The Surfer

The traditionalists feel under threat again, but maybe the Packer experience tells us not to fret too much. Change can be beneficial and the advent of the IPL, along with so many other incomplete Twenty20 schemes, is hastening that change. Before Modi had his bright idea there was plenty wrong with the international calendar: too many sterile fixtures at Test level watched by nobody; too many ODIs, whose results are forgotten within hours. There is now a better chance of changing all that.

England have rightly made a virtue of loyalty in the past few years. Recently, this has seemed to reach obsessive heights, especially with regard to the batting. The only notable amendment has been the omission of Michael Vaughan and that, originally at least, was of his own doing.

The conference has been organised by the England and Wales Cricket Board, and it is a good idea. But there would have been much less need for it if only they had heeded the two key recommendations of the Schofield Report, which they themselves commissioned after the last Ashes debacle.

Reduce the amount of cricket which the England team have to play so they can focus on quality instead of quantity; and do the same at domestic county level.

Of course, a bunch of bored schoolboys armed with a calculator and with access to www.cricinfo.com might have surely done a better job than the honourable experts to whom the ICC chose to hand over the job. As an exercise in ranking the finest players in history, this one was as arbitrary and subjective and flawed as it could have possibly been.

While, predictably, most of the ire directed at the ICC from these shores was caused by the ‘injustice’ done to a little man from Mumbai who the ICC masterminds slotted in at No.26 in the list of batsmen, my own reaction on spotting a familiar name at No.59 in the list of bowlers bordered on temporary insanity — I just couldn’t stop laughing.

Sun-Herald: How did Ricky Ponting react when you told him you were retiring?

"I'm in that dressing room. I don't need to read about it. Everyone's going on about cliques and this and that. I suppose there are. You get put together as a group of people. The one thing you've got in common is that you play cricket. Within that, you'll get on better with someone. That's not to the detriment of the side. That's how it is. If you're in an office or any other walk of life you get on better with some than others and that's how the England team works. When you get on the pitch we're all fighting for the same outcome. We want to win games of cricket. I really don't see it being a problem."

Which rather invited the question of who they had placed above him (Hayden). Sadly for the PR in question, not Sachin Tendulkar. In fact, in a bizarre turn, Tendulkar was 16 places beneath Hayden. A mistake. I imagine that the look on the PR's face was a little like those I last saw being worn by the Volkswagen people when they roped a bunch of journalists up for a press junket in which we stood and watched Ravi Bopara accidently flip over a 4x4 by pulling a doughnut on a downhill slope.