The Surfer

Boyd's height marked him out from an early age. By the age of 11 or 12, he already stood 6ft tall. Soon after that, he was playing age group cricket for Ireland. But his parents made sure he remained grounded. In fact, his eventual move to England at 18 was not motivated solely by cricket. His main objective was to complete an agricultural degree at Harper Adams University in Shropshire. "He was ploughing from eight or nine," says his father Bob. "If he's home,  he's out at seven in the morning. He knew he had to rise in the morning to work. Other boys could just lie in their bed all day. That's not him. He's a very skilful tractor man, a very skilled  ploughman. He's quite skilful, too, at repairing machinery. He taught himself to weld, pretty much."

So Stokes got his head down, started to be "more professional". He did, in short, exactly what England asked of him. Which is how he will carry on. He'd love the opportunity to play at No6, but right now he says he'll be happy to adapt to whatever job they want to give him. In the ODI series against Australia he was batting at No8 and bowling first change, "a different role from the one I am used to". Stokes still thinks of himself as a better batsman than a bowler. "I'm still learning a lot about bowling, but I have really come on in the last two years because of the responsibility that I have been given at Durham. I used to be guilty of trying to get a wicket every ball, but I've learned the game is not that easy. That's come with experience."

The prodigiously talented McCullum brothers - Brendon and Nathan - went to King's High School and grew up in South Dunedin. Who knows how many sixes they flogged over the back fence at the family home in Waterloo St? Batsman Michael Bracewell and spinner Nick Beard went to Kavanagh College, Hamish Rutherford and Sam Wells went to Otago Boys' High School, and James McMillan went to John McGlashan College.

The alternative cricket website has a socially conscious side as well, its founder Nishant tells you. The 25-year-old English citizen of Indian origin -- originally from London -- studies medicine in Hradec Králové, a small town about 100 miles outside Prague. As a compulsive cricket aficionado, Nishant would devour every single article on the game available on the Internet. After a "fallow streak of articles", he realised that blogs were overtaking the mainstream in terms of quality.

In the same way that time moves differently for the fly, so fast bowling feels different depending on who's facing it and when. In his majesterial The Art And Science Of Cricket, Bob Woolmer highlights some experiments conducted in the early 1980s by Tim Noakes, a South African researcher, in which an old-style static bowling machine was set at 130kph. Peter Kirsten faced up to it, and was unable to hit the ball without the complex series of visual clues a batsman picks up from the bowler's run-up and delivery stride (during his long career Kirsten faced all of the world's quickest bowlers out in the middle, playing deliveries at speeds of 150kph). Yet spat without notice from the cold eye of the machine, the ball came towards him too quickly for him to accurately plot its course.

There were on-field problems - to which we will get to - but the more relevant lesson for modern cricket administration was Packer's attitude once he determined that day-time attendances were a problem. He did not waste time by carrying out endless trials with different balls and kit, under different lights. He wanted to have a day-night Test and he simply went ahead and got it.

That mindset has been passed down by coaches, who see the perfect action as being the one that bears the most repetition while minimising the risk of injury and maximising the degree of control. As Brearley says, Test cricket is poorer for it, stripped as it is of the physical threat to the batsman and robbed of one its most exciting elements. But bowlers have longer careers as a consequence. Fans and players love to argue about who was the fastest. That's a debate that can't be settled. But it is clear that you won't find many contenders in this day and age. We are in a time of tortoises, not hares. The perfectly fast action, like the perfect game of draughts, is a thing of the past, a target players have long since stopped pursuing

South Africa, for example, can ask themselves why they got into a situation where their cricket economy was so dependent on an external power that is always more likely to do what suits itself first. It is just likely that one of the conclusions will be that it was the easy, lazy option to take. If an Indian tour guaranteed a lot of money, it also meant that you didn't need to create other parallel revenue sources to insure against untoward happenings. And it would seem to me, even if I am looking at it from afar, that other cricket playing countries too therefore need to create such a parallel economy. Again there is a similar situation affecting India. If the US decided they would halve all software and business process outsourcing to India (however unlikely that would be but this is meant to be an illustration), we would be similarly hit. It wouldn't help if Indian companies complained about the big bad bully who was taking away jobs, they would just have to develop other capabilities and find other revenue sources.

He was, he says, "a nervous cricketer". His action, he admits, "wasn't a biomechanical dream". But the first over was fine. "Peter Bowler cut me for four. But I felt OK." When he came back for his second, Trescothick was on strike. Boswell's head started to swim. He had been struggling to bowl to left-handers. Suddenly Trescothick "looked as though he was 50 yards away. He was like a tiny dot. I just couldn't see him. Then I bowled a wide and I heard the noise of the crowd. I bowled a second wide, and the noise got louder and louder and louder." His muscles grew tight. His fingers grew tense. He began to sweat. "I just couldn't let go of the ball. I wanted to get on with it, so I began to rush. The more I panicked, the more I rushed." He lost his run-up. The pitch, already on a slope, seemed to tilt sharper beneath his feet. He makes it sound like vertigo.

Over the course of conversation with Lele, it struck me that his yarns would best be enjoyed with a glass of whiskey, rum or whatever else your chosen poison was, sitting around a fire, and listening. He was a mine of information, he was enthralling, even occasionally amusing, and he forced you to be a good journalist, not reporting verbatim but sifting fact from fiction and getting dates and names right.