The Surfer

As I said, the most important thing about Stanford was not the money but actually getting the players tuned up for India. One of the key skills about an England tour to the sub-continent is having your moaning in really tip-top order, so that when you arrive, you’re ready to hit the ground complaining.

According to Giles Clarke, chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, one of the principal purposes of last week's game in Antigua was to break America. "We have to see if we can develop that market," Clarke said, which suggests those involved in last week's events have learned nothing from the experience of the Pro Cricket League. Even worse, they have learned nothing from Stanford's experiment in Fort Collins, Colorado, earlier this year, when he spent £2m (£250 per head) on trying to get the locals interested in the game. Its success can be judged by the opening paragraph of a recent story in the town's paper: "When it comes to cricket - at least as far as Fort Collins is concerned - it's nothing but crickets."

In sport, as in life, some things are just not meant to be. Just ask David Beckham, who departed for Milan last week, disillusioned no doubt that "soccer" has failed to replace baseball as the national pastime or NFL as the national obsession. What he has realised, and what Stanford and Clarke will come to realise if they continue to chase their illusionary American dream, is that the only thing worse than having no ambition is having too much ambition.

Ganguly was that rare thing: an upper-class streetfighter. He was an autocrat, not averse to chicanery to protect his power, but grant him the power and he was an avid proclaimant of India's cricketing emergence. Tendulkar made his point by weight of runs; Ganguly galvanised India in whatever way he chose, a symbol of a brash, emerging economic power. No Indian Test captain has been more successful.

Saturday was always going to be a great occasion and I think that England missed a trick. They could have said that they were looking forward to a carnival atmosphere, to an evening of great entertainment for the crowd with a fantastic chance to earn $1million. They could have talked up the whole spectacle - yes, acknowledging the money, but emphasising how it would generate a really exciting game.

1992 As if you needed any more proof for my "Australia flourishes in a recession" theory, I offer up Black Wednesday on September 16, when sterling collapsed and John Major had to pull us out of the ERM, costing Britain £3.4 million. A couple of days beforehand, a young spinner named Warne had just completed his first Test series for Australia in Sri Lanka and had not been all that effective. He was selected for the next summer's Ashes tour, however, and turned out OK in the long run.

The complete abandoning of all norms and even rules for this extravaganza makes a mockery of all the high moral complaints cricket administrators had against Kerry Packer and what was disdainfully described as ‘his circus’. If that was a circus, this was a trapeze act, for whatever Packer may or may not have done, he stuck to the rules of the game and never did anything to harm the formal structure of the sport.

But tournaments like this one will harm the sport’s formal structure in the long run, by making the traditional form of the sport, specially Test cricket, so much less attractive for both players and spectators simply because the money involved will, by comparison, be laughable.

...what an incredible sight it was to see Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the captain-designate giving a lift to Anil Kumble, the man he takes over from. If no man is a hero to his valet, no Indian captain has been a hero to his successor, and this unique tribute was testimony both to Kumble's place in the team and the new captain's youthful spontaneity

Sri Lanka's nucleus of top players may be small, but it is unrivalled in its quality: Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene score most of their runs; Muttiah Muralitharan and Ajantha Mendis take most of their wickets. So what a shame it is that Sri Lanka’s next scheduled Test match was May in England, a tour that will almost certainly not now take place.

"Oram" and "injury" are no strangers to being in the same sentence, and the player is increasingly frustrated at being unable to stay healthy for a reasonable length of time. He calls his frequent injury layoffs "a bit of a joke", except no one's laughing.

... there was the incident of Mohinder Amarnath landing at Chandigarh in 1988 as one of the selectors had left a message with his father Lala that Mohinder should be there to attend the selection committee meeting as the new captain of the Indian team. But it was Vengsarkar who was asked by the BCCI secretary Ranbir Singh Mahendra to attend the selection committee meeting. The moment Amarnath realised Vengsarkar would be leading, he barged into the press box and created a ruckus. Understandably, he was hurt.