The Surfer

Last week, when the ECB decided on a new domestic structure, the county chairmen last week had the opportunity to do something about the abysmal state of 50-over cricket in England - and did absolutely nothing. England are the only one of the eight major cricket-playing countries never to have won a global tournament (the World Cup or Champions Trophy) and the ECB, by their actions, are manifestly happy for it to stay that way. They want to line their pockets with two 20-over competitions. A successful England team at 50-over cricket? Empty words.

Pattinson's inclusion proffers a depressing statement, the antithesis of the England and Wales Cricket Board's desired message. For they are desperate for their counties to rely more on talent reared in their own academies than ready-made hired hands from abroad. And now this from the national team. It is a dreadful example for the head boy to be setting. And Pattinson doesn't even look that ready-made.

The latter, particularly, seems a strange marriage - the chevron merchants first gaining prominence with Alan Ball's white boots in the early 1970s and Denmark's "we are red, we are white, we are Danish dynamite" Euro 84 strip worn by Preben Elkjaer and Soren Lerby.

Far from rushing him along or trying to change him or claiming all the glory, his coach at Army club was wise to leave him to his own devices, contenting himself with filming his action and showing him the footage whenever things went wrong. The best coaches are not dictators but mirrors. As the months passed, Mendis added other balls to his off-break and leg-break. Nowadays he has numerous deliveries in his repertoire, all of them under control.

Apparently, he sends down most of them every over. Mendis’s next stroke of fortune was that the national team had fallen into thoughtful and mature hands. A lesser leader than Mahela Jayawardene, a lesser lieutenant than Kumar Sangakkara, might have insisted on including the youngster in the team to tour Australia last season.

The stage is set then for the football model where there will be T20 leagues in each country; some more lucrative than others. That is why I was amused when I read of a proposal in England to ‘counter’ the IPL. You don’t need to. The Bundesliga exists, so does La Liga as does the EPL. And France, Belgium and Turkey and everybody else has its own league. The leagues with bigger markets draw the better players, the smaller leagues effectively become feeder leagues and that is how it could well be with cricket. Having said that, it raises the question of how much T20 cricket is good for the game.

The key here is the definition of the “game” as we have traditionally known it. If the “game” is Test cricket, it is a valid question but I don’t think any one person decides what the “game” is. The markets decide. We didn’t decide how much rap was good for the music world, people buying cds did. We didn’t decide how much of computer animation and special effects was good for the storytelling style of movie-making. The box-office decided that. So too it will be with T20 cricket. If we believe we can control how much T20 should be played, we will seed another Packer for human enterprise fuelled by finance will always find a way.

What is somewhat dispiriting about Colville's investigations is how many of the rebels remain unrepentant. At least John Emburey admits he went solely for the money. Colin Croft, on the other hand, casts himself and his fellow rebel West Indian side as cricketing Rosa Parks, there to show racist South Africans that the black man could play cricket as well as the white and thus helping to accelerate the end of apartheid. Perhaps Croft should talk to Peter Oborne, the author of the definitive book about the D'Oliveira case, who tells Colville that the tourists "should never be allowed to forget they were giving comfort to a wicked, barbarous regime".

But it was Gatting who finally demonstrated how far a cricketer's moral compass can go awry. By 1990, when he led a tour to South Africa, no one could claim ignorance. The moment he signed up, Gatting was subject to unrelenting opprobrium. At a press conference, he was hectored by a journalist who wondered how he would spend his blood money ("fancy a yacht, Mr Gatting?"). Unlike even the West Indies team whose presence was greeted largely by sullen disappointment among black South Africans, Gatting arrived in Pietermaritzberg into an organised maelstrom of demonstration. Indeed, his very presence highlighted the growing absurdity of a dying regime: a month after his tour was abandoned in embarrassment, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the swift gallop to normality was unleashed

Unfortunately, the ICC, who rule on how technology should be used, display a total lack of comprehension of its benefits. Television can quickly evaluate whether a ball has brushed a pad or a glove, but cameras used to adjudicate whether a catch has been grassed present a flat image and usually cloud the issue. Yet the umpires are allowed to refer the latter and not the former. They are effectively umpiring cock-eyed.

When I faced Freddie on Wednesday, I was expecting him to push the ball across me, as he has always done in the past. So I was leaving one that started out wide - and suddenly it came booming back in and hit me on the knee. I was about three hours late on the shot, and was left hopping about in pain.