The Surfer

Perhaps no other cricketing family has endured such criticism, even scorn from the public as well as the media, than the Akmal brothers. Sad in a way as all three possess talent for the game, if not for common sense and commitment. They have been branded variously as selfish, incompetent, nepotistic, all for one and one for all; yes, the three musketeers without the cause.

Once inside there's a feeling of contentment and peace. A sense of cricket-islanded by the stands, the scoreboards, the bank with its trees, and the high fence, surrounded by the city yet never overwhelmed.

There's a taxi driver relaxing, a financier loosening his tie and reaching for a book, and a grocer dozing. Some give themselves up to the yielding curve of a chair, others to a more primary sprawl on a blanket. It's sharing the day and making friends on the embankment in the hot sleepy air.

Where it matters, in the heart, and head, he is the unprogrammable man. In his hotel room before batting he bats each ball in his head. After batting he often does not look at the tape. Yet he still watches the replay - in his head. Sportspeople sometimes claim they do this. Chanders honestly does it, every ball. Studying the tape would seek to make explicable, predictable, repeatable, something that should, morally, be left mysterious and free-floating, inside our heads - cricket - so that to see Chanders batting, though it may not involve notions like sexy, is to dream possibility, and be lifted out of our selves, by the simple act of watching

Man management has become very important in the changed scenario. Big money breeds big ego and big egos need special treatment. Even the great Sir Alex Ferguson has said he has changed his management style to keep pace with time. Every big sport is now a million-dollar business. And those who are earning in millions are big stars. They should be treated like stars and not schoolboys.

This Australian team has a millionaire in Glenn Maxwell. The off-spinner has played just one Test and a handful of ODIs. But that didn't prevent him from becoming the most sought-after man in the IPL auction. Maxwell is now a big player despite the fact that he has very little international experience. As the definition of stardom has changed, so is the method of dealing with the stars. The dressing room becomes restive when coaches and captains forget that.

For me, just to live again, feel normal, be with my friends, family and breathe normally was a great feeling. I started to put on weight, I ate like hell, eating every 45 minutes, enjoying all the delicacies I had thought I would never get to eat and smell again. And I didn't care. I was living again and that was the most important thing.

The cricket diversity strategy needs a specific subcontinental bent, because Australian cricket's future lies with the subcontinent - and with the subcontinent within Australia. It should study carefully what the AFL has managed with indigenous Australia, albeit Indians et al are coming from a very different place.

A Test debutant aged 28 he has become England's defining off-spinner of the modern era, able to attack or defend, contain or destroy, to dismiss with both rip and bluff. Plus there is the paradox of his glorious orthodoxy as a bowler. Elsewhere, finger-spin has become a poutingly sexed-up business, a mille-feuille of intermingled variations, from the zinging, waddling, slingshot conjury of Saeed Ajmal to the princely, short-form poker player Sunil Narine. Swann, though, is something else, a bowler who, for all his dad-rock hipster slouch, is essentially old-fashioned, his method diligently refined over many years in county cricket.

"In the first two or three years people feted him and he wanted to be swashbuckling but he worked out what he wanted to do. I am particularly proud of that. He knows his game and no matter how many coaches he has worked with, he has worked out his method.

With its dope scandals, the silliness of its swim team and now the cricket controversy, Australian sport, once a model, now looks bruised. It only proves that great sporting cultures do not simply keep breathing strongly but must be carefully preserved.

The cricketing management believes, and not entirely wrongly, that success in the short-term is worth sacrificing for a process to be set in place. But, by allowing it to become a public and ridiculous spectacle, a presumed lesson on discipline has turned also to evident distraction. A good point has been clumsily made.

One can argue that things should have been done differently, in days gone by it would have been handled man to man over a beer, but the world has changed so one has to assume that previous warnings or exhortations went unheeded. In that case the only recourse was to use selection as the blunt instrument to get the message across.

The discipline aspect is vital too, but Australia have not given themselves the best chance to win. Michael Clarke ought to realise that the last time Australia won a Test in India was when his career was just three Test matches old. He will play his 92nd today in Mohali.