The Surfer

Under the guise of protecting its intellectual property rights, it issued a set of guidelines for media bristling with unacceptable conditions. The most outrageous condition in the original accreditation guidelines was this clause: “For the avoidance of doubt, IPL shall be entitled to use and reproduce, free of charge, worldwide and without limit in time any and all photographs/images captured by the Accredited Party at any ground and the Accredited Party shall make the same available promptly to the IPL...at his/her cost.”

Since South Africa’s tour to India followed their trip to Pakistan and Bangladesh, Vincent Barnes has a ‘been there, seen it and done it too’ expression on his face as he takes a look at the Green Park track. He speaks about the pitch in Dhaka during the Bangladesh tour and how his team’s fear proved unfounded. “We first thought the pitch was certain to break in the first couple of days. It actually lasted for five. The same thing happened in Chittagong as well,” he says, highlighting how modern-day tourists to the subcontinent aren’t that fussy about the dust bowls they encounter.

An Indian journalist met an old classmate of Gandhi's, who remembered a “dashing cricketer” who “evinced a keen interest in the game as a school student”. If these oral testimonies are reliable, Gandhi spun a cricket ball long before he spun khadi, the hand-woven cloth he argued should be worn by all Indians in preference to machine-made textiles.

“In 1983, I prepared a green pitch for the India vs West Indies game and the consequences weren’t great,” Chotelal says. It was the game in which Malcolm Marshall’s fiery bouncer saw Sunil Gavaskar’s bat falling from his hands and India suffering an innings defeat. What followed was brickbats and Chotelal’s shelved his green experiment for good.

Cricket is the loneliest of team sports, and the backslappers and well-wishers don't usually arrive until after success. Bollinger learned early, nobody would be knocking life's stumps down for him.

... And more than the provisions pertaining to media accreditation for the IPL, this is the crux of the problem—the BCCI has repeatedly thrown aside all norms, and treated cricket as its personal property, to buy and sell at will ... Can the BCCI on the same lines either start its own magazine, or ‘sell’ rights to one paper or magazine, and immediately prohibit everyone else from mentioning Indian cricket, in whole or part? Can the BCCI launch a television station tomorrow, and forbid everyone else from applying for coverage rights, or showing even the briefest of clips? And most importantly, what do you mean, sold? Was this a private transaction the rest of us are not privy to? What was the process followed?

I defy any recent player to stand up and say he didn't learn anything from Duncan Fletcher, whether he played one Test or a hundred ... Prior to the 2005 Ashes series, Fletcher came up to me stating that he thought I needed to work on my method against Shane Warne. Being slightly pig-headed, I replied that rather than change anything before the series started I would prefer to see whether my technique worked first. I was running back for advice and guidance two Tests into the series.

No other contemporary player, save perhaps Mohammad Azharuddin, could deflect the ball so finely and so powerfully with a turn of the blade and flick of the wrists. Lara had subtlety in an age of power and brute force.