The Surfer

Frank and Tony are great friends who live 60 miles from each other; occasionally they travel halfway to a pub to share a pint of beer and talk. It’s not casual conversations; it’s calculative to the core and serious.

Despite Pakistan's behaviour, which forced the first forfeit in 129 years of Test cricket, Hair was blamed for the loss of millions through television rights and gate receipts when the match failed to resume on the final day. Hair will allege racial discrimination on the basis that while his international umpiring career has been ruined, costing him about $120,000 a year in match fees, [Billy] Doctrove has continued to umpire international matches largely unhindered.

People are saying – they're right – the friendship between Warne and Waugh deteriorated after Waugh pipped him for the Australian captaincy in 1999, then reached an icy low from which it never really recovered when Waugh dropped Warne on a West Indian tour a few months later. They are also saying there was little warmth in the relationship between Gilchrist and Warne because they were men of contrasting styles – the wholesome family man and the reckless cavalier whose lives rarely met in the middle.

In a perverse sort of way, Warne's modest rating of Steve Waugh and Gilchrist gives us a hint of why Australian teams have been so successful over the past decade – they simply put the personal stuff to one side and go out and play for the team. It sounds easy to do but it has been beyond many fragmented England, West Indian, Indian and Pakistan teams of the same era.

Randomly slotting international cricketers into teams does not work, because cricket fans have always been loyal to their teams. Whether it is India vs Pakistan, Lancashire vs Yorkshire, Delhi vs Bombay, Dadar Union vs CCI, even Greater Kailash II Main Road vs I Main Road, there’s something at stake for the fan. When you create artificial rivalries you kill this sense of identity.

It may seem as if the ICL has drawn a lot of cricketers away from the mainstream but they have little to show for quality. They’ve assembled a motley crew of havebeens, might-have-beens and wannabes. Yet, Kapil will have us believe the nation will sit up and watch this lot ... Just who will watch Shalabh Srivastava bowl to Shashank Nag when Ricky Ponting is hooking Zaheer Khan or Yuvraj Singh is clobbering Mohammad Asif?

He appears to be provoked into playing big shots before he's carried out his reconnaissance. The Indians want him to go after the bowling during that first half-hour at the crease, to take risks while he is still vulnerable. And they suspect that, when provoked, Pietersen cannot resist lashing out. So they provoke him.

"I thought out there that this was a similar situation to the one against Sri Lanka in the World Cup and I didn't want to go through the disappointment of not finishing it off this time," Bopara admitted yesterday. "You learn from your mistakes I guess and I didn't want to fall short again."

I place him very slightly ahead of Lara because I found him slightly tougher mentally. It is such a close call, but here is an example of what I mean: in Australia in 2003-04 he was worried about getting out cover driving so he decided to cut out the shot. I saw the wagon wheel for his next innings: he scored 248 without a single cover drive. Like Lara, he has scored runs all over the world. I have seen him run down the pitch and hit Glenn McGrath over the top for six, and I have seen him hit me for six against the spin going around the wicket.

So why have we come to this stage? Because we have always looked upon fielding as an additional degree not as basic education. Not everyone can be a Jonty, or a Ponting or a Symonds or a Collingwood. But if you want to be an economist you must know mathematics, if you want to be an athlete you must know a fair bit about food and diets. That is why I believe, and I remember saying this five years ago, that coaches at India’s hyped but ineffective academies must take most of the blame. If a 17-year-old isn’t told that without being a fine fielder he is compromising on his future, then the teacher is no good. Neither is the student but sometimes you need to be shown what you cannot see.

Cricket is leaning towards a system similar to the National Rugby League model — a first positive test would see penalties deferred if the player agreed to counselling, while a second would attract a harsher punishment. The system preferred by Cricket Australia has the support of the Federal Government and is tougher than the controversial AFL "three-strikes" policy now in crisis.