The Surfer

Nothing is against the rules in this self-proclaimed brave new cricket world, because there are none. In most sports, some sort of eligibility criteria apply. In Twenty20, McCullum can make his debut for New South Wales in a final.

For two years, Osborne's parents, Chris and Kerry, would drive her from their Tamworth home to Sydney so she could play each Sunday for the NSW under-19 side. The trip was four-and-a-half hours each way and by the time the Osbornes reached home it was often 1am on Monday, giving them just a few hours of sleep before waking for work.

Twenty-overs cricket has changed the hierarchy of the game. It has also encouraged nations to open doors. Lots of Australians tootle off to India in search of their fortunes. Immersed in hypocrisy, even blasts cannot deter them. Lots of foreign sportsmen try their luck Down Under. Dwight Yorke has turned out for Sydney FC. Irishmen have illuminated various footy sides, Poms bolster league line-ups, foreign nags enter lucrative antipodean races, a Japanese horse won the Melbourne Cup a few years ago and so forth. Australian sport survived. Often standards were raised.

Interestingly, India go to Sri Lanka with five seamers. That is at least one too many and seems to reinforce the suggestion that a couple of them have been picked so that they can be with the coach and the trainer and start getting ready for New Zealand. Having said that there is a fair amount of flexibility in the side with one of the seamers, Irfan Pathan, and one of the spinners, Ravi Jadeja, capable of batting in the middle order. So India could play either Pathan brother at number seven with Jadeja at eight and accordingly play either another spinner and two new ball bowlers or three quicks.

Official reasons for his omission claim the 30-year-old's fitness has been a problem in the past, with him not up to the level of a franchise cricketer, let alone an international cricketer. While that was possibly true in the past, I struggle to see how a player can score 153 after fielding 50 overs for the South African A team and not suffer any cramps can be regarded as unfit.

More than most players, I suspect, Hayden benefited from continuity, not just of his own selection but of others. During his peak of proficiency, he paired up with Justin Langer; they became as familiar and inseparable as a pirate and his parrot. It's a factor in matters of team composition that selectors would do well to heed: a player is not just a sum of his abilities, but also his relationships with comrades. And no cricketer is so dependent on another as an opening batsman on his partner.

It was by magic carpet that they arrived in St Kitts today for the start of their 10-week tour of the West Indies. Or, at least, a magic carpet of sorts, a Boeing 747 with the Virgin logo spilling all over its tail, as if it had just snagged its famous owner's hot-air balloon. It was magic because Flight VS29 was not meant to go to St Kitts at all, but Barbados. It was rerouted for the specific purpose of unloading the 16 England cricketers and support staff whose tour starts with a three-day fixture against a St Kitts XI on 25 January.

As an example of what that phrase "team spirit" means in practice, just look at the washed-out one-day match between England and Australia at Edgbaston in 2005, when Matthew Hayden exploded into a rage after being hit on the shoulder by Simon Jones' wayward shy at the stumps in his follow-through, and Jones' team-mates rushed to his defence. "It was a big statement on our behalf. In other times, we would probably have all shuffled back to our places," observed Marcus Trescothick in his book Coming Back To Me. "This time four or five of us rushed to the scene to back Simon up." England cannot afford to be "shuffling back to their places" now.

By the time the Royals romped home, Jadeja had 36 from 25 balls, and though Watson was the star of the show, the two Shanes – Warne being the other – lavished praise on the 19-year-old left-hander. "We identified him as a special talent straight away," said Warne, while Watson was just as complimentary: "He was hitting it wherever he wanted, against bowlers of the quality of Brett Lee." Warne later had the headline writers in a tizzy by referring to Jadeja as a "superstar in the making". Nine months on, the rave reviews don't look as ridiculous.