The Surfer

There have been so many produced with the titles 'My Autobiography' or 'My Story' over the past 10 years that I have started to suspect that it's gone beyond a claim for definitiveness and has become the crudest Amazon search engine optimisation strategy. Pretty soon all autobiographies will just be called 'The Book'.

Of all the measures being contemplated, the one that can achieve the result of quickening up the game without totally destroying its fabric is to send a fieldsman off while the team's over-rate remains at an unsatisfactory low. Sounds dramatic? Maybe.

Lord’s has yet to be given any indication that its requirements are deemed disproportionate, but while its desire to do everything possible to ensure the safety of its players is understandable, the fact that neither cricket nor cricketers have been targeted on the sub- continent gives rise to the suspicion that the Mumbai atrocities have resulted in a high degree of paranoia among England players and officials.

“Although what happened in Bombay was tragic, these acts of terrorism are not isolated,” the expert said. “Over the past two or three years it has been a regular feature of life in India. People are shocked by the events of last week, but I am not. It is a volatile, uncertain country and if anybody thinks that one part is safer than any other, they are living in a dreamworld.”

They won, in fact, each of their first six games after 9/11, thrilling their fans and delighting the city as they did so. Back pages were again filled with headlines about the 'Miracle Mets'. Their hitter Mike Piazza commented: "we expect to win every game right now ... because we're playing completely relaxed, even during what should be the most tense of circumstances."

The Imran Khan interview was sold to the Afternoon Despatch & Courier newspaper for which we got paid Rs 200. This financial windfall was celebrated with a lavish gesture we believed emperors would struggle to match. We ascended the marble steps of the Taj foyer (more jauntily than we had ever done), walked right past our favourite lobby sofas, past what we imagined to be the astonished posse of security and sashayed into the Shamiana.

A Bradman bat sold recently at the height of the global financial crisis for a world record A$145,000; "The Don" is still defying convention. "This is the single most valuable item we've ever auctioned — sporting, Australiana, across the board," Charles Leski said before the December 15 auction.

At a wretched time such as India is now enduring, sport has a role to play. It did after after World War II in England, it did after the tsunami in Sri Lanka and it does now. It was not cricket's fault that the bullets and bombs rained down in Mumbai, but cricket can help to begin the process of soothing and rebuilding. India needs to play cricket now and it needs the world to play with it.

During his frequent injury-induced absences from the game, Flintoff appears to have forgotten the art of batting. Bell, Collingwood, Owais Shah, Bopara, Prior and the rest made guest appearances at the crease and disappeared. On the bowling front, James Anderson conceded more than six runs per over and after four matches was yet to take a wicket. And he is their opening bowler! ... Add to their troubles the slow turners, sight screens which seldom worked properly, light which faded around 4 pm, the stupid refusal to switch on the lights and get on with the game.