The Surfer

Perhaps Warner hoped vaguely some gremlin in the DRS would gum the works in his favour. The easier conclusion is that his judgment, such as it is, had been mangled by the fevered nature of his reception at the wicket: not just from the crowd but also from Joe Root who walked uncomfortably close before Warner had faced his first ball and seemed to be offering some helpful words of advice on high summer conditions at Old Trafford. Increasingly that initial sense of bafflement over Warner's choice of late-night victim - Really? Little Rooty? - seems less obviously clear-cut.

Old Trafford has never been a bijou secret garden like Lord's or a city bolt hole like The Oval. It is instead a low-slung mix-and-match urban bowl, a ground that still allows the surrounding streets to peer in through the cracks. And for all the vague sense of tiered segregation and the hefty queues for bars and seats and ice cream vans - plus a fair helping of the claustrophobia common to all English Test grounds - this rebuilt arena still provided a heartening sense of that familiar Old Trafford spirit around its network of tunnels and byways, still awash with bars and pumps and pint glasses.

Slowly he remembered his steps: the stride back on to his stumps to play the turning delivery late, the shimmy up the pitch to caress, rather than crunch, the ball through extra cover against the spin. As his muscle-memory rebooted, his footwork became silky and his timing sublime. His range of movement - right back or two yards down the pitch - upset Swann's rhythm and forced him to try round the wicket. Clarke bunted him back over his head, the field scattered and Swann went back over the wicket. Now Clarke had control and the runs began to flow.

Fauzul Azim, Spicy Café team owner who also owns the café, presides over the match as if overseeing a major league. All of his team members are his employees, though he insists that he doesn't recruit staff on the basis of their cricketing prowess.

Recasting the dos and don'ts for administrators, franchise owners, their friends, players, et al in the IPL is an immediate imperative. Appointing an ombudsman and a couple of independent members on the governing council would have great value too. There are just too many loose ends to make for full credibility, as has become evident over the past six years--this could be detrimental to the brand value of the IPL. Taking cognizance of public sentiment would be an even bigger step in the right direction. I am not in favour of cricket coming under the control of the government, but being open to scrutiny under the right to information (RTI) law is not necessarily a bad thing.

When the stench of corruption - in the selection of players, in the performance of those players, whatever - becomes too noisome to be conveniently ignored, it appoints a committee of inquiry. It then laces that committee into a straitjacket by defining the 'terms of reference' so narrowly that no evidence of probative value can be considered.

At Worcester, before the Ashes series started, Darren Lehmann donned his whites (or those of someone else) and a Baggy Green and carried the drinks out for his team, a spirit-lifter but getting a small buzz, you can believe, from being back in the mix. Then at Hove last week he went one better and put on the pads, Boof having a biff in the nets. It looked like someone in genuine love with the game, and by all accounts he looked OK, having a bit of fun because he could. Except that with it came the realisation that with the exception of Michael Clarke he was, with 82 first‑class hundreds as a credential and five of them in Tests, and the technique and nous that goes with them, probably still the most accomplished batsman in the party, not too dissimilar to England nets when Ottis Gibson was the England bowling coach shortly after taking 100 wickets in a season for Durham.

"Scoring a hundred at Lord's is always special but the conditions at Trent Bridge made it the better knock. It was quite testing. As a middle-order batter, the hardest thing is to start against spin or reverse swing and when I came in it was reversing a long way. I'd improved after playing in subcontinental conditions and, after the series in India in the winter, I tried to put that into my game. The Aussies all reversed it and did it very well. They swung it both ways and it was very difficult. Lord's was a much more traditional English swingy day - a bit more what we're used to - but a reversing ball at Trent Bridge made it all the more challenging. And to have scored a hundred in one of the best ever Tests means a lot."

The sight of empty stadiums at matches in the West Indies is not encouraging, and the organisers will have to keep their fingers crossed, for the simple reasons that the West Indies is a region of small territories, that it is not a financially rich region, and that, to a set of people who are basically insular, the teams are not territorially based.

By the end of the Second Test in 1993, Australia had played eight Tests in the year. In 2013 they have played seven. In 1993, five players had scored a total of six centuries, three at Lord's in a total of 632-4 dec. In 2013 they have scored only two hundreds, none in this series and one by Matthew Wade, not currently in the side. They are the only Test team this year whose top four have not managed a century. The only batsman still in the side to have scored a Test hundred this year is Michael Clarke. In 1993, four players averaged 43 or more. Clarke averages 38.20 this year, the rest are below 30.

"By core, I don't just mean the abdomen. For me the core also includes glutes, hip and moving up right till the shoulder," he says. He goes on add that for a pacer like Zaheer, whose action needs explosive power and puts a lot of stress on his body, the "core" is of prime importance.

Having failed to impress the talent-spotters at Yorkshire CCC, Jeeves struck lucky when Rowland Ryder, the Warwickshire secretary, happened to stay a night in the village. In a very Wodehousian twist, Ryder went on to mistime a shaving stroke with his cut-throat razor, causing himself a painful injury. "The doctor, having dealt with the cut, prescribed a visit to the afternoon's cricket match," wrote Ryder's son, also called Rowland, in his book Cricket Calling. "And here my father saw a young cricketer whose effortless grace as a bowler told something of his potential."