The Surfer

With the possible exception of Vatican City missionaries and Peter Sterling's barber, Australian selectors have held down the cushiest posts of the past decade. A superstar line-up, coupled with mediocre international competition, left the panel with little to do but maintain the status quo and watch as the Australian cricket juggernaut vanquished all before them. Fishing with dynamite, you might say.

Shane Warne is a different matter. It is not only the absence of the man himself that is mourned but the non-appearance of the promised generation of Warne wannabes. Where are all the young wrist spinners with surfer haircuts that seemed certain to queue to replace their hero? The leg-spinning revolution was a romantic notion and should have been a fitting legacy, but it has withered on the vine.

I've been at Middlesex for eight seasons now and Compton is obviously a household name in that part of the world. It is something I got used to. Maybe it has been a sub-conscious thing, perhaps it was more pressure than I needed. I'm my own player and people realise that. I think one of the reasons was to get away from that, disconnect with the UK. Come here in relative obscurity.

It's a simple line: if what you are going to do in the name of aggression is going to harm the team's interests, then don't do it no matter what. That's all.

One famous victim was Sunil Gavaskar of Bombay University in 1970. He describes in his autobiographical 'Sunny Days' how he shouted to his partner Ramesh Nagdev that he had learnt to read Mumtaz, only to be completely fooled by one that looked like a perfect Chinaman but went the other way ... There was a brief moment in cricket history when fame and fortune flirted with Mumtaz Hussain, teasing him and cheating him in the end. He had just completed taking 48 wickets for the season in Rohinton Baria, a record until then, and had been included in the Board President's team to play against the touring West Indies led by Gary Sobers. The other left arm spinner in the squad answered to the name of Bishan Singh Bedi, a young bowler of immense promise. The chairman of selectors was former Test off spinner and captain Ghulam Ahmed, intent on being seen to be scrupulously fair as a selector. When it came to a choice between Bedi and Mumtaz, the local boy naturally lost out, or so the story goes.

It was assumed Stuart Clark and Brett Lee would be around to carry Australia's attack into the 2009 Ashes tour and beyond. They were earmarked as anchormen of the next generation. But life can change quickly when your team fades at the seams. Days become longer, the workload more taxing. The body feels five years older than it is.

Bradman and Tendulkar have much in common, the most significant being that they were the repository of all knowledge of the batsmanship of their time... You could go to Sourav Ganguly for the cover drive, VVS Laxman for the on-drive, Rahul Dravid for the square cut, Kevin Pietersen for the lofted drive and so on. Or you could get them all under one roof, as it were, with Tendulkar.

Even today, at cricket conversations, people ask me if it is true that TE told Gavaskar during the Australia-New Zealand tour what was wrong with his (Sunil’s) backlift, and if that is what cost him (TE) his career! I find it difficult to believe that even TE was capable of such effrontery or that it could have made any difference to Sunil Gavaskar’s attitude to his cricket. Of course, another story that has done the rounds since that tour, is even more spectacularly funny: that of TE landing in Australia and informing the press, ‘Tell Dennis Lillee TE has arrived!’