Tour diarrhoea

If winter's here, can the sight of fat, pink English bodies basking in the Indian sun be far behind? There we were at Mohali, us natives, huddled in the sensible woollens that granny knit for us as she watched Wadekar and his boys administer the limeys a pasting back in glorious `71. And there they were, the whole barmy lot of them, all jiggling tit and wiggling gut, spilling out of their ostentatiously short shorts in a look-ma-us-northerners-don't feel-the-cold display designed to awaken the inner football hooligan in all of us.

Wait, there was no telly back in `71 was there? Hence granny couldn't have etc etc. Pity, such a poignant image it was, too.

Other crimes against taste for the month include Gower and Beefy: neckties worn over half-sleeved shirts - a punishable offence when perpetrated by anyone who isn't an American car salesman, surely? Botham yes, but Gower? Once so elegant and dashing and all? How the mighty have fallen. And of course, Sourav Ganguly whose chief identity these days - since he can't bat, field or lead the side - is mainly that of The One Who Wears The Iridescent Sunglasses of Doom.

But getting back to the point, why is it that it that the last people you'd want to see naked are the ones that are always going around topless - i.e. 47-year old Norman from Chichester whose wrinkled dugs would put the fear of God into Tiresias aka the bloke from Eliot's The Waste Land who wept by the rivers of Babylon because his breasts were shrivelled. Or something.

All told, the high point at Mohali, apart from those low-flying planes (oooh, scary!), was the `Fun Army' sponsored by a cement company - a bunch of local children who pranced onto the field during the lunch interval and regaled the crowd with a display of homestyle garba that showed far more athletic talent than the fielding to say the least. Which is not saying much when the fielding side in question is India, of course.

The one man who can't ever be accused of hesitating to jump in at the deep end has been sadly missed during this series. At his most listless Navjot Singh Sidhu speaks in an apoplectic spit-spraying frenzy that expends more calories per second than Ganguly sprinting full-tilt for the ball. It has taken a month of Botham and Gower for people to realise anew the truth in the adage that a prophet is not recognised in his own land. Enough of being British and genteel. Who needs a cup of tea when there's the thrilling prospect of a black egg laid by a white hen instead? Send in the clown, I say. Come back Navjot, all is forgiven. Ride roughshod over the wild plains of syntax one more time. Tread on those similes till their backs break. Knee those metaphors in the groin and wrestle them to the mat till they squeal like... like lambs that thought they were on their way to the shearers but find themselves in the slaughterhouse instead.

Speaking of which, who's getting the axe?