The Surfer

The film needed to be on the lunchtime train to make the first edition, and The Sunday Times had sent a courier (in full livery) who insisted that he needed to leave the ground by 11.30am, the point at which the game was about to start.

Speaking of lessons, what can England learn from Australia, not as winners but as losers? Can the 2006-07 Ashes series generate English renewal as the 2005 series did for Australia? "Mate, it depends how badly it hurt. I remember 12 September 2005, very clearly, sitting up there on the balcony at The Oval, next to Haydos [Mathew Hayden], Gilly [Adam Gilchrist], McGrath, and Punter [Ricky Ponting], watching those streamers everywhere, and Vaughan jumping around with champagne. That's when a little piece of kindling was lit.

There is an intolerance of maverick slow bowlers, who are obviously regarded as an expensive luxury. The tender loving care that all spinners need is scant and unique idiosyncracies are smoothed out. Reliability is valued above sleight of hand. The obsession with quick bowlers - symbolised by the Dennis Lillee foundation in Madras - may be denying India traditional raw material.

Lee believes he has recovered fully from the off-season surgery on his left ankle that cost him a place in Australia's victorious World Cup squad. "I'm 100%," Lee said.

Tait has started fitness training with South Australia but will be unable to ease back into bowling for at least a fortnight. "If picked in the Twenty20 stuff I'd obviously like to go but if it's not quite right I won't risk it," Tait said yesterday. "Playing for Australia is great, but to risk it in a Twenty20 tournament would be silly."

Ramnarine used to play cricket and was a relatively decent leg-spinner at the regional level, playing for Trinidad and Tobago. Unfortunately, for the West Indies, his talent did not manifest itself at the level of Tests we now wonder whether the issue was talent or temperament.

Tomorrow, Dravid will walk out for the toss as captain and, blasphemous though it may be to the ears of Sachin Tendulkar’s millions of fans, the most valuable batsman in the team. In fact, although the howls of protest from Bombay will be deafening, Dravid has regularly proved to be Tendulkar’s better, in Test cricket anyway.

Yet for all his stellar status there have always been question marks attached to Tendulkar, anomalies of a kind that ought not to dog a batsman of this calibre. His big innings, it is said, all too often count for little in a team context, mostly coming in matches that are ultimately drawn or lost.

The International Cricket Council's latest rankings no longer include Zimbabwe, yet its administrators continue to ride the gravy train of elite status and all the money and control that it entails. Zimbabwe's players often complain they are not paid on time, if at all, and a recent financial report by ICC chief executive Malcolm Speed was damning. But Speed's hands are completely tied because of an ICC board dominated by the Afro-Asia bloc, which is more interested in good mates than good cricket. An attempt to take Zimbabwe's future out of its own hands was disgracefully rejected by the ICC board, so now Zimbabwe is painted as making the magnanimous gesture of standing out of Test cricket for the good of the game.

Cricinfo recorded 29 million page views from 7.5 million visits to county cricket alone in 2006 - and has already had 19 million this season so, despite the rain, they expect the figure to be exceeded. Obviously because a great many people want to find out the latest scores. Sadly, if they are on the move in their cars they can listen for them in vain; and when they are given it often seems to be as a breathless afterthought following the big story that Scunthorpe's millionaire chairman has denied rumours that their controversial manager Bruno Boscovic is going to be sacked. Or, more to the point, some utterly mundane comment by Jose Murinho such as he thinks that Chelsea have the players to win the Premiership. What a surprise. The media has been conned to a dangerous extent – if you value the variety of life - into becoming a sort of spin machine for the all-pervading, all-powerful Premiership.

So serious are the problems that one Master in charge of a successful cricketing school is calling for a national conference to see what can be done before cricket dies in some independent schools

Was he shocked at how hard the Australians came at them? "Not at all. It was not a shock for me at all. I was prepared for it. I was ready for it. I did my part." That last sentence, I feel, is one of the few lines he speaks that has a truth behind it that transcends the slightly superficial nature of his answers. It is delivered with real poignancy, and it hangs in the air after he has said it.