The Surfer

With the hitting power that permeates through this team, McCullum's true value to his side is in the time he can spend at the crease. This is something I feel he may have forgotten and he sold himself short in trying to demonstration his potential destructive abilities.

From an uncertain performer always on the fringe of hitting his stride to a mature bowler the Indians now rely on. He forms one half of what some call the best new ball-pair in the world, whose presence gives the Indian bowling attack its heft and will make all opposition think twice about loading their decks in bowlers’ favour.

His refusal to endorse Pietersen's broadside at Stanford seemed significant to me. Flintoff is too decent and honest a character to make retrospective judgements in public about a man whose money he was happy to accept, and even as I prodded him for his feelings about Giles Clarke and David Collier of the England and Wales Cricket Board, who refuse to acknowledge their craven foolishness in hooking the reputation of English cricket to the rotor blades of the Texan's hired helicopter, I knew that I would get nowhere. "That's not my business, that's got nothing to do with me," he said, understandably, when I asked whether he would like to have seen Clarke and Collier resign. Fair enough, but did he hold private opinions? "Not really."

Our main tactic was to try and bore Tendulkar out, keep him off strike, disrupt his momentum, contain him as much as we could. We were only moderately successful, and the same goes for Dravid, a similar type of runmaker. Tendulkar's average is much the same here as it is anywhere else, even if he wasn't perhaps as fluid in his strokemaking here as he was at home or somewhere like Australia, where conditions are more to his liking. Greats like Tendulkar and Dravid know how to adapt. They will make runs anywhere. It is unrealistic to expect to dominate them.

West Indies are up against it now. To score 401 just to avoid the prospect of following-on is no easy task, even though the pitch has scarcely a mark worth calling a blemish. They were 85 for one last night, with Devon Smith (37 not out) and Ramnaresh Sarwan (40 not out) well ensconced. But for them, this will be a psychological battle as much as a technical one, the loss of Gayle a hammer blow at the end of two cataclysmic days in the field.

South Africa has played Test cricket since 1889, was, with England and Australia, a foundation member of the then Imperial Cricket Conference in 1909 and its black and coloured communities of the Western Cape have a rich but largely unknown cricket history spanning more than a century. For all this, only occasionally does cricket engage across the numerous divides of one of the most complex, compartmentalised and politicised societies on Earth.

The first casualty of recession is often gratuitous glitz and glamour and that is how it has proved in cricket's newest form of the game. Twenty20 cricket is not going to die - but it is going to have its wings clipped. It may have to survive on its product as much as its rowdy bells and whistles.

Slater's own explanation, according to someone who talked to him about it, is that the filmmakers wanted to include an answer that was obviously wrong - and Slater's name was the one chosen. Why? Maybe because the movie's writer, Simon Beaufoy, who is English and presumably follows cricket, happened to see Slater commentating on a cricket telecast around the time he was working on the screenplay.

Solid players there [at No. 5 and 6] allow the first three the option of taking the odd liberty with the bowling aware that there will not be a slide that sees the team six down with eight overs to play. And yet five and six must also be able to produce the big shots in the end. From that point of view alone it made sense to send Rohit Sharma at number four allowing two inventive players in Yuvraj and Dhoni to man the crucial positions.

The following people were disappointed: Hughes, his parents on their first overseas trip, the team-mates so desperate to see Hughes succeed and the beer drinkers at the pub in Macksville. The reason for the angst in Hughes' home town? Free beer at the local watering hole until his dismissal. The revelry lasted two minutes.