In a recent post, we explored the issue of some cricketers transcending national loyalties and being embraced by the cricket world in general. In this respect, Sir Don Bradman is probably the only one that has unequivocally achieved that status. Perhaps Sir Garfield Sobers approaches that level of worship but even his considerable aura doesn't hold a candle to The Don.

At a time when we are reminded that the great man narrowly missed out more than one triple figure landmark, averaging 99 with the bat and a mere 92 in life, Australia has been reminiscing about his achievements and trying to get a handle on "just how good was he?"

Most cricketers seem to acknowledge that his status as The Greatest Ever is unquestioned. Neil Harvey seemed to think that in the modern era, The Don would average 199.9 whilst others, less prone to getting carried away have merely reiterated the theory that he would still be a stand-out figure in any age.

We'll never know. How good was he? Twice as good as everyone else? Twice as good as those he played against or twice as good as anyone he'll come across in the modern game? Trying to transplant Bradman's genius on to the contemporary stage is an impossible task but it makes for some interesting debating points.

The Bradman fans, of which there are many, argue that he was so far ahead of his time that he would undoubtedly have coped with the more athletic demands of today's game. With better equipment, sports science, coaching and pitches, Bradman would have dominated like no other. He was as brilliant as he was allowed to be, as he needed to be, to stand tall in his era. Like any great athlete, they are utterly convinced that he would have continued to distinguish himself from the mere mortals of the game.

Yet, there are others, slightly more pragmatic and perhaps a bit less seduced by the romanticism of the legend of Bradman, who concede that he may not necessarily rule the roost to that extent. They point to a number of factors that may bring Bradman back to the field if he were still plying his trade today. The quality of fielding is obviously a factor.

Most reasonable observers would probably agree that the standard of fielding and catching has improved enormously, and continues to make quantum leaps. These days, most international cricketers are athletes. They chase down the boundaries instead of trotting off amiably behind another Bradman shot. That's a lot of runs saved, a lot more runs that Bradman would have had to score to average 99.

Less clear cut is the question of whether the quality of bowling has improved. Archival footage is inconclusive. Certainly, Tyson and Trueman were fast but how many other genuine quicks were around. Were there any Warnes or Murali's around to baffle him with spin? Bradman never faced O'Reilly in Test cricket. Were the wicketkeepers as agile and skilled?

Certainly there were less teams so much fewer opponents but on the flip side, less soft runs to be had against mediocre attacks too. These days, perhaps the video analysis would have led to a more thorough breakdown of his weaknesses (did he have any?) and perhaps, Bodyline might not have been viewed with remotely the same horror. Would he have made the adjustment and disposed of the great West Indian pace quartets of the 70s and 80s? Would he have dealt with Wasim Akram's reverse swing or Murali's doosra? We'll never know.

It's a question that is fascinating but only in an academic sense. We know he was good, bloody good, but just how good?

I can't verify the accuracy of this story but I've heard it told a few times so perhaps there is a grain of truth to it. Apparently when Bradman was asked to address the 1992 World Cup team, one of the young Australians (attributed toTom Moody) asked of him: "If you played against England today, do you still think you would have averaged 99?". Modest to a fault, Bradman replied "of course not. I'd be lucky to even average 50". Shocked by this, the same player stammered "but Sir, how can you say possibly say that? I mean, you were the greatest of all time and you don't think you'd average even 50 today? The English attack isn't that strong". The Don smiled gently and allegedly said "son, don't forget, I'm 83 years old now".

That's how good he was!

	The beers and beards come out at the cricket © Will Luke

I found Michael's piece on the desirability of looking beyond national boundaries in one's cricket appreciation quite thought-provoking, especially since the appeal was being made on the Internet, which has done a fair amount to both stoke and assuage nationalist frenzy in cricket fans worldwide. My relationship with the Net in this regard is a love-hate one. While it has certainly made possible contact with a larger body of cricket fans (with all the attendant benefits of travel when it comes to exposure to different cultures) it has also enabled a particular kind of xenophobic conversation that is extremely dispiriting.

Before I moved to the US, I had met very few cricket fans from other countries. A couple of Australian and English friends and acquaintances were the extent of my contact. My exposure to other cricketing cultures was largely a textual one: books, magazines and the like. I saw players and grounds on television, read about them, made up fantasies about how I imagined them to be. (Thus Australia was always sunny; imagine my shock when I found that Melbourne in August was nasty, cold and wet.) But moving to the US changed matters. I now met cricket fans from other countries in the flesh, talked to them, asked them about their favourite players and grounds, told them about mine, and traded the odd "favourite cricket moment" story and so on. Going online to talk about cricket (this was in the late 1980s) further changed things.

I met cricket fans here too. But the medium of conversation was very different, and the nature of the conversation radically so. The anonymity of the net, the speed and size of the distribution of messages, the 24-hour asynchronous link all led to a conversation that was rich with a diversity of insights, factual detail, analysis, and unfortunately infected by a great deal of rudeness, misunderstanding, and invective. The flame war was, as far as electronic conversations on cricket were concerned, an early, persistent, and tiresome companion. And the content of the flame wars was not just passionate disagreement; it quickly degenerated into xenophobia, chauvinism and deliberate ignorance. For cricket has its nationalist lines, most clearly visible in the teams and the fans that support them. These lines can be exhausting ones; I stopped reading cricket discussion fora for a very long time because I had become worn out by constant exposure to nationalist bickering. While I enjoyed reading a lot of the material (and being exposed to the passions of other cricket lovers) too much of it was trapped in a sludge of juvenilia.

I am not the first (nor will I be the last) to note that the Internet has its good side and its bad side. As a medium for getting in touch with an international community of fellow cricket lovers it remains unparalleled. When my desire to engage in a conversation with them and express my thoughts about the game grew too strong, I took up blogging. For the expat cricket lover, it is the only way to maintain one's sanity. But that doesn't mean it cannot exacerbate misunderstandings, shade subtlety and often lead to more corroded discourse. And at this present time, with the game facing a critical moment that could affect its future, it behoves us to try and evolve a conversation online that could approximate our favourite moments offline. Which in my case are talking about the cricket, while at the cricket, with a cold one close by. If only our Internet encounters could be as mellow.

	Mark Butcher leads England to victory at Headingley in 2001 © Cricinfo

In my post on the iniquities of the career average, I mentioned Mark Butcher, and it occurs to me that it’s about time somebody rang down the curtain on his Test career. He hasn’t retired and he wasn’t dropped: he missed the last three Tests of the 2004-05 series in South Africa through injury but was ignored once fit again.

Butcher was identified in his teens as a promising talent, and his ascent to the England ranks was virtually inevitable, but once there, although he played a couple of good innings against South Africa and one against Australia, it was apparent that he was not up to the job. His defensive technique was no match for Test-class pace bowling and he played spin the way a guitarist would play the bagpipes.

In a number of parallel universes, he would have lived out his days on the county circuit carrying the millstone of “Test failure”, but in this one there was a stream of injuries running up to the 2001 Ashes which resulted in him getting another chance.

He grabbed it with both hands and became a fixture at number three for the next four years.

A compact left-hander, his business shots were the slapped drive through extra cover, the neat late cut past backward point and the flick forward of square leg, with the occasional straight drive mixed in. However, his other main shots were the waft to gully, the chip to mid-off and the spoon to midwicket, which had him permanently teetering on the edge of danger, compounded by his unfamiliarity with judging a run.

Yet he was one of England’s most consistent performers. The remodelled Butcher averaged 42.53 over the period: the only other reasonably regular number threes to have averaged as much for England since 1970 are Alec Stewart and David Gower.

The trouble was that he was a supporting actor rather than a star, and that is not really enough from a number three in Test cricket. Consistent though he was, despite appearances, it was rare for him to play the kind of decisive innings one expects from first drop.

Once, though, I was there when he did it, and oh, what a day it was!

It was the fifth day of the Headingley Test in 2001. Adam Gilchrist had declared the previous evening with the intention of nicking a couple of wickets before the close but had been thwarted by bad light, so England had the little matter of 310 runs to get.

My train was late, and the groan from the crowd as I reached the gate told me a wicket had fallen. 33-2 it was, with hope already ebbing away fast.

Scratchily, Butcher and captain Nasser Hussain kept the new, swinging ball out. Hussain then lashed out and deposited the ball in the car park, which was the best tactical move of the day, as the replacement refused to deviate off the straight. Gradually, they developed a partnership and were still together at lunch.

The crowd smiled nervously at each other during the interval, wondering if they should dare to hope. Butcher still seemed to be living on borrowed time – how many of those dabs through the gully region had been mere inches short of a fielder?

On they went, and then, after another forty minutes, something seemed to click. Butcher’s shots were being hit with an unfamiliar confidence; though they still went fairly close to fielders, they looked precisely placed. When he reached his hundred, the place erupted. It was on!

He lost Hussain with 100 needed; his place as Butcher’s foil was taken by Ramprakash, though he went just before the end and it was Usman Afzaal who saw Butcher stroke England to victory, ending on 173*.

In bright sunshine, I waited for the traffic gridlock to die down, floating around the streets listening to the post-match interviews on the radio, a beatific smile on my face and humming David Bowie: “We can be heroes, just for one day.” Life felt good again, even though the Ashes were long gone.

For that day especially, thank you, Mr Butcher.

	Brian Lara's unique back lift and penchant for huge scores, married to a complex personality and a reputation for honouring the spirit of cricket makes him one of cricket’s unforgettable memories © AFP

If the 1990s is to be remembered as the era of the great spin bowlers, the next eight years must surely belong to the wicketkeepers. Ian Healy and Jeff Dujon could never have imagined that their legacy has been embraced by the next generation who have turned that position into a genuine all-rounder role. Just about every country, England and West Indies notwithstanding, have a wicketkeeper who now wins matches regularly by his batting alone. Even trawling through the history books, I can’t remember an era when that was the case.

The decade began with the scandals involving Hansie Cronje and Mohammad Azharuddin. It brought home the dangers of a game that was in some sense a victim of its own television popularity. With so many meaningless ODI tournaments being televised around the world, it was a fertile environment for a particular type of gambling that allowed players to perhaps comfort themselves that they weren’t actually throwing a match. They were merely engineering a small period of play within the context of a longer game. Or so they believed.

We also saw the emergence of an opening partnership to match the Greenidge-Haynes combination, perhaps even surpass those statistics. Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer took aggressive opening batting to new heights and with players of the calibre of Ricky Ponting (and others), Australia remain market leaders in most aspects of the game.

Speaking of partnerships, we saw the great Dravid-Laxman effort in Kolkata which was on a par with the Gilchrist-Langer effort in Hobart 1999. Brian Lara and Hayden traded world record scores, Muttiah Muralitharan and Shane Warne traded bowling records while Brett Lee and Shoaib Akhtar started hitting speeds that hadn’t been touched for 30 years. It just seemed like a decade of high octane, high performance events that kept coming. Players from all around the world seemed to be treating statistics and records as a personal challenge. Even hat-tricks seem to happen more regularly these days.

Technology has played a major role in this decade too. History will show that innovations like HawkEye and the recent third umpire referrals had a profound effect on the game. Even in coaching circles, software analysis is now considered to be an indispensable part of a dressing-room environment. It’s barely a sport anymore, more like a scientific laboratory that produces F1 racing cars - fast, exciting and highly tuned machines!

There are too many wonderful players to mention in a short article like this, lest anyone take offence at notable omissions. It would not be proper to allow the retirement of one Brian Lara to go unmentioned though. That unique back lift and penchant for huge individual scores, married to a complex personality and a fantastic reputation for honouring the spirit of cricket makes him one of cricket’s most unforgettable memories. The decade marked the retirement of his notable peers too. The Waugh twins, Inzamam Ul Haq, Wasim Akram, Glenn McGrath, Shane Warne, Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock, Aravinda De Silva – where do we draw the line? I can think of a dozen more great names.

On-field, cricket is a strong product. In the boardrooms and corridors of power though, there are serious geopolitical issues that remain unresolved. Allowed to fester, they may yet unravel the wonderful entertainment spectacle that is the modern game. From the IPL and T20 cricket to the status of Zimbabwe to the possible boycott of the 2008 Champions Trophy, these are all issues that need strong leadership by the ‘suits’. They need to be reminded that behind the accountants and television executives, there are now millions of global cricket fans who simply want to see the best cricketers in earnest competition with each other.

The two World Cups of this decade were pretty uninspiring events but that is not Australia’s fault. They have been simply superb in big tournaments, having not lost a World Cup game since May 23 1999. The onus is on the challengers to breathe new life into a tired format because after that terrible farce in the dark of Barbados in 2007, it was Australia first and daylight second. Well, twilight anyway!

	The ICC was already in crisis in June over Zimbabwe, but in terms of its own future the Champions Trophy issue is much worse © AFP

So the ICC has postponed the Champion’s Trophy for a year. After South Africa withdrew on Friday, postponement was inevitable. Cricket SA’s announcement came immediately after a meeting with the ICC’s top two officials, both South Africans, and it seems inconceivable that the latter didn’t tacitly approve.

The Champions Trophy controversy reflects the ICC in crisis. Not a crisis of leadership – because of the removal of the Australian MD, as argued by Malcolm Conn in a typically Aussie one-eyed take –– but a structural crisis. Its governance processes have become outdated as the power relations in world cricket have shifted. An unfashionable German guy with a beard long ago referred to this sort of problem as the inevitable consequence of the contradiction between the forces and the relations of production.

The ICC was already in crisis in June over Zimbabwe, but in terms of its own future this is much worse. Not being able to play in Pakistan is a far worse blow to world cricket, but the Champions’ Trophy debacle has so much further polarised the ICC as to render it incapable of making decisions. Its two-thirds majority voting model is no longer feasible, since the Asian group of four has veto power over any proposals if it sticks together, but cannot carry its own proposals against ‘old’ powers Engand and Australia, without support from both SA and West Indies, which it didn’t have in this instance and won’t automatically have in future. The Asian group could not make the tournament happen but it could prevent cancellation as favoured by the old powers. Postponement was simply the least unsatisfactory compromise for both sides. But it was not a proper resolution of the problem, nor was the Zimbabwe decision in June. Sooner rather than later, the ‘least unsatisfactory’ compromise will not be adequate and the organisation will implode.

Not coincidentally, there is a similar problem in the arguably more important world of international trade, where negotiations for a new WTO agreement have collapsed (again). India is at the heart of that crisis too, together with China and Brazil. As in cricket, it is the nouveau riche challenging the presumptive dominance of the ancien regime, and using the existing rules to do so. As in cricket, the outcome is stalemate – at least for now. The emergent countries have acquired enough defensive power to block their opponents’ efforts, but not enough to impose their own solutions or to create a new set of rules..

The future of the WTO is unclear. There are powerful centrifugal pressures in the world trading system, as powerful countries – old and new –focus on building exclusive trading blocs, pushing smaller nations into bilateral trade agreements to try to exclude competing powers.

Where to for the ICC? Can the ‘cricket world’ hold together? The pressures for disintegration have surely been greatly reinforced by the undermining of ICC authority reflected in today’s decision. Private interests – whether IPL, Stanford, ICL or whomever – will be emboldened to test the limits of ICC regulatory power over the cricket calendar and ‘official’ stamp. Franchise-based ‘club’ cricket competitions like the IPL will be expanded, leaving less time for international representative cricket. The incentives for national boards to adhere to the ‘Future Tours Programme’ will be weaker, and countries more likely to pick and choose Test opponents based on marketability and politics (The itinerary provided to England by India for the forthcoming tour was an interesting straw in the wind.)

The ICC can try to resist this, and it probably will try. That would be a mistake.

The proper meaning of ‘crisis’ is not closure or collapse, but ‘turning point’, and a crisis is therefore also an opportunity for renewal. Instead of trying to defend the status quo, inevitably in vain, the ICC should undertake an orderly retreat aiming to leave itself with enhanced authority over diminished territory. In this, cricket would be following the examples of football and rugby. It would require drastically reducing and refocusing the Test and LOI schedules, but at least the ICC would thereby maintain control over international cricket, and could arrange a considered and well-designed Test calendar rather than an unco-ordinated and unplanned one. The alternative is to leave more powerful private interests to structure their own tournaments with international games reduced to the leftovers. Of course there would be numerous contracts to re-negotiate, not least with the TV overlords, but they (and national boards) would be compensated by the continued growth of globally-marketed ‘club’ cricket.

The subtext here is of course more Twenty20 and less Test cricket, not good news for those, myself included, who choose Tests above the rest. But if anything is inevitable in cricket’s future, it is more Twenty20, a lot more, and less time for everything else.

	Two blokes patting steady, disciplined bowling around on a placid pitch, with no prospect that a wicket will fall is my idea of cricket-watching hell © Getty Images

The Edgbaston Test was almost as good as Test cricket gets. South Africa gradually established a strong position, then there was an aggressive counterattack from Pietersen and Collingwood which put England in the box seat, bringing forth a truly great innings from Smith to win the game and series. All it lacked as a match were some good spin bowling and two or three more South African wickets to make the last hour tenser. If Test cricket were always like this, grounds round the world would be packed.

On the other hand, though, we had Lord’s.

Stephen took me to task for describing day four (and five, for that matter) as “enervatingly tedious”, inviting me to appreciate the grit and determination of the South Africans as they saved the game, but I remain unmoved.

I can certainly praise the application, patience and concentration which the South Africans demonstrated, but as a spectacle it lacked just about everything. Two blokes patting steady, disciplined bowling around on a placid pitch, with no prospect that a wicket will fall unless a batsman has a brainstorm and no likelihood that an aggressive shot will be played is my idea of cricket-watching hell.

Stephen drew a parallel with Atherton’s two-day match-saving 185* at Jo’burg. Since I wasn’t at the Wanderers, I can’t really comment on whether Atherton’s epic was worth watching, but I strongly suspect that it was pretty bum-numbing fare for most of the hundred or so hours it seemed to last. The place to watch admirable innings like that is the members’ bar, where one can have a good natter with one’s friends and keep a weather eye on progress on the TV screen in case anything actually happens.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good fight for survival. The best session of the first two Tests was the third morning at Headingley, when only 52 runs were scored for the loss of one wicket. Painfully slow it may have been in scoreboard terms, but the ball was swinging, Anderson was bowling very well and the other bowlers were making things happen. The batsmen, though, were more than equal to it, using every ounce of wit and skill at their disposal. That session on its own confirmed that South Africa should win the series because they were the better team.

I’ve relished similar things at Headingley before, notably Dilip Vengsarkar in 1986 and Rahul Dravid in 2002, when survival was match-winning given the difficult conditions for batting. The terror tracks of Headingley in the 1980s may have produced low-scoring games which were over well inside four days, but by heck there was some great cricket involved.

But that was not what was happening at Lord’s. After that match, even Neil McKenzie said that he was pleased to have got his name on the board, but he wouldn’t be remembering it as one of his great achievements.

I’m not criticising the South Africans: they simply did what the game situation demanded and did it very well, probably much better than England would have done.

The villain was the groundsman, as it was in March at Chennai when the only enlivening thing in an otherwise pointless contest was Sehwag’s blistering 300.

Pitches like the ones served up at Chennai and Lord’s are not fit for serious cricket. They may suffice for ODIs, but no-one has ever suggested that ODIs are supposed to be an equal contest between bat and ball. Michael Holding, Allan Donald, or Shane Warne would carry on taking wickets on pitches like that because that’s just what they do, but ordinary Test-class bowlers have no chance against Test-class batsmen. It should not be necessary to be an all-time great to have some prospect of success.

If the world’s cricket administrators are sincere in wanting to preserve Test cricket as the pinnacle of the game, it’s not a Test championship that we need to rekindle interest but action to restore the balance between bat and ball.

	I'm sure many Indians loved watching Wasim Akram whilst at the same time cursing him for every Indian wicket he ripped out © Getty Images

Depending on what happens over the Champions Trophy, cricket fans might soon be part of a political game of tit-for-tat which will have one common casualty - watching the best players from all over the world in action.

Since Bradman became the first global colossus of the game, we've seen a few players who have been adopted by genuine fans who can truly put aside their loyalties and simply recognise wonderful cricketers for what they are. In my lifetime, I immediately think of players like Shane Warne, Adam Gilchrist, Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara, Muttiah Muralitharan, Michael Holding and Malcolm Marshall. I'm sure other readers will have their own favourites from countries other than a blind allegiance to their own.

IPL may represent a watershed in this regard. A bit like what county cricket did for the great West Indians, Pakistanis and other overseas players, IPL's model of bringing the great players of the modern era to Indian franchises and global television coverage will hopefully bring about a cultural shift in the minds of cricket fans all around the world. Imagine a team that might one day have Brett Lee and Shoaib Akhtar bowling in tandem. Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh winning a thrilling run-chase and embracing in delirious joy. OK, OK, now I'm getting carried away!

Every four years when the Olympics come around, it reminds me that the world of elite sport is exactly that - the world! Sure, I get excited when an Australian is competing and I sit a bit further forward in my seat but that's only natural. When someone like Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps takes to the starting blocks though, the sense of genuine pleasure is palpable. I'm not sure why because I have no real reason to cheer on Jamaica or the USA except for the fact that these guys just strip away my sense of identity. For a few minutes, they make me a citizen of the world.

Likewise with cricket, I have never understood people who can't see beyond their own local heroes. I'm sure there are many Indians who loved watching Wasim Akram whilst at the same time cursing him for every Indian wicket he ripped out. When I was a young boy growing up in Sri Lanka, I adored Allan Border to the extent where I'd even wear my lucky shirt every time he batted (until he got out cheaply and I threw it away in disgust!). Later, after moving to Australia, I remember 'hating' Gower with a passion during the 1985 Ashes Series but was still unable to switch off the television at three a.m. on a school day.

When I lived in England more recently, I chanced upon an encyclopedic statistician who refused to acknowledge that Shane Warne was arguably the greatest spin bowler of all time. When that same person later announced that Ricky Ponting was a flat track bully who only scored runs against poor bowlers, I immediately discounted him as a credible companion. He was just a sad, misguided soul, carrying a Wisden Almanack who missed his calling as Minister for British Propaganda.

Watching Michael Phelps last week was an exercise in shedding prejudice and just embracing a supreme human being. It was just good to be a part of the same species. Likewise with Usain Bolt - for those 10 seconds (9.6 to be exact), Jamaica shared him with the world. Revealingly, Bolt himself confesses that one of his biggest heroes is Matthew Hayden. Anyone who accuses Bolt of being disloyal to his fellow countrymen just misses the point totally. Some things in life go beyond Passport Control. If cricket is to become a truly global game to remotely rival soccer or tennis, it's future lies in taking a leaf out of the Olympic spirit and start revelling in greatness, regardless of whether it hails from Brisbane, Bangalore or Barbados. How many of us care whether Roger Federer is Swiss? Perhaps he has an Australian uncle somewhere.

In view of the looming crisis on the Champions Trophy front, it behooves all parties involved to realise that cricket cannot survive a global split along party political lines. World cricket needs to find a sensible compromise or else the Champions Trophy might be called that in name only.

	In the worst case scenario, there is confusion about lines of authority and the team falls apart (c.f. Greg Chappell and the Indian team) © AFP

Most cricket fans have, at some point, while listening to the ponderous pronouncements of an 'expert' television commentator, said words that approximate the following: "No sh*t, Sherlock!" In short, we are used to being deluged with Missives from the Department of the Bleeding Obvious.

We are told early wickets are important, that while chasing a victory target, the openers should provide a good start, and that line and length is key (feel to supply your own personal favourite). My intention in reminding us of these tautological dictums is not to make merry at the expense of an oft-vilified demographic, The Expert Commentator, but to try and segue into a brief questioning of the latest addition to international cricket's evolving cast of characters: the national coach. For, like some cricketers, I often wonder at what precisely the role of the coach is. To slip into corporate mumbo-jumbo for a second, what is the ‘value-addedness’ of this entity, what is its core competency?

Does the coach supervise the nets? Does he run catching drills? Does he map out tactics and field placings? Devise team selections, batting orders and bowling combinations? Perhaps the answer to this set of questions is "Yes". But in each case, the tasks described are better done (and have been for ages) by the captain in co-operation with other members of the team, with the captain picking and choosing his partners on the basis of assessed competency at the task. The captain and the rest of the team are the ones executing these tactics and strategies; they are the ones whose professional success is inextricably linked with the team's performance.

In cricket, it is the captain who is given unique responsibility for the operation of the game on the ground. Given this, it is appropriate that the captain have corresponding authority off the field in order to run his campaigns efficiently. To introduce a coach into this picture is to unnecessarily muddy the waters of authority, to introduce incoherence into a straightforward situation (perhaps with embarrassing psychobabble about motivational strategies) and to run the risk of players constantly being subjected to a barrage of obvious throw-away lines ("I think we need to restrict the lead tomorrow and hold all our catches"). The world of professional cricket provides all the wisdom needed for any cricketer, available to anyone who bothers to watch and listen to his contemporaries, whether friend or foe. If a cricketer isn't picking up tips from this grapevine, he isn't a very good listener or learner, and no coach can help him.

The best you can hope for is that the sheer cricketing talent of the team will render the coach harmless (c.f. John Buchanan and the Australian team). In the worst case scenario, there is confusion about lines of authority and the team falls apart (c.f. Greg Chappell and the Indian team). And as has been noticed in Pakistan, New Zealand, England, Sri Lanka, West Indies, Bangladesh, and South Africa, the coach cannot make up for the cricketing deficiencies of 'his' team. The experience of those teams is roughly the same all over the world: in terms of positions on the cricketing ladder, the teams are where one would expect them to be given the quality of their players, captains, and cricket administrations. Their results show no overall positive or negative bump depending on the coach. In short, the coach is irrelevant to the success of the cricket team. There have been some success stories that may be linked to some coaches (e.g., Wright, Woolmer, Fletcher) but in each case it seems to me there are perfectly good alternative explanations.

Most irritatingly, the national coach seeks to turn the Test captain, a singular figure in international sport, into a glorified quarterback. Here, here is the playbook, printed off from my laptop; now, run out on the field and execute it. The introduction of the coach into the international cricketing setup has been the introduction of the second sword into the scabbard: pointless and counterproductive.

If Michael Vaughan’s knee injury at the back end of 2005 had ended his career, as once seemed likely, his place in history as one of the great captains would be assured.

He managed to square the 2003 series against a fairly obviously superior South Africa, had an indifferent visit to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and then won six series on the bounce, including England’s first series wins in the West Indies and South Africa since the 1960s and culminating in the glorious victory in the 2005 Ashes, over which a grateful nation swooned.

His ability to get the best out of the individuals in his team and uncanny knack of knowing which bowler to bring on and what unorthodox field to set for each and every batsman evoked comparisons with the other two great England captains of my watching career, Raymond Illingworth and Mike Brearley.

But the story of Vaughan’s captaincy is an Aristotelian tragedy, in which a man’s reversal of fortune comes from a mistake. It was reasonable enough to appoint a stand-in captain for the series in India which followed the injury, but once it became apparent that the injury was going to take a lot longer to heal, he should have given up the captaincy and allowed England to move on while he came back in his own good time.

As it was, when he finally resumed office, he was concerned about his knee and his batting form dropped off disastrously. Captaincy had affected his bating before: he had averaged in the high thirties in his first period of captaincy compared to the high forties he had been registering while still in the ranks, but that was a reasonable price to pay for the wickets he could take by ingenuity in the field.

But when the runs dried up almost completely, at least against good bowling sides, he seemed to rely more and more on the two things which he felt had won the Ashes – consistency of selection and unorthodox field settings –eventually resulting in his over-the-top reaction to the selection of Darren Pattinson and making 253 field changes in a single day.

Vaughan’s tragic mistake was not to recognise what in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is contained in Ecclesiastes, although atheists like me tend to digest it in the form of The Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn”: “To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.” The lengthy injury was a signal that his captaincy had had its time, but he failed to spot it and thus incurred the unhappiness of the second time around.

A production of the Tragedy of King Vaughan could portray him in several ways. He could be played as power-hungry, arrogantly refusing to give up his crown, but this would seem unfair to me. When the vast majority of the advisers (in the form of the ECB) and the people (in the form of the fans, including me) plead with the king to stay on because we believe in him as a miracle-worker, it would take a monarch of extraordinary sagacity to deny them when falling in with their wishes seems only too agreeable a prospect. Were I to be directing it, I would present it as a parable on the dangers of dwelling on the glorious past rather than taking a clear-eyed view of the future.

Vaughan’s triumphs will shine through history, but history will take its own good time to decide how much weight to place on the subsequent disappointments. For those English fans who lived through the 2005 Ashes, though, it is easy to forgive what followed.

Continuing with my theme of comparing decades rather than individuals, I recall the 1990s as a period of significant change. It began with the retirement of some all-time greats but time stands still for no man. Sachin Tendulkar, Shane Warne, Brian Lara, Muttiah Muralidaran, Glenn McGrath, Wasim Akram and Steve Waugh were just some of the new generation to dominate the ‘90s. Ian Healy took wicket-keeping to new heights but even his excellent batting at number 7 looks out of place amongst today’s glovemen.

Courtney Walsh’s fabulous career covered this entire decade too.His career went full circle from feared enforcer to the lone class act in a fast bowling attack that had none of the venom of his early days. And that was possibly the biggest power shift in cricket. Australia, sensing the weakness of the Reggae Kings, finally conquered the Caribbean fortress in 1995 and thirteen years later, they still hold the world crown in both forms of the game.

The Aussie domination can be traced to multiple factors, not least a talent pool that reaped the dividends of a strong domestic structure and the vision of the Cricket Academy. Top class players, battle-hardened and confident, kept arriving off the conveyor belt and were instantly ready for elite company. Imitation is definitely the sincerest form of flattery with most countries now replicating that ‘finishing school’.

The balance of the Australian team was arguably even more superior to the West Indies in their pomp because they had Warne. No pitch was now beyond them, even though India still defended their castle staunchly. Individual players too became supremely adaptable, performing at home and abroad, on green tops and dust bowls alike.

Australia also changed the way cricket was played. Scoring at 4+ RPO in Test cricket was now de rigueur and other sides soon followed. That legacy can still be seen today.

South Africa was back! How good it was to have another genuine contender in the field. They were immediately competitive and could easily have even won their first World Cup in 1992. Pakistan’s win in that tournament was a triumph of inspirational leadership and brilliant youth. Imran and Javed steering the ship whilst Akram, Mushtaq Ahmed and Inzamam Ul Haq looked nothing like each other but were bound by the common thread of genius.

Sri Lanka then changed the one-day game forever with their ambush in the 1996 World Cup. Their tactics still hold good today but now everyone tries to bat like Sanath Jayasuriya at the top of the order. It was a refreshingly simple but high-risk strategy – keep playing shots even if you lose early wickets and hope someone fires on the day.

Australia adapted better than most and conquered the world in 1999 but they did it with more conventional players like the Waugh Bros and Ponting who simply expanded their skill base. They were that good. Their duels with South Africa in that tournament will stick forever in my mind. Lance Klusener deserves a mention too.

Meanwhile, Lara and Tendulkar were phenomenal players. Their battles against the likes of the great bowlers like McGrath, Allan Donald, Warne, Murali, Akram and Waqar Younis made for compelling entertainment.

What was best about the ‘90s was that it made spin bowling fashionable again, bringing a new dimension back to the game. Have we ever seen so many ‘great’ spinners debuting in a single decade? We’ve already mentioned Warne, Murali and Mushtaq but what about Saqlain Mushtaq, Anil Kumble, Stuart MacGill and even the quirky Paul Adams? Young kids were suddenly captivated by this new art form and the tree is still full of young fruit.

One significant change that the ‘90s introduced was the phenomenon of spreadbetting. Born in London’s financial markets, its influence touched cricket with stunning consequences. It even had the power to take down captains and spawn cricket’s own mafia.

Despite this shadow, my memories of the glorious ‘90s still feature positive images of an Australian dynasty that took the on-field skills to new heights and dragged cricket to a higher plane. All of a sudden, cricketers needed to be athletes in every sense of the word. Revealingly, Australia did it with personnel who essentially had techniques that were built on old-fashioned principles that had stood the test of time. They did it consistently better than anybody else, from number 1 to 11. Not many other teams could regularly match that depth of class. Not many still can!

	Anil Kumble, captain of India's Test team, chosen by the Board of Control for Cricket in India © AFP

In response to my previous post on the alleged linkages between national character and cricket, reader Ajax wrote (in part): "Who exactly are the 'national boards'? This is the greatest marketing gimmick in the Commonwealth. Is a player unpatriotic for joining the ICL?" If I've understood Ajax correctly, he is asking, "What makes the national teams playing today the 'official ones'?" In return, I'm going to be self-indulgent, and quote myself from a post I wrote on 'Eye on Cricket' a few months ago. Talk about subversion.

I'm watching the ICL India XI get their caps from Kapil Dev as I write this. This moment is one of those that philosophers love; it shows something we took to be a conceptual given, is actually a matter of convention or arrangement. For as long as we've known cricket in India, it was assumed there was only one 'Indian' team. And the BCCI was its lord and master. This India XI, for trademark reasons, I'm sure, is called the "ICL India XI" and not just the "India XI", but it's an India XI as much as the BCCI's XI is. Team India might be the team we call the "Indian team" but really it's just the "BCCI India XI", just like the English team at one time was the MCC XI (before the TCCB and then the ECB took over).

The point I was trying to make (slighly loosely) in response to watching a bunch of players taking the field calling themselves an India XI, is that when people say "That's my country's team", they are referring to the group put together by the organisation 'in charge'. And the 'in charge' just means "doing it for long enough in a situation where they are (or have become) the only ones". And over that period of time, the entities in question, both the organisation in charge and their selected group become identified with the game in the 'national representative' sense. But that is a matter of established convention, not some otherworldly linkage, and they remain 'official' only so long as they don't face competition.

Had Kerry Packer's WSC stuck around long enough to fully permeate the consciousness of a generation of spectators, the confusion over which team was the 'real Australia' would have been pronounced and genuine. Indeed, by the time the WSC Australian XI went to the West Indies in 1979 for the Supertests, I had become seriously confused myself. What I seemed to be reading about in the papers sure as hell sounded like Test cricket to me. (And I still consider Greg Chappell's batting in the series one of the finest performances against the "West Indies team".) This thought experiment is well worth playing out.

Imagine the Packer dispute had not been settled. How long would it have been before fans would have started wondering which side- the Packer XI or the ACB XI -made claims on their allegiance and support? Perhaps they would have supported both but the intensity of their nationalist ardour might have been dimmed somewhat. The raising of the question of which team was the 'real' one would have brought the awkwardness of the answer to the fore. There is no 'real' 'official' Australian XI. But to expect one is to expect that anything could be more 'official' than what is already at hand: a bunch of players selected by the (hopefully only) organisation in charge of the game.

The moment there is more than one organisation in charge, the confusion begins. Witness the situation in boxing, where it is not clear who the 'world champion' really is. Surely there must an 'official' world championship (or there must have been one in the glory days of Ali, Frazier et al). But there wasn't. There was just the championship of the dominant boxing council (Good Lord, what was that alphabet soup again? IBF, WBC, WBA?) When it lost its dominance, we had the spectacle of multiple world champions and the urge to find unification champions. The chess world championship underwent similar confusion.

The existence of the ICL India XI served to remind me of the origin of the Indian National Team[tm], the BCCI and the linkages between the two. The BCCI is not identical with some mystical entity called "Indian cricket"; the 'Indian team' just happens to be their team. And I sure as hell support it like a good Indian fan. Why wouldn't I? But still, it's worth acknowledging the convention at hand. (And conventional arrangements are nothing to sneeze at; think of how languages got to be the way they are!)

The ICL might not survive but hopefully, it will have reminded people of how things got to be the way the things are, and how things could change in response. Because when organisations act like monopolies, they have the bad habit of displaying laziness, complacency and greed.

	A much-improved player: James Anderson © Getty Images

A number of people replied to some of the things I said about Graeme Smith and Jacques Kallis with the mantra “Statistics do not lie.” Oh yeah?

Until the end of 2007, James Anderson was a second-choice bowler for England, only getting in the side when someone was injured. During this period he averaged 39.21 with the ball. This year, he was picked ahead of both Matthew Hoggard and Steve Harmison for the second Test against New Zealand, thus graduating to first-choice bowler. Since then, he has taken his wickets at just under 27 apiece [at the time of writing]. He now has a career average of 34.

Mark Butcher had two stints in the England side. In the first, lasting 27 matches, he scored 1253 runs with two centuries at an average of 25.06. In the second, lasting 44 matches, he scored 3035 runs with six centuries at an average of 41.01. Overall, he has a career average of 34.58.

What truths do these averages of 34 tell about Anderson and Butcher? In my view, none. On the contrary, in fact: what they tell is lies. They allege that Anderson and Butcher are or were mediocre players, when the truth is that they have had periods of being consistently awful and periods of being consistently quite good without ever really being mediocre.

England’s collapsible top order have been the subject of considerable disquiet in recent months, but the Team England camp keep intoning that they all have career averages in the 40s (apart from Pietersen at 50+), thus asserting their right to keep their places. Yet Andrew Strauss, Alastair Cook and Paul Collingwood are all averaging under 40 over the last 12 months (and Michael Vaughan’s 12-month average was under 30 before he fell on his sword). Those healthy career averages are mostly telling lies about how good these players are *today*. And while Bell’s average over the last year is a reasonably impressive 47, when has he scored runs against a good attack on a vaguely helpful pitch? Unanalysed averages in his case probably serve to hide his being a bully on flat wickets or when faced with popgun attacks but pretty much useless when the chips are down.

As should be clear by now, I do not think that statistics are out-and-out liars. What they do is answer the precise question you have asked, but that is not always the question you were trying to ask, and that makes them awkward and untrustworthy unless you pin them to the floor and beat the truth out of them.

And the most untrustworthy is the career average, which means different things for different players. Some players are only picked at their peak and perform well for the four years they are in the side. Others, usually coming from weaker countries, have eight-year careers but get picked two years before they are ready and hang around for two years after they have stopped being good enough, simply because there is no-one else. And their career averages are correspondingly worse even though they are intrinsically just as good as the players who could only get in a side when they were actually good enough.

That is why I am always deeply suspicious of contributions to cricket debates which effectively say “X’s career average was 35 and Y’s was 40 and that proves it” (whatever “it” might be). As has already been observed in various posts to Different Strokes, comparing them across eras is fraught with difficulty, and the point I’m making here is that it’s not always a straightforward matter to do so even between contemporaries.

	Graeme Smith’s was not only a captain’s innings, it was his captain’s innings © Getty Images

It’s been all about captains this week, at least in England.

Graeme Smith’s innings was without question a great one, if not a huge surprise to South Africans who have seen that absolutely resolute batsman more than once. You knew he would be there till the game was decided either way, but it was a rollercoaster as the familiar resignation of top-order disintegration was followed by heart-in-the-mouth during the AB de Villiers and Mark Boucher partnerships, and finally relief with 25 or 30 to get. I listened to the hugely entertaining Henry Blofeld for the last hour on the car radio parked outside my daughter’s school – I snuck out of the function inside with Russel and Clive, two other dads. It felt a bit like 1965, South Africa’s last series win in England – plus ça change and all that.

Smith’s was not only a captain’s innings, it was his captain’s innings. His leadership style combines big heart and strong mind, both essential to his Edgbaston effort and to Day 4 at Lord’s, when he led the fight for the draw. But do these qualities make him a great captain?

In leadership, as elsewhere, context is everything. Churchill became a great leader in 1940 when his country’s back was to the wall. Mandela moved from icon to great leader during our democratic transition, when compromise and reconciliation were of the essence. If great cricket captaincy were only about rearguard fightbacks, Smith would deserve the label. But it isn’t and he doesn’t.

Great captaincy also means creating a dominant position and pressing home your advantage. Smith has not really managed that in this series, even against a team in some disarray.

In fact, the opposite of greatness was evident in an important moment - against stronger opposition maybe a series-defining moment – very early in the first Test. Dale Steyn had started with three mediocre overs, making the batsman play only 6 of 18 deliveries. Smith immediately took him off!

Steyn was maybe overawed by Lord’s, maybe a little rusty. But he was 'The Man', the top-ranked test bowler and leader of an attack which – according to SA’s hype – was going to over-run England. Taking him off was utterly defensive, more so in the first half-hour of the series, and after winning the toss. Surely Steyn should have had a chance to get into a rhythm, find a line, work up pace. Some words of encouragement or advice rather than consignment to the outfield. What relief for England, what discouragement for the South Africa attack.

Smith has serious limitations when he has to make the running - the overcautious and rigid mindset of post-re-admission South Africa has long outlived Hansie Cronje. Smith didn’t bother to hide his dissatisfaction with his bowlers in public: journalists described his body language as an ‘air of resignation … he had nowhere to turn, no variety to offer’. But: ‘even so, it was odd that Smith was not more proactive’.

Of course being too proactive was (one of) Michael Vaughan’s problems. Apparently he made 253 field changes in one day during the series. If Smith swings from one extreme - the bloody-minded World War One infantry officer bursting from the trench to lead the charge – to the other – circling the wagons into a laager – Vaughan’s trial-and-error approach was reminiscent of a white-coated lab scientist groping for a solution, but not really sure where to look, or maybe even what he was looking for. During the New Zealand series Vaughan couldn’t close out wins from a controlling position. But that was apparent already in 2005 (remember Edgbaston then?).

Now for some ‘reductive quasi-social-science theorising’, which will please Samir. A report this week on an international management survey showed that, compared to ‘bosses’ in other countries, South Africans are an unusual breed: really ‘gung-ho’ about succeeding when up against the odds in risky foreign ventures, but paradoxically lacking any trust in their own employees. Not a great recipe for success, but Smith (and indeed other SA national leaders) does seem very much a product of his milieu. And if milieu is so determinant, maybe those hoping for a new English dawn this week should also restrain their optimism.

	Players like Javed Miandad made brave runs, wearing their bruises with pride, playing epic innings' against hostile short-pitched bowling © Getty Images

The 80s was the decade when one-day cricket became a staple of the cricket diet. Slow, steady starts, wickets in hand and a crescendo in the last 10 overs. Once the chasing team’s asking rate got above the six runs per over figure, Richie Benaud pronounced many a solemn death. Today, that would be a stroll to the finish line.

It was also the first signs of West Indies' domination in ODI cricket coming to an end. India surprised even themselves when they famously won the 1983 World Cup and Australia were shock winners of the 1987 World Cup in the subcontinent. That ‘home’ hoodoo still holds true. No host has won a World Cup yet.

What about the allrounders though? So many genuine legends, all playing in the same era. Ian Botham, Richard Hadlee, Imran Khan, Kapil Dev and Clive Rice were similar players, genuinely capable of being selected for their batting or their bowling. Hadlee might be borderline as a batsman as was Malcolm Marshall who was just out of that true allrounder class but as bowlers, they were both peerless.

Perhaps age is dimming my memory but I recall attrition and hard work for batsmen. The West Indians were probably exempt from that - Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes, Richie Richardson and Viv Richards were strokeplayers with a young Gus Logie and Carl Hooper showing signs of class too. The other great batsman of that genre painted their reputations with drops of blood. Players like Sunil Gavaskar, Allan Border, Graham Gooch and Javed Miandad made brave runs, wearing their bruises with pride, playing epic innings' against hostile short-pitched bowling. Dean Jones' death-defying innings (literally) in the tied Test in Chennai will rank amongst the most courageous sporting performances of all time, in any sport.

Martin Crowe and David Gower were as elegant as any in cricketing history. The early Steve Waugh model showed glimpses of style (his later technique was much more effective but less attractive) and Aravinda De Silva was always good to watch. Pakistan had Salim Malik’s artistry and India had the wonderful wrists of Mohammad Azharuddin.

This next statement may appear confused but the bowling seemed high quality without being memorable. Does that make sense? I know West Indies had their usual production line of fearsome quicks but there seemed to be an awful lot of good medium-pace attacks around. Bob Willis was quick enough at times, Craig McDermott had good wheels and Wasim Akram was freakish but I can’t remember being captivated by anyone in particular. The spin-bowling stocks were particularly uninspiring with lots of steady, reliable tweakers but very little in the way of flair. Abdul Qadir was the obvious exception and his legacy still lives today.

Australia were certainly a mediocre team of battlers for much of that decade, especially after the retirement of the Holy Trinity (Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh) until we saw a glimpse of what the 90s had to offer. Border was the rock they were built around but it should not be forgotten that this was also the decade when teams started employing a full-time coach (Bob Simpson for Australia). Twenty years later, we now have a ridiculous circus of support staff and computer boffins who require their own coach (the bus variety).

We heard of the great African players like Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards but most of us never really saw how good they were. That is a great pity. How they dealt with Curtly Ambrose, Malcolm Marshall, Courtney Walsh, Patrick Patterson and Co would have been great to see. We’ll never know …

Something else we’ll never know is how the West Indians would have dealt with their own fast bowlers. Would they have ducked and weaved and worn bruises like a badge of honour or would they have taken on the short ball without fear? Would Viv have batted without a helmet against a relentless four-pronged pace attack? Probably!

The 1980s reflected the global economy of the time. These were hard men, eking out a living in tough times and the general style of play reflected that. Except for Botham in '81 of course!

The list of virtues cited for Kevin Pietersen as England captain is well-known: he will be aggressive, he can hold his own in terms of playing ability in all three forms, he is confident, will be unafraid to take the attack to the enemy and so on. Running through all these expressions of support is also a hope, implicitly or explicitly expressed, that he "will shake things up"; that, fundamentally, he will work in a not-English way.

It is the expression of this particular sentiment, sometimes expressed by pointing out how the very fact of his being South African is an advantage, because he will not be caught up with being English in all those ways that contribute to losing cricket games, that I find by far the most interesting.

For this sort of suggestion, that somehow national character, a particular nation-wide psyche or characteristic, is to blame (or praise) for lack of success (or failure) at cricket, is exceedingly common in cricket journalism and in conversations amongst cricket fans. Indian fans are quick to indulge in long bouts of psychoanalytic speculation about the lack of national "killer instinct" when it comes to finishing close games, with their diagnoses ranging from weather conditions to colonial histories to religious inclinations; Pakistani fans have had a long tradition of pointing to the success of their cricket team and their endless production of fast bowlers as vindication of national aggressiveness (and sometimes a rejection of vegetarianism); Australians would have us believe that it is a particularly Aussie brand of 'mateship' that contributes to 5-0 Ashes victories (nowhere has this been better exemplified than in the visits to Gallipolli and the Buchanan Boot Camps[tm]); the self-flagellation of the English fan is well-known; the list goes on. I could supply more examples (and I invite readers to send me their favourite examples) but my slightly facetious list above should be sufficient reminder of how much speculation, conjecture and theorizing about nations and their alleged characteristics infects discussions about failures and success in cricket.

And all of this is inevitable. For what cricket provides in heaps, quite unlike any other sport, is something quite unique in international sport: direct country versus country competition, understood as the highest form game. Till the advent of the IPL, there was no international league in cricket. The closest we ever came to it was World Series Cricket a long while ago, and part of the reason it suffered initially was that people associate top-class cricket games with "official" national teams playing against each other. More than any other, the cricket fan aches for the stamp of "Certified International Contest" upon the game that he is watching. And as such, cricket is bound to provoke not just some of the nasty nationalist spats that are now a depressingly common feature of fan interactions (what the Internet giveth, it also taketh away), it also invites the sort of analysis pointed to above.

While some of this quasi-social-science theorizing is infuriatingly reductive, some of it is entertaining, and as such, should be welcomed. After all, what is not funny about linking vegetarianism with failures to produce fast bowlers? Or in the alleged linkages between military victories and defeats and performance on a cricket field? Sometimes it is in the most allegedly serious of claims that one can find the most humour; and mostly this is because of the tiny germ of truth in there, blown up to grotesque proportion. Caricature works because it seizes upon a tiny feature and exaggerates it. These wonderfully entertaining theses, masquerading as deep analysis, should be recognized for what they are, and welcomed. They lead to great conversations and might even provoke some folks to read a history book or two. So long as we don't take them too seriously.

	Smith's batting is almost endearingly gauche, not unattractive so much as unpolished; its lack of education gives it a veneer of vulnerability and danger © Getty Images

I think I felt a bit like the Yorkshire member who advanced on Bradman as he left the field at Headingley in 1948 and expostulated “You… you… b-booger!” It shouldn’t have happened, it couldn’t have happened, but it did, and there was nothing left but to marvel. England were beaten at Edgbaston by one of the great fourth innings hundreds at the end of a vibrant Test match which hardly ever flagged; they had an excellent chance of winning which they did not blow but which was wrestled out of their grasp by a captain who would not be denied.

It must be infuriating to bowl at Graeme Smith. At least when you bowl at someone like Shiv Chanderpaul or Rahul Dravid you probably realise that you are extremely unlikely to get him out, an expectation which he is only too glad to fulfil, but surely it exhausts your mental energy to see Smith apparently escaping danger by the thickness of the laminate on his bat all the time.

His batting is almost endearingly gauche, not unattractive so much as unpolished; its lack of education gives it a veneer of vulnerability and danger. Whereas most leading Test batsmen present finely-drawn shots played with practiced ease, Smith offers prototypes cobbled together from a sketch on last evening’s restaurant napkin. His feet are often in the wrong place, or the bat is too far from the body or held at the wrong angle, or it’s not really the right shot to play at that ball – it seems that by all logic he should be out twice an over, but instead he manhandles his strokes to great effect and gets a barrowload of runs.

If the batting of an Ian Bell or VVS Laxman or Mark Waugh was lovingly constructed by skilled automotive engineers and expensive design consultants, Smith’s was put together on Scrapheap Challenge - and as with the odd-looking contraptions made of cannibalised parts, it sometimes works spectacularly well.

The prize for the best comment on my piece about Jaques Kallis goes to Howard, who demonstrated a perfect understanding of what I intended by remarking that Smith, even though a flawed and less talented player than Kallis, is perhaps more likely to achieve greatness. I shall be rather cross with him if he does, because I don’t remember receiving an application from him to join my list of heroes. In my world, Smith is not supposed to be a great batsman: what he is supposed to be is lbw, trapped on the crease by an inswinger.

As may be apparent, I have not previously been one of Smith’s admirers: I sat through his double hundred at Lord’s in 2003 (another match I remember with ‘Samiristic’ despair) wondering how bad bowlers had to be to fail to get this limited lunkhead out. But cricket never ceases to surprise, and if he eventually joins my pantheon, his innings at Edgbaston will be the point at which he started to change my mind.

	Sir Viv is still the ‘King of Cool’ © Getty Images

The recent debates (here and here) about Jacques Kallis and an earlier thought-provoking piece about comparing players of different eras threatens to steal boyhood dreams that began in the 1970s. I keep trying to compare different players from different eras but the harder I try, the more confused I get. I might devote my next few posts to defining the last four decades and the great comparisons within.

To the 1970s then: little did I know then that cricket would become the single most defining influence in my life. The players from that era still evoke a kind of magic that comes from a childlike awe.

The West Indies were the glamour side of that era, perhaps because they were so tall and so cool. Viv Richards, Clive Lloyd, Lawrence Rowe and Alvin Kallicharran stick in my mind as flamboyant geniuses. My father’s hushed tones when describing the fearsome pace quartet still frightens me slightly – Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Sylvester Clarke and Wayne Daniels were almost the stuff of fairy tales. How fast they must have been!

County cricket of course was almost the modern-day equivalent of the Indian Premier League. Reading the detailed scorecards of the Championship brought great players like Glenn Turner, Majid Khan, Mike Procter and Derek Underwood to life in my scrapbook. Was this where Fantasy Cricket was born, watching global marriages like Gordon Greenidge and Barry Richards (Hampshire) taking on Imran Khan and Garth Le Roux (Sussex)?

Australian champions like Dennis Lillee, Rod Marsh and the Chappell brothers were similarly god-like. Sunil Gavaskar’s brilliant innings against the West Indies still sticks in my mind, as does my father’s reverent worship of the Indian spin dynasty of Bishan Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna and Bhagwat Chandrasekar. I never quite understood why he was so enchanted by these mysterious slow bowlers when there were all these fearsome fast bowlers to imitate. I put it down to a ‘grown up thing’ so I pretended to understand and was allowed to stay up late and listen to the commentary.

Perhaps the sheer statistics and averages of the players of the 1970s don’t really stack up today but they still seem impossibly heroic to me, even thirty years later. Was it the romance of radio and newspaper that created legends where only mediocrity existed ? Does television sometimes spoil that aura and mystery?

Funnily enough, I remember more individual details from Test matches that I listened to on the radio, smuggled under the blankets, than later matches I watched on TV. Maybe the lack of vision led to a greater sense of imagination because I had to create the scenes myself. The beautiful commentary allowed me to form my own impression of what Holding must have looked like, gliding in off the long run or how Zaheer Abbas was meant to be a ‘touch player’ or the impregnability of Geoff Boycott’s defence. Why was Lillee’s action so classical? Why did Collis King seem to hit every ball for six?

It’s a tough task, comparing Kallis or Brian Lara to those of a different era.To a little boy, huddled next to a barely audible radio in Colombo, listening to wondrous accents from faraway places, the 1970s seemed full of the greatest players that ever strode the Earth. It was a decade of the quickest bowlers, fearless hookers (the batting kind!!) and Asian players whose wristy strokeplay and teasing flight conjured up images that I barely understood but was told repeatedly was pure magic.

Was this really the decade of innocence and greatness before the pragmatism and hard graft of the 1980s? Were these players really as good as they were made out to be? They must have been! Is it any coincidence that only little children believe in giants?

In an era before averages and strike-rates were the barometer of greatness, my first experiences of cricket were painted by uncles and grandparents who vividly described players whom they had never even seen. It almost spoils it when I see archive footage and realise that Jeff Thomson wasn’t really faster than a rocket! Mind you, Sir Viv is still the ‘King of Cool’.

	Frozen in time: Alvin Kallicharan effortlessly hooks John Snow during the 1973 Test series © The Cricketer International

A good photo more than just freeze the actions, catching cricketers at moments of poised athletic grace and power. It offers us a hint of what came before and after; it invites us to think about the effect of the action on display on the game being played; it instantly captures a mood, and urges a description, a captioning, on our part. Sometimes the action captured can make us think about the physics of the action at hand, reminding us that one reason we pay good money to watch these men play is that they are capable of doing things we can only dream out. This is certainly the case with two of the most dramatic photographs I've ever laid eyes on.

The first is that of Alvin Kallicharran hooking John Snow during the 1973 Test series. Anyone that has seen this photo knows which one I'm talking about (raise your hand if you do). Kallicharan is poised on his right foot, his left leg raised and bent at the knee, performing a seemingly impossible balancing act as he hooks, crisply and powerfully, over his shoulder. In the background, Snow can be seen, perhaps despairing that his intended thunderbolt has been dispatched.

The second photo is that of Don Bradman stepping out to drive "Farmer" White during the 1928-29 series. (I have to admit, I'm a little obsessed about this photograph, having mentioned it before on rec.sport.cricket and on my blog, and no, I don't have a link to it). In this photo: Bradman is at least six feet out of his crease, and the back face of Bradman's bat is parallel to his upright back. Bradman seems to have sailed down the pitch and whiplashed this furious off-drive, with the bat swinging over his shoulder and then down. The crispness of the action on display is palpable, almost making the photograph itself sharper. (Actually, I do have favourite photographs of bowlers in action as well, but I think I will save discussion of those for another day.)

The look of the game has changed over the years. Helmets now cheat us of the bare-headed batsman, the batsman with the country cap; the sponsor's logos cheat us of the pristine shirt fronts of old; the half-sleeve shirts prevent us from glimpsing the rolled sleeves of the fast bowler as he charges in; the new style pads look spongy and sodden; tyre manufacturers logos sprout on bats. But these do not prevent, in the good cricket photograph, a glimpse of what is really at issue: a cricketer, captured for a moment by an image that expresses his cricketing powers vividly and memorably.

Which photographs over the years did this for you and why? Do you find they express a particular cricketing preference of yours?

“Gelb’s Gallery of Greats”, if it ever gets written, will no doubt include a substantial essay on Jaques Kallis but “Holmans’s History of Heroes” will not.

That’s because there are almost as many definitions of cricket greatness as there are cricket-lovers. The main cause of duplication is the faction of know-littles who believe that you can discover greatness with a spreadsheet. You may have come across the type, who in his most recognisable form declares that being an all-time great (ATG) batsman involves nothing more or less than a Test career average exceeding 50.

You can deduce excellence from a spreadsheet, but greatness is something else. Nearly all great players are excellent and most excellent players are great, but the two sets are not quite the same. Learie Constantine was a great player but his numbers are anaemic; Ken Barrington had a fantabulous Test batting average but few refer to him as an ATG.

Stephen’s paean to Kallis, like so many invitations to call him a great player, relies too much on “Look at these numbers” for me to be comfortable with it. The player I have watched over many years does not quite match the conclusions drawn.

Comparing his batting average to Sobers’s is a bit naughty. Sobers averaged in the high fifties at a time when most good batsmen averaged in the mid-to-high forties, whereas Kallis is doing it when his peers are averaging 55. He is far less comparable to Sobers than he is to Geoff Boycott, who was similarly eminent relative to his peers.

‘Boycs’ was a childhood hero of mine, so I don’t mean that comparison pejoratively, but in the end he too fell short of what I need from a batsmen to make me call him “great”. What neither Kallis nor Boycott have done – at least not often enough for anyone to notice – is really dominate a Test bowling attack, and I want to see at least occasional domination in my greats. One of the things which lifts Gavaskar above Boycott for me is the way he put West Indian bowlers to the sword in the Caribbean, even if his signature innings was the patiently resistant double hundred at The Oval in 1979.

Kallis’s bowling is even less remarkable. He is the only member of the 200-wicket club to have taken less than two wickets per match. No other member has as few as three 5-wicket hauls against major teams – the others all have at least six. Against non-minnow teams, his average is a moderate 34, and the trend is upwards, not downwards. He is a fill-in bowler par extraordinaire, but an attack featuring him as one of four specialists would look very thin indeed.

None of this is meant to belittle what he has achieved, still less to deny his enormous value as a player. Only a captain already able to call on Aubrey Faulkner, Keith Miller and Garry Sobers would be sane to leave him out, and South Africa are a very strong side because of the amount he contributes. At what he does, he is undoubtedly excellent.

To me, though, he lacks the sprinkling of magic dust which bestows greatness. If I’ve got involved with a good conversation in the bar, the news that great player has come on to bowl or out to bat causes me to quickly finish up and get outside, but hearing that Kallis is about to get going usually seems like a cue for me to get the next round in. But if his record is enough to satisfy you about his greatness, as it certainly appears it is for Stephen, then I wish you joy in him.