The Surfer

Strauss, since September, has had no match-practice apart from three quick innings in Antigua but, as he said after his century, a fresh mind was more than adequate compensation. The pitch has been essentially slow, except on the few occasions the ball has spat (at Ian Bell and Graeme Swann), and Strauss was able to learn how to walk again, before running, by quietly picking up his first 31 runs of the match on the legside.

South Africa have not lost a series since they toured Sri Lanka in 2006 so they have every right to be bullish. But do they really believe they can win against Australia? They have never managed a series victory against them in eight attempts since their readmission to world cricket ... In this era South Africa have won just one Test in Australia - in Sydney on the 1993-94 tour. In all, these teams have played 25 Tests against one another since readmission, Australia have won 15, South Africa four. So we can understand how the phoney war is playing out.

The biggest concern is our bowling unit. We have POTENTIALLY the most devastating attack in world cricket, but there is some distance to go before we reach that potential.

So at the changeover Tony Greig called his bowlers, Imran Khan, Garth le Roux, Mike Proctor and myself, and said, “You see what they have done to Majid? We will get them back.” Well, just like us, the Windies struggled with the wicket; it was just so damn quick.

Anyway at about 75 for 9, with four balls left in the over, Joel Garner came out to bat. Tony shouted across to me, “I want four bouncers.” My first ball was a bouncer and it was a good one, it was going straight for Joel’s Adam’s apple (laughs). It smashed into his hand, sent his bat to midwicket and his gloves almost to extra cover. Joel just turned, picked up his bat, his gloves and walked off the field.

At Brisbane, it rained so hard the Gabba was reduced to a lake. The next morning, play started on time at 10am. Yesterday, despite there being nary a spittle of rain since the previous evening, a ball was not delivered until 2.45pm.

“Actually, that’s a myth. We’re not good friends at all, I just pretend to get on with him because he’s bloody fast and I don’t want him to hurt me in the nets. Fortunately, he’s very gullible so it wasn’t hard to convince him that we were mates,” Harris says, deadpan.

“He can be a bit hot-headed — much like me a few years ago. I think I know my way around his control panel, I know which buttons to push. He needs calming down more than firing up but there was one time, against New Zealand, when he was a bit flat. So I walked over to him and slapped him, hard! He was furious, really pissed off. But he couldn’t kill me so he killed them — they were 97-7 at lunch,” Harris says, chuckling.

In the climactic scene, Warne/Perfect cavorts with a fluorescent stump, à la the cricketer's uninhibited celebration of retaining the Ashes on the Trent Bridge balcony 13 years ago. Treading softly on to the stage, the man himself looked rather more abashed, mainly because this was hardly his crowd.

These days, though, he starts so slowly that all the momentum generated by the helter-skelter opening partnership of Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir is inevitably lost. And all too often a couple of hours of toil is followed by a lapse and the sort of stroke that he would not even have contemplated in his halcyon days.

Has the younger brigade passed him by? That would seem to be the case though Kartik at 32 is still fit, hungry for success and as competitive as ever. He is still determined to play for the country and is only eager to be given an opportunity. His overall figures are not bad – 24 wickets from eight Tests at just over 34 apiece. Moreover, he is a bowler in the classical mould.

The meltdown came even as IPL team owners were taking stock, glumly accepting that their projections were wide of the mark. The CEO of one of the IPL teams would privately admit, months before the meltdown, that the picture painted to his franchise was rosier than it actually was, that the talk of break-even timelines and monetising opportunities didn't have a strong basis. The downturn has now forced several rethinks and mid-course corrections.

I'm all for introducing scientific rigour into sport wherever possible. It would be mad not to. Modern training techniques have undoubtedly made players stronger, fitter and more powerful. Some areas of sport do suit quantitative analysis. But data and measurements get us only so far – the human dimension never goes away. In our computer age, when information is getting easier, cheaper and more worthless by the minute, we should be wary of allowing ourselves to become slaves to what the computer tells us are 'the answers'. Systems shouldn't become a cop-out from judgements.