The Surfer

Goodness, that is still hard to believe. This is one-day cricket after all. This is just not supposed to happen. England are wonderfully woeful at one-day cricket: that has long been written in the stars.

This morning, he tells me, he did a Myers-Briggs personality test; he won't find out until tomorrow whether he is, officially, an introvert or an extrovert. I propose that the answer is fairly obvious. Gough shakes his head. 'I'd say I'll be borderline. Ninety per cent of the public would say I'm extrovert, but I'm not like everybody thinks.'

Clarke is not only a young, inexperienced captain who shouldn't have to put up with disciplinary issues, he is also the man who twice has tried to save Symonds through his tumultuous career. On the 2006 South African tour, it was Clarke - six years younger than Symonds - who quelled a potential fight between Symonds and a Cheetahs rugby union player in Cape Town nightclub Hemisphere.

I wholeheartedly endorse Dilip Vengsarkar’s statement that Mahendra Singh Dhoni is emerging as a great captain, but I think his belief that the victory over Sri Lanka in the one-day series must rate as one of the finest in Indian cricket history is a bit exaggerated — or premature.

Bowlers rarely get the same space as batsmen in newsprint or on prime time but this time they did. I can't recall when each one, in isolation or as a group, was so telling. Zaheer, Praveen, Munaf or Harbhajan and Pragyan Ojha earned everyone's respect.

There was a time when opponents cowered before the cricketing might of West Indies teams under Worrell and Sobers, Lloyd and Richards. Now it is the other way round and there won't be a revival until such insecurity is erased.

It is far from inevitable given that the game has little or no traction in Europe, North and South America and most of Africa, and that team sports are being dumped rather than recruited - ask baseball and softball. There is also the matter of priorities - soccer and tennis, among others, are regarded by many to be out of place at the Olympics because they have bigger fish to fry. The same argument applies to golf's regular attempts to crash the party.

Some inventions are made faster than you can say serendipity. Penicillin, superglue, the microwave oven and the potato crisp were all discovered by accident. And suddenly we have an England one-day cricket team. "Suddenly" might not be the right word because one-day international cricket has been played since 1971 and England have not won a global tournament in all that time.

If you tell a lie enough times, people will believe it to be the gospel. The decision not to play in Pakistan wasn't really about security. Not one Indian player spoke of being under siege during the recent Asia Cup, and these are citizens of a country that has fought four wars with Pakistan and still squabbles over disputed territory in Kashmir. To imagine that a Ricky Ponting or a Hamish Marshall would be a more attractive target than Sachin Tendulkar for some clueless Jihadi is to reduce yourself to the intellectual level of those who envision 72 Ana Ivanovic clones waiting for them in heaven should they strap some RDX to their belts and blow themselves up with a timer.

"I decided early on to go into coaching. I felt there was a gap in coaching on the developmental side of the game. That gap needed to be filled.

"I was also motivated by my own experience. When I was an upcoming player, there was no one other than the development coaches to push me. I felt there was a big void. People like myself, Steve (Mangongo; Board XI coach) and Bruce (Makovah; former selectors chairman) saw the potential in a lot of kids and felt the need to help them get into the system.

"I didn’t foresee myself ending where I am now. I also went into coaching to further my playing side. After coaching I would make time to work on my own game. I still felt I had a chance to get noticed by selectors, which obviously wasn’t to be."