The Surfer

We will have more wins at home, top ranking, time for auctions and an undisturbed IPL slot. We will also have batsmen who score 200s in ODIs, Test batsmen sitting on record run piles and spinners on the top of the ranking charts. So what if the batsmen will continue to show a lack of patience or skill while playing the rising ball and the bowlers will remain one dimensional. We have never won a series in Australia and South Africa, and perhaps we never will. But, thanks to our administrators, we will remain a few rungs above them on the power list. It's time officials got their due.

What, we are left to ask, does this request tell the other members of the team, especially the juniors? Will they not draw the conclusion that as long as they perform, regardless of whether they help the team cause or not (Shakib's gesture came hot on the heels of him playing an irresponsible shot when the team needed him to stay out there) they can behave in whatever way they want? As far as Shakib goes, this request and heavens forefend if it is accepted, will just serve to remind him that he continues to be above the law.

The Taylor-Knott imbroglio was not a standard, frothy, sporting back-and-forth. It was not: should the England football team line up with Ashley Cole or Leighton Baines at left-back? It meant something. Your allegiance was a revealing comment on who you were and what you stood for. It was an aesthetic judgment, perhaps even metaphysical. A vote for Taylor showed you acknowledged the labours of a fine craftsman, that you could appreciate unshowy elegance, that you weren't distracted by razzle-dazzle. A preference for Knott, meanwhile, screamed that you were an ignorant heathen.

If you look at the away scorecards of matches between 2002-07, which was a good phase, some things become apparent. For a start, the batsmen made a lot of runs; it was the coming together of an extraordinary quintet of batsmen. With Dhawan, Pujara, Kohli and Rahane, maybe that phase can return though it is best not to live with such expectation. In seven Tests in Australia and Pakistan in 2003-04, India had scores of 409, 523, 366, 705, 211-2, 675 and 600! India won three out of those seven Tests but lost two and again the scorecards tell a story. While there were sporadic individual bursts, Agarkar at Adelaide, Pathan and Balaji in Pakistan, India's bowling wasn't scaring anyone. The opposition in those Tests made 323, 284-3, 556, 558, 474, 376-6, 407 and 489. What India seem to have done well was to capitalise on opportunities created which, in the years ahead, came from shooting stars like Sreesanth, RP Singh, and from Zaheer Khan.

But it seems that the bowler we saw at the Eden Gardens and in the subsequent few matches didn't take the flight to New Zealand, for both the accuracy and the speed has been missing. While he had some success with the new ball in the ODI series, his old ball numbers (a boundary every 4th ball after 40th over) and the potency in both the Test matches was below par. He's still running in hard, the arm is still high, he's still close to the stumps and the ball is coming out okay too, yet something is a amiss. Both the consistency with regards to the off-stump channel and the pace has gone missing. When he's trying to bowl an out-swinger the ball, instead of remaining close to the off-stump, is finishing at least a foot and a half wider. The extra width allows the batsman to free his arms. And when he tries to bring it back to the right-hander, the ball drifts down the leg side for easy runs. It doesn't come as a surprise that he's looked half the bowler in NZ that he really is.

Indian sports can be divided into two categories -- cricket and the rest (that means Olympic sports). One brother, 'Srini' held the reins in cricket and 'Rami' was the master of the rest. Under normal circumstances, that would merit a headline by itself: Brothers ruling Indian sport. Alas, not all stories are fairytales.

The report of the Justice Mudgal commission deals not in philosophy but in the practice of sport. It should have lit a fire under the smug behinds of the BCCI. Yet the governing body didn't think the Indian Premier League or indeed cricket in India was in any crisis.

He's also now an event himself, which is an astounding thing to achieve over the course of six Tests. It's Mitch as appointment television. It's Mitch as default headliner and Mitch as TV news bulletin place-setter. You find yourself rushing back with a drink in time for the first ball of his over. It's a cage fight and we're all clamoring for a better look. For opponents it's more about endurance and survival than winning or losing. In those six Tests he's taken 49 wickets at 13.14 with a strike rate of 27.1, a rare case of numbers doing justice to what you're seeing with your own eyes.

For example, the bid for South African batsman Faf du Plessis was initially won by the Delhi Daredevils for Rs.4.75 crore (which might not have represented their full willingness to pay), but du Plessis's earlier employer Chennai Super Kings matched the bid at that price and bagged him.

In Wednesday's auction preview, we had mentioned that in order to get around this flaw in the auction design, "we might see a bizarre situation where only one team continues bidding on a particular player, just to dissuade his home team from using the right to match card". It appears that none of the teams noticed this flaw in the auction mechanism.

It also appears that teams didn't fully appreciate the concept of the right to match. For example, when South African all-rounder Jacques Kallis came up for auction, his former employer Kolkata Knight Riders entered the bidding, thus possibly bidding up his price, before it used a right to match card to secure his services for the next season.

"Ryder and Doug Bracewell's drinking session the night before the first test in Auckland took the gloss off an exciting win against India. That does not go down well with players, coaches and selectors who pore over computer footage late at night while Ryder and Bracewell shout their hangers-on another round of bourbon and cokes. No one wants to see Ryder self-destruct but at some stage he has to accept some responsibility. The timing of his latest slip-up is poor, with the IPL auction on tomorrow night (5pm NZ time) but perhaps it is a blessing in disguise."