The Surfer

At the match presentation after Kings XI Punjab and the Delhi Daredevils game, in the middle of the suits, jeans and polyester T-shirts, stood the yellow-robed, long-haired His Holiness Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev. Alongside him, in front of the perspex sponsors board, were His Luminous Loudness Ravi Shastri, Her Perpetual Perkiness Preity Zinta, His Loopy Loquaciousness Niranjan Shah and His Humble Anonymousness (gentleman in King’s XI gear). To hear LL Shastri utter the words “His Holiness” was like listening to the Pope holler, “Yo, who de maan, maan?” but LL did ensure that HH could smoothly hand over cardboard cheque and acrylic trophy that was the Maximum Sixes Award to Irfan Pathan.

I’m hoping we reach the final again, and we get India again and of course this time round we manage to win. We have a strong side, just recently we beat Australia in the 20/20 format and we are due to play a domestic tournament before coming to the UK. This way we get enough practise, only thing is the conditions will be a bit different here so we’ll need to adjust quickly. But I’m hopeful we have the type of batsmen which can adapt their game, they’re definitely mature enough to adapt.

“I played cricket until I was 16 and sort of lost interest. One of my mates played baseball, and he asked me to come along to a tryout. The coaches said, 'Oh, you're tall, you want to get on the mound?' Because I played cricket, I obviously had a stronger arm than the other kids. And all of a sudden it was, 'Who's this Josh kid?' “

"Cricket in Australia is like baseball here - it's huge. So I went pretty much from the biggest sport to the smallest sport, which was pretty ridiculous for many. When I signed to play baseball in America, my friends were like, 'Baseball?' "

There was enough in Broad's pre-lunch scalping of Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ramnaresh Sarwan to suggest that the sun will shine often enough this ­summer on Broad's side of the street. He cracked the old crab Chanderpaul with an ­excellent off-cutter, delivered at 80mph from around the wicket, and then, in his persistent desire to make things happen, indulged in a well-timed bouncer or two against Sarwan.

For England’s batsmen there has been no similarity at all between playing West Indies and Australia, except when Edwards has been steaming in, and in this second Test he has only done so at Anderson as the two have wound each other up. A celebration featuring a pelvic thrust was Edwards’s reaction to dismissing England’s nightwatchman, but thereafter the tourists’ strike bowler dedicated himself to chastity, and it was Anderson who had the final words with his three evening wickets.

It seemed inevitable that Strauss would be dismissed by Gayle's bowling on the first morning of the current Test. And, as the England captain slouched off, he did look like someone who sleeps with Chris on his mind, a man who turns on the light in the wee hours and sees Chris staring back at him in the bathroom mirror, who pours his Shreddies at daybreak and glances down to find he's raising a spoonful of tiny sugar-frosted Chris's to his mouth.

Cricket is the summer game and the best exposure it gets is when it is being played in short-sleeved shirts under a cloudless sky. We all know the weather in the United Kingdom can never be guaranteed, but there are times when there is a greater chance of the sun shining and the temperature reaching 20 degrees, and early May is not one of them. Those who have recently tripped over cricket whilst flicking through the channels at home must sit there and wonder what pleasure these supporters get from such an experience. Looking at the body language of an apathetic West Indies team it is clear they are not enjoying it either.

If you tried to get inside Afghan society, you'd discover some interesting reasons for this lack of enthusiasm. The first is that the players are not only all Pashtun but also come from the east of the country. In Afghanistan's tribal society, the team's success was interpreted as a sign of Pashtuns' special privileges in the social and political spheres. Afghans, who tend to perceive everything through racial and tribal filters, do not regard a team whose members belong to a single ethnicity as a team representing the nation.

Sitting before me in a warehouse in an enterprise park in Manchester, incongruously, are two men whose form and fitness could determine whether this sporting summer is a vintage one for these islands. Shane Williams, rugby union superstar, and Andrew Flintoff, cricketing colossus, have never met before, yet there is plenty of common ground. They were born in the same year, 1977, and together they have a chance of making history, or at least of achieving something never done in their lifetimes. Not since 1971 in New Zealand have the British and Irish Lions won a series in the same year that England's cricketers have captured the Ashes, winning what are surely the two supreme battles for sporting supremacy between the British Isles and the old outposts of empire.