The Surfer

Still, unlike Obama at his oath-of-office ceremony, the new England captain has made an error-free start, speaking sensibly to the media, evading nothing and giving his first few days a grand theme - that of player responsibility. Something that would be considered so fundamental to professionalism, even to players of the most recent generation, has been waylaid in the drive to cover all bases. That such a recalibration of priorities is deemed necessary is terribly damning of paths recently taken, but, surely, asking players to take responsibility for their actions is a necessary first step.

'Maturity' was the buzzword ahead of the Australian series. What did you mean by this term?

I think the amount of time we've spent together over the last few years has allowed us to grow together as a team. There's a real family type of atmosphere in the team at the moment...as much as I'm captain and can guide the guys, each player must still deliver his own ball and score his own runs. The more they grow, the more they mature, the better they get, the better they become, and that's my philosophy.

He now has sore fingers to go with his sore back. It is this life-long passion for music and the more recent obsession with the guitar which Watson, 27, believes may be part of his life after cricket. While the talented and committed Watson will take a typically uncompromising approach to his latest round of rehabilitation on a body that continues to let him down, he is beginning to think about a future beyond bat and ball.

Operating out of a secret bunker beneath the Wanderers, Pietersen’s Cricket South Africa handlers watched as their diabolical intrigue unfolded just as they had planned. To start with, the “bats like Geoffrey Boycott’s mum” pills were proving devastatingly effective against Michael Vaughan.

It was Tendulkar who guided India to its biggest ever chase on home soil — a target of 387 against England in Chennai — a few weeks ago. But you set up the win on the fourth evening with a blistering 83 off 69 balls. Did you plan that innings?

George Orwell warned us about all this more than 60 years ago. In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, he wrote about the dangers of "a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves". He suggested that "many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning ... a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying".

The sacking of Peter Moores has derailed plans – well his plans, at any rate – and the timescale coupled with the imperative to get the appointment absolutely right next time means that there is no direct replacement as head coach. Instead, there is an old-fashioned arrangement at the top of the tree, if not further down, with the managing director of England cricket, Hugh Morris, in charge much in the manner of the tour manager of yore, and the operations manager of the team, Phil Neale, to deal with logistical matters over and above his usual duties. It is to Andy Flower that the team will look for guidance, however.

He clearly can't have enough confidence in himself to make his own decisions. You should not be asking staff what they think of management. If you ask the players to choose their captain or coach, then why do you need a managing director? If you ask players each month whom they want as captain you would have to change the captain on a monthly basis because if the skipper criticises a player, shouts at someone, leaves a couple of guys out of the team, or doesn't bowl a guy as much as he thinks he should bowl, you can bet they will not vote for him the next time there is a players' poll.

Rahul Dravid, now re-established in the team, was luckier than most simply because he was Dravid, and his image was that of a player for whom failure was a stranger.

In the current team, Yuvraj has laboured for long under the weight of his image as a casual player, unable or unwilling to buckle down to serious business. A place in the Test team seldom falls into the lap of a player, and most of those who have got that far are conscious of this. Yet some players pick up such a reputation, and few are able to shake it off.