The Surfer

Vaughan has to accept responsibility for the shambles at Headingley. Captaincy takes many forms: it includes setting the right fields, dealing with personalities, and leading from the front with bat or ball. But just as important is the guidance a captain gives his players in the dressing room, explaining how he expects them to play. Vaughan has to tell his batsmen to abandon this one-size-fits-all approach, and show a bit more brains.

Is this all part of a top-level powerplay in which Sir Allen who, having seen the phenomenal success of the first season of the Indian Premier League, is prepared to throw even more of his millions around to ensure that his name is reflexively identified with the increasingly popular Twenty20 version of the game?

Kevin Pietersen stood on the balcony in the morning session watching Jimmy Anderson and Alastair Cook. He twisted and turned his tall primed body for everyone to see. This was a warrior and you could smell his anticipation . . . and the crowd's . . . and the South Africans'.

Mendis and his captain Jayawardene will have a set plan against the Indians. Since Mendis is an attacking bowler, he tends to try out all the deliveries he possesses every over. At the international level, especially against top Indian batsmen, keeping the secrets guarded will be very difficult. They will watch him more at the non-striker’s end so that they should be comfortable at the striker’s end.

With barely a murmur of complaint Pattinson has done a lot more in the last few days than take the new ball for the country of his birth, if not his upbringing. He has placed Grimsby and Dandenong on the Test-cricket map. He has given Australians another excuse to guffaw at the old enemy. And he has encouraged the pessimists' perennial grouse that English cricket is going to the dogs. What he was not supposed to do, after just 11 first-class matches for Victoria and Nottinghamshire, was expose worrying holes in England's masterplan, both for this summer and next.

For two seasons as a young man, Ashwell Prince was the professional at the Northern League club and it is a tribute to the allure of club cricket that he still keeps in touch nearly seven years after he forsook the northwest for wider horizons.

There was an ugly incident in a one-day international I played in Barbados when Gladstone Small, one of the nicest men to play cricket for England, pointed to the dressing room when he dismissed Gordon Greenidge, the rather angry West Indian batsman. At the Kensington Oval the dressing rooms are divided by a narrow walkway, and at the end of the match an England player stuck his head in our room to inform us that an irate Greenidge had Small by the throat

Jerome [Jayaratne] is the current head of the system that has produced unconventional cricketers such as Muttiah Muralitharan, Sanath Jayasuriya, Lasith Malinga and now Ajantha Mendis. And, as one takes a look at the display window of the academy, one finds that the supply-line isn’t going to stop any time soon. A Malinga lookalike, a leggie who delivers the ball from an awkward angle, and a pacer who till yesterday was a star on the tennis-ball circuit, are a few of the ‘works in progress’.

“I will tell you exactly what I said. He was ripping into me, saying stuff, so I said, ‘Mate, you’re actually making me concentrate, so thanks for that’. He kept going, so I hit back. ‘Paul, tell me, are you embarrassed about your MBE? Don’t you think you should send it back? You’ve played one Test match in the Ashes, made seven and 10. I mean, mate, I would be embarrassed if I were you. But if you do send it back, I’ll pay for the envelope and the stamp’. He went pretty quiet after that. Sledging is actually made out to be more than it is and 10 years ago it was far worse. Now there are too many cameras, too much super slo-mo, and the players have to be politically correct.”