The Surfer

... one must not forget opener Mahela Udawatte, who the ‘A’ coach Chandika Haturusinghe has identified as a batsman who has good ‘eye-ball co-ordination’. In his last two ODI innings, Udawatte has two impressive scores of 73 and 67.

Forty-five minutes after a day's Test cricket is usually the most tense of the day in the press box. Match reporters are flat out and the 'quotes men' have just arrived back from the press conference, tense and anxious to meet deadlines. It is the quietest time of the day, the most prevalent sound being the hurried, two-fingered bashing of laptop keyboards. Suddenly, a disembodied woman's voice was echoing loudly around the box. "...And don't forget you promised to drop the kids off at Grandma's, and we've got dinner at John and Noreen's tomorrow night, and..."

My happiest memories of watching cricket have come when those five gents have been at their best; those memories are now being tarnished by their struggles to hang on to their places in the side. It is time to think ahead.

Ah, the sweet swish of the new broom. There is nothing quite like that mellifluous sound in sport, in politics, in life to inspire dreams of reinvigoration, of fresh prosperity.

For such a cerebral game, cricket can be hideously dunderheaded, happy to toss commonsense into a sea of bureaucracy and another word that begins with 'bu'. The denouements to the 2005 Ashes and the 2007 World Cup spring to mind, but surely nothing will ever match the tragifarce of the 1992 semi-final. The shambolic rain rule was one thing, but the fact that the game could not continue when the players returned to the field, or on the following day, because the host broadcaster Channel Nine wouldn't have liked it is beyond comprehension.

Mahela Jayawardene had the scent of the kill in his nostrils, and Ajantha Mendis and Muttiah Muralitharan were soon wheeling away in tandem. Badrinath, who was Murali's team-mate in the IPL, played them with the poise of one who had been doing it for years. He worked Murali through the leg side with a wristy flourish and cut him impossibly late on a couple of occasions. Mendis's variations were met with the straightest of bats. Unlike some of his more illustrious compatriots, he didn't get sucked into pad play, and his solidity at one end allowed Mahendra Singh Dhoni to whittle away at the target from the other.

He flew to South Africa to meet the prime minister of the republic, John Vorster, a former wartime political extremist who supported and admired the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Vorster welcomed Bradman, believing he would support the cricket tour. But the meeting turned sour. Bradman asked questions in his direct way about why black people had not been given a chance to represent their country. Vorster suggested that they were intellectually inferior and could not cope with the intricacies of cricket. Bradman laughed at this.

Consecutive Melbourne and Sydney Tests are a feature of the cricketing calendar, but this is something else again. There are only four days between Perth and Melbourne and three between Melbourne and Sydney. How can Brett Lee be expected to come through that unscathed? How will emerging South African pace bowler Dale Steyn cope? Australia has got through these situations in the past only because of a certain leg-spinner.

Pilloried for upholding the laws of the game, Hair is the leading example of the worldwide failure of cricket officials to support umpires and helps to explain why it is the least developed aspect of the game.

One of cricket's many great ironies is that India, one of Hair's most vocal opponents, which complains more about umpires than other country, is the only major Test nation not to be represented on the ICC's elite 12-man umpiring panel.