The Surfer

Batsmen, over the last several years, have become accustomed to changing it like that. This is a fine point — little should be detracted from what batsmen have achieved in the last decade and a half in limited-overs cricket. They haven’t been undeserving Shylocks extracting their pounds of flesh. Why, just on Sunday, Tendulkar, Yuvraj Singh, and Jesse Ryder batted uncommonly well. Each shone with a gem-like flame; the variety and richness of the stroke-making was of the highest order. But there’s no doubt the bowlers have been compromised.

Four peculiarities of cricket weighed against all these men, and many others besides. One is that a cricket team is relatively small, and made up of specialists. Only two opening batsmen can be picked at a time, four middle-order batsmen, three seam bowlers, but perhaps only one spinner and certainly only one wicketkeeper. It means that even for a struggling team, wholesale change is rare.

West Indies were clinging on tenaciously in the face of some beautiful, controlled spin bowling from Monty Panesar, on whom most of all, the evidence thus far suggests, rest England's hopes of squaring the series, and mercurial pace from Amjad Khan, who produced some wicked deliveries, one of which disposed of Ramnaresh Sarwan in between giving Matt Prior a torrid time behind the stumps.

At first, the significance of what I saw didn’t sink in. We are sportsmen and especially in the Asian region, the reaction that we are accustomed to is one of adulation, where fans seek autographs and some of them even want to touch and feel us. Who, therefore, would want to carefully take aim and fire at us?

Doubts were expressed last week about the second IPL taking place. But Muttiah Muralitharan, due to play with Andrew Flintoff for Chennai Super Kings, joked that he is "going to wear a bulletproof jacket for future journeys on team buses". All the Sri Lankans signed for the IPL will, at this stage, go to India – Thilan Samaraweera, the most badly injured, is not contracted – because they believe security in India will be far tighter than in Pakistan.

Test cricket is already reaching for the snorkel and flippers in its Canute-like attempt to stem the inrushing tide of Twenty20 and, with only a draw needed in Trinidad to win the series, here we have the West Indies appearing to have removed the responsibility for the playing surface from the head groundsman and called in a local undertaker to prepare it with an injection of embalming fluid.