauss's fault that county cricket is so inept at developing one-day talent.

For Flintoff these are the Road Runner years, a fascinating period in any celebrity sportsman's life where it's clear, but only at a distance, that you've already gone skittering out over the edge of the cliff, legs pumping, held up by fame-momentum and an invisible cavalcade of agents, hangers-on, miracle oven-cleaner adverts, new tattoos and the remembered gleam of a tarnished potency.

... the state associations that exist have been fattened on grants. Any system where you are fattened on grants, you will not want to pursue excellence -- which is the bane of all sport in India, and the bane of federations in India.

Hockey, for instance, doesn't take off because hockey sits back and takes money from the government; archery sits back and gets money from the government, so they don't have to become good.

Associations don't have to become good because they sit back and get money from the BCCI. Which is why I was very excited about the franchise structure, where all Indian cricket is franchise-driven.

Currently people say the problem with the Ranji Trophy, for instance, is that no one watches Division 2, no one watches Tripura play, for instance, which is fair comment.

But if you have 15 private franchises, a Mallya, for instance, won't want to come 15th, so he will go around picking the best players for his franchise and so will the others, and suddenly the league becomes competitive, people come to watch, and when the spectators come, it becomes profitable.

The problem is not that England players can’t score runs. Look at the scores between 50 and 74 in the Ashes. There were 24 of them, of which 16 belonged to England. The problem is that no one is doing what Ricky Ponting did last night and deciding to win the game by themselves. Would Ponting try a reverse-sweep on 35, as Strauss did yesterday? Or try to reverse-paddle a second successive delivery, as Eoin Morgan did to his cost?