The Surfer

Too many gripes and moans - the sort that emanate from those taking a loftier view of themselves than they can justify - have emerged not to have provided a distraction. The hotel was unsuitable (for what?); Sir Allen Stanford had offended them through a bit of harmless byplay with their partners; the host also came blundering unannounced into their dressing room, a sacrosanct place; the pitch was wrong; the lights too low and glary; the outfield like Pietersen's former haircut rather than his current one.

As Ramnaresh Sarwan rightly said, the WICB should look at similar training camps ahead of a series. Credit must be given to head coach Eldine Baptiste, who was overlooked by the WICB for its top coaching post a few years ago.

Last Wednesday, Australia began a crucial Test in Delhi needing to take 20 wickets to level the series. Our panel came up with the slow bowling trio of Cameron White, Michael Clarke and Simon Katich. This grouping is unlikely to take 20 first-class wickets in a calendar year on doctored decks in the Gobi Desert.

MacPherson Meade, one of Montserrat’s batsmen, works as a part-time groundsman, mowing the field and picking up stones from the black soil. Wicketkeeper David Lane is in construction at the new town of Little Bay, which will replace Plymouth. In the two domestic Stanford Twenty20 tournaments, where there was no appearance fee, they competed like hell for the $25,000 aMn-of-the-Match award and £10,000 Play-of-the-Match award, even if Montserrat beat only the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Matters of vulgarity, money and the future of Test cricket aside, there are other issues that should present English cricket with very real concern about the deal with Stanford. As recently as July, Bloomberg reported that two former employees of Stanford Financial were suing for unfair dismissal on the grounds that they had been forced to resign because they refused to participate in illegal conduct.

The team to tour Australia will be picked this week and Oram's status and the return of Chris Martin are the only sticking points in what should otherwise be a straightforward exercise. With no cricket, aside from typically soggy spring club forays, being played, there is nowhere for the selectors to turn except for the players who, barring one or two notable exceptions, underperformed so badly in Bangladesh.

It is part of sporting life but Anderson must have felt like he had been mugged on the way to the bank. He must have thought all along that he would be one of those to have a shot at winning $1m, the prize on offer to each member of the winning team. Two main factors conspired against him: the nature of the pitch at Stanford Cricket Ground which persuaded England that they must play a second spinner, Graeme Swann, and the return to the one-day international fold of Stephen Harmison whose bang it in methods were bound to be preferred on this surface.

World cricket authorities aren't happy. Whatever the future of cricket, and whatever the place of Twenty20 in it — they're still trying to work it out — they know it isn't this: once-a-year, winner-take-all exhibition matches in substandard conditions, without context or explanation, gratifying one man's ego.

... Palace servants disguised as dacoits came rushing to where the young Karnataka players Viswanath and Chandrasekhar were in the woods after a gunshot was heard and announced that Prasanna had been killed. The youngsters burst into tears, believing the yarn). According to Durrani, Vijay Manjrekar, retired from Test cricket, and an officer in Air India then, handed over his watch to one of the "dacoits" and told him that was all he possessed. “Please let me go, I'm ...