The Surfer

"I think he's shown a complete disregard for the position that Buchanan has held and his attitude to the camp was very poor for a senior player," Hughes told Britain's Daily Mail ... "He would have been an embarrassment if he had captained our country."

"That doesn't often happen over there. They are normally a pretty tight unit," Gatting said. "It is usually the Aussies having a go at us for things we've done badly. But I think we've done things well, we're a good unit and the guys have now got to go over there and show that."

Apart from cricket, I love football. I'm a West Ham fan. It has been an interesting one this season, with the arrival of [Carlos] Tevez and [Javier] Mascherano. I think Alan Pardew has come in and done brilliantly.

The idea that Glenn’s 5-0 prediction has put more pressure on us is rubbish. We just think of it as Pigeon Talk, from his nickname, roll our eyes and smile. He is a very positive thinker and he can’t imagine Australia losing a game. He expects us to win them one by one, and at the end of the series that adds up to five. There’s nothing deep about it.

Beware the man who talks up his side — it suggests he is nervous. Remember Sven- Göran Eriksson’s prediction before the World Cup finals this summer that his England football team were going to come back from Germany with the trophy?

The walls came down long ago, the battlelines were blurred, the general population became fair game, the rules went out of the window. Nor is the enemy easily pinned down. Nowadays battles are waged by nationalists, religious extremists and other unsavoury types. No one is sitting in trenches. Hit-and-run tactics, and the fear they create, are the chosen weapon of the ecstatic killers.

Simple answer would be this: express left-arm bowlers, particularly those with the ability to swing the ball, have been the rarest of commodities in Australian cricket for more than a century. Surely, though, there is more to Johnson's rise than a mere attempt by administrators to match a man with a job description. Perhaps, then, the answer lies in the battles Johnson has waged, and seems to be winning, against his body and mind.

As such a move would be unprecedented in the history of cricket, the implications of India owning the broadcasting rights to ICC events are impossible to specify exactly. The main events in the cricket calendar over the next eight years – notably the World Cups of 2011 and 2015, the Champions Trophy tournaments and the new Twenty20 World Championships – have already been decided. But conflicts of interest and issues of governance would be bound to arise as, in effect, a limb would be taking over control of the body.

"I know quite a few players feel there is an element of inconsistency about our decision to continue with the tour and I agree with that," Ponting wrote in his Ashes Tour diary. "If we were in, say, Pakistan or Sri Lanka and something like this had happened, I am sure we would have been on the first plane out. Countries like that have lost revenue as a result of tours being called off because of terrorist threats yet here we are, staying put in the United Kingdom after terrorists just didn't threaten to do something, but in fact detonated explosives in the city where we are due to play our next two matches.”

The thinking behind picking Watson (Test batting average 20.25, bowling average 61.50) would be in the hope of giving the Australia team the balance that Andrew Flintoff provides for England. For two decades the English have striven to emulate the Australians; now the position may be about to be reversed.

The Ashes has always been the pinnacle of Test cricket as far as England's cricketers and supporters are concerned, and by the end of this winter we want one-day cricket to be viewed as equally important. As players we therefore have the responsibility to improve and perform in the Champions Trophy, the one-day series in Australia and the World Cup. And after plenty of difficulties in one-day cricket last summer I believe we have a much clearer vision of what we need to do, of our roles and the right frame of mind.