The Surfer

To me the coach of any international team is a facilitator - someone to be in the background. He is a sounding board, a confidante for the players. If a player is struggling with his technique it is up to the coach to help him. He prepares players for cricket matches. That is his role.

The team have gone through a lot of issues over the past 12 months and many of the problems have been caused by the selectors. All the players are uncertain about their place in the team because of the way teams and squads have been chosen.

Fans once relied on what they could find in the back pages of the papers or the odd monthly-magazine. Now they are spoiled for choice. Cricinfo, under the enlightened stewardship of Sambit Bal, have just launched The Cordon, "a collection of cricket writing from outside the mainstream media". Then there is Wisden Extra, the lavish and entirely free, online magazine run by Lawrence Booth, and Wisden India, whose website launched last year, with their own Almanack following soon after. Add to that the burgeoning number of individual blogs, from Jarrod Kimber's Cricket With Balls to Jon Hotten's The Old Batsman.

Today's schools, obsessed with academic league tables, prefer to concentrate on more scholarly subjects. This means shunning cricket, which is seen as taking too long to play compared with other sports. Finally, cricket has also fallen victim to the ubiquity of football, which now dominates the sports media and is the primary sporting obsession for most youngsters.

This has led to a vicious circle. As fewer people play the game, there are fewer new teachers competent at coaching it. While most physical education teachers feel comfortable overseeing a football kickabout, cricket requires them to impart more technical skills. If they do not have them, they are more likely to turn to a simpler sport such as rounders to fulfill the "striking/fielding" requirement of the national curriculum.

It's been a fragile arrangement, and in India the second half of the equation has been rendered less potent by the pitches. This won't matter so much in England this summer, where Australia's seamers may just win them a Test. But the defeats in Chennai and Hyderabad have confirmed a long-standing hunch: Australia just ain't that good any more.
And there's the rub. A nation that for 20 years grew accustomed to winning Test matches, sometimes from ludicrous positions, has been obliged to look in the mirror. Understandably, it isn't enamoured with what it sees.

Requesting players to put together arguments about their selection and value might seem wacky to many. People might scoff at the wellness reports too. But whatever the case, this point is inescapable. The players in question have not done what they were told.

"I would say that just be the best you can be (irrespective of what your father achieved). Put in the hard work. From what I've seen, he doesn't shy away from [hard work]. You can see his enthusiasm for the game, so that's a plus. Look, you've got to do more than what the other guy is doing. And it applies to everybody, not just him. See, when he's out there on those 22 yards, the ball doesn't become slower or faster or turn more or turn less just because his last name is Tendulkar."

His achievements as a player are astonishing because of the odds stacked against cricketers from Kashmir. The weather, for a start, leaves fewer months to play cricket than in most other parts of the country and the lack of infrastructure means many club teams are forced to quit.

It was long known that the pure glovesman had disappeared, taking with him the mutton-chop whiskers he cultivated on his cheeks and the patchwork gloves into which, to better protect his palms, he slipped steaks of meat. But it's now clear that even the 'keeper-batsman who raised the level of his craft while swinging a subversive bat (Alan Knott, Rod Marsh, Jeff Dujon, Wasim Bari, Syed Kirmani, Ian Healy, Jack Russell, Adam Parore and Mark Boucher, for example) is facing obsolescence.

The reasons for teams to choose the better batsman over the better 'keeper -- indeed sometimes even convince a batsman to take up 'keeping -- aren't difficult to understand. Teams are forever chasing balance. And with the scarcity of genuine all-rounders, it is the wicketkeeper's spot that captains and coaches eye. Apparently it's easier to develop a 'keeper who can get by than a bowler who can take wickets or control runs.

"Their techniques may differ but there are echoes of my old mate, Chris Tavaré, in Compton. In the early 1980s Tavare may have been a source of some exasperation to spectators as he plodded forward before the inevitable muffled call of "Waiting" from beyond his mouthguard on those occasions when the ball had indeed travelled more than half a dozen yards from his bat."

Did NZC think an incident outside a Queenstown bar involving an international sportsman would just go away? All it needed was a press release saying Patel made a bad decision drinking heavily during a match last Wednesday night, and outline what went on. Instead, he was simply "unwell" when he missed the second day's play.

Cricket followers aren't stupid and generally know when there's more to a story. Economy of truth can be seen through in a hurry, and the treatment of Ross Taylor still has people on high alert. Fans deserve transparency, the knowledge that the players they pay money to watch are preparing well for matches and the administration is competent and not embarking on coverups.