The Surfer

Yes, fine, but did this assume that England, so grateful to have his at times Herculean services, would suspend all the normal rules of selection, not to mention the obligation of care that normally attends the training and preparation of both human and equine sports stars? One racing insider was aghast yesterday at some of the comments from the Flintoff camp. "In any decent yard," he said, "what was being proposed for Freddie Flintoff just wouldn't, couldn't happen to a horse."

WADA spends millions of dollars on research. So why isn’t it possible to come up with an alternative way for out-of-competition testing? The practical issues around administering out-of-competition testing are also amusing, considering many of India's sportspersons have their roots in villages and often visit them, the addresses given out could be as unidentifiable as taal no 3, or quila no 6, near jhulli walan gali, Gandhi Nagar. Indian villages are not completely mapped or on GPS like the western world and finding such locations is quite impossible without the entire village knowing about outsiders looking very lost.

Tharoor proudly claimed that he wrote about Sachin Tendulkar in the late 1980s in the Club Cricketer magazine in England, after Sunil Gavaskar had talked to him about this young gun who could become a great. Tharoor told a few of us how he wrote that Gavaskar had led very poorly during the home series against David Gower's Englishmen in 1984-85.

Is everything fair game – from fraudulent messages that cause players mental agony to blackmail to threat of physical violence? All in the name of “doing their bit” for the team? Just ahead of a Ranji Trophy match years ago, some “fans” attempted to beat up Tamil Nadu’s star all rounder Robin Singh to prevent him from playing. But he escaped, and although shaken played the match. Is that the direction in which fandom is heading?

They were a rabble, an ill-tempered bunch of no-hopers and the decline was so steep, so unbroken in every phase of the match that mattered, it was impossible not to conclude that it will take a lot more than a miraculous flight to Lourdes by Flintoff and Pietersen to restore the damage – and any competitive balance to an Ashes series which some of the more romantically inclined believed was within England's grasp on Friday morning.

An obviously class act as a batsman, intelligent and without the skeletons in the cupboard that put paid to Shane Warne’s captaincy ambitions, he has merely had to sit at the right hand of the man at the helm and listen and learn. When the time comes, though, Clarke’s elevation to the captaincy may be seen as a departure as he lacks the spit-and-sawdust style of Ponting, Waugh and Border.