The Surfer

''I went up in a tree to prune a branch. I was standing no higher than seven feet off the ground. There was no visible sign of danger, really, but unfortunately for me the branch I was cutting was entangled with another branch. When the one I was cutting fell to the ground it ripped the other one from above, out of the trunk, and that came crashing down on the back of my head and drove me to the ground. I believe that is what broke my neck."

"The key moment came when Ed Cowan rang,'' Bennett said. The Australians, preparing for the first Test of the summer against South Africa, were looking for a net bowler whose action resembled Proteas leg-spinner Imran Tahir. Cowan recalled seeing just such an action when Ahmed was bowling in the MCG nets.

"Chris has a very perceptive insight. He is incredibly bright. He has just completed a distance learning degree that included diverse subjects like American history. I loved driving around towns in New Zealand listening to his perception of things. Conversation with Chris was exciting because I learnt something. For example, he once told me "I looked around New Zealand, worked out who the best bowlers were, and made sure I was better than them". Chris rarely speaks without thinking. As a senior player, he keeps an eye out and when he feels something needs to be said he says it. Very rarely does he talk to the group; he prefers to talk quietly in the background. When Tommy talks to you, you listen."

"Your mannerisms and body language are a mirror of your mental thoughts," he says. "If someone's standing in a room at a business meeting, you can always tell if someone's nervous. Body language slows your mind down a bit, so you stop thinking about irrelevant thoughts. That's all concentration is: it's an absence of irrelevant thought."

"The thing that stands out for me was walking down the street and people coming up to me saying they'd never watched cricket before and suddenly they couldn't miss a ball. I remember Old Trafford on the last day when so many people couldn't get in. That atmosphere, and especially the cricket, made it the best series I ever played in."

Similarly, if we look at the India captaincy as a standalone - what is the planning being done to prepare Dhoni's successor? No one in this Indian ODI team has any real captaincy experience at the first-class level - the odd match doesn't count. Most Indian teams are named without the vice-captain being explicitly named. Virat Kohli is the man on whose shoulders the responsibility has fallen this time round and he seems to be the man being prepared to take over but can we be sure? The BCCI has never made it publicly evident.

The problem is rooted in the fact that in the years since 1996, the BCCI perfected to a fine art the business of cricket, and brought unimaginable wealth into the sport, without any revision of operating procedures to guard against corruption. Thus means, opportunity, and the ability to rationalise aberrant behavior--the three classic elements of the fraud triangle--came together. And to this, the BCCI systematically added a fourth element as a safety net: over-arching political patronage.

I think it's really important that England don't listen too much to what has been going on with the Australian side and we always made a very conscious effort to concentrate on ourselves and not worry too much about the opposition whether they were really good or really bad, and this is no different really.

This development reflects the sad state of affairs within the PCB. The body has been dysfunctional and there has been no strategic planning or a roadmap to bring back international cricket to Pakistan. The bottomline is that no progress has been made since the tragic attack on the Sri Lankan team. They have basically adopted a hit-and-miss approach in asking various cricket boards to pity them and visit. This unprofessional attitude has put them in no-man's land.

In 1999, when Jagmohan Dalmiya was Asian Cricket Council chief, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka had played an Asian Test Championship between them. It didn't prove to be financially viable. Now with all the top teams interested, the World Test Championship is likely to avoid the same problem. It's good news for India also. Turnout in Test matches in this country has declined to an historic low.

The 2023 World Cup will have to deal with a very different challenge. By the time it is played, Virat Kohli, the best of India's new generation of batsmen, will be nearly 35. Kohli's age group is the last of its kind, which grew up loving a game played over five days or 50 overs a side. By 2023, the Indian Premier League generation, which was introduced to the game via Twenty20, will be knocking on the door. Will 50-over cricket matter to them, or will it be the unwanted middle child squeezed out as T20 competitions continue to mushroom around the world?