Born-again Ganguly still out to lord it over England

"The most memorable image of perhaps the most brilliant era of Indian cricket," says Rahul Bhattacharya in The Guardian, "is of a half-naked man on a handsome terracotta balcony. He is waving a shirt above his head, a tangle of gold and amulets are heaving across his chest, and all the while rather forcefully wishing somebody what looks a lot like "luck"."

In India Ganguly has an unmatched knack for dividing public opinion, but in England it is quite unanimous: the image is of a character so impossibly wealthy and spoilt that it is ultimately amusing. A classic instance is the story of him instructing Michael Atherton to run off for a sweater for him, an account so far from the actual event that Atherton himself dismissed it as apocryphal.