The Surfer

What is it about women's cricket? This is, after all, the game's showcase. It can only be the poor public perception and, alas, perception is everything. It is entertaining but try telling that to anyone, let alone convincing them to come along.
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In women's sport, various codes have been unfairly branded as enclaves of hard-nosed lesbians. My first response to that is: who cares? However, it simply doesn't apply. Just as we tell our kids not to generalise with nations, the same applies to sporting codes. Maybe women's cricket still suffers from a lingering element of that perception. Good on Cricket Australia and Cricket NSW for using the likes of Ellyse Perry to try to break that stereotype. The women deserve more respect.

What is the toughest game you’ve had to umpire?

Quite simply, the captain has to be worth his place in the side as a player. There is no room (or ought not to be), as Michael Vaughan ultimately found out, and before him Nasser Hussain and Michael Atherton, for a captain just to maintain continuity. This is not to say that Strauss cannot adapt. His absence from the team after the World Cup, was predicated in part on his own basic decline in form that has taken 18 months to rectify

I've said before that the England coaching role is the top job in world cricket because of the scrutiny you come under and the expectations involved. I find it odd that the England and Wales Cricket Board needed to employ a firm of headhunters to get their man, but now that's the case you would imagine an impressive CV would be one of the chief requirements. I know Flower has worked a bit with Essex, but surely the ECB are looking for more than that. I may be wrong. Flower may be worth a gamble. But the facts are that England have so far struggled against a pretty ordinary side out in the Caribbean. If by the end of the one-day series there are still no signs of improvement, it would feel very strange indeed to name Flower as coach.

Two things continue to hold back England’s one-day cricket, one that can be sorted out with enough will and one that cannot. Dodgy weather is a hindrance, producing pitches that favour honest trundlers and batsmen wary of hitting through the line of the ball, both a rare breed in winning international teams. But New Zealand have a similar problem and when Strauss did service for Northern Districts two winters ago he proclaimed the standard of New Zealand’s domestic one-day cricket to be far superior to England’s.

The New Zealand cricket press has reacted by calling BCCI officials “travelling goons”. Rude words those, but look what the BCCI’s doing by enforcing such degrees of separation from the ICL. It is actually ordering cricketers to be put out of work — not just from the field but also places as removed as television studios.

Angus Fraser: I want the series to leave a similar mark on the game as the 2005 encounter, and if that is to be the case we need two well prepared and evenly matched sides lining up against each other in Cardiff on 8 July. Indeed, if the ECB were so worried about the first Test why is it being played in Cardiff, a virgin Test arena and therefore a ground where Strauss' side will feel as unfamiliar as the opposition? There is the small matter of the Twenty20 World Cup, too. The Indian board did not seem too worried about England's top players gaining valuable experience in the IPL before the tournament.

Justin Langer once felt sorry for batsmen. Now he feels sorry for umpires. Darrell Hair believes the system is overturning good decisions and Channel Nine fears that it will further hinder an already slow game. While the cricket community appears to broadly endorse the concept of using more technology to improve decision-making in Test cricket, the reality is that as many problems have been created as solved.

Lahorites are also over the moon that hundreds of fur-clad Mongolians have travelled all the way from their distant country to watch their team play its first-ever cricket match. The fact that nobody in Mongolia knows anything about the game is another matter. It doesn't bother Lahorites that there are no Michael Holdings or Javed Miandads in the Mongolian team. What has the good people of Lahore dizzy with delight is the enthusiasm being displayed by the Mongolians for the forthcoming match.
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Pakistan Cricket Board officials, however, are worried sick that something might happen to the Mongolian team. That's why they have decided to hold the match in the Lahore Fort, instead of in the Gaddafi Stadium. As a further precautionary measure, the PCB has arranged for the Mongolian team to stay at an undisclosed underground facility. The walls of the secret facility are 10 feet thick and are made of heavily steel-reinforced concrete.