Sport is part of society, and society is shot through with politics © Getty Images

Next on the cricket front is the ICC meeting. Very good arguments for strong ICC action have come from writers in SA, the UK and India. I recommend especially Sambit Bal’s Cricinfo editorial and Andy Bull in the UK Guardian. But both still seem uneasy about ‘bringing politics into sport’. To repeat myself, sport is part of society, and society is shot through with politics. The ICC is part of international relations and this is also inherently political. National political parties and their competition have no place in sport, but sport cannot be quarantined from ‘politics’ in its wider sense of the exercise of power, at either domestic or international levels.

What about the ICC? Prima facie, Zimbabwe Cricket is financially and organisationally bankrupt, since every other public organisation in that country appears to be. The onus should be on ZC to demonstrate its viability, that its institutional capability (not simply its playing ability) still warrants a place at the top table. Does it have income other than the ICC’s handout? Can it mount adequate domestic competitions including at junior levels and home and away tours for the national team as well as lower level? These and similar questions need answers.

If ZC cannot answer satisfactorily, the ICC should act as any responsible regulator would and declare it bankrupt, that is, suspend its membership and institute a process to restore its health. The ICC should appoint a task team to develop a plan – backed by funds – to be implemented once Mugabe no longer has absolute power and the country begins to stabilize.

Cricket’s recovery in Zimbabwe will require externally supervised elections for a new national body. As I have argued, national sports authorities provide public goods and need to be accountable. To be effective, they must be credibly constituted in the eyes of ‘the public’. In 1991, the SA Cricket Union had to close and a new body, the United Cricket Board, established. Whether or not Peter Chingoka or other ZC officials are linked with Mugabe’s reign of destruction, the schisms in Zimbabwean society mean cricket will need a new, properly representative governing body.

These steps are way too far for the ICC at present (though by doing so it would at the same time enhance its own governance). Media reports suggest the BCCI will support the status quo, unless the Indian government forces it to do otherwise. If BCCI’s position is predicated on Zimbabwe’s ICC vote, it is short-sighted. Even the façade of Zimbabwe cricket will crumble soon, forcing India to cut them loose.

The Indian Government will not push BCCI: it won’t jeopardise its major ongoing initiative to build closer economic ties with African countries for the sake of Zimbabwe or cricket.

But I don’t expect that Mugabe will relinquish his hold on power anytime soon – just last week he said only God will remove him - so there will be further opportunity and need to press the ICC to intervene. I hope I’m proved wrong.

As an MCC member, I was quite indignant when I heard some cricket fans, cheering sarcastically at the great club’s response to the Kevin Pietersen switch-hit incident. Apparently they were surprised that the MCC could possibly have made a decision that was eminently sensible, reflecting a commonsense view of Pietersen’s outrageous talent.

To the ignorant, it seems a populist view that the MCC is made up of ancient people who are completely out of touch with the realities of the modern game. And ignorant they are. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I can’t speak for generations past but I’ve only ever experienced a club that views its role in the game with a mixture of irreverence, humour and a total devotion to the true spirit of the game. The Pietersen ruling was exactly what I expected – a commonsense decision that acknowledged KP’s genius and the fair contest between bat and ball. What’s so surprising about that?

And before you write me off as an apologist for the aristocrat Brit, perish the thought. A Sri Lankan-born Australian from suburban Brisbane is hardly the epitome of the posh Etonian with a double barrelled surname and a country estate in rural Hertfordshire. From my experience, the MCC is made up of a host of people who share one thing in common – a genuine love for the game and a real desire to see it embraced in far-flung corners of the globe.

Sounds far fetched? Sound elitist? Not on a little island called Lakemba in Fiji where a thousand rowing boats descended on a tiny village green to watch the MCC take on the Fijian national team. This was my first overseas tour with the club and it opened my eyes to how far the club would go, at its own expense, to promote the game. Test cricketers discussing the finer points of reverse swing with a burly Fijian fast bowler whose occupation (surely he was pulling our leg?) was apparently a bat hunter, the flying fox variety. The only ‘elitists’ were the giant mosquitoes which completely ignored the locals and feasted solely on the MCC. And feast they did!

Playing for the MCC seems to have a liberating effect on cricketers, even the world’s best players. I played in many games where seasoned international players shared a dressing room with rank no-hopers like myself and never felt the need to act like primadonna’s. In fact, it almost appeared as if playing for the MCC allowed these players to regress to a time when they played cricket for the pure enjoyment of it. You’d go a long way to meet a nicer man than Andy Flower and he never once gave the impression that he was too good for a game against a school First XI on a windswept British hillside on a chilly April afternoon. He was not an exception.

England is full of teams like the Free Foresters, The Arabs, John Paul Getty’s XI and the MCC and it’s easy to be sarcastic without understanding their genuine love for cricket. As an outsider who was always made welcome in this environment, I never witnessed the sort of arrogance that I see in club cricket every weekend. Even players who are prone to such tendencies seem too embarrassed to carry on like pork chops (Australian vernacular for ‘idiots’) when turning out for the MCC. Winning or losing is almost an afterthought.

Of course the MCC was going to endorse Pietersen’s brilliance. It was a moment that was great for cricket. Why wouldn’t they embrace it? For those ignorant critics of the MCC who don’t really understand what it stands for, take a leaf from KP and reverse your stance!

	Hardly anyone watched county four-day cricket © Getty Images

Everyone knows that the structure of the English season will change from 2010 onwards, but in what way? Will the ECB come up with a structure which people will want to support and patronise, or will they end up pleasing no-one by scheduling too few first-class games to satisfy the traditionalists only to discover that expanding the limited-over programme results in little or no growth in overall attendance figures as people pick and choose how to spread their cricket-watching budget?

The basic problem is that hardly anyone watches county four-day cricket. It costs vastly more to stage in terms of player salaries and staffing of the grounds than it ever takes in through the turnstiles. Even if you allot all of the income from membership subscriptions to the four-day account, every county makes a huge loss on the first-class game.

However, a successful England Test team is a huge revenue-earner. Broadcasters aren’t prepared to pay much to show a team which usually loses, but a winning team attracts top dollar for the TV rights. A successful Test team needs a strong first-class competition to supply its personnel, so the financial justification for the championship is that it provides that nursery.

In my ideal world, we’d have Championship matches starting every Friday and Twenty20 every Wednesday evening, but that’s simply what I want to watch; there is no specific cricketing justification for it. Though the present 16-game Championship seems pretty meagre to me, it is futile to pretend that it is the minimum necessary for Test preparation. Fifty years ago, Australia used to be able to come up with a side to beat us on eight games a season while we played 32.

Players know that first-class cricket is the stiffest test of their abilities: you can do quite well in short-form cricket by riding your luck, but first-class cricket always finds you out in the end, and it is the high degree of skill developed in first-class that enables the best players to do such spectacular things to make the moolah in Twenty20. Winning the championship, whether or not it is the most lucrative, is still the most fulfilling thing a county cricketer can achieve professionally, just as an actor will judge himself on his Hamlet, Estragon or Willy Loman at the National rather than his successful TV sitcom.

The most important thing in any new structure for the championship is that it retains the players’ respect. For that to happen, it must be clear to them that the team which wins is extremely likely to be the best team. Since they were not serious challengers in 1947 or 1949, Glamorgan’s famous win in 1948 was the sort of exception that proves cricket to be a funny old game after all, and no-one will mind that happening again once in a while, but as a rule, the players of the counties who don’t win should feel that the winners deserved it by virtue of being the best-equipped and best-performed team of the season.

Before we traditionalists lacerate whatever the ECB come up with, we should in fairness at least consider whether it will still deliver a championship a player will be proud to win.

	Norman Arendse's veto powers on selection have been removed © Getty Images

This follows the furore in March when CSA President Norman Arendse allegedly (he denies it) forced the replacement of Andre Nel by Charl Langeveldt in the team to tour India. The media and popular reaction then was: We won’t be fielding our best side! Race quotas are all very well lower down, but not for the national team! This ignored the facts. Langeveldt had performed better than Nel in the subcontinent, and Nel was no longer in the Test XI anyway. He had been replaced by Morne Morkel, so the argument was actually about the reserve seamer spot.

The new guidelines have provoked a sigh of relief, together with moans over some of the recommendations: Politics has not been fully exorcised from cricket!

Affirmative action invariably provokes illogical arguments and the cricket quota debate is no exception. Racial transformation targets – percentage shares with deadline dates – are now fully accepted by SA business, covering ownership, management, skilled labour force, purchases of goods and services and even customers. By and large, formerly white corporations have recognised the necessity of transforming and even its benefits. But far from being voluntary, it needed pressure and regulation to chivvy corporate foot-draggers. Government contracts depend on meeting BEE targets, big shareholders demand change, and legislated codes are in place.

Cricket boardrooms and executive offices are transformed, as evidenced by Arendse, Ray Mali et al., though there is the odd disgruntled (Ray) White. The national team has included black players on merit for years. So why the recent fuss?

I think it stems from a deep contradiction within national sports bodies. Fans following their sport enjoy what we economists call a ‘pure public good’ – all can be fans together and no aspiring fan can be excluded. Fans without the admission fee maybe can’t watch their sport ‘live’, but can be fans nonetheless. Public goods are best supplied by a single provider, usually government representing ‘the public’. Think of national defence, another public good.

National sports organisations are usually monopolies, but aren’t publicly accountable like government agencies or corporations listed on stock exchanges. They are private in character – non-transparent and self-regulating – if not privately-owned. This helps them enormously to evade the consequences of poor performance, limit players’ freedom of movement, and vigorously protect their monopoly power (I’ll write about IPL vs ICL soon).

But the fans have neither ‘exit’ nor ‘voice’ options to register their disapproval. They cannot switch to a market competitor nor hold ‘their’ sports organisations to account to force a change of behaviour. They carry all the risk: if the team does badly, they suffer, but they can’t change teams.

Back to Arendse, who was at worst ham-fistedly forcing employees (the selectors) to carry out company policy. His goal, if not his method, was that of any manager. The hostile reaction was in response to his own lack of transparent accountability. The real problem is deficient corporate governance, affirmative action is simply the context for the fight. So don’t expect the new guidelines to sort things out.

Can anything be done to improve accountability? Perhaps, though as I said, the problem is at the heart of national sports organisations. But I’m out of space, so I’ll have to come back to it another time.

There is a fairly well-established stereotype of the Australian cricket fan out there: loud, beer-swilling, male, proudly, passionately patriotic (and did I say loud and beer-swilling?) I want to point to another stereotype of the Australian fan that I carry around in my head: the enthusiastic recreational player come to watch the highest form of the game.

Australia owes part of its cricketing strength at least, to the extensive, well-organised network of recreational cricket that is visible in its summers. And each summer, a large segment of this population turns up at the Test matches and one-day internationals, all keen to see players practice the highest form of the game. Their presence ensures Australian crowds often provide the most knowledgeable spectators at Test cricket. And it reminds us of how the game played in the middle is experienced very differently by those watching in the stands, and how at least one, facile, binary division of cricket fans is possible: those who play and those who don't.

One abiding memory of the Test cricket I watched at Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide is of the fan who while watching the game, revealed a knowledge of the game that only a player could possess. This knowledge is perhaps best revealed by a quiet patience, with player mistakes in particular, and a quick appreciation of cricketing skill, regardless of the nationality of the player.

This fan will not impatiently call for batsman to get a move on regardless of game situation, and will be tolerant of occasional mishaps, largely because he is aware of the difficulty of playing the game well, and knows that mistakes will happen. This fan will readily applaud a display of cricketing competence, no matter what the player's nationality; a good shot is a good shot, no matter who plays it.

The playing fan also pays particular, thoughtful, attention to the players out in the middle, analysing as best as he can, their bowling skills or the structure of a shot; for him, watching a cricket match affords yet another opportunity for study of a game that obsesses him. The player fan is also more accepting of the misfortunes of the game; the loss of a wicket late in the day is borne with fortitude. This fan has not as yet, swallowed completely, the picture of the game sold to him by its television version; he is able to come to the ground and gain access to the essentials, unobscured by several dozen replays and cued music.

The fan who plays the game realises something the non-playing fan often does not: it's just a game. Some people play it better than others; it's not perfect, and everyone gets it wrong once in a while; it's hard, so when someone does something right, its worth noting.

Most fundamentally, for the fan who plays the game, what happens out in the middle is not pure spectacle or performance (what Mihir Bose termed tamasha), with players to
be primarily heckled, applauded or castigated. Instead the doings on the pitch represent striving, first and foremost. It is that striving that the playing fan recognises, in himself, as well as in those flinging themselves about on the field. And it is that recognition that changes his relationship to the game being played and makes him different from other fans.

I am writing this on June 16th, Youth Day in South Africa but better remembered, by those of us old enough, as Soweto Day. Thirty-two years ago, schoolchildren began to protest in Soweto township and were met by police bullets, a landmark moment in the resistance which led to our liberation in 1994.

An icon of that struggle, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, gave the Spirit of Cricket lecture at Lord’s last week. More than anyone else, Tutu has been our post-apartheid moral conscience. A cricket fan since his teens, he is the first fan to be asked to give the annual lecture. Since this is a fans’ blog, it seems entirely appropriate for this debut piece to be a homage to him.

The headlines after the lecture focused on Tutu’s support for a cricket boycott of Zimbabwe, though his lecture was not explicit about this. Nonetheless he is right, even if official South Africa – and the ICC - disagree. Our president is notorious for insisting on ‘quiet diplomacy’. Our cricket board sent SA and SA ‘A’ teams to Zimbabwe last August, and included Zimbabwe in our domestic competitions last summer, as used to happen in the 1970s when Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia.

The old anti-apartheid slogan ‘No normal sport in an abnormal society’ applies. Six-digit inflation? People dying of starvation? A ruling party that threatens to take up arms if it loses an election? Zimbabwe is an abnormal society, a society at war with itself.

Neither is Zimbabwe’s sport ‘normal’. Read the poignant piece on Zimbabwean cricketers resorting to illegal and desperate means of survival because inflation has dissolved their salaries, or the story of the SA ‘A’ team in Bulawayo last year – no food in their hotel, they went to get dinner at a chicken fast-food outlet. But the restaurant had no chicken, or anything else to eat.

There is an irrefutable moral case for a cricket boycott. Is there a political case too? Will it make a difference? Not directly. Unlike white South Africa, neither Mugabe nor his supporters seem to care much about cricket, sport generally, or their image in the West. Only a serious economic boycott in which South Africa participates will really impact on Zimbabwe. But the lesson from ending apartheid is that this needs an international social movement to force the hand of reluctant political leaders who don’t really want change – like Margaret Thatcher then and Mbeki now. A cricket boycott will help build this social movement, even though it is very late to be starting.

Tutu’s main concern was a much deeper disagreement with Thatcher, who famously denied the existence of ‘society’ and thought only in terms of ‘the individual’. Tutu argued that humankind is in essence a social being: the individual does not exist outside society. For him cricket epitomises this interdependence: more than most other games, it is a series of struggles between individuals which have meaning only in the context of the wider struggle between their teams and are only resolved with the help of their teams. Batsman and bowler always play for both themselves and their teams.

Cricket is shaped by the same economic, political and social forces which impact on the rest of society. Having enjoyed the Warner Stand at Lord’s in the 60s while a student in England, Tutu would have been forced to sit in a rudimentary ‘non-white’ enclosure at the Wanderers after his return home. What a way to be reminded that even if the cricket world – players and administrators – tries to keep the real world at bay, it cannot succeed, if only because its fans are necessarily part of that real world.

Cricket is facing big challenges which forcibly remind us that it is not just a game, from affirmative action to failed states, from the power of money to the tension between technological progress and social organisation (aka the third umpire). In my contributions to this blog, I plan to take up these issues while also writing about cricket on the field, like why Jacques Kallis is an all-time great, and what it feels like when South Africa beat England (hopefully) and Australia (really hopefully).

Cricket was how I learned about time zones. It's how I learned other creatures on this planet experienced very different times of day while being simultaneously co-existent with me.

I knew all about GMT, the International Date Line, and 360 degrees of longitude as a child; these were abstract academic facts about a globe, gleaned from geography textbooks, and I was a nerd after all. But I only really learned what time zones meant when it became clear to me I could be hunched up in bed on a cold winter night listening to a disembodied voice over the radio describing flannelled men playing in bright sunshine somewhere far away. It's how I really learned to grasp that India was a big country, and that the bureaucratic fiat of Indian Standard Time did abuse to the fact of its spectacular east-west sprawl. How else was I to understand that one part of the country (Calcutta) could fall into darkness (as test match cricketers seemed to be pointing out to umpires) while I was playing in the bright winter sunshine with my friends in New Delhi? Cricket sliced up the day into distinct parts, each marked out with its own distinct label, each providing a particular background and locale for a distinct set of cricketing memories.

Test matches in England were about summer heat, burning hot afternoons that shaded into cooler evenings before the radio commentary finally came to a halt just before midnight. Game changing moments happened as the Delhi night wore on outside. Watching cricket in Australia had as its local backdrop, the North Indian winter, its freezing early mornings, its glorious sunny afternoons, and the chance to conduct post-mortems of the day's play from lunchtime onwards.

Perhaps nothing else quite so clearly marked my move to the US, and my subsequent residence on the East Coast, as my realization that from now on, those two locales (England and Australia) would be almost precisely exchanged (a temporal reversal of roles if you will), that other places in the mind's cricketing map would have to be rearranged.

England became associated with summer mornings; with early morning cups of espresso; with the hope that perhaps I could delay my setting out for work so I could finish watching the post-tea session. Australia became associated with winter evenings; snow would fall on my dark Brooklyn street while I watched players do battle at Brisbane; and I could crawl into bed by 2 AM as the day's play wound down. And perhaps most strange of all, the West Indies, that mystical place where giants once slew all those who visited, and which was all about post-dinner commentary and tape-delayed radio in the early mornings back in India, this place suddenly became part of my local time zone: games began in the late morning and ended in the evening. The machinations to watch games in the West Indies took on a similar hue to those employed in India to watch home games: the 'sick' days, the "I think I'll just work from home" claims. The advantage of being located in the same time zone had also brought along its inconvenient companion: the clash with work hours.

Cricket told me the experienced daily world is sliced up into distinct temporal spheres; nothing else brought this home quite so clearly, not even those ubiquitous rows of clocks at airports, each set to a different city. And yet nothing else quite so clearly reinforced the connectedness of the world either.

	The IPL hardly made a ripple in Australia in terms of avid fans of the concept but there was an appreciation that India had now changed the face of cricket forever © Times Of India

Not so long ago in Australia, the subcontinent was the butt of crass humour and cheap stereotypes. The famous 'Twelfth Man' skits were hilarious but they hinted at a first-world superiority that made no apologies for making fun of the so-called curry munchers. Ironically, winning in the subcontinent was a major achievement (if you managed it) but losing was a minor irritation. After all, dodgy umpires, dodgy curries and dodgy pitches were standard fare, were they not? Real cricket was always played on fast, bouncy pitches or perfectly manicured green fields in faraway northern lands. Mind you, when the West Indian pace quartet of the 70's and 80's were playing 'chin music', we weren’t that keen on fast, bouncy pitches but that’s another opera altogether!

But Australian cricketers and fans alike are starting to warm to this impending marriage with a grudging affection that is born from being a nation of no-nonsense pragmatists. If you can’t break up the lovers, there’s no sense in missing out on a good party! It helps of course that our wonderfully talented team has all bases covered in cricketing terms. Batting, bowling and off-the-field, Australia is now comfortable with the notion of competing with the home nations in their backyard. The mystique and fear have largely been replaced by cultural familiarity and supreme adaptability in all conditions. No one can argue with Australia's ability to win away from home.

The cricketers can thank their talents and their bulging wallets for this new-found appreciation of India. Let’s be honest – the rupee is now the most seductive mistress of world cricket and any cricketer who pretends otherwise deserves our scorn. There’s nothing wrong with this so long as the love affair is mutually beneficial and not conducted behind a veil of hypocrisy.

From an Aussie fan’s perspective, India is both Montague and Capulet, saviour and villain. Reality suggests that this is where the future of the game now resides in an unholy alliance with the corporate moguls. It may be a marriage of necessity but here is a young maiden who is happy to be consummated on the altar of satellite television. And this bride is neither demure nor is she afraid to experiment. IPL hardly made a ripple here in terms of avid fans of the concept but there was nonetheless an appreciation that India had now changed the face of cricket forever. Whereas Australia used to be the innovator of change in the cricket world, even those who prefer tradition could not help but marvel at India’s ability to put on a show. And what a wedding it promises to be.....

On the other hand, there is also this uneasy sense that this could be a marriage based on a very convenient double-standard. The public perception of India is still that of a relatively poor country with social ills that the average Australian cannot comprehend. Perceptions can of course be wrong but perception is reality. How do we reconcile this poverty with the outrageous dowries being paid for Twenty20 mercenaries and the possibly devastating impact on our own local talent pool? If Corporate India has this much money to ‘waste’ on cricket, perhaps India should be viewed as a first-world country and therefore no longer to be viewed in a condescending (or sympathetic) light when it comes to broader economic perceptions.

South Africa has had to grapple with this duality for a long time and their experiences will provide a fascinating insight into how we understand modern India. Powerhouse or poorhouse?

At many Western weddings, it is customary for the guests to be asked the question: “if you have any objections, speak now or forever hold your peace”. Cricket Australia may have done just that but it is now a faltering voice, ignored by the princess and her followers. Australian cricket is definitely nervous about this shift in power but one hopes it is not a nervousness spawned by cultural prejudice. We ran the game for so many years and expected everyone else to respect our authority. The King is dead. Long live the King. We should now have the grace to hand over the reigns with willing hearts and minds.

To continue with the marriage analogy, it is not so much an issue as to where the Princess hails from but how benevolently and wisely she will govern the kingdom. World cricket cannot afford a ruthless dictator but countries like Australia need to remember that when we ran the show, shotgun marriages were often the norm. The only difference may be that the shotgun is now in different hands.

The brief for Different Strokes is to be personal rather than analytical. Good: I find it very hard indeed to be dispassionate about cricket. Without passion, cricket is merely an arcane ritual of interest only to the participants and anthropologists with a taste for the bizarre.

Naturally I pay lip-service to the Corinthian ideal of a good contest, but I don’t really mean it. The last thing I want when one of my teams is playing is a good contest. What I want is for my team to win, and if it can do so without causing palpitations, sweaty palms and nail-biting, then I am entirely satisfied. As I write, Middlesex have won five games in a row, and only the first, the championship game against Derbyshire, was anything less than a walloping. What with England doing rather nicely against the Kiwis over the weekend and even Yorkshire finally managing to win a T20 yesterday, I am a pretty happy bunny right now.

Victory is all the sweeter when it comes against your traditional rivals, which in county cricket usually means your next-door neighbours. Beating Essex three times in a week is pretty good, but giving them three comprehensive towellings is even better.

In the championship game, overcast conditions gave us an early advantage which we proceeded to cash in on to the eventual tune of an innings win, but Essex still played as though they meant it. The T20s, though, were another matter. At Lord’s, Essex’s batting was clueless, a succession of skied catches meaning they did not even reach 120, which they followed up by dropping half a dozen chances as Eoin Morgan gave us a bit of a show on the waltz to triumph, then at Chelmsford they were undone by a hat-trick from Nannes in his second over and Middlesex again strolled home. If the prospect of millions from the Champions League is supposed to be concentrating county cricketers’ minds, the conclusion to be drawn is that Essex’s are concentrating on blue funk.

But while Middlesex supporters have been ecstatic and Essex’s are no doubt pretending to their office colleagues that it’s just a blip and has nothing to do with them smashing their coffee mug, these games have involved little to please the neutral observer.

The myth of T20 is that it’s a batsman’s game. It was, in the beginning when bowlers hadn’t a clue about what to do, but it is rapidly changing. Now bowlers have realised that if the batsman is always on the attack, he exposes vulnerabilities and they can bowl to exploit them, especially the slow bowlers. If the team bowling first is successful, then the evening of thrills and spills rather peters out – as we also saw when England played New Zealand.

The runaway success of T20 has had a lot to do with its novelty. It’s brought in a whole new audience who have had thrills a-plenty as a bunch of highly-experienced cricketers have tried to get to grips with an unfamiliar format. As they discover the best ways to play, though - and with the huge amount of attention now being paid to it, they will be straining every mental sinew to find them – it’s entirely possible that T20 will be tactically mined-out within a few years, a fate which has already largely befallen the 50-over format.

For the partisan supporters, this is unlikely to be a problem. For us, what matters is whether we won or lost, and how we played the game comes a distant second.

But the dollar signs lighting up the eyes of players and administrators are predicated on T20 remaining enough of a white-knuckle ride to attract vast armies of new audience, and professional teams cannily using their experience to produce a game which resembles arm-wrestling more than jousting knights in armour will end up leaving the cash registers idle. If the T20 balloon deflates, the jolt when we hit the ground could be painful.

I’d much rather that didn’t happen. I love the exuberance of T20 and its emphasis on quick and accurate decision-making under pressure; first class cricket is all about strategy while T20 is purely tactics, and it’s a special sport which can accommodate forms which show off both to such advantage. Let us hope that the golden egg does not kill the goose.

Professional journalists are sometimes a little envious of the unconditional freedom enjoyed by self-published literary crusaders on the Internet, but the truth is, only the good and credible get read. One of the wonderful things about wandering online is discovering new writers and new ideas: original, startling, delightful, provocative, and sometimes all of those together.

Different Strokes is a modest attempt at finding some of these voices and bringing them to you. None of the contributors here are professional cricket writers. And it is an advantage. They carry none of the cynicism that familiarity can breed, nor are they inured to the foibles of the game. Distance can bring wonder, as it can bring perspective. We don’t expect their views to always match ours, but we do expect their voices to enhance our offering to you.

A couple of our contributors are teachers, one is an amateur cricketer, and another is a database consultant. More are expected to join them soon. We’d like to regard them as enlightened lovers of the game we all cherish.

Sambit Bal is Editor, Cricinfo