The Surfer

There are no solecisms in his [Tendulkar's] batting. The head is held still. The bat comes down straight. When playing forward, his left foot is always to the pitch of the ball, and there is no gap between bad and pad. When playing back, he goes right back, with the right foot across. The errors are rare and minimal.

Do you bench the man who had given Ricky Ponting’s New Age XI the most trouble - and had wickets to show for it – to have the captain step in? Or do you drop a batsman, play five bowlers, including the three slow men?

They were like Aladdin’s slippers, curled up at the front and studded with jewels (at least they looked like jewels). Immediately it occurred to me that Tendulkar had placed them there because he didn’t want a stranger to see them. I felt like an intruder. Tendulkar has spent all of his adult life fighting for every precious moment of privacy he can find — the stories are legion of him going out in the dead of Mumbai’s night, sometimes in disguise, to escape the crowds — and here was I, prying into one of the few remaining spaces he could call his own, the space behind an armchair in a nondescript hotel room in Essex.

He is shorter than Kumble, bowls slower but has an equally easy action. Yesterday his leg-break crept through Simon Katich's defences, while in the last over of the day his googly, bowled from around the wicket, deceived Michael Clarke, who often seems unusually vulnerable near the close of play

The game is on its knees. As the top associate member of the ICC, it is worrying that Kenya has not won this First Class competition, now in its fourth edition. The team’s failure in the multi-day game can be attributed to lack of a first class league in the country. Then there is the matter of an ‘A’ team, a crucial feature in any cricket-playing country because it is a major link between the main national team and the development sides. Kenya has none. The usual excuse of lack of funds is what CK offers for its inability to get its programmes moving. However, the officials were elected to find money to run the game and to improve on the huge image that Kenya cricket had built in 2003. If the chairman and his team cannot find the money, they have no business running the association.

... the game and the administrations has been travelling the wrong way. True as captain he could have dictated terms on the field and had his way. But somebody should have told him that playing is one thing and administration is another. Going down memory lane, it would not be wrong to think that no other IC chairman, became so unpopular and had so much adverse publicity tossed his way as has been done on the former captain.

New Zealand's problem scoring against Bangladesh was most stark at the top of the order where the first 10 overs passed by in a befuddled haze of dot balls, wickets and the occasional boundary. In the first international at Mirpur, just 19 deliveries were scored off in the opening 10 overs; in the second that number decreased to 16; and at the better paced Chittagong wicket it sunk to an embarrassing 12.

The CA board certainly argues that Test cricket should always be treated as the premium, prestige format and Test cricket is more popular in Australia now than it was a decade ago. However, it is not as popular in all other countries as it is here. Our view, which is reflected in the ICC approach, is that the long-term development of cricket should have Test and ODI predominating in the international cricket calendar, with Twenty20 cricket complementing that as a mainly state or equivalent level format with an appropriate but not disproportionate amount of international Twenty20 cricket. IPL is, for example, a state level competition in India and we play three Twenty20 internationals in our Australian summer, which I think is about right

Doubt around his ability to deserve a place in the team to start with, to really hack it in international cricket when he got there, to return as a Test batsman after being dropped, to face top quality fast bowling, to play the pull shot with any conviction, to lead India with any success, to recover from the most brutal public ridicule heaped on an Indian sportsperson in recent times, to return to the team with any confidence, to script his own farewell, to bring to his own career the finesse he brought to a cover drive.