The Surfer

Moments before, the small group of boys and girls had been milling around a patch of hardened sand, on their unauthorised encampment in the southern Israeli desert, the Negev. Now, courtesy of five Englishmen, who have just spilled out of a van, carrying plastic wickets, plastic bats and tennis balls covered in electrical tape, they have been corralled into playing an impromptu game of cricket. Somehow, it works. The children may not realise it, but almost immediately they are experiencing the pleasure of thumping an on-drive through deep mid-wicket.

The IPL is a fun tournament and will make excellent wallpaper in sports bars around the world in years to come. But South Africans are already beginning to see it for what it is, rather than what it portrays itself to be. It is an entertainment circus, rather than a sporting one, designed primarily to enable a very small number of fabulously wealthy people to become even wealthier.

He even calls himself fake, as if sensing the general tone of the proceedings. Outside the cricket, much about the IPL itself is fake. The numbers being bandied about around it as earnings or audience, the long-term sanctity of any contract signed by its IPL leading lights, the notion that the rules really matter and are not invented on the spot (and then you think up a seven and a half minute break a few days before the event and call it a ‘strategic time-out’)

Pierce may well be correct to imply that Flintoff could have been injured just as easily playing for Lancashire, but would he have been tearing around the outfield at Hove, sliding on his injured knee to save a boundary, as he was on Thursday?

Siddle returned from South Africa with instructions to allow the stress reactions that recurred in his left foot to heal, and although he is still three weeks away from bowling, the first steps have been encouraging. "All that is actually feeling really good now. I've been running the last week and it's pulled up fine."

I've never received so much kit in my life - not even with the Proteas! I received something like 10 playing shirts, four tracksuits, caps, shoes, spikes, you name it! And all branded with the Mumbai Indians logo. I even received a 22-carat gold chain engraved with the Mumbai Indians logo. I thought I was past the stage where receiving new kit excited me but this really was something else.

Australia's biggest problem right now is that we don't have a decent spinner. On top of that, our quicks don't really understand how to bowl reverse-swing properly. If our two finger spinners in Nathan Hauritz and Jason Krejza are the best spinners we can produce, we must look for new spinning coaches because these guys are average at best.