The Surfer

It would be unfair to expect any man to concentrate on line and length while he's preoccupied with the presence of several cauliflower-like florets where no cauliflower-like florets were ever meant to be, so it is heart‑warming to hear that the PCB has at least left its wayward son in no fewer than three pairs of good and presumably gloved hands. In a scene that calls to mind a trio of match umpires inspecting the contents of a box of cricket balls, their three-man medical board has declared that although Shoaib will not be participating in the World Twenty20 his condition should be reassessed. Presumably by all three of them and possibly on prime-time TV.

The ideal way to go about it is to have five batsmen, a keeper and a batting all-rounder in the top 7. If there is a second batting all-rounder in that mix, it is even better. No 8 must necessarily be a bowling all-rounder and of the three bowlers, one should be able to bat. India’s top seven are well served on this parameter with Sehwag, Gambhir, Raina, Yuvraj, Rohit Sharma, Dhoni and Yusuf Pathan. Irfan Pathan must be No 8 and with Harbhajan likely to get in, the batting looks like it has enough to counter most situations.

True, Ricky does have a few people we have heard of in his team: Brett Lee, Stuart Clark, Simon Katich, Michael Hussey (although I would be wary of including anyone nicknamed “Mr Cricket”). The trouble is that these players have spent all their lives as No 2s, expecting others to carry the weight. The new reality of becoming alpha males will test these aged understudies.

Hughes was approached at the back-end of last year as a promising domestic player who had yet to play international cricket. Actually it was Middlesex's bad luck that his profile went through the roof in South Africa and with it his share value. Hughes was a brilliant signing who would have played a full season but became too successful at the wrong time.

Whatever may be the level of the game, it is imperative that a captain must know his players. Tendulkar, Pietersen and McCullum didn’t seem to know the strengths and weaknesses of their players to counter the strategies of the opposition.

No, the Stanford fiasco could have been included but wasn't. Instead, Clarke's three-page chairman's statement concentrates on such issues as a lucrative new media deal, a rise in attendances at county matches and the success of the England women's team, but there is no reference to the 100 hours of talks with Stanford that presaged various deals worth eye-watering amounts of money (if only it had materialised) or the defeat to Stanford's Superstars on November 1 which meant each England player missed out on $1m.

If the captain does not care, why should the players? Chris Gayle deserves some sympathy for the way this tour was foisted upon his team when he and others had prior arrangements, but that is where the sympathy should stop. Captaincy, in no small measure, is about sacrificing yourself for something bigger and leading by example.

The upshot is a tournament that smacks of overkill and has little hope of competing with the IPL as the world's leading Twenty20 competition. And, if the below-par crowds at the start of this year's Twenty20 Cup are anything to go by, the P20 risks diluting the impact of both tournaments.