The Surfer

All the big guns from the ICC are here and will presumably take the stand: Malcolm Speed, the chief executive, Ray Mali, the acting president, David Richardson, the general manager, and Sir John Anderson, the New Zealand representative on the board who was so engrossed by discussion today that he spent much of the afternoon working his way through a bumper book of Su Doku puzzles.

Everything is hunky-dory, until we lose. When we win, we pump out our chests and feel so proud to be South African, and when we lose, we start fighting over quotas, the captaincy, and chewing gum.

"I felt they were quite useful," experienced batsman Martin Love said. "With the blacked-out glasses you lose sight of the ball three or four metres before it gets to you so you start reaching for the ball and hitting it in the air. Eventually you adjust and start waiting for the ball to come to you and hit it later. When you give the glasses away you tend to hit the ball later. That is what we are trying to achieve."

As if this act of brutishness was not enough, Sree again crudely remonstrated, after accepting a return catch from Symonds. Celebration is one thing, behaving disrespectfully is another. Perhaps, Sree wouldn’t care. Playing in front of his home crowd, could have pumped him up. Also, the Aussies, who are masters at sledging, could have baited him, but Sree had no business to do what he did.

The script went something like this:

Now everybody is calling me 'Mr Six' ... It’s nice to have such a label, but the way out is not to treat the high expectations as added pressure ... I’ve got to respond to situations, not expectations ... Of course, I’m aware of the need to be consistent.

I dropped my bat and backed away, cursing and spitting blood, then realised that I was spitting bits of teeth as well. Two teeth had been knocked out and another two broken off at the gum line. Even more alarmingly, they were on opposite sides of my mouth and the ones in between were noticeably looser than they’d been a few moments before.