The Surfer

The competence of the ICL was immediately put in doubt as their first statement left off the names of the six team captains - Law, Brian Lara, Inzamam-ul-Haq, Craig McMillan, Chris Cairns and Marvan Atapattu.

There's a problem here. Warne did refer specifically to Murali in his column. But given that Muralitharan has not read the article directly, he accepts Warne's version of events and offers an apology for his outburst. Another opponent bamboozled by Warne's spin. And things were good. Like a pair of old chums, Warne and Muralitharan arrive for the trophy unveiling ceremony, flashing smiles and sharing a few laughs while camera shutters click and pens scribble around them.

"You do know that Warne referred to you by name in his column?" Murali is asked. "But he says he didn't," he replies. The passage is read back to Muralitharan. "Then everything is the same as yesterday," he says. "I apologised because he said it was not about me."

The Warne-Murali trophy is a marketing ploy, the latest instance of sport's compulsion to present stuff. It's a photo opportunity. Its provenance shows it. One of the enshrined has only just retired, the other is still playing. Not nearly enough time has elapsed for proper appreciations of their relative deeds and standings to be made, let alone the tension between them resolved. The portents are not good. Warne and Murali are fundamentally and congenitally estranged.

In the documentary, Guru Greg, to be shown on ABC television next week, the former Australia captain makes it clear that he believes he was attacked because he was a foreigner.

Sinclair has been a nearly man for half a decade. His absence from the test team, considering three big test hundreds, another two ODI centuries and 11 international 50s, seems inexplicable when players like Papps, How, Cumming, Fulton and any number of Marshalls have been preferred.

Bit by bit, one or two well-known players are signing up for the league, and while, as things stand, it doesn't have the international game quaking in its boots, at the same time it is firing a warning shot across the International Cricket Council's bows, and they ignore it at their peril.

This after all, is a sport that contrived, despite all the business acumen that has come into cricket in recent years, to organise possibly the least impressive World Cup ever staged. It's almost impossible to imagine - actually it is impossible to imagine - a football World Cup bombing in Brazil, or a Rugby World Cup failing in New Zealand. Well the ICC took cricket's equivalent to the West Indies and made it a laughing stock.

If South African journalist Telford Vice reckons Scott Styris is cricket’s version of Banquo’s ghost, then in “Nella” we just might have gone one better and discovered the sport’s Shakespeare.

If cricket is a game of statistics, then attendances for the first Test at the Gabba would surely have this great ground struggling to hold its spot in the side. Queensland Cricket had hoped for an overall match attendance of about 60,000. It didn't even reach that modest figure, with 55,953 (1285 yesterday) filing through the turnstiles over five days, although it was one of the best returns for a series involving a sub-continental team. Whatever spin Cricket Australia puts on that, it's not good enough for a sport which claims to occupy the hearts and minds of Australians in summer.