Can Joe Denly do the job Marcus Trescothick used to? © Getty Images

One of the great puzzles about South Africa since re-admission is why they have performed so poorly against England. The last time England toured, in 2004-05, England brought the side which won the Ashes a few months later and may just have had a slight edge which they duly converted to a series win, but on every other occasion South Africa's team has been obviously miles better - until you look at the scoreline and find that if they managed to win at all, it was only by the odd Test, and that they even contrived to lose in 1998. In one-day cricket, at which South Africa are known to be good and England known to be hopeless, the score between the sides in the 2000s is 10-all with one tie and two no-results.

I have no wish to know why South Africa underperform against England -- and would rather no-one found out, because the consequence has been fascinating cricket with ding-dong battles and it would be a shame to dispel the magic.

And although it would be amazing if the ODI series which is about to begin will consistently emulate the last match these sides played, at Centurion a few weeks ago in the Champions Trophy, we can hope.

As an exhibition of 50-over cricket, that was probably the best game of the tournament. Entirely against the trend of performances going back as long as one can usefully remember, England batted positively and effectively throughout, with a text-book rocket boost at the end of the innings courtesy of Eoin Morgan. South Africa's gallant reply was led by Graeme Smith's century, which was as epic as Tendulkar's hundred against Australia on Thursday, with the same heartbreaking result. It was one of those games neither side really deserved to lose but someone had to.

I'm hoping that the one-day series will be played as that game was. In particular I want to see England taking that aggressive approach with the bat. I want to see more England batsmen playing like Bangladeshis, hitting out as often as possible even if they get out while doing it. I'd prefer it if they didn't lose their wickets quite as quickly as Bangladeshis, but it's the thought that counts here.

Their performance in the first warm-up game against Boeta Dippenaar's Eagles is therefore generally encouraging. Only Joe Denly and Paul Collingwood failed to deliver, and Wright, Broad and especially Morgan had strike rates well over 100. (Wright's was higher, over 200, but Morgan played the more substantial innings, starting well before the end-of-innings charge.)

I hope Denly starts to do better soon, since he is the new England recruit who most fascinates me. He has not so far achieved much in the way of scores but he does something which very few England batsmen do, which is advance down the wicket to turn fast bowlers' good length balls into half-volleys and tee off in the early overs. It's not the only way of scoring runs at the top of the order, but it is the most effective demonstration that the batsman is intent on dominating the bowler – and that kind of intent has been missing without trace for years from England's one-day side. He is also a superb fielder in the deep: in that game against South Africa he scored only 21 runs, but he took two catches and saved a good couple of dozen runs in the field.

The likelihood has to be that England will fail more often than not by taking the aggressive approach in the short term. But they aren't going to get better at playing the aggressive game by going defensive as soon as anything goes wrong: they have to keep trying until they get it right. Denly as much as anyone, and if he breaks through and starts recording the big scores, we will at last have found someone to do the job Tresco used to do.

	The ideal county limited-over allrounder © Getty Images

In a January 2000 ODI at Kimberley, Mark Ealham took five wickets for eight runs in 24 balls. Five of Zimbabwe's top seven were struck on the pads, and each time umpire David Orchard responded by raising his finger. It was the first time anyone had got five lbws in an ODI innings.

It is the perfect example of his bowling strength. The spell was during the dreaded middle overs of an ODI when nothing much usually happens, and his line was deadly accurate. The Cricinfo profile labels him medium-fast, but that “-fast” suffix risks contravening the Trade Descriptions Act: he might have tried to justify it in his early years, but he soon settled down as a straight medium-pacer. Ealham's control of line was impeccable, he could often wobble it in the air, and he could vary his pace enough to unsettle batsmen committed to trying to score.

In the MCC v Champion County match which opened the 2006 season, Ealham smashed eleven fours and seven sixes on his way to a 45-ball hundred, which went on to win the Walter Lawrence Trophy for the season's fastest. Forty in thirty minutes rather than a hundred in three hundred was what his county sides usually wanted from him, which explains why he passed fifty 80 times in first-class cricket but only converted 13 into hundreds.

In short, he was the ideal county limited-over allrounder, a part he played with distinction from 1995 to 2003 for Kent (having debuted in 1989), and then for Notts until 2008. In 2009, he was not quite a first-team regular and his bowling average shot up from its customary 27 to 36 in both the long and short games, so he has called it a day at the age of 40.

Ealham was not quite the ideal ODI allrounder, though he did a reasonable job in his 64 appearances. His bowling was more than adequate, bordering on pretty good, but his batting was more skittish than forceful. To be fair, England lower orders were regularly faced with dire situations to which panic was a fairly rational response; even so, he rarely did himself justice with the bat.

But Ealham should not be blamed for his eight disappointing Test matches. He could in fact be said to have performed a useful service by helping to explode the muddled theory held by the England selectors in the late 1990s that someone who could bat better than the bowlers and bowl better than the batsmen while not being adequate in either discipline was a useful addition to a weak Test team.

Martin Saggers also owed his Test selection to selectorial desperation, but given his trouble getting on to the ladder at all, just winning three Test caps was a triumph.

His was a mildly romantic story. He had tried out in the second XI for a few counties in the early 1990s, but by 1996 had given up and was playing for Norfolk. Picked for the Minor Counties, his opening spell in their Benson & Hedges match against Durham was impressive enough for the county to offer him a contract. He was effectively competing against Steve Harmison for a place, a contest he was bound to lose, but when Durham inevitably released him, Kent snapped him up and he became one of the best swing bowlers on the circuit. He took 64 wickets in 2001 and 83 at 21.5 in 2002, occasioning a lot of serious suggestion that he should be picked for England.

Perhaps that was Saggers' moment, but he was up against Gough, Caddick, Hoggard, Flintoff, Harmison and Jones (at least) and therefore too far down the pecking order. He finally got picked in a Test in Bangladesh when most of them were injured and Gough had retired, and then again the following summer in similar circumstances against New Zealand, bowling Mark Richardson with his first ball in a home Test but otherwise achieving little. Like many Test failures. he was compelled as the junior member of the attack to demonstrate his weaknesses as a change bowler with the old ball rather than his strengths as a dangerous customer with the new one.

His England episode over, he remained a useful member of the Kent attack and 2009 was a well-deserved benefit year. Unfortunately a knee injury brought his season and career to a premature end and the circuit will miss his sunny personality.

Alex Wharf was another who needed great persistence before eventual recognition.

He started in 1994 as a pace bowler at his native Yorkshire, who also had Gough, Peter Hartley, Chris Silverwood and Hoggard, which considerably limited Wharf's opportunities. He moved on to Nottinghamshire, where he got more first-team cricket but he was not the strike bowler they were after.

A big, burly man, his run-up exuded aggressive energy but the ball only travelled at 78mph rather than the 88mph the run-up advertised. Notts did however give him the chance to develop as a power-hitter, sending him in early in limited-over innings, but Paul Franks already had the job Wharf was suited for.

He found his niche at Glamorgan, who had a vacancy for a lower-order hitter and aggressive bowler, especially for their one-day side. Wharf's rumbustiousness with bat and ball were key ingredients of the county's winning the 45-over league in 2002 and 2004. That 2004 campaign included a quite remarkable Wharf performance, albeit in a losing cause: in a weather-affected match, Kent's relatively simple Duckworth-Lewis target was 143 off 25 overs, which they managed to scramble with one wicket to spare off the last ball despite Wharf's amazing spell of 5-3-5-6.

Such efforts earned him a run in the England one-day side that winter, the selectors being ever on the hopeful lookout for someone who could inject a bit of life into the flaccid international ODI team. Like Ealham before him, his bowling held up to international scrutiny but his batting failed to ignite and the selectors moved on to the next bright-looking toy in the shop.

His career had already begun to wind down by 2009, his Glamorgan first-team place no longer assured, but now his knees have called time on him too.

So that concludes the goodbyes for 2009. Thank you, Mark Butcher, Andy Caddick, John Crawley, Mark Ealham, Jason Gallian, Martin Saggers, Michael Vaughan and Alex Wharf for what you have done, and good luck for the future.

	Jason Gallian was more of a bruiser; he was a slender version of Mike Gatting, sharing his appetite for runs though not for food © Getty Images

Eight former England players announced their retirements during the 2009 season. I have already written about Andy Caddick, Mark Butcher and Michael Vaughan, who all had substantially successful Test careers, but the others have received little in the way of public appreciation for their efforts over many years.

In the first Test of the 1989-90 Under-19 Ashes, Jason Gallian made an impressive 158 not out and 14, while John Crawley made 52 and 44 not out. They both made their first-class debuts for Lancashire a few months later but in the youth game Gallian, having been born and brought up in Sydney, was captaining the young Australians. He also qualified for England through his parents and was enticed back by Lancashire's offer of a contract.

Crawley was the earlier to become successful in first-class cricket. He impressed in 1993 and it was no surprise when he was picked for England the next year. He was an exceptionally good player on the leg side and a more than competent player of spin, but he never quite clicked as a Test player.

He scored 106 at The Oval against Wasim and Waqar in 1996, and 156 not out in Muralitharan's famous demolition job at the same ground two years later. He also hit a hundred in Bulawayo when Zimbabwe still had Andy Flower and were a good match for England, but his weaknesses outside off stump were repeatedly exposed by Ambrose and Walsh for West Indies and by any number of Australians and South Africans.

No longer in England's favour, he began to fester in county cricket, but was rejuvenated when Rod Bransgrove recruited him for the new, go-ahead Hampshire. Lancashire refused to release him, so he had to buy out his contract after an acrimonious legal tussle.

In his first match for his new county in 2002, he scored 272, which led to an England recall against India. He was one of four centurions in his comeback Test, the others being Nasser Hussain, Michael Vaughan and Ajit Agarkar, but thereafter it was back to the middling scores of 30 and 40 and he played his last Test on the 2002-03 Ashes tour.

Until very recently, he continued to rack up the runs for Hampshire, phenomenally so against Nottinghamshire, his scores in five matches from 2004 to 2006 being 301*, 39 & 6, 311*, 106 & 116, and 148 & 23. He finishes his career with over 24,000 first-class runs at a highly-respectable average of 46.5, as well as four Test centuries. He's more than earned his keep.

The captain of Notts when Crawley notched up the first of those triple hundreds was once again Gallian, whose career had been more chequered. Where Crawley was stylish, Gallian was more of a bruiser; he was a slender version of Mike Gatting, sharing his appetite for runs though not for food.

Picked for England largely on promise in 1995, he was not ready for the big time and swiftly returned to county cricket. His response to being dropped included a match against Derbyshire in which England captain Mike Atherton recorded a duck while Gallian went on to make 312, numerically at least the peak of his first-class career.

Perhaps hoping to revive his England career, he moved to Notts for the 1998 season, and was promoted to the captaincy halfway through that campaign. Over the next six years, he did for Notts what Nasser Hussain was doing for England: turning a poor side into one which could win games, only for someone else to take over and win the glorious prizes.

He had inherited a bowling attack largely incapable of taking wickets, so results were very poor in the early years, but as the youngsters gained experience and overseas players like Chris Cairns and Stuart MacGill were signed, things looked up, even more so when a South African lad with English parents by the name of Pietersen turned up to try and make his fortune much as Gallian had done a dozen years earlier. And as the team's fortunes improved, so did Gallian's personal contributions. He enjoyed his richest form in his early thirties: perhaps if he had not been pushed too far too early in his career, he would have reached his batting maturity somewhat earlier and ended with more impressive figures than 15,000 runs at 37.6.

Despite these personal and team improvements, Gallian was sacked as captain. He and KP had not got on well at all, with the result that the Notts dressing room became fractious, and though Pietersen jumped ship to join Crawley and Shane Warne at Hampshire, the county decided that a new captain was required and appointed Stephen Fleming for 2005. Back in the ranks, Gallian had his best season ever, making 1200 runs at 53, in the course of which he was twice run out for 199 – and Notts won the Championship.

But it was his last success. Over the next three seasons he averaged just under 31, and then moved to Essex for 2009, where a meagre 245 runs in seven matches told him it was time to quit.

These were substantial careers. They did not fulfil the optimistic dreams their early displays of talent encouraged, but they have certainly not wasted the last twenty seasons.

Enough for now. I will wave goodbye to the other retirees in my next post.

	As yet, at least, fans haven't decided that the Champions Trophy is a prestige tournament. © AFP

A lot of people took me to task after my last post, in which I suggested that it was a bit odd that most cricket fans don't rate the Champions Trophy very highly, many accusing me of English sour grapes. I was clearly underestimating Asian interest in the tournament, but Chris from Australia commented that there was zero interest in Australia, and when I checked the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age websites immediately afterwards, they still had the Ashes logo on their cricket pages - which still devoted far more attention to deconstructing Australia's Ashes loss than to prospects for the CT. And Australia are the holders.

Some people suggested that ICC needs to give the CT more prestige. I get the idea, but I'm not sure that prestige can be magically bestowed by the powers that be. ICC tried that with their idea of a Super Series of ODIs and a “Test” between the top-ranked country and the Rest of the World, at which the world's cricket public blew a resounding raspberry. Throwing oodles of cash into the prize pot doesn't do it either, as Allen Stanford found before he was arrested. The point is that prestige is not in the gift of the authorities: it is we, the fans and supporters, who confer prestige on tournaments and series. And as yet, at least, we haven't decided that the CT is a prestige tournament.

I think the problem is that we don't know what it's for. We have a 50-over World Cup already, and we're very happy to think that World Cup is a huge deal.

A World Cup happens every four years – as it does in many other sports, especially those involving inflated leather balls. Four years is a good interval because it basically ensures that there will be a different cast of characters even if the team names remain the same. Last time's Grand Old Men have retired, the then-established stars have moved into GOM-hood, some of the up-and-comers are now the leading players and there are some new faces just making their way. Each World Cup is a whole new adventure.

Contrast this with the CT going on three months after the World Twenty20; Tendulkar, Dravid and Strauss are playing in this after not being included in the Twenty20, but otherwise the differences between the teams which were in England and these ones have mostly come about through injuries (or, in the case of West Indies, total meltdown). Yes, it's a longer format and the results haven't always gone the same way, but it's felt awfully like the slo-mo replay taken to a whole-tournament level.

It's not that it hasn't been entertaining, or that we haven't learned anything. No-one had previously had any inkling that England had any idea how to play 50-over cricket, so their performance against South Africa was a discovery on a par with finding a new planet orbiting the sun. Nor, at a less mind-boggling level, had most of us realised that the final authority on run-out decisions is the fielding captain.

But was it really necessary to mount a whole tournament for the same old eight teams to make these additions to the sum of human knowledge?

In football, when England fail to win the World Cup, they can go off and fail to win the European Nations Cup, a tournament obviously smaller than and different to the World Cup but still big enough to garner its own level of prestige. India can finish out of the medals at the Olympic hockey and then make a mess of the Commonwealth Games, a lesser but still obviously significant event. But cricket's problem is that there aren't enough top teams to have a multiplicity of top-team tournaments without inducing terminal deja vu.

Perhaps what we need rather than the Champions Trophy are two quasi-regional tournaments. One would be for Asia-Pacific, involving India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Australia, New Zealand plus Afghanistan and UAE, while the Atlantic Cup could be for West Indies, England, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ireland, Netherlands, Namibia and Kenya (or such other European, American and African countries as qualified).

Obviously the Asia-Pacific one would be far more prestigious and have a much larger audience, but the Atlantic Cup would give more of the emerging nations serious competition, which might make future World Cups even more interesting. Most of all, though, it would be fascinating to see how South Africa could contrive to get knocked out at an early stage.

Now, I really must get back to eating those sour grapes.

Over the next couple of weeks, I expect I shall watch at least some of the Champions Trophy coverage on TV. After all, I'm a cricket junkie and the English season finishes this week, so I've nothing else to watch until April. And, since you are enough of a cricket junkie to be reading a blog on a cricket website, it's pretty likely that you will also be tuning in at some point.

TV companies know that there are many people round the world like us who will watch any international cricket, almost whatever it is, and are therefore willing to part with money for the broadcast rights, and the ICC then spends that money on what it considers to be worthy causes. Slaking our appetite for the game provides money to help develop the game around the world (though why they pour money into salvaging Zimbabwe when West Indies are in danger of collapse passes my understanding), so it seems beneficial all round.

But nobody seems to care very much about who wins it.

This may simply be the perspective of an England fan who knows that his team don't stand an earthly chance and will be doing exceptionally well if they win any of their three games, but I don't detect any groundswell of anticipation amongst the fans of other teams I see on my travels round the net. A 50-over World Cup always stimulates a pre-tournament buzz, but the Champions Trophy generates a tidal wave of indifference.

Like a lot of people, I can tell you which country won any World Cup and where (though not necessarily which ground the final was at). But apart from West Indies winning in England in 2004 which I remember because I was giving daily bulletins to my father as he lay dying in hospital, I have no idea which team won any of the other editions of the Champions Trophy, or even when they were.

Which is odd, if you think about it.

It is a much more efficient way of determining the top team at 50-over tournament cricket than the World Cup with its Scotlands and Bermudas. Adding all the no-hope teams to the World Cup simply expands it without changing the destination of the winners' trophy but allows for the possibility of embarrassment in the early rounds. Just as it is (or would be) amusing if Manchester United exit the FA Cup by losing to a semi-pro team or Roger Federer gets beaten in the first round at Wimbledon by a British wild-card entrant currently ranked 793rd in the world, we can all have a good laugh when one of the major teams gets knocked out in the group stage of a cricket World Cup. If nothing else, it relieves the tedium of the early stages which seem to consist mostly of mismatches.

But the Champs Trophy is what the final stages of a World Cup would look like if none of the major teams tripped over the banana-skin in their qualifying group. It's the business end, the nitty gritty, the chase which is cut to when we start paying close attention to a World Cup instead of just checking that nothing out of the ordinary happened. It's the World Cup without the boring bits. If there were any justice, we'd take a lot more interest and give a lot more weight to the Champions Trophy, but there isn't and we don't.

Instead, we treat it more as an inconvenience, a distraction from whatever the real business of our teams is supposed to be at any given time, and we want it over and out of the way as soon as is practical. What a strange lot we cricket fans are.

There is always a wistful tinge to the last game of the Lord's season, as Saturday's ODI was; as I leave the ground, there is the gloomy realisation that it will be next year before I next hear the five-minute bell and then see the umpires walk out to start the day's play, but still, I'm at one of my favourite places in the world. I always enjoy going to Lord's on a warm summer's day, even more so if there is cricket being played. Though I've been coming regularly for only thirty years and am thus a relative newcomer, I feel at home at the home of cricket. Even if the cricket is dreadful, I am sure to see some friends and have some pleasant conversation.

Thousands of the cricket-besotted turned up for similar reasons and will have taken equal satisfaction from another day at HQ, happy just to have been there.

However, when the BBC radio commentators inform their listeners that the crowd “are enjoying it” or “purring contentedly”, they seem to be saying more than that people like being at Lord's: there is a definite implication that they are taking some pleasure in the actual cricket.

Hearing those remarks, I wondered where they were dreaming it up from, because there was no evidence of people enjoying the cricket anywhere near where I was sitting in the Warner Stand. Nor was there any in the Pavilion or any other part of the ground I went to.

The cricket was simply awful, apart from the spectacle of Brett Lee knocking stumps over at the end of England's feeble batting effort. When Australia batted, they merely went efficiently about their business. I don't mean to suggest they were under any obligation to try and entertain the crowd with spectacular fireworks, but it would have been more fun if they had.

Some were angry, a few outraged, but most were just disappointed - to a greater or lesser degree, depending on what their expectations had been. Mine had been pretty low and England only sank narrowly below them, so it was no worse than seeing the bus leave the stop just as I left the ground and having to wait a few minutes for the next, but I think all of us would take exception to the allegation that we had enjoyed it.

My companions and I agreed that enjoyment would have been entirely inappropriate, anyway. We were here as punishment. This was the penance we had to do for winning the Ashes, for the joy we had felt when we had beaten Australia at Lord's for the first time in 75 years, for the fun we had had at the World Twenty20 (especially as England had won a World Cup), for thinking that Ravi Bopara's hundred against West Indies had signalled the arrival of a major new talent – in other words, for being English cricket fans at Lord's. I hope the cricketing gods accepted our collective sacrifice.

Another friend I bumped into said he had come to practice supporting Australia before doing it for real when they come back to Pakistan's new home ground, which rather surprised me: I cannot conceive of supporting Australia, and particularly not against Pakistan, who rank third in my affections behind England and West Indies. Well, so be it: he and I will be on opposite sides during the second of next season's Tests.

Ah, yes. Next season. We'll be back at Lord's again next season. That sounds good.

Michael Jeh's piece about the number of talented-looking players who appear for England but fail to produce the goods when things get difficult is timely, since those he mentions have all just been granted contracts by the ECB for the coming year.

Not that Ian Bell and Ravi Bopara are actually failures. They have each scored a healthy number of Test hundreds. Yes, they have been against West Indies, New Zealand, a Pakistan side depleted by injury and player bans or a South Africa who were bowling very poorly on a flat track, but they were in Test matches all the same. They have only failed against the very best, but there are plenty of those from everywhere. (Owais Shah is in a different category: I have long thought of him as Owaste of Space at the international level.)

I don't think it's because the standard of domestic cricket is too low. Most of the Division One counties could give New Zealand a pretty good game, and Durham have a better bowling attack - or at least had, depending on how much difference the return of Shane Bond makes. Demanding that the county championship be of a higher standard than the Test cricket played by the bottom half of the rankings table (where England reside anyway) is surely over-optimistic.

Nor are Australia immune. Phil Hughes succeeded majestically in Sheffield Shield, county cricket and in Tests against South Africa, who now admit that they bowled badly at him. Then, when he came up against Steve Harmison (for the Lions) and Andrew Flintoff armed with both a plan of bowling fast leg stump throat balls and the ability to execute the plan consistently, he was found wanting. No amount of domestic cricket can entirely prepare you for the very top.

But Fox (Michael Jeh) was talking more about one-day cricket, and there the problem is more likely to be systemic. England have been rubbish at ODIs since the early 1990s no matter who has been picked but their main fault has been that they have so few batsmen able to play the aggressive game. The successful Test batsmen tend not to score fast enough in ODIs so instead they pick domestic strokeplayers who don't know how to graft, at least when under run-rate pressure which requires scoring as well as blocking.

In suggesting that it is a peculiarly English problem, however, Fox has not been paying sufficient attention to the Indian team. How often have Rohit Sharma or Suresh Raina gritted out a match-winning 70 in testing conditions?

The old adage says that form is temporary and class is permanent. It may well be that that is true, but only if you correctly define “class”.

Both England and India have selectors who define class as elegant technique and great timing, and believe that players possessing them are more likely to succeed than batsmen who look to be struggling. I can understand that: when I watch a county game, the batsman who plays beautifully is far more likely to catch my eye. I learn to appreciate batsmen who play solidly for the counties I follow much earlier than those I see only occasionally for an opposition.

An Australian selector going to watch a domestic game has fewer matches to choose from than his English or Indian counterpart. He will inevitably see players more often and notice much earlier that the same ugly bloke keeps getting 75 while the fancy dans get out for 3 against the better bowlers at least as often as they glide to 123 in less challenging circumstances. Such a selector may well acquire a different definition of class.

Where having large numbers of teams may hurt both England and India could lie less in lowering the standard of play than in preventing any given selector seeing enough of the unattractive players to tell the Allan Borders from the genuinely incompetent. What it then amounts to is class prejudice: the selectors favour those who bat like aristocrats rather than artisans – and snobbery is a recipe for decadent failure.

Strange though it is to remember now, there was a time when Fred Flintoff was not the darling of English cricket and his omission from the England side was seen as a reason to praise the selectors for finally seeing sense rather than as an excuse for the team's dismal performance.

He had attracted a lot of attention as a young player with Lancashire. He was a huge and hugely powerful middle-order batsman who was a pretty good bowler, allegedly of the fast variety. England, so desperate for a new Botham that they had been picking players like Mark Ealham, Adam Hollioake and Ronnie Irani, could not resist the temptation and picked him for both the Test and one-day sides. Over the next couple of years, though, it became apparent that he was too fat to bowl fast and too indisciplined to offer anything more with the bat than the occasional lucky explosion. England sent him back to Lancashire with the stern message that he need not worry himself about future selection unless and until he was fit enough to bowl as fast as his early billing had suggested – and, as history now records, he went off and shaped up with fairly dramatic results.

The point is two-fold. One, is that, what a player is like when he first plays for England may bear very little relation to the cricketer he eventually becomes. The other is that the gulf between English domestic limited-overs cricket and the international variety is far greater than between the four-day championship and Test match cricket. What makes you a very useful allrounder in the county 40 or 50-over formats, is nowhere near what is required to fulfill a similar role internationally.

Over the last two to three years Tim Bresnan has been building a considerable reputation in county cricket, but his nine ODI appearances for England have given little hint of why. His bowling has been tidy enough but has posed no problems for batsmen, and even though he has had several opportunities to do some whacking in a death-or-glory bid to rescue yet another dismal England batting performance, one struggles to remember him even playing an aggressive shot in an ODI. Though the England management are presumably being encouraging, it must have dawned on him by now that he is going to have to improve considerably if he is to have much of an international career.

That it can be done is shown not only by Flintoff but also now by Luke Wright, to whose presence in the England team I am now warming. Nor am I the only one: the gentleman who sat next to me on Sunday morning was also pleasantly surprised by how good Wright's bowling now is. After some discussion in which Barry Knight's name surfaced, we agreed that Wright is the reincarnation of the young Darren Gough. That's the Gough who was a quick but not very subtle bowler and a cheerful biffer capable of hitting Shane Warne and Craig McDermott all round the Sydney Cricket Ground. He was also a great trier; one who would always go down fighting because he didn't believe a game was lost until the last ball was bowled or the last wicket fell.

Gough's batting fell away after he was hit later on that 1994-95 tour, but Wright has played higher up the order often enough to suggest that the batting he clearly learned at an agricultural college is likely to remain a permanent feature, so if his bowling gains some of the guile that Goughie acquired, he could yet become an important part of the set-up.

The big change since Wright's debut is that he has moved up from being a 75-80 mph bowler to an 85-90 mph speedster with a dangerous, skiddy bouncer – that lifts him from being a county all-rounder to an international-class bowler-batsman. It will be interesting to see how he progresses from here. It will also be interesting to see whether Bresnan can effect a similar improvement.

	The tactically astute Richie Benaud will lead Rest of the World © Cricinfo Ltd

In my last post, I selected an Old-Timers Twenty20 XI for England, old-timers being defined as those whose international career finished before 1970. India, Pakistan and New Zealand had too little history by then to pick reasonable teams, so I went for Rest of the World as England's opponents.

Before we go any further, Don Bradman does not make the team. Many will protest that he could adapt himself to anything, but the successful Twenty20 batsman is comfortable with hitting the ball in the air to clear the infield or the boundary and accepts that he will sometimes lose his wicket cheaply because of the risks he takes. Neither of these can plausibly be seen as traits of Bradman's batting. Maybe he could have adapted, but it would have been through gritted teeth at the gross offense to his principles, and I'd rather pick players who are going to relish the thrill-ride of a Twenty20 batting career.

The first two names are obvious. Twenty20 could have been invented for Learie Constantine. Tearaway fast bowler, whirlwind batsman and a strong candidate for the greatest fielder of all time, he was born 80 years too early to be the Maharajah of the IPL he would have become rather than the king of the Lancashire League that he was. Of course, he would have been in competition with Keith Miller, tearaway, whirlwind and superb fielder in the deep, taking running catches the way Constantine ran batsmen out.

As Les Ames was for England, there is a standout batsman-keeper in Clyde Walcott, who might as well open the batting because he would be excellent in Powerplay overs. Unlike England, though, one of the great Australian openers will be ideal as his partner. Victor Trumper, the legendary stylist, was quite happy to send the first ball of a Test match back over the bowler's head if he thought it deserved such treatment.

Charlie Macartney, the Governor-General, is mostly remembered as the great Australian batsman between Trumper and Bradman, but he was really an all-rounder, since his left-arm spin took over 400 first-class wickets at under 21.

Number three looks like his berth, and six and seven for Miller and Constantine, so I want a four and five. Stan McCabe in particular will be disappointed, but I'm picking Everton Weekes and CK Nayudu. It's just about arguable that Nayudu's big-hitting 153 for the Hindus on MCC's 1926-7 tour of India tipped the balance of persuasion that India were ready to join the ranks of Test-playing countries.

Now things get difficult. We will have a leg-spinning all-rounder as captain, but I change my mind hourly on whether it should be the great South African Aubrey Faulkner or Richie Benaud. At the moment, I favour Benaud as the more tactically astute.

We will want a couple of medium-pacers. Fazal Mahmood will be one, moving the ball both ways and being highly economical, but then there is a choice between Amar Singh and Alan Davidson. Amar was the better bat, but Davidson is a left-armer and will add variety.

Finally, we need an off-spinner, and here I shall plump for Hugh Tayfield, the South African spinner of the Fifties who bowled maiden after maiden after maiden, and who will strangle the England batsmen into false shots just as he did in Tests.

So here is the Rest of the World XI I have finally decided on:

Victor Trumper
Clyde Walcott (k)
Charlie Macartney
Everton Weekes
CK Nayudu
Keith Miller
Learie Constantine
Richie Benaud (c)
Alan Davidson
Fazal Mahmood
Hugh Tayfield

Now let battle commence as you tear this side to shreds and propose a whole load of people I didn't even consider!

	Fetch that: Fifteen of Gilbert Jessop's first-class centuries were scored in under an hour © The Cricketer International

As the rain washed away the first T20I between England and Australia, I started to ponder how the old-timers would have done at Twenty20, and fell, as one does, into constructing imaginary XIs for England and Rest of the World selected from those who finished their international careers before 1970, so as to exclude anyone who ever played an ODI. It is more of a jigsaw-puzzle than picking an all-time Test team because of the need to cover all the angles. You want at least eight batsmen who are unafraid of taking the aerial route, six bowlers covering every speed from 50mph to 90mph and a couple of really good fielders you can put in key positions.

Beginning with the England XI, SF Barnes is always the first name on the sheet for any team I select for which he is eligible since he was the best bowler ever, a master of swing, swerve, spin and pace.

Next for Twenty20 comes Gilbert Jessop, one of the most amazingly fast scorers ever seen. Fifteen of his first-class centuries were scored in under an hour. He was initially regarded as a bowler, of fast-medium pace, and was also a brilliant fielder.

The other two certainties for me are Denis Compton, whose talent for batting improvisation remains unsurpassed, and Frank Woolley, a man capable of peppering the roof of the football stadium at Bradford against the powerful Yorkshire attack. Furthermore, Woolley was an almost Test-class slow left-armer and Compton's leg-spin was good enough to bring him 622 first-class wickets.

So, with Woolley, Compton, Jessop and Barnes as the nucleus, who else?

Of the three great H's, only Wally Hammond seems cut out for this team. Hutton spent his career worrying about the weakness of those coming in after him and curbed his aggressive talents, and Jack Hobbs was a timer and placer as well as a great stealer of singles and would, I fancy, have been as unsuccessful a Twenty20 player as Michael Vaughan. Hammond, however, crunched the ball through the off side with immense power and frequency. That he could (if reluctantly) bowl fast and was a brilliant close catcher are also useful add-ons.

The obvious batsman-keeper is Les Ames, who can also open the batting. But with Hobbs and Hutton ruled out and most of England's openers before 1970 being a stodgy lot, his partner needs some selecting. I will go for Colin Milburn, whose England career finished when he lost an eye in 1969, but who had broken the mould of English openers with his blitzkrieg style.

Still room for one more specialist bat. My choice is Percy Chapman, who will also captain the side. A batsman who hardly knew the meaning of defence and a brilliant cover fielder, he was appointed captain for the fifth Test of the 1926 Ashes and won them back, and then went to Australia and rested after the fourth Test because England were already 4-0 up.

Three places left. We have no off-spinner and no top-quality fast bowler yet, and we can give those spots to Jim Laker and Fred Trueman, whose credentials hardly need further elaboration. The last place goes to Maurice Tate, the great medium-pace bowler between the wars who also opened the batting rumbustiously for Sussex.

So here is the final XI in batting order, with the proviso that Jessop might well be sent in early if it seemed like a good idea:

C Milburn
LEG Ames (k)
FE Woolley
DCS Compton
WR Hammond
APF Chapman (c)
GL Jessop
MW Tate
FS Trueman
JC Laker
SF Barnes

My Rest of the World Old-timers Twenty20 team will appear in a couple of days.

The English counties voted this week to scrap the 50-over and retain a 40-over competition from next year, and were quite open that the decision was made on the financial grounds that 40-over cricket gets better gates than 50-over.

This may not be because 40-over cricket is more appealing than 50-over: the Pro40 is mostly played in July and August and the 50-over Friends Provident mainly in May and June. For Pro40, normal dress is shirtsleeves but for the FP it's three layers, at least one of them waterproof; the Pro40 is in school holiday time and the FP is largely played on midweek days when kids are at school and dad is at work. Swap them over, and maybe 50-over would be more popular than 40. I doubt it, however. A 40-over game is a longish afternoon out, whereas a 50-over game takes up the whole day.

Chief selector Geoff Miller and Paul Collingwood, pro tem one-day captain, are saying that is very bad from a cricketing point of view because we ought to be playing domestic one-day cricket that exactly mirrors the international form in order to prepare future England ODI players.

But, if playing the same length game is so essential, should not Test cricket's training ground, the county championship, be a five-day rather than a four-day competition?

Test matches expanded over time from three days to four and then to five because top-class batsmen would not obligingly surrender their wickets in time for games to be resolved. And all the batsmen in Test cricket, just about, are top-class. Domestic teams do not in general have line-ups consisting entirely of top-class players. They have some pretty average players mixed in with the two or three who might catch a national selector's eye. Give them five days to play their games and they will usually be over in four. It therefore makes sense to schedule it as four-day from the outset.

Playing 50-over cricket domestically in England does not do anything to train people for the international 50-over game. In fact, far from giving people experience of tactical situations they will encounter in the ODI arena, it gives them all sorts of incentives to play very differently.

An ODI team typically has five top-class batsmen and two lower-order power hitters. Between them, they can play aggressively and usually last the fifty overs. A county team, on the other hand, has three pretty good batsmen and two average ones, a big hitter and someone who is really a big misser. If the good batsmen play the way they could if they were surrounded by other good players, it's very likely that their team will be all out in forty because the lesser lights can't keep up. 35 overs to go and only two decent batsmen left is a position that you rarely encounter in an ODI but is not uncommon in county 50-over cricket. So the good batsmen learn to play more conservatively, and we wonder why we can't find anyone who is convincing in ODI Powerplay overs when nobody plays that way domestically because it would be stupid cricket if they did.

Playing domestic games which are shorter than their international equivalents compensates for the lower standard of player. It is no coincidence that South Africa play 45-over games at home and are the most consistently successful 50-over ODI side year in year out – even if they choke in World Cups.

Though the counties made their decision on commercial grounds, they have inadvertently stumbled on the best thing they could do for the England ODI team.

	Johnathon Trott: Better value will be obtainable when market fever subsides © Getty Images

The Holmans Consulting Group (HCG) presents another market survey, this time covering leading English stocks. Investors are advised that this is a highly speculative market in which there is the potential for both substantial gain and considerable loss: market sentiment is extremely volatile, leading to regular outbreaks of panic buying and selling which distort the market considerably.

Strauss Hold. Has achieved outstanding results since adding a management services division, both in management itself but also in the batting, which is now one of the world's leading suppliers of opening products. Trading conditions in South Africa will be extremely challenging and dividends may well fall back in the short term, but the medium-term outlook is bright.

Cook Sell. Impressive when a newcomer, performance has declined significantly over the last twelve months as the competition have ruthlessly exploited technical defects which have not been fixed despite bullish reports from the research labs. Up-and-coming firms such as Denly of Kent or Carberry of Hampshire could well displace Cook in the short term, although the underlying strength of the company makes recovery probable.

Bopara Sell. Many observers were very surprised at the appalling performance in the most recent trading period after outstanding success in some Caribbean ventures. HCG believes that the stock will eventually have considerable value but it will take time for markets to regain confidence in it.

Bell Weak sell. While famed for its elegant products for the luxury market, consumers have long been demanding an extension into the steel grinder field. The product unveiled at Oval09 goes some way to allaying concerns but a more substantial version needs to be brought to market soon. HCG reiterates its belief that Joyce of Sussex would be a more appropriate vehicle but recognises that long-standing ties between Bell and central government are likely to see the relationship continue for some while.

Pietersen Hold. It is expected that once refurbishment has been completed this powerhouse company will resume high levels of production.

Collingwood Sell. By holding firm at the beginning of the reporting period, Collingwood averted a complete meltdown in the market, but subsequent performance was extremely disappointing. The emergence of strong competition makes its hold on market share very precarious.

Trott Await developments. Given that the markets were so febrile that many brokers fell for a PR offensive from the venerable firm of Ramprakash, it is not surprising that the IPO was received with suspicion. Those who took up the offer made huge immediate profits, but there is no guarantee that these will be maintained. HCG believes this stock now to be massively over-priced and that better value will be obtainable when market fever subsides.

Prior Buy. The perky batting division had some good returns, although doubts remain about its ability to cope with crisis conditions, but heavy investment in training for the wicketkeeping division has resulted in products of considerably higher quality, leading HCG to believe that its position is unchallengeable.

Flintoff has regrettably ceased trading.

Broad Take profits. Freddy's medical bankruptcy opens up a market gap for a multi-purpose agency which many analysts hope Broad will fill. While HCG predicts a profitable long-term future, Broad is currently trading at a price which will not be justified by asset values without another two years of steady growth and refinement of the product range.

Swann Hold. Like several other English bowling firms, Swann has some excellent specialist products but is not well-equipped to deal with unfavourable trading conditions, though it should be noted that considerable value is also derived from the dynamic batting subsidiary.

Anderson Weak buy. Now the world's leading producer of swing goods, but much more work is needed on the general-purpose bowling products, which have very basic functionality and contribute very little to sales revenue. The batting company is gaining respect despite the first complete failure of a project in the final trading week; HCG believes that the popular Nightwatchman range has an outside possibility of three-figure returns if market conditions are particularly favourable. Unusually for a fast bowling group, they also have a very high-quality fielding division.

Harmison Sell. Post-Freddy's, Harmy's is the only recognised supplier of Ultrabounce items left but quality control is poor and too many are defective. There are strong rumours that the company will withdraw from the market entirely unless government is prepared to offer contract guarantees but there seems to be little incentive for government to do so.

Onions Hold. This recent market entrant has so far performed satisfactorily. Unexpected celebrity endorsement from Lily Allen will assist the PR efforts.

Panesar Sell. The Cardiff Expo saw the unexpected introduction of an excellent batting product, but the main bowling line has fallen away badly. Even in the domestic market, returns have been far below expectations and the future looks bleak for this popular enterprise. HCG would instead draw investors' attention to Rashid of Bradford, which has been demonstrating three-figure batting returns concurrently with bowling that reaches the 5W standard.

For the moment, the general trends in this sector remain very unclear. Investors are urged to be cool in their judgements and not allow themselves to be swept away on one of the market's frequent bouts of insanity. HCG accepts no liability whatsoever for investment decisions taken by readers of this survey and strongly urges that investors take professional advice, preferably from a psychiatrist.

	Phillip Hughes: Short-term sell, long-term buy © Getty Images

Cricket markets are notoriously volatile and have become even more so in recent times, and investors may be unsure where to put their money. The Holmans Consulting Group (HCG) is therefore pleased to offer this analysis of the Australian market's leading stocks. [Potential investors are reminded that past performance is not necessarily a guide to future returns and should take professional advice before committing any funds.]

Ponting. Hold. The dominant company's batting division is and will remain a world-class performer for the foreseeable future. The management division has posted its third loss in five reporting periods, which clearly gives cause for concern, but there are signs that it will be concentrating more on improving its own performance rather than explaining disappointing results by referring to unfavourable conditions, competitors' business practices or perceived failures of regulation.

Hughes. Short-term sell, long-term buy. Technical defects in the product line have forced a retreat from international markets for retooling. Testing of an updated range in the domestic market should be carefully watched, however, as it is anticipated that this highly innovative entity will prove one of the leading performers over the long term.

Katich. Hold. Since repositioning in the openers sector, Katich has yielded solidly reliable if unspectacular returns which should continue to satisfy the conservative investor.

Watson. Weak hold. Government has long regarded Watto's as a preferred long-term partner, and early results from entry into the openers sector are reasonably promising, but the bowling division has declined from an already weak position to the extent that it should probably be shut down.

Hussey. Sell. There is considerable loyalty to the Mr Cricket brand, and many will be hoping that the strong performance in the last couple of trading sessions signals a return to previous dividend levels. HCG is less optimistic and regards Hussey as extremely vulnerable to takeover, especially if strong domestic competitors emerge.

M Clarke. Strong buy. Long-standing predictions that Clarke will become as important a force as Ponting seem on the verge of fulfilment, and bumper returns are to be expected from this quarter. Especially fine are the products for the spin-facing niche, which for flexibility and agility rival any of those offered by the traditionally-dominant Asian producers.

North. Buy. Well-engineered batting coupled with some very handy spin-bowling accessories should ensure a prosperous medium-term and make the long-term prospects very hopeful.

Haddin. Weak hold. Those with nostalgia for former giants of the keeping industry such as Gilchrist, Healy or Marsh will continue to regard Haddin as yielding very poor dividends. On the bright side, the batting performs somewhat above lowish expectations, but the keeping is of extremely variable quality. An absence of serious competition in the field means that the stock should be retained pending developments.

Johnson. Partial sell. Investors who piled into the Mitch on the back of exceptionally strong performances in the South African market should seek to reduce their exposure. The sling-based technology is inherently unstable and prone to malfunction while offering the potential for very high returns when it operates correctly. It is worth retaining a holding as part of a diverse portfolio, but not as the main focus of investment.

Siddle. Hold/weak buy. Only a recent market entrant, Siddle has already established a reputation for reliability and should provide very steady returns. Optimists may wish to increase their holdings, but HCG sees little potential for further growth and would advise against.

Hauritz. Buy. This stock was badly underrated and deserves more attention. While not offering the earnings potential of a Warne or a MacGill, failure to include this stock can in some circumstances result in catastrophic losses.

Hilfenhaus. Weak sell. This may seem an odd recommendation given that the Hilf was the leading performer in the last reporting period, but similarly swinging trading conditions may not be encountered often enough for him to continue to lead the market.

S Clark. Sell. A loss of oomph in the main power unit has rendered this product line largely ineffective unless the targets are already on the brink of failure. It will be of very limited usefulness going forward and there is little chance of an improvement in the stock price. A more likely option would be the Lee, but it has been absent from the market for some time and future performance is therefore uncertain.

To sum up, batting stocks remain relatively buoyant. Returns may be down compared with the historic market highs of the 1995-2006 boom years, but they remain in the market's upper quartile. However, bowling stocks have fallen significantly, particularly when compared with South African equities, and considerably improved performance will be needed from them if Australian industry is to resume its world-leading position.

Our next report, to be published shortly, will be a survey of the English market.

	Andrew Strauss got the bowling changes right when it mattered most © Getty Images

The biggest difference for me between the 2009 Ashes and most recent editions of this long-running soap was that the Australian bowlers were never alarming. During the 90s and most of this decade, I usually had a reaction to a change of bowling. Either dread at what Warne or McGrath or Alderman or McDermott or Gillespie might do in the next few (or, in Warne's case, many) overs or relief that they were taking a rest and England's batsmen - or, more to the point, their supporters - could breathe somewhat more easily.

It's not that Ben Hilfenhaus or Peter Siddle are bad bowlers. Hilfenhaus is the nearest approach Australia have made to an Alderman-a-like in ages and Siddle can bustle in like a truck for hours of lung-bursting effort, but one never felt that they put batsmen in imminent danger of dismissal. Nathan Hauritz, Marcus North and Stuart Clark are usually competent at what they do, but rarely rise to incisiveness. And the bowler who had ripped through South African batting orders like so much tissue paper, Mitchell Johnson, only managed to bowl well in one innings of the fourth Test – if anything, his introduction to the attack was the signal for the batsmen to get their shovels out and start filling their boots.

But apart from remembering to give Hilfenhaus the new cherry and not put a spinner on until the shine was off the ball, Ricky Ponting's bowling changes were basically an exercise in working out whose turn it was next. Wickets would fall because whoever was on bowled enough good balls for the inevitable lapse in a batsman's concentration to prove fatal, but there was rarely a sense that any of the bowlers had the force with them.

England's bowlers, on the other hand, were wildly inconsistent. Though quite capable of sending down hours of dross, they also turned on the magic for the odd spell and a clutch of wickets disappeared in puffs of smoke (or, at The Oval, dust). At Lord's, Jimmy Anderson and Fred Flintoff got five-fors, and at The Oval Stuart Broad got one for real and Graeme Swann had a moral one - though the scorebook says that Michael Clarke was run-out, an entry of st Strauss b Swann would give a slightly more accurate picture of what happened. Australian bowlers only managed two five-wicket hauls, both at Headingley. Graham Onions managed a couple of very destructive spells, and even Steve Harmison came to the party on the last afternoon, rattling Mike Hussey's cage enough to get him to run Ponting out and then wiping up the tail in no time flat - a task at which Australia failed repeatedly. England's tail usually wagged as if a lifetime supply of dog food had been plonked down in front of them.

Strauss had a wider range of bowling styles available to him, but every change was a bit of a gamble because until they started sending them down, he had to guess which of them was going to bowl accurately, at the right pace or on the right length. Fortunately for England, he got it right when it mattered most.

Much has been made of Australian players dominating the series aggregates and averages, but the statistical table which really tells the story of these Ashes is the one showing the best innings strike-rates, which has Siddle's and Johnson's performances from Headingley at or near the top, followed by a swathe of Englishmen scything Australians down in every match bar Cardiff.

A constant complaint about England's players is that they are too inconsistent. On this evidence, English inconsistency which has deep troughs and soaring highs is preferable to Australian consistent competence.

	Ed Joyce deserves serious reconsideration © Getty Images

A quiz question: who is the only player to have scored a one-day hundred for England against Australia who has not played a Test?

We'll come back to that in a moment, but first, some applause to the selectors for agreeing with my last post and sticking with their original judgement that Jonathan Trott is the batsman most deserving a chance. Presumably this was a decision based on rational assessment of his capabilities, such as averaging over 90 this season in Div 1 of the championship, although since two of the last three debutants were Swann and Onions, one cannot entirely avoid the suspicion that having a name which makes for good punning headlines is now the primary qualification for selection. (Actually, come to think of it, perhaps “Amjad Khan't” counts as well.)

Like Australia's casualty Phil Hughes, Ravi Bopara is too young and too talented a player not to get another chance in the fulness of time, but his failure to establish himself gives Ian Bell his third shot at convincing people that he should be England's No. 3.

A Bell century is a thing of beauty full of fluency, timing and elan, which is why he has many admirers (including me), but it is also the problem with him. Substantial Test batsmen also make ugly hundreds, prising out runs when the team is in trouble and the bowling implacable, and Bell has never gritted such an innings out. That is why it is a little unfair to brand him this generation's Mark Ramprakash: one thing Ramps quite often did for England was run out of partners as he uncharacteristically blocked and nurdled for 47*. Bell is far more aptly termed this generation's Graeme Hick, who scored several Test centuries and for most of his Test career had figures at least comparable to his England peers but who never quite gave the impression that he belonged at the highest level while clearly outclassing everyone else in the county game.

Bell has been out too horribly too often for me to have much further patience with him. Mike Selvey has been labelling him mentally flabby for some months now, and unless he can correct that impression at The Oval, I'd be in favour of junking him entirely.

But if you are going to recommend dropping someone, you have to have a candidate to take over. That brings us back to the quiz question, to which the answer is Ed Joyce, now of Sussex. In the recent round of championship matches, Bell got a hundred after his team-mate Trott had reached the mark first. Such is Bell's way. In the previous round, Joyce came in at three for Sussex and was ninth man out, scoring 183 out of 308 while everyone else failed. Such is Joyce's way.

Slightly to my surprise, for he is not anyone's image of a successful hit-and-giggle merchant, Joyce has been this season's most prolific run-scorer in the medium-length forms of the game, topping the table in both the 50-over Friends Provident and the Pro40. But his 94 against Somerset was on TV last night, and he batted the way he does in first-class cricket, as an anchor around whom the big hitters can bat - though in this case, he stood firm but the others didn't and Sussex lost.

Whereas a Cook or Collingwood trades in singles and a Pietersen or Flintoff in boundaries, Joyce deals in twos. He plays later than the nurdlers, guiding his shots into the gaps between fielders, relying more on precision and timing than on power. He has very pleasant attacking shots – his whipped off-drives are reminiscent of Brian Lara and some of his cutting has the deftness of David Gower – but he deploys them judiciously rather than using them to storm barricades. His substantial innings are memorable less for their brilliant shotmaking than their solid effect: he is the kind of player who reaches 40 before you realise he's there. On an international continuum, he is a little to the Rahul Dravid side of Hashim Amla.

His first-class average may not be all that special, but neither were Michael Vaughan's or Marcus Trescothick's when they were picked: they had the ability but also the character to
play Test cricket, and character is what the current England middle order (oh, all right, Bell and Bopara) apparently lack and Joyce seems to possess.

I have no quarrel with the selectors for picking Trott, but his selection creates a vacancy for the heir-apparent: my contention is that Joyce was the baby thrown out with Duncan Fletcher's bathwater and deserves serious reconsideration. He even offers possibilities for headline writers.

In the 1988 NatWest final, Middlesex were set a modest target of 162 in 60 overs. They made a poor start, and things took a disastrous turn when Mike Gatting, the side's main batsman and captain, was run out without facing a ball. The young lad who had called him through for the cheeky single needed to stay out there and get runs, at least until his captain had calmed down, which he did to such good effect that his 56 won the cup and the Man of the Match award.

Over the next couple of years, Mark Ramprakash revealed himself as the finest batting prospect England had had for decades. It was surely inevitable that he would go on to play for England, score thousands of Test runs and be acclaimed as an all-time great. So confident of this outcome was I that when I saw him in a pizza joint in Cardiff the week following his Test debut, I waited until he had finished his meal and then asked him to autograph my Headingley match tickets, figuring that they would be worth a packet some day.

As we all now know, this was not one of my most accurate predictions, but at least I am not alone in having been wrong, wrong, wrongitty wrong.

In his excellent “What Sport Teaches Us About Life”, Ed Smith says that no subject has taken up more dressing-room conversation these last 20 years than why Ramps failed to succeed as a Test cricketer. In the current Wisden, Nasser Hussain pays tribute to Ramprakash and Graeme Hick, and whereas he can see how Hick failed to adapt to the harder world of Test cricket, he remains as puzzled as anyone else that the Ramprakash legend failed to materialise.

Thinking about calling him up as the knight in shining armour to save the Ashes would be a triumph of hope over experience. There is precedent, of course, in the shape of Cyril Washbrook being called up in 1956 after a five-year gap, or of Wilfred Rhodes making a reappearance at The Oval in 1926, but a crucial factor about them was that they had previously been major Test successes. All they had to do was remember how to perform magic, a very different requirement than to have to turn it on for almost the first time in your life.

For what it's worth, my Ramprakash theory is that he thrives on being the acknowledged top dog, the No. 1, the composite of Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker and James Bond who will always save the day, a status in which he has luxuriated at Middlesex and Surrey, but that when he has to prove himself all over again, as he clearly has to at Test level, he freezes. If this theory is correct – and there is plenty of evidence to back it up – then picking him for The Oval would be the usual disaster, and there would not even be the compensation of feeling that a new player had been blooded who might profit from the experience in the future.

Ramprakash was not the answer when the selectors asked who the next batting cab off the rank was before Headingley: they picked Trott in the squad. Surely if they are going to change the middle order, it is Trott who should be stepping in – otherwise what was he doing in Leeds last week?

I hero-worshipped Ramprakash through the 1990s. I desperately wanted him to succeed, and the romantic in me still does, but this is not the match for the Ramps Romance. The forthcoming Test is the Final Flingtoff. If English cricket is to fete a hero for winning us the Ashes, then the appointed talisman is Fred. Because if he can't do it, nobody can, not even Ramprakash.

	Philip Hughes has struggled in England © Getty Images

There are always mysteries in cricket, though they change from decade to decade and even from year to year. Here are three which I have given up trying to solve for myself and which perhaps the readers of Cricinfo can shed some light on.

First, what happened to third man?

I am unaware of any edict prohibiting captains from posting a third man. I have consulted the Laws, ICC's playing regulations for Test matches and the ECB's similar regulations for first-class cricket in England, and I can find nothing which says that it is an illegal position, even if there are eight other fielders on the off side already, yet nobody ever fields there. New ball bowlers especially tend to bowl some form of off-theory and have plenty of slips and gullies but unless the ball travels at something like catchable height, batsmen quickly rack up the boundaries as the ball flies under, over or through the cordon. One-day cricket has emboldened batsmen to play the angled slash designed to clear the almost non-existent slips, yet modern captains seem perfectly happy to allow them to get clean away with it and thereby leak hundreds of runs.

Second, why do some people have an all-consuming passion for rubbishing players who fall short of greatness?

To be a regular in a Test team for a period of years is in itself a pretty special achievement. There are millions of cricketers around the world, but at any given time only sixty or seventy of them can hold down regular spots in their countries' Test XIs. Only a few of those, the greats and near-greats, are consistently brilliant; most work hard and try their best, having odd days of excellence or lousiness but making, overall, a useful contribution to their teams until their powers wane and the selectors decide that someone else should have a go.

Yet offer an appreciation of a middle-ranking player on the occasion of their retirement in a Cricinfo blog, and it is virtually guaranteed that it will be greeted with a volley of comments to the effect that he was rubbish, very ordinary, or a waste of space who deserves little more than abuse. There are, thankfully, a lot of more generous souls only too glad to raise a kindly glass, but it puzzles me that so many seem to get their cricket kicks by concentrating on players' faults and imperfections.

And third, why do England bowlers insist on persevering with barrages of short-pitched bowling when it is blindingly obvious that the batsmen are having no trouble at all in dealing with it?

Phil Hughes was bounced out of the current Ashes because he was unable to cope with it, but there is plenty of evidence that the rest of the Australians have the technique to do a lot more than survive.

Ricky Ponting is often an uncertain starter and may well be vulnerable to an early bouncer, but after he's reached about 10, all he does with short stuff is pull it or hook it powerfully in the general direction of mid-wicket. Unless the England bowlers are trying to make amends for the crowd booing him, it is hard to understand why they insist on serving him these delicious snacks for over after over. Bowlers with the height and speed of Flintoff or Harmison, who can extract steepling bounce from only just short of a length, have more excuse for it because they can make batting extremely uncomfortable, but why Onions, Broad or Anderson bowl more than the odd short one as a surprise variation is quite beyond my limited understanding.

So those are my questions. Can anyone help me out with some explanations?

	Andy Caddick may fall short of being an international great, but was an absolute giant for Somerset © Getty Images

Amid the welter of high-profile retirements from Test cricket, one which has not been noticed very much is Andy Caddick's – the consequence of his retiring from all cricket at the end of this season.

The great mystery about Caddick was the enormous disparity between his performances in the first innings, which were usually insipid, and those in the second, which were often devastating. It is particularly appropriate to take note of his retirement on the eve of a Test at Headingley, scene of one of his most spectacular feats of brilliance and of one of his most abject disasters.

In 2000, West Indies struggled to 172 in their first innings, with Craig White taking 5-57. That England managed to gain a lead of 100 was entirely down to a stand between Michael Vaughan, in his 11th Test innings, and Graeme Hick, who scored his last Test half-century. When West Indies batted again, it was Gough who took the top-order wickets, but then came Caddick's over of overs: W . WW . nb W, crashing WI from 52-5 to 53-9. Sarwan managed a three off Caddick's following over, but the second ball of his next knocked Walsh's off stump back and England had achieved their first innings victory against West Indies in 34 years, Caddick's second-innings return being 5-14.

Two years later, he was by a long distance the senior bowler in the England attack for the game against India. There were gasps around the ground when it was announced that Sourav Ganguly had elected to bat on winning the toss. The sky was dark grey and there was dampness in the air – ideal conditions for pace bowling – and when Sehwag departed in the seventh over, it seemed as though Ganguly's gamble was a loser. But we had reckoned without Caddick's inability to bowl well in the first innings of a match. Ball after ball was banged in far too short and went sailing harmlessly over the stumps as Rahul Dravid swayed patiently out of the way. By the time the clouds cleared and batting became a much less daunting proposition, the match was effectively over.

His last Test was the fifth of the 2002-3 Ashes, a dead rubber to be sure, but one which England won through one of Caddick's classic performances – a weak 3-121 followed by a brilliant 7-94. He was not officially dropped, as he never ceased to remind people, but England under Michael Vaughan had moved on.

Two-hundred-and-thirty-four Test wickets is no mean tally. Only seven England bowlers have taken more, and most of them have claims to greatness. A new-ball bowler who fails to take first-innings wickets can have no such pretensions, but he did enough to re-establish the idea that England could win matches after the barren 1990s. He was too diffident and too grumpy to win many fans' hearts, especially since his main England partner was the ebullient crowd-pleaser Gough, but his contribution to England's revival under Nasser Hussain was profound.

But even if he was not an international great, he has been an absolute giant for Somerset for whom he has taken 873 first-class wickets (and counting). Of post-WW2 players, only Brian Langford took more, and he was never required by England. That 75 of them at 23 apiece were in 2007, when he was 38, behind only Mushtaq Ahmed and Ottis Gibson was remarkable, but that he took more than half of them at the Taunton bowlers' graveyard was little short of phenomenal.

The body won't take any more pounding, and so he has announced that he will not be back next season. For the remainder of this one, the collection boxes for his testimonial deserve to overflow, and may he have a long and happy retirement on the proceeds.

	Andrew Flintoff falls short of greatness but enriched the game in many ways © Getty Images

Samir Chopra has poured cold water over the idea that Andrew Flintoff's name should be added to the roll of great cricketers. He is of course right, but it is nevertheless significant that the question should even be worth discussing. When Paul Collingwood retires, for instance, any English paper bandying “great” around will also be carrying reports of the Pope's conversion to Scientology and its travel supplement will be featuring a guide to the exciting new ski resorts in hell.

Ricky Ponting has compared Flintoff to Curtly Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Wasim Akram, Justin Langer rates him as one of the three best bowlers he's faced, and Adam Gilchrist has confessed to having nightmares about him. Michael Holding rated his spell on the fifth morning at Lord's as one of the greatest spells of fast bowling he had seen. His dismantling of Jaques Kallis was one of the indelible memories of last summer. These are not the memories of, nor tributes paid to, the journeyman bits-and-pieces player Flintoff's statistics seem to betoken, but ticks in several of the boxes on the application for membership of Great Players CC. Too few to qualify, but enough for him not to be dismissed out of hand.

Flintoff is one of those poignant characters discussion of whose career will usually include the words “if only”, the ones we might call the lost greats. Whether because of early death (Archie Jackson, Collie Smith, Duleepsinhji) or apartheid bans (Barry Richards, Mike Procter, Sylvester Clarke, Franklyn Stephenson) or other causes over which they had little personal control, we cannot help wondering what we would have thought of them if only they had had uninterrupted careers.

Michael Vaughan might have found the captaincy which consumed his mental energy a somewhat lesser burden after the triumph of the 2005 Ashes and reacquired the form which had propelled him to the number one ranking three years previously, but he quickly injured his knee and never really returned to full fitness. He doesn't qualify for GPCC either, but those who remember his sublime batting in 2002 and 2003 cannot but wonder what might have been.

Since he has never managed to play a Test against England, my opportunities to watch Shane Bond bowl have been very limited, so I am more reliant on statistics and hearsay than on personal observation, but if only his fitness had been more robust, surely there would now be arguments over whether he or Richard Hadlee occupies the number one spot in the history of Black Cap bowling.

Then there is the amazing saga of Shoaib Akhtar. If Flintoff can be held partly responsible for his own downfall, Shoaib gets twice as much blame. Sometimes he has been allegedly fit but has not turned up, sometimes he has turned up when obviously unfit, and at other times he has just been at loggerheads with the PCB, but seeing him charge in when he does play, his jet-black hair flopping around in an echo of Fred Trueman, has been one of the biggest thrills of the last decade or so.

No doubt, if all four had had continuous careers, one or more would eventually have fallen short of greatness, but all of them possessed a magic which lifted them above the common herd. But while we deny them the ultimate accolade, we should also acknowledge they have enriched the game in ways that those who were never candidates for greatness could not dream of doing.

Who else belongs on the list of lost greats? Academic though the question is, wistful nostalgia has always been an essential part of cricket chinwags, so I look forward to reading your nominations.

	Mitchell Johnson had a match to forget © Getty Images

Are Test matches won or lost? The immediate reaction to a match usually focuses on the outstanding performances which can be said to have won it, but I often find it instructive to look at the weakest links which might be said to have lost it. Specifically, I have a hypothesis that you learn most about the difference between two sides by looking at their fourth-best bowlers.

Few substantial Test innings involve less than four bowlers. If you like, they form the four walls surrounding your castle. If the fourth wall is a rickety wooden fence rather than solid brick or concrete, then the cavalry can plunder through and run riot, negating the sturdy resistance being mounted around the rest of the compound. A fourth bowler who restrains batsmen as well as a colander holds soup allows the batting side the luxury of blunting the edge of your best bowlers and just waiting until the runs flow again, whereas a fourth bowler who manages to contain and even take important wickets allows no let-up – which means the batsmen have to take risks against the top men, thus increasing their chances of getting out to them.

At Lord's these last five days, Stuart Broad was England's fourth bowler and Mitchell Johnson Australia's. Broad's match figures were 34-4-127-3 and Johnson's 38.4-4-200-3. Broad's performance was of the not-too-bad variety while Johnson's was somewhere between poor and awful. Since England won, this is an observation of data which confirms the Fourth Bowler Hypothesis (or, to be more rigorous, does not disprove it).

At 23, Broad is still young enough to be classed as a promising up-and-coming player who has not yet mastered his trade, whereas Johnson is 27 and should be approaching his best. Broad's imperfections are therefore more to be expected and offer less cause for major concern than weaknesses in Johnson's game.

England have given try-outs to several young or youngish pace bowlers in recent years: what makes Stuart Broad stand out ahead of most of them is his steady absorption of lessons. On Saturday morning, he ran in and bowled bouncer after bouncer at Nathan Hauritz and Peter Siddle and was treated with as little respect as his poor execution deserved. It was nothing like the chin music with which Fred Flintoff has been serenading Phil Hughes – it was short-pitched dross. Even so, there was a big difference between that spell and the kind of tripe which was served up by the likes of Liam Plunkett, Saj Mahmood and Chris Tremlett: it was deliberate. It may not have been the best of plans and it may not have worked, but at least he was bowling to one. What a captain wants most from any bowler is that he should bowl to the field which has been set, and the best thing about Broad right now is that he is obviously doing his utmost to fulfil that requirement.

Mitchell Johnson, on the other hand, was clearly driving his captain to distraction at Lord's. He was nothing like the electrifying destroyer who had taken South Africa's batsmen apart over the winter. He had no control of length or direction, so his opening spells against Strauss and Cook on Thursday opened the gates of the Australian castle, let down the drawbridge and said “Come on in and pillage our gold.” He it was who allowed England to carry on building momentum after the great Cardiff escape, a momentum which carried England through to victory despite the lack of self-belief which saw them surrender the initiative on Sunday to such an extent that it was easy to imagine Australia setting a record for chasing which would be likely to stand for decades.

This is not an attempt to write Johnson off. Whereas the drop-off in Phil Hughes's performances since South Africa is owing to a weakness being identified and ruthlessly exploited, Johnson's deterioration is purely a loss of form. If or, more likely, when he recovers his composure and control, he will once again be a formidable bowler, but he needs to do so fast if he is not to be dead weight taking up space in the team which could be used far better by someone else in this series.

If the hypothesis is correct, then a comparison of fourth bowlers ought to shine a spotlight on how difficult the respective selectors' jobs are. Broad's problems are not so serious that they cannot be accommodated with the expectation that the experience he gains today will serve him well in years to come, whereas if Johnson continues in this vein he could lose the series for Australia.

	Matt Prior's 61 from 42 balls ensured that England fans were ready to give him another chance © Getty Images

When Matt Prior was first picked for England, the obvious suspicion was that he was the personal pick of incoming coach Peter Moores, the ex-wicketkeeper who had coached him all through his formative years at Sussex.

He made a very good impression with his debut innings, a swash-buckling century against West Indies at Lord's in 2007. Subsequent matches of the series revealed that the attack was seriously poor, which took some of the shine off, and his batting form anyway declined as the season progressed. The odd error in his keeping on debut could be put down to first night nerves, but if anything he got worse behind the stumps as well as in front as time went on.

Apparently fuelled by Moores's belief that wicketkeepers should make their presence felt, he made enough noise behind the stumps to make one recall Alec Stewart's over-the-top shouting with almost affectionate nostalgia for the good old days when people were only noisy when they had some credibility as players. He managed to alienate his county colleagues when appearing for them between internationals by missing no chance to remind them that he was now the England wicketkeeper and had scored a century on debut at Lord's.

Then he went to Sri Lanka, where he scored very few runs and missed approximately 73 routine chances, mostly off Ryan Sidebottom, which drops resulted in his taking the same medicine.

He was shocked, even more so when it became apparent how much glee there was at his downfall. His bubble of self-importance had burst in spectacular fashion.

The news that the England selectors had decided to recall him was greeted by many people with glum resignation. One had to admit that he did have a more convincing batting record than any of the candidates with better keeping credentials, and recent English batting has been far too fragile to admit weak links where they need not be. But he was there on sufferance.

He has clearly taken on board some of the criticism. Sitting in the stands, you hear the odd shout of encouragement, but the incessant inane jabbering is a thing of the past. His keeping is nothing to write hymns of praise to, but he will still be on the bowlers' Christmas card lists. This was improvement enough for his opponents to suspend active hostilities, at least pending developments.

His 61 off 42 balls at Lord's, though, means the war is over.

After enduring two hours of Ravi Bopara and an obviously lame Kevin Pietersen scratching around as though England could bat until Tuesday before they needed to declare, the crowd were aching for urgency and vitality, and Prior sprayed them with gallons of both. I think it was the flicked front-foot drive through extra cover down to the Tavern which got me hooked – or perhaps it was the all-run four which should by rights have only been two.

Lord's standing ovations usually take until the batsman is halfway back to the Pavilion for everyone to get up, and half-centuries very rarely get accorded a stander, but the entire ground (apart from a block of people wearing yellow sweatshirts in the Compton Stand who may possibly have been Australian) were on their feet as soon as it was confirmed that Marcus North's brilliant throw had run Prior out. The cheering was so loud that when Fred Flintoff appeared, the roar which greeted him sounded muted in comparison. In fact, it was even louder than the cheers and guffaws with which the crowd celebrated the repeated showings of Ponting spilling the simplest of slip catches. (I cannot remember a visiting captain being treated with such open contempt by an English crowd. Usually they're given at least the polite respect one might accord to the Grand Duke of Pomerania - given that one doesn't know exactly what a Grand Duke might be or where Pomerania is - when they're not being reviled as the nasty man who is being so rotten to our team by beating them so often, but Ponting is actively despised.)

We may yet spurn him, but Matt Prior will now have to do something spectacularly horrible to lose our affections. Tonight, he is English cricket's sweetheart.

	That James Anderson and Monty Panesar were able to hold out for 12 overs is eloquent testimony to the blandness of the surface © Getty Images

I would have made Paul Collingwood Man of the Match. His was the innings which decided the Test or, perhaps more correctly, undecided it. When people talk about this game in years to come, as they may, it will be his dogged resistance they recall rather than Ricky Ponting's characteristically crushing 150 – just as it was Ponting's innings which is remembered from Old Trafford 2005 rather than Michael Vaughan's or Andrew Strauss's.

At the end of that Old Trafford Test, Vaughan was able to hearten his deflated and frustrated side by pointing out that the team whooping with delight across the field was Australia, and they were celebrating a draw. It seems unlikely that Ponting would have been offering much comfort to his men if he tried something similar this evening. Rather, he has been reduced to the inevitable taking of positives, as Strauss had to do after the Tests at the ARG and Queen's Park Oval in the spring.

The problem England had then, as Australia did these last five days, was a pitch unfit for Test cricket because it provided a wholly unequal contest between bat and ball. It kept the ground packed for five full days, which was of course the commercial objective, but for cricket the last five days have been yet another travesty. ICC are making noises about making radical changes to Test cricket, but none of them will make any long-term difference to the popularity of the format while “chief executives' pitches” such as these remain as depressingly common as they are. Pitches like these are only really usable by great bowlers, and there were none playing in Cardiff this week.

That James Anderson and Monty Panesar were able to hold out for 12 overs is eloquent testimony to the blandness of the surface. Although there was little about their efforts with the ball for any of the bowlers to be pleased with, with the bat they did at least manage to compensate for the inadequacies of the alleged specialists. The slipshod efforts of Strauss, Alastair Cook, Ravi Bopara and Kevin Pietersen on day one led eventually to a compelling final couple of hours, but this match should have died halfway through day four when Australia passed England's first innings total of 516.

And no, KP, “That's just the way I play” won't wash this time. Nine times out of ten, it's a reasonable defense because the ball he was caught off was certainly there to be hit, but on Wednesday Hauritz threw it too wide for the sweep to be on – a reverse sweep, sure, but not the shot he chose. Let us hope that despite the wish to laugh it off in public, Pietersen has done some serious contemplation while lying awake.

In these days when players eagerly jump into baths of ice at the end of a day's play, a bucket of cold water is probably no longer some kind of shock for them, but less personally masochistic England fans who had believed these two sides were evenly matched have received the equivalent of a serious dowsing. But it means that England have made their best start to an Ashes series this century. They have comprehensively lost on all four previous occasions, with the result looking pretty much certain by the end of day one. So to have hung in at reasonable parity until lunch on day three and then to eke out a draw when all seemed hopeless is a distinct advance. Starving for good news as we are, this crumb of comfort seems like an entire cake right now.

	Cricket becomes fashionable to the English public once every four years © Getty Images

During the ICC World Twenty20, our esteemed editor was struck by the lack of hoopla as he strolled up to The Oval. There was little sign that a world championship was taking place, and he then went on to suggest that the ECB had concentrated on marketing the Ashes.

Well, maybe, except that if there is an event which the ECB do not have to market at all, it’s the Ashes. In the run-up to a series against anyone else, there are interviews with England players and tourists on the sports pages of the newspapers but as an Ashes series approaches, the features editors and news editors muscle in on the act, the players get interviewed by the same people who interview Hollywood stars and politicians and the results appear in the colour supplements and stories about the build-up appear in the news section. It is not the judgement of the ECB that the Ashes is the most important thing there is, but the view of news editors in what used to be Fleet Street.

The bulk of the English public have the same attitude to cricket that I have to swimming: most of the time I couldn’t care less about it, but when the Olympics come round, I’ll be as glued to the TV as anyone else. And then I forget about it for another four years.

Since I’m not a swimming buff, I just take it for granted that the Olympics is the premier swimming event which deserves my attention. The news desks of the press and broadcasters make a big thing of it, so it must be, mustn’t it?

In fact, all it indicates is that that’s how the news desks think. Not every sporting event which is deemed to be news rather than sport is the premier event to those in the know. There must be more important events in rowing than Oxford v Cambridge, but you would never know that from the newspapers. The Derby and Grand National are the big horse races of the year on the front pages, but they may not be so regarded by real racegoers.

England v Australia was the top cricket clash for nearly a hundred years. The West Indies emerged as challengers in the fifties, South Africa in the sixties, and the rest came later, but by then it was too late. The Ashes had become woven into English culture as an institution, but England v Anyone Else is merely cricket.

It does not really matter what cricket folk think. We all knew in the 1980, 1984 and 1988 that West Indies were the top side and that the Australian teams which came in 1981 and 1985 were pretty moderate lots, but the news editors couldn’t care less. West Indies thrashing England at cricket could not be news in an Olympic year: the public who aren’t fans of particular sports can only swallow one event other than Wimbledon each summer: leap years the Olympics, the following year the Ashes, the next year the FIFA World Cup, and whatever Great Britain or England (depending on which sport) has a chance of winning in the other year. Cricket tried to occupy that other year with the World Cup - held in England in 1975, 1979 and 1983 – but then the rest of the world demanded its slice of the action, and since then it has largely clashed with the football season, which renders it virtually invisible.

Every Ashes series, unlike every other cricket event in England, begins in the glare of national publicity and stays there until England have lost, just as Wimbledon is a big story until the last Brit loses.

It all starts again tomorrow, and I’m hoping that the press will still be interested in writing about it after 24th August

Samir Chopra wrote eloquently yesterday about his unease at the England team having a bonding session in the cemeteries of Flanders. I share many of his qualms, though not all, and have a few of my own.

One factor which mitigates the gimmickry aspect is that they did gather to lay a tribute at the grave of Charlie Blythe, one of cricket’s near-greats. There is something entirely appropriate about an England team paying collective homage to one of their fallen predecessors.

I can just about see the point of capturing that rite on film for posterity but the rest of the photo coverage was, I firmly agree with Samir, tasteless. The existence of the photographs means that there was an observer who was concentrating on taking pictures rather than paying his own respects to the war dead. And some of the photographs which have been published look posed, which would mean that the subject of the picture was breaking off from contemplating whatever thoughts the rows of gravestones occasioned to make sure that he would look good on camera.

Samir’s point about encouraging these young men to go and visit memorials in their own time is well made, but is there not also a value in a collective experience? I’m with Samir when it comes to visiting war graves as a corporate management training away day, but I suspect he would have no principled objection to a school organising such a trip for 16 of its pupils, and there is an argument that a lot of young professional cricketers are little more than school kids when it comes to life outside sport.

So while I certainly object to the publicity (and am acutely conscious of the hypocrisy involved in even looking at the photos), I am less sure than Samir that the event was flawed in principle.

But Samir appeared to be addressing the issue of war graves in general rather than specifically the First World War graveyards in Flanders, whose significance is now somewhat ambiguous.

Historians argue about the rights and wrongs of WW1 breaking out, but nearly all of them agree that the actual prosecution of the war was a disaster. The armies were commanded by men who had learned soldiering in the days before mechanised heavy artillery, machine guns and air power. The troops who died in their hundreds of thousands on Flanders fields were famously described (on both sides) as lions led by donkeys, who died for no great cause but because their commanders were boneheads unable to adapt to what war demanded of them in 1915 rather than 1885. Many cast their eyes over the endless acres of the Flanders cemeteries and see a monument to the horrifying consequences of human stupidity rather than a tribute to heroism.

If there is an analogue in today’s world of cricket, it’s that the cricketers are the poor bloody infantry being shoved around the world for 7-match ODI series by national boards run by twerps who either think or wish it was 1975, but this seems an unlikely lesson for the ECB to want to instill. But this is to go down the road of making sport comparable with war, and Samir was extremely persuasive on the undesirability of that.

I cannot bring myself to condemn the England management in 2009, nor the Australian management who led their team to WW1 memorials on previous trips: the players who have been have spoken of the humbling and thought-provoking nature of the experiences, and they may well have benefited in wholly laudable ways. But I do still wonder whether they were wise.

	It was a privilege to be able to stand in the Long Room and applaud a winning England team back to their dressing room © Getty Images

While the public stands were only sparsely occupied for the women’s ICC World Twenty20 Final, the Pavilion End was packed. Admittedly this was mostly because seating for MCC Members and their friends is unreserved so those wanting a good viewing spot for the afternoon’s proceedings were obliged to turn up early, but the prospect of seeing an England team in a final they were actually expected to win made this far less of an inconvenience.

I had not realised how much I cared about it until the national anthems. I had stood for them before the men’s games at Lord's, respectful but unmoved – except when the Pakistan and Sri Lanka teams stood interleaved with one another in solidarity before their group game – but as the British dirge struck up for the women, I felt the tears welling. Not that I hadn’t been paying attention to the women’s progress: when those headlines about Edwards being a doubt for the semi-final appeared on Cricinfo mid-week, my first reaction to was to panic about Charlotte’s availability for England rather than be concerned about Fidel’s for WI.

But though the MCC were out in force for the final, they do not go in for community singing. Instead, about three dozen women at the Nursery End took on the onerous duty of representing the Barmy Army. I am no fan of their anthem - in its customary form as a baritone bellow it resembles a herd of cattle protesting at being woken up; as rendered yesterday it sounded more as though a fox had got into the henhouse. On the other hand, I usually like the songs for individual players, and the rewording of the old favourite “Michael Vaughan, my Lord, Michael Vaughan” for Jenny Gunn was felicitous.

In the event, the game was rather ruined as a spectacle by Katherine Brunt. A spell of 4-2-6-3 is liable to be pretty significant in any game of cricket, but as an opening burst in Twenty20 it is a gamebreaker. In the afternoon, following a start almost as bad for Sri Lanka, Kumar Sangakkara and Angelo Mathews were able to hit lustily enough to establish a total that was at least slightly competitive, but the New Zealand women were unable to achieve anything that gave them any realistic hope of salvation.

Being honest, though, one must admit that the women’s game is never likely to be spectacular. There may be women physically strong enough to bowl at 140kph or hit the ball high into the stands, but none of them are playing international cricket and one suspects that they would anyway be too bulky to be of much use in the field. People who enjoy watching the likes of Mahela Jayawardene, Ramnaresh Sarwan or Ian Bell batting well will find plenty to appreciate in women’s cricket – and since I am one, I much enjoyed Claire Taylor’s innings – but there are no Chris Gayles or Boom Boom Afridis to tonk the non-existent Lasith Malingas, Dale Steyns and Brett Lees around.

The pleasant corollary is that there are equally no Luke Wrights or Brendon McCullums. They are powerful enough men that when they mishit a wild slog, it is quite likely to clear the ring and fall safe, but a woman with abominable technique stands no chance at all, given that the women field well and look pretty safe catchers.

It is a pity that the game was not as exciting as the England v Australia semi-final, which was clearly the match of the tournament, but for English fans used to watching embarassing failures in World Cups, the sight of an England team cruising to a world crown was deeply satisfying.

So congratulations to Charlotte Edwards and her team, and thanks. It was a privilege to be able to stand in the Long Room and applaud a winning England team back to their dressing room. You did us proud.

	Netherlands' performance was one of committed enterprise, England’s one of nervous inhibition © Getty Images

Regular readers will recall that I predicted two months ago that England would pick the wrong team and get beaten by Netherlands, and so it has come to pass. Discussion of England’s incompetence can wait until they have been eliminated; today is for lavishing praise upon the Dutch.

Netherlands won because they entered into the spirit of Twenty20 and their opponents did not. Theirs was a performance of committed enterprise, England’s one of nervous inhibition.

Their preparation was no doubt enhanced by the experience of Dirk Nannes, the Australian whose Dutch parentage makes him eligible for the Netherlands’ team but also allowed him to play for Middlesex last year as a non-overseas player. The sight of him opening the bowling from the Nursery End was thus very familiar. Nannes has real pace, but he was also accurate enough to prevent Bopara exploiting it.

The rest of their attack is really rather ordinary, but it has the advantage of not being very quick. The boundaries in use at Lord’s (and at The Oval, from today’s TV coverage) are the same as in Test cricket, so batsmen have to supply all the power if they are to clear the ropes off the Dutch bowling – and though Luke Wright tried, his timing and technique were not really up to it.

The combination of tigerish fielding and bowling that made fast scoring slightly tricky was enough to restrict the target to eight an over – stiff but by no means impossible.

The first couple of overs did not go well, but thereafter they took their lives in their hands and just went for it. They tried to hit everything, and England placed so much reliance on their fast bowlers that miscues went for four; even more importantly, they ran for everything, especially overthrows and ricochets. Such impertinence sent the England fielders into a tailspin of panic, and the errors, dropped catches and wild throws multiplied.

The shot of the day was Tom de Grooth’s six off Broad. Stepping forward to turn the ball into a half-volley, he played the perfect three-iron over long-off. His innings was a gem, as adventurous and stylish as anything we will see from well-known internationals in the major teams. At the age of 30 he probably has higher priorities in life, but a number of counties will have seen enough to consider offering him a contract at least for next season’s Twenty20 competitions.

The English were frightened of making mistakes, made too many, and worried about them. The Dutch expected that they would make mistakes and therefore ignored them. Twenty20 is about being fearless, and it was the bravest team which won. Pakistan, no strangers themselves to losing World Cup matches to minnows, be warned.

The Dutch victory was not the only example of the cricketing gods’ excellent taste, though. Instead of the opening ceremony which the organisers had planned, we were treated to something far more characteristic of English cricket: the ground staff taking the covers off just in time for the rain to restart, not once but three times over. As entertainment, this was almost certainly superior to the scheduled display of the twelve men’s captains standing on six little daises waving inanely to the crowd while Alesha Dixon sang.

A little World Cup involving twelve teams does not need an opening ceremony to kick it off – a thrilling cricket match was all that was needed, and that is what we had.

Gelukwensen aan de Nederlanders!

	Daniel Vettori took three wickets and effected a run-out to seal a nine-run win for New Zealand against India © AFP

The difference between Clark Kent and Daniel Vettori is that Clark Kent took his glasses off before saving the day.

India had slowed down a little but were still ahead of the rate, seemingly cruising to victory when Vettori brought himself back on for the 17th over. Yusuf Pathan could not make much out of the first two balls, but latched on to the third, sending a screamer back over the bowler’s head. A certain four, quite likely six. Except that SuperDan leapt, stuck both hands in the air and despite being knocked sideways by the force of the blow, was still clinging on to the ball when he hit the ground.

It was a stunning catch. The remaining Indian batsmen seemed dazed as they pushed and prodded for singles and scrambled twos when boundaries were needed. The crowd in the Upper Compton stand, which had been shouting loud enough for an entire full house, stopped mid-yell and sat in shock as the game slipped away.

Catches indeed win matches – even in a form of the game where wicket-taking is theoretically optional.

Not that this was Vettori’s only influence on the Indian innings. Gautam Gambhir and Rohit Sharma had started well, Gambhir falling at the end of the fifth over with the score on 42 to bring danger man MS Dhoni to the crease. Dhoni began with dot-four-two and then Vettori brought himself on for the first over after the powerplay. By the end of the over, he had disposed of both Dhoni and Sharma, and India wobbled slightly. Since Raina and Ravindra Jadeja soon picked up the pace, it did not seem to have mattered all that much; in hindsight, perhaps it left them a batsman short right at the end. And of course it was Vettori whose sharp pick-up and throw ran out Irfan Pathan to extinguish India’s remaining hopes.

Other than Vettori, the rest of the participants in the game mostly did what you probably expected them to. Raina and Sharma hit the ball sweetly, Ross Taylor and Scott Styris aggressively, and Brendon McCullum batted with the grace and subtlety of an out-of-tune Motorhead.

I do not demand classical purity of technique. I’ve watched in awe as Brian Lara and Kevin Pietersen invented shots I’d never seen before. I’ve weathered, just, the storm as Viv Richards the Master Blaster unleashed his elemental power. I love it that the unorthodox jostles with the technically correct to enrich this wonderful game.

But that does not mean I have to approve of McCullum’s batting.

Effective it may be – when it comes off – but it is ugly, ugly, ugly. I do not for a minute accept that Twenty20 is some horrible mutant as the form’s most vehement detractors would have you believe, but McCullum is the sort of unhelpful evidence the defence does not need to have brought before the court. At the very least, his innings ought to be regarded as not suitable viewing for impressionable young minds – but since the whole idea of this tournament is to get the kids watching, I fear that a whole generation may be corrupted while such menace is allowed out on a cricket field.

Over the next three weeks we will see brilliance and incompetence, thrilling games and bad ones, beauty, courage, comedy, athleticism, determination, clumsiness, impudence, passion, triumph and despair. And McCullum’s batting.

We got most of those at Lord's on Monday evening. As a warm-up, India v New Zealand was just about perfect.

	Twenty20 cricket's success depends upon whether new spectators carry on watching © Getty Images

Five years ago, the first domestic Twenty20 match at Lord’s attracted 30,000 spectators. The two matches at Lord’s played so far this season have attracted about half that number – not each, but together. All the counties are seeing smaller crowds this year than last, and last year’s were lower than the year before. TV ratings for the IPL this year were down about 15% on last year.

The novelty value of Twenty20 seems to be wearing off. It has undoubtedly brought new people into watching cricket, whether live or on TV, but long-term success depends on whether these new cricket spectators carry on watching.

If their continued loyalty is dependent on the games being exciting, though, the prospect is fairly bleak, because relatively few Twenty20 games are particularly exciting. Only about 30% of games in the IPL have come down to the last over, a figure similar to the English domestic competition. In international Twenty20, fewer than one game in four goes to the wire. At least half the games are pretty much done and dusted by the end of the second innings powerplay, the remaining hour of the match merely giving concrete form to the inevitable.

Not that these figures are bad - in cricket terms. Longer games are even less likely to change their obvious trajectory in the last hour of play. But it compares very unfavourably with other mass-appeal sports.

In huge numbers of soccer games, the result is still uncertain with five minutes to go: a single goal would still be enough to equalise or one side to take a late lead. Hoping to get five runs in the bottom of the ninth in baseball may require huge optimism, but making up a one or two-run difference remains within most teams’ capacity - it only takes one big hit.. With their higher scores, oval ball codes of football tend to be more or less decided rather earlier – once a team needs to score more than once and at least every five minutes, they are very likely to lose – but the tension usually lasts well past the two-thirds point.

Twenty20 moves considerably faster than the longer forms of cricket, but by comparison with other sports it is like watching people racing through treacle.

Longer forms make up for inevitability by offering a stage for individuals to shine. Within the context of a virtually-decided match, there are often subsidiary dramas to sustain interest. Bowlers can get useful hauls and batsmen can play innings long enough to be memorable. Twenty-wicket cricket, whether four-day or five-day, has the further advantage that while it may be obvious that one side cannot win, the possibility that they will not lose remains open right until the end.

Twenty20, though, depends almost entirely on the result for drama. In four overs, a bowler is doing well to take even two wickets, and it takes something spectacular for an individual batsman to stand out. There is much less to talk about with your mates on the way home.

I am not trying to knock Twenty20. I enjoy Twenty20 a great deal. It doesn’t bother me that it does not in practice live up to the ambitious marketing of thrills and spills all the way; I am wholly accustomed to watching matches where not much happens, so one close game in three is quite OK in my book. What is far more dubious is whether the casual fans who have been sufficiently attracted by the new format to give boring old cricket a try will persist with it once they’ve rumbled that underneath the glitz, flashing lights and dancing girls, the central attraction is still cricket.

In March 1986, Graham Gooch’s 129* off 117 balls just got England over the line in what was reduced to a 37-over ODI against West Indies. Earlier in the tour, they had recorded their other victory by winning a four-day game against Jamaica. They lost the five Tests and the other two ODIs by massive margins, as well as four-day games against the Windward Islands and Barbados, and weren’t exactly impressive in the four-day games against the Leewards or Trinidad.

What we have just witnessed was as one-sided as the slaughters to which England were subjected twenty-odd years ago.

Back then, all we had to go on were the reports in the papers and the live radio commentary . The captain was David Gower, regularly pilloried along the lines of his being horizontal were he any more laid-back. The tabloids especially delighted in using words like “spineless” and accused the team of failing to try and of lacking guts or pride, and stopped only marginally short of calling for the ritual disembowelment of the captain as prelude to flaying alive the rest of the squad on their shameful return home. Sound familiar?

I could not then accept that the England players were quite as contemptible as the reports said. The charge which could be laid against them was defeatism: they were beaten before they even got on the plane because they expected to lose, which sure enough they went ahead and did.

After the Test series in the Caribbean, Chris Gayle intimated to several of the press party that the prospect of a swinging ball in a cold English May was not one that he or his players were relishing. The West Indies turned up like teenagers to a cinema showing “Bowlers of the Living Dead”, expecting to be scared out of their wits. It is to England’s credit that they largely managed to make the fantasy all too real. Anderson delivered high-class swing at pace, and if Stuart Broad’s command of the bouncer is not as sure as Joel Garner’s was, Ramnaresh Sarwan is unlikely to feel much like arguing the toss over it. And then there was the horror of Swann, all the worse for being unexpected.

I hope that’s what happened, anyway. I don’t want to live in a world where the failure of Shivnarine Chanderpaul to average 100 in a series can be used as evidence that he is not trying his damnedest for the team the way he has done throughout his infernally dogged career. I don’t want to believe that the younger players in the West Indies team aren’t storing away their hurt with a resolution that one day they will be stronger and better-equipped to make England pay.

Part of England’s problem in 1986 was that their captain was a rational man whose realism led him to the conclusion that his team were not good enough to win and was unable to pretend to them that they could. He was replaced later that year by Mike Gatting, the kind of optimist who believes that both sides start the game at 0 for 0 and either team can win. The following winter, Gatting’s team - which couldn’t bat, bowl or field - won the Ashes.

Chris Gayle’s brand of leadership is not what West Indies now need: they need someone who will lead a charge over the top in even a hopeless cause. The obvious choice is Dwayne Bravo, but an Englishman is bound to point to Ian Botham and Andrew Flintoff as evidence that charismatic, swashbuckling all-rounders do not necessarily make good skippers. So why not Fidel Edwards?

Phil Hughes’s early-season stint as Murali Kartik’s stand-in has finished and England’s limited-over squad has gathered, which results in the dispersal of Middlesex’s remarkable quartet of unorthodox batsmen – Hughes, Owais Shah, Eoin Morgan and Dawid Malan.

Born in four different countries and learning their cricket in a slightly different set of four countries, they have independently arrived at the conclusion that the stance in which they take guard is merely a take-off point. The conventional batsman does no more than go forward or back, and possibly move his front leg outside off stump to prevent the lbw, but when the ball is delivered, these four go a-roaming in search of the best place to play the shot they intend. There are a fair number of such batsmen these days, but it is rare to see virtually a whole top order made up of these crease-gypsies. Not that these four have much more in common – each has a highly individual style.

So far, two of them have made it to the highest level. The left-handed Hughes likes to back away and smash the ball through the off side while the right-handed Shah glides across his stumps to hit leg-side boundaries, so when the two bat together a captain can set an 8-1 field which doesn’t have to change over when the batsmen run a single. Hughes has successfully deployed this technique – or lack of it – in Test cricket; Shah has become a key member of the England ODI team by moving about in his crease but curbs his wanderlust in Tests, a self-imposed restriction which may lie at the heart of his relative failure in five-day cricket.

Malan, while born in Roehampton, grew up in South Africa and is not England-qualified for another few months, while Morgan has so far played ODIs for Ireland with very little to show for them - only the eagle-eyed will have noticed the 91 runs he amassed in nine games at the last World Cup. Both, though, could well become stars of the future.

Malan is the more normal of the two since he plays recognisable cricket shots, even if from positions in which ultra-correct batsmen like Peter May, Geoff Boycott or Greg Chappell would never have been seen dead. He caught the national eye last year in the Twenty20 Cup quarter-final . Most people turned on their TVs to see Fred Flintoff making one of his many comebacks and were rewarded with a rollicking half-century and a three-wicket haul from the megastar, but it was Malan’s astonishing 54-ball 103 which powered Middlesex through to Finals day and persuaded the England selectors to include him in their Performance Squad of up-and-coming players.

Morgan, though, is on the verge of making his England debut. If he does well, A&E units around the country will be overwhelmed by people coming in complaining of jaws dropping so fast that they break.

A couple of weeks ago, the Sky commentators were stunned by one of his boundaries very fine on the leg side: alien to the cricket canon, the shot would have been instantly recognisable to a hockey player as a blind-side backward pass. For Morgan’s first experience of hitting balls with wooden things came in the Irish game of hurling, which bears the same sort of relationship to hockey as Australian Rules does to football in that the ball spends most of its time flying around at chest height rather than zipping along the ground. Hurlers acquire an extraordinary flexibility in spinning round and hitting the moving ball in all sorts of directions: Morgan has translated this to cricket and come up with what may be a unique style.

Time and again when watching him, you see a smooth and effortless stroke and instinctively applaud the boundary but then scratch your head and wonder how on earth he accomplished it. At least in the domestic Twenty20 there is a big replay screen available to assist in deciphering what happened, for without one it is nigh-on impossible for cricket-trained senses to apprehend it.

Except, perhaps, for elderly Middlesex members whose memories stretch back sixty years. Though coming from a very different background, Morgan’s inventiveness is perhaps best likened to that of the grandfather of another current Middlesex player and sometime Cricinfo blogger: I fancy Denis Compton looks down at Morgan from the great pavilion in the sky and raises an approving glass to his spiritual heir.

	James Anderson bowled as well as any England swing bowler has these last twenty years © Getty Images

West Indian cricketers are not supposed to fear anyone – except their mothers. So what must have happened is that when Chris Gayle got home with the Wisden Trophy, his mother took one look at it and told him that it wasn’t his and he was to give it back to the people it really belonged to as soon as possible or there would be trouble. And if the other boys’ mothers said similar things, then we can understand why their performances at Lord’s and the Riverside were so abject, and perhaps even forgive them.

All right, so it was pretty chilly out there in the middle and the ball moved in the air and off the seam at times, but international-level cricketers ought to be able to make a better fist than that of conditions other than idyllic. Fidel Edwards managed to make some good use of the moving ball but his colleagues did not even get the ball to whisper, let alone talk. The batsmen decided to play as if the ball was not moving at all and trust to luck for survival, a policy with predictably grim results.

It gives me no pleasure at all to have to write that whatever credit they justifiably accumulated with their gritty determination to win in the Caribbean, they squandered in seven days of rolling over and dying in an English spring. Unless they really were doing what their mamas told them to.

There is a feeling, then, that England were merely beating the air, but even that has its benefits. It does the heart and confidence a lot of good to record thumping victories if you haven’t had one for a year.

The bowlers especially will feel a lot better for knowing that they can bowl very well indeed if there is a little help from the pitch and weather: even Tim Bresnan looked a handy back-up bowler once he could get some movement while James Anderson bowled as well as any England swing bowler has these last twenty years. Stuart Broad bounced Ramnaresh Sarwan out and Graeme Swann gave left-handers a lot of trouble. Assuming Fred Flintoff comes back to replace Bresnan, that leaves Graham Onions fighting it out with Ryan Sidebottom and Monty Panesar for the fifth bowler’s spot, the question being which of them best complements the other four in the conditions anticipated.

But what encouraged me most about their performance was that they enjoyed being at work. The mid-week crowds may have stayed away (for all the concerned comment about small gates, the one Saturday of actual play was almost a sell-out) and the media may have spent large parts of every press conference wheedling about the Ashes, but the captain and team director had clearly managed to get them to concentrate on doing the job in hand as well as they could and worry about what comes next when it arrives. There was an enthusiasm and brio about their play which belied the lack of attention being paid by anyone else.

For a team which was in turmoil five months ago, this is an impressive tribute to the management skills of Strauss and Flower, hereafter to be known as the Andrews Brothers.

Their task, which they have no choice but to accept, is to reassemble the group after the interlude of the ODIs against West Indies and the ballyhoo and disappointment as teams more skilled at Twenty20 leave England standing at the World Cup and get them to carry on from where they left off. Since this is Mission Impossible, this post will self-destruct five seconds after you read it.

Five of the players involved in the Wisden Trophy series went to South Africa with the IPL, which many thought would be very poor preparation for playing Test cricket. So how have they done?

Ravi Bopara and Chris Gayle both both recorded similar figures, averaging about 28 with the bat at a strike rate of about 117. Gayle’s contributions were generally useful without being outstanding, while Bopara played one match-winning innings and some small ones. Both were thus moderately successful.

Bopara is the batting success story of the Tests so far. Gayle was going pretty well in the first innings at Lord’s before dragging one on, and was done by Anderson’s swing for a duck in the second.

Kevin Pietersen had a disappointing IPL, failing to record a hundred runs even in total over six innings. At Lord’s he was out first ball, beaten by a superb delivery from Fidel Edwards, who was the best bowler in the Test. Edwards had also been to the IPL, where his returns were adequate, being neither as impressive as Lasith Malinga’s nor as laughable as Andrew Flintoff’s.

The fifth was Paul Collingwood, who did not get a game in the IPL, and then looked out of touch during his brief Lord’s innings. Although not strictly relevant, Owais Shah also did a stint of training with an IPL team without getting on the field, and then returned to play 50-over cricket for Middlesex, lasting two and six balls in his two innings, the second of which realised one run.

Any competent statistician would point out that this is a very small sample from which to try and draw any conclusions, but the obvious one is that form is continuous from one form of the game to another. Gayle has always been more vulnerable to a swinging ball and Edwards is a better bowler when the ball swings, which accounts for the differences in their performances just as well as any other possible explanations, such as Gayle’s much-publicised wish to be somewhere else. If you play badly at Twenty20, you won’t immediately get better by playing in a Test, and if you don’t play at all, you’ll get out of touch.

What it definitely shows about Bopara, though, is that he is an adaptable and versatile batsman. He is quite content to watch and play quietly for periods as well as capable of mounting exciting assaults. He played good Twenty20 cricket in the IPL and then came back to play good Test cricket. The Australians will no doubt have noticed that he’s a good candidate for being caught at square leg when hooking poorly, but otherwise he seemed to make the transition entirely smoothly.

But is that not what one requires from any top player? Should there really be any surprise that a batsman can spot the differences in field settings when he is at the crease? Most of batting is knowing where the fielders are and attempting to hit the ball to where they aren’t while being cognisant of the sort of shot which is liable to cause the ball to go to them at catchable height and avoiding it. Attempting to whack every ball from a quick bowler over his head when there are four slips and a gully posted behind you is not clever cricket, and anyone worth picking in a Test match ought to be able to work that out without four weeks of rehabilitation from the adrenaline-fuelled stress of playing Twenty20.

What is essential in terms of preparation for playing well is being in good form and having your body adjusted to the correct time zone. In the end, being able to select your shots based on the merits of the ball, where the fielders are and what the state of the game is so basic that one wonders why anyone makes a fuss about the format it’s done in.

	Now who didn't see that one coming? © Getty Images

The BBC commentators made Graham Swann’s dismissals of Devon Smith and Shivnarine Chanderpaul in consecutive balls their champagne moment, but I would have awarded it to Fidel Edwards for that beautiful ball which did for Kevin Pietersen.

Admittedly, bowlers start with a big advantage when delivering Pietersen’s first ball. They know in advance that he will come forward and attempt to dink the ball to mid-on before setting off for a suicidal single, but even armed with that knowledge it takes a high degree of skill to bowl the right ball. Fidel landed it absolutely to perfection.

Edwards was the best bowler on show: it was just a shame that none of his team-mates bothered to turn up until Brendan Nash and Denesh Ramdin’s stand of 143 delayed the end of the match by a couple of hours. Because of Edwards, England were struggling at tea on the first day, but because of everyone else in the West Indies team, England picked themselves up and eventually romped to victory.

England’s out-cricket was impressive. James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Graham Onions and Swann made up a varied and hostile attack, the fielding was sharp and nearly all the catches were taken – the only really bad miss being when Swann failed to get hand near a fairly routine third slip catch before Nash had scored. Even Matt Prior’s wicketkeeping failed to cause the usual drawings-in of breath and tut-tut-tutting from the always-pick-the-best-keeper brigade. It is not hard to imagine this fielding team holding good batting sides in check, especially once Andrew Flintoff gets fit enough to replace the hapless Tim Bresnan.

As a county allrounder, Bresnan is in the top echelons, but his bowling lacks the bite necessary for Tests. I suspect him of bribing the guys who calibrate the speed guns, because it was when he was alleged to have bowled at 90mph that I knew for certain that they were badly wrong. He is the Ronnie Irani de nos jours; he may well have a lot to contribute to the limited-over sides, but the Test team needs someone who wouldn’t flabbergast if he got a five-fer.

Such as Swann, for instance, who already has two to his name, and whose 63 not out was classier than is expected from someone batting at nine – but, counting Bresnan and Flintoff, England have five players competing for the number seven spot to which they are ideally suited so someone has to drop down.

On the other hand, the top order’s batting was pretty dismal.

Had umpire Davis properly sent Ravi Bopara on his way when he was palpably lbw on 40, England would indeed have been in the mire. But on such things careers can turn. Being able to make a big hundred when the rest fail is exactly what England have wanted to see in their No. 3, so in one innings he ticked all the boxes that Ian Bell and Owais Shah left blank on their application forms and booked his spot for the rest of the summer. If he succeeds over the next three months, he will have the job for years.

The rest have little to be satisfied about. Apart from KP, for whose dismissal Edwards and Ramdin were responsible, the top order gave their wickets away, although Prior contributed 40 well-made runs before offering extra cover some easy catching practice.

England deserved their win, and it is a significant step forward for them to be one-nil up rather than one-nil down after the First Test of a series, but they will have to improve their batting considerably if they are to challenge Australia later in the summer.

If I were Geoff Miller, I think I’d be a little miffed at the coverage given to the various England squads announced last week. There is scarcely a mention of the national selector who chairs the selection committee and acres devoted to the influence allegedly wielded by the newest addition to the committee, team director Andy Flower, whose imprint we are supposed to be able to discern.

Excuse me? The head coaching honcho, whether you call him coach, team director or Grand Panjandrum, spends his time working with whomever is in the current squad, giving him extremely detailed knowledge of today’s personnel while preventing him gathering much of interest about potential recruits.

Flower won’t have seen Eoin Morgan, Graham Onions or Tim Bresnan play much, if any, cricket over the last two years, so how can his imprint be seen in their selections?

There might be something in the picks of Graham Napier and James Foster since Flower came to the England job from Essex, but they have earned their elevation by performances in last year’s Twenty20 Cup, mostly played when England were busy losing ODIs to New Zealand and Flower was presumably fully occupied trying to inculcate the basics of shot-selection into Ian Bell.

Geoff Miller, James Whitaker and Ashley Giles are the men who watch county cricket and work out who looks ready for the big time, so why aren’t they given any credit for shaping the new-look England sides? I don’t see Flower’s squads here – I see Miller’s.

We became used to the coach wielding immense power in the Duncan Fletcher era, but it was a power that he did not really want. Reading Nasser Hussain’s account of selection meetings, it is apparent that the official selectors were weak and dithery, the inevitable consequence of which was that the one selector with a clearly thought-out view ended up getting his own way most of the time. Fletcher himself realised after a time that he had become so close to the regular members of the squad that he could not be dispassionate and stepped down as a selector.

The most important influence a coach can have on selection is essentially negative. After working with players identified by the selectors, the detailed knowledge gained enables him to identify the ones to keep, the ones to discard and the ones to send back to domestic cricket to rediscover their technique, desire or ideal waist measurement. What he can’t do is give more than a specification for the type of player the team will need to replace the ones who are not currently measuring up: it is the selectors’ job to identify them, not the coach’s.

The Schofield Report produced following the debacles in the winter of 2006-7 identified the selection process as needing a more professional structure. That has now been implemented, and it is already evident that the new players getting picked have been carefully watched. They have good records in domestic cricket, but not necessarily the best. They are presumably being chosen because they appear to offer that extra something which lifts a player to success at international level – and that can only be spotted by people who see them play, which the national team coach gets precious little opportunity to do.

While I disagree with much of my fellow columnist Michael 'Fox' Jeh’s thesis about international coaches being useful only as modes of transport, I agree very much that the cult of the head coach is becoming dangerously fetishistic, especially in England where people seem obsessed with finding the new Fletcher in the same way as we used to hanker after the new Botham.

Interpreting anything that happens through the prism of the coach being Lord High Everything does us all a disservice. Cricket is too complex for supremos. Credit Flower with the axing of Bell and Harmison if you like, but let’s praise (or blame) Miller, Giles and Whitaker for the players called up instead. Hold Flower to account for what the selected players do, but pay proper attention to how the selectors go about their business too.

Samir wrote recently about his problem in adjusting to the idea that a team allegedly representing Delhi had a load of foreigners in it. Here in England, this is not exactly a novelty, since most counties have had overseas players for forty years - even Yorkshire relaxed its Yorkshire-born-only rule nearly twenty years ago.

There are probably still a few diehards hanging around among the membership of every county who think the use of overseas players is immoral or unpatriotic, but the vast majority have completely adjusted to the idea of adopting someone from abroad as one of their own.

Winning things for the team is a fantastic way of breaking the ice: people can forgive a great deal in someone’s background if they are instrumental in bringing silverware or even just winning a few games. Having captained Yorkshire to their first championship in thirty years, Australian Darren Lehmann has a plaque in his honour on the West Stand at Headingley. If parochial Yorkshire can take an Aussie to their bosom, anyone can.

County sides now have players from three sources: home-grown players who have come up through the county’s youth system, players who were previously on another county’s books, and imports from abroad. If you have no other source of information, you can work out which category a new player falls into by listening to the comments from the members as he trudges back after being out for a scratchy thirteen.

They have patience with the promising young lad from the second eleven: he looked as though he was trying or did not have a lot of luck – but maybe he’s not really ready for the first team yet. And they are much quicker to welcome his arrival as a worthy player: a couple of fifties and a maiden hundred are quite enough to ensure a gaggle of admirers at the next supporters’ evening.

Those who previously tried elsewhere cause Playfairs to be extracted from pockets and consulted as to the previous record, after which comes “I don’t know why they keep getting us these Hampshire rejects. They’re never any good. Remember Kevin Shine? He was bloody awful too.”

Unless the English import has been poached by dangling large salary cheques in his face, in which case he might as well be an overseas player. By definition (at least in the supporter’s mind), overseas players get paid barrowloads of money which they probably wouldn’t deserve even if they were Donald Bradman and SF Barnes rolled into one. Resentment that this hyped-up popinjay is taking the county for a luxuriously-upholstered ride grows quickly, and you can hear knots of supporters expressing a fierce pleasure when he fails again “because at least we’ll get shot of him for next season.”

On the other hand, the class import may well have enough ability to win hearts and minds immediately. I missed Phil Hughes’s rapid hundred for Middlesex last Thursday, but those who saw it were quick to say that he had been “awesome”. I got to see him make 65* on Saturday and another 74 on Sunday, and I too was impressed.

I also worked out how England could counter him in the Ashes, but as I explained my theory about the field to set, one of my companions spotted a rather big objection: the Laws do not actually permit a 12-3 offside field. Well, that’s a problem for later. In the meantime, he’s playing for Middlesex and is due to open with Andrew Strauss in the game which may or may not start tomorrow depending on the weather. I hope he enjoys the Southgate pitch.

Oh dear. It seems that Michael Vaughan has battuus interruptus, otherwise known as premature dismissal syndrome, that often embarrassing condition to which stylish batsmen are peculiarly vulnerable. It is very easy to spot the afflicted: they walk confidently out to bat and begin with a few sweetly-timed boundaries but then get out for not very many, and the onlookers who were contentedly setting themselves down to savour some delectable batting haute cuisine get no more than a mouthful before an over-zealous waiter whips their plates away.

Even though today’s innings was probably cut short by an over-zealous umpire, Vaughan’s chances of appearing in the Tests this summer are receding daily. Which means that those of us who were hoping that Headingley would resound in July to the Barmy Army’s version of “Kumbaya” while the former captain’s cover drive simultaneously completes his hundred and clinches the Ashes are liable to become very boring as we intone sentences beginning “If only …” at every conceivable opportunity, so be warned.

On the other hand, we have this week heard the welcome news that, barring unforeseen disasters, he intends to play cricket next summer (at least) whether or not he gets picked for England along the way.

That declaration of intent presumably contains a bit of selector-nudging, since he would understand that the Strauss-Flower regime might prefer to go with the batsman who certainly has a future rather than an imminent retiree if it comes down to a toss-up between two plausible candidates, but since he said it to the Yorkshire club magazine, it really amounts to a promise to play on in first-class cricket after his international career is over.

It’s not that he needs the money. As a senior professional of considerable stature he could expect a pretty decent wage for playing county cricket, but he would probably get a similar amount from the former-England-captain pension scheme run by Sky TV, which involves a great deal less effort even after taking into account the bother of having to share the occasional commentary stint with Sir Ian Botham.

There are plenty of reasons to decry the English system as bloated, but in its favour is the opportunity that young players get of playing with and against players whose exploits they marvelled at when they were kids and learning from their experience. There is probably a lad in the Hampshire dressing room whose earliest cricket memory is of Dominic Cork laying waste to West Indians in 1994, and now there is the man himself just across the dressing room. Not so much a dream coming true as fantasy made real.

The truth of “class is permanent” is nowhere better demonstrated than on the county grounds of England. The reactions may have slowed a little, the eyes may be less sharp, but most of the veterans are capable of stepping up to something near their former best for at least the odd innings or bowling spell; even when they are in cruise mode you can usually see that they were once a cut above the rest.

So, since I’ve lost faith that he will return and win us the Ashes, here’s hoping that Michael Vaughan gets over the battuus interruptus, his zest for the game remains undimmed and the knee holds up for several years. Unless, that is, the likes of Joe Sayers, Adam Lyth and Andrew Gale improve enough to insist on being picked for Yorkshire ahead of him.

Those who read my last piece will not be surprised that I thoroughly approve of the decision by Andrew Strauss and Geoff Miller that if Strauss plays any Twenty20 cricket this year, it will be for Middlesex - though whether the Twenty20 champions will want to pick someone rejected by a rotten side like England remains to be seen.

I admit to scepticism that he will be a success as a 50-over opener: his five Caribbean outings only produced one innings which was what the team required. On the other hand, once in five attempts is more than a fair number of other applicants have managed in their auditions, so I am very willing to be proved wrong about his batting because his leadership skills are an asset to a struggling ODI team.

So who should lead the Twenty20 side instead?

On looking at the preliminary squad, the question that immediately sprung out was what a 40-year-old was doing in the 30 for the Twenty20 unless he was there as a captaincy candidate. England could do a lot worse than appointing Shaun Udal: with Murali Kartik he formed the jaws of the vice Middlesex used to squeeze their opponents to death on the way to winning last year’s trophy, and he is now on his second county captaincy. The only thing against him is age, but he’s quite athletic enough to field competently in the one-saving ring.

But perhaps this is old-fashioned thinking.

The kneejerk reaction to the John Buchanan multi-captain theory was to rubbish it, but longer consideration suggests that there are a couple of worthwhile ideas contained in it.

The Kolkata IPL team has in the end reverted to the traditional appointment of a single captain in Brendon McCullum, who opens the batting. But when he succeeds, he is obviously going to be staying out in the middle while wickets fall at the other end. Twenty20 lends itself to tactical shuffling of batting orders, so I can definitely see the sense in giving the job of making those dugout calls to the batting coach (or head coach or whomever).

The Laws of Cricket require a single fielding captain for the umpires to warn or notify about things, and the IPL’s rules require one to blame for slow over rates, but nothing says that the same bloke has to do it every game. It is not surprising that an Australian coach should propose having no permanent captain because it was traditionally the Australian way to pick an XI and then appoint the captain from amongst their number. In a concentrated tournament like the IPL where you might well rest a designated captain for a game or two, it is not illogical to say in advance that you won’t know who is captain for any given game until after the XI has been selected.

How much of this was in Buchanan’s mind is unknowable. As a disciple of Sun Tzu, his proposal could just as easily have been designed to draw fire and divert attention from his real purpose, that of removing Sourav Ganguly from the captaincy. The last Australian coach who tried that ended up losing his job pretty quickly, and Buchanan is astute enough to realise that the same fate awaited if Kolkata’s coach attempted a frontal assault on the Prince of Kolkata.

But whatever his true intentions were, the central question he raised is a valid one. How important is continuity in captaincy? My initial reaction is that a campaign is best commanded by a single general, but I would be fascinated to read your views.

Whichever of their number the cricketing gods deputed to oversee proceedings on England’s tour of West Indies has an evil sense of humour. He saw to it that the average Test side lost the series to the weak one, and then turned round and made the decent ODI side lose the series to the truly awful one. And then he caps it all by making Andrew Strauss the Player of the Series when everybody knows he shouldn’t be within a hundred miles of a one-day side.

Granted, Strauss’s innings to win the fourth ODI was a decent enough effort, but awarding him Player of the Series involves also giving him credit for the century he made in the second game. While he did not quite scale the heights of irrelevance reached by Gavaskar’s famous World Cup 36, giving him an award for it is like giving a safe driving medal to an ambulanceman who observes traffic lights and speed limits without worrying whether the casualty in the back will survive long enough to receive treatment.

But as his other three innings were what one expects from him in short-form cricket – scratch, scratch, miscued big shot, out – there may have been a deeper purpose behind the award, that of ensuring that he will think he is good at one-day cricket and continue to open England’s innings throughout the World Twenty20.

These days, everything eventually tracks back to the IPL, so my guess is that this ludicrous accolade was directed by a dirty tricks department reporting to Lalit Modi.

The first hint of this campaign of misinformation I spotted was a week ago, when a strange Indian gentleman claiming to be a journalist popped up in the Sky TV studio, ostensibly to make sage comments on the Test match going on in Napier. Everything he said on that subject sounded sensible, but he was then invited to talk about the ODI which had just finished in Barbados, and pronounced that the main fault with England’s one-day side was the bowling.

Being English, I can’t really be expected to understand one-day cricket, but that just seems plain wrong. Without wishing to go overboard with praise for the unworthy, surely the bowling is the least of England’s one-day problems. Broad and Anderson are making good progress as new ball bowlers, Flintoff is excellent both in the middle overs and at the death, and the rest of those on show usually manage to border on adequacy.

Modi’s man was clearly trying to divert attention away from England’s horrible batting, which remains as clueless as ever. Tellingly, the only games which England won on the field (as opposed to being handed victory by a West Indian clerical error) were ones in which they did not have to try and bat for 50 overs. Given the full ration, England panic as soon as they lose a couple of wickets and are six down and struggling before they know it.

West Indies perhaps rely a little too much on a Gayle blitz to launch their innings, leaving them slightly doubtful if he goes early, but Sarwan and especially Chanderpaul are adaptable and versatile enough to build good platforms and then accelerate. They are followed by Bravo and Pollard, who possess both the ability and the self-belief to marmalise defensive bowling from the off. England batsmen who try and emulate them unerringly pick the wrong ball to whack straight up in the air, but if that doesn’t work they fall back on their sorry judgement of runs to get themselves out.

The plan must be that the series win sufficiently blinds England to their own uselessness to allow the rest of the world to laugh at them come June. West Indians disappointed with the outcome, particularly those seeking to blame coach Dyson for the Duckworth-Lewis debacle in Guyana, should therefore realise that this wholly ridiculous and anomalous result was part of a much deeper strategic scheme to destabilise England by getting them to pick the wrong team again and again and again.

The wry smile on Chris Gayle’s face at the final presentation suggests to me that he is privy to the conspiracy and was thinking “mission accomplished”. Though the best team lost, it was for the greater good, and the rewards will be reaped when England crash out of the Twenty20 World Cup by losing to the Netherlands.

The West Indies-England ODI series has been a pretty scrappy affair, the games mostly being given away by incompetence rather than won by superior play. Even should the deciding match take place and be a humdinger, this will still not be a series many will wish to remember.

Except for one thing: the return of Dwayne Bravo to international cricket.

He is that rarity in West Indians, an allrounder. In their 80-year history as a Test team, they have only really had five: Learie Constantine, Gerry Gomez, Frank Worrell, Garry Sobers and now Bravo. Collis King was a very useful one-day allrounder, but it takes thinking very hard to come up with any other names unless you want to give the benefit of the doubt to the spin of Viv Richards, Carl Hooper or Chris Gayle – and I incline not to.

In the years after WW2, a popular call-and-response in the Caribbean was “Who de best cricketer in de West Indez? It’s Gerry Gomez!”

Gomez’s statistics don’t scream “megastar”, but he was a player of a very similar cast to Bravo – a medium pace bowler who batted at six or seven and one of the best fielders in the side, though Gomez caught close and Bravo is a run-saver. And calling Bravo the best player that West Indies have is at least plausible.

He does not take as many wickets as the other bowlers, nor does he score as many runs as those higher in the order, but then his contribution is more qualitative than quantitative. He is dangerous. A side may think they are getting on top, but then Bravo disabuses them of that notion, whether by getting rid of the partners in a stand of 140 in the first and second over of his spell, breaking the grip a bowler was tightening by smacking him for three fours and a six, or making a brilliant catch or direct-hit runout.

He is the action hero who drops out of a helicopter on to the roof of a moving car, slides in through the window, grabs the steering wheel and wrenches it into a U-turn with one hand while incapacitating the driver with the other.

Of course, it’s rare that stunts like that come at the end of the movie. All that has been achieved is a temporary advantage. Whether it is decisive will usually depend on whether the backup arrives in time to press that advantage home.

Under the indolent leadership of the somnambulistic Gayle, it is all too possible that the backup will finish their drinks and smoke a cigar before making their way to the scene in their own good time, but Bravo’s evident passion is at least partial insurance against such sloth. His committed enthusiasm ought to be infectious, but even when it isn’t his vocal displeasure at sloppiness in the field lashes the lazy into line.

It is most likely that his contributions will be recognised as decisive in the shorter forms of the game – if he has not done so already, he should commission a joiner to come up with a display case for all the Man-of-the-Match awards he is going to pick up – but he will also be the man who tipped close Tests West Indies way. Even though someone else gets the credit for a century or six-for, the crucial moment will have been when Bravo ran out Graeme Smith or smote Harbhajan Singh from the attack.

He is an exciting player in the best sense - he makes things happen and matches come alive when he is involved. It is good to welcome him back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day! Calloo, callay” – Lewis Carroll.

At last, England have won a match on tour this winter. Break out the champers, light the fireworks, let joy be unconfined.

Yes, I know it’s pathetic, but there has been all too little to be pleased about this winter, so it will have to do.

Still, this was a special win. Unlike most of England’s rare victories, this one will be remembered for many years. Pub quizmasters will be reminding their punters for decades that for the first time in the history of ODI cricket, batsmen were ordered from the sidelines to accept the offer of light when they would be declared the losers – and when they had been ahead on Duckworth-Lewis until the previous ball.

Both sides’ supporters will claim that their side would have won if the game had run its full course, but the incontrovertible fact is that West Indies carefully laid out a banana skin and then demonstrated how to fall over on it without taking into account that they were doing it for real – unless, that is, they were actually bent on proving that they could equal any incompetence England had managed at Sabina Park.

And it’s West Indies as a whole, not just the coach. John Dyson honourably stood up and took the rap, but ultimately ordering players on and off the field is a captain’s prerogative and he does not escape blame simply because he delegated his responsibility to a member of the support staff.

So West Indies have gone one better than South Africa did when bundling themselves out of the 2002-3 World Cup when they too misread the Duckworth-Lewis rules, thought they didn’t need an extra run to take the win which would have kept them in the competition and blocked out the last ball.

Which, meandering further back into history, recalls the remarkable end to the semi-final of the 1983 NatWest Trophy. Middlesex had managed 222/9 off their 60 overs, and at the beginning of Somerset’s 60th over, they were 222/8 with Botham on strike on 96*. Botham was the captain, and he checked on the rules with the umpires, who confirmed that if the scores were level at the end of 60 overs, the side losing the fewer wickets were the winners. So Botham blocked out a maiden, knowing that that was all he had to do to win.

Returning to the present, there is clearly a distinct risk that several England players will be unavailable for training tomorrow, being on sick parade with sides split through laughing manically at their good fortune. They should stop laughing pretty quickly, though, for they only scraped though by the proverbial coat of varnish.

Shiv Chanderpaul came oh so close to ripping the game out of their hands with that astonishing assault on Steve Harmison. Even Kevin Pietersen must have blinked at the audacity of the sweep over fine leg for six, but the rest of the over was just as destructive. If he hadn’t been out the next ball, he would have won the game and added the Man of the Match award to his string of honours – which as of Tuesday includes Guyana’s third-highest national award, the Cacique’s Crown of Honour. (I’m most disappointed to find out that the Crown of Honour is only a medal with a crown on it: it would have been such fun to see a crowned head walk out to bat.)

But still, a win’s a win, and England’s pro tem coach Andy Flower will be much relieved; it may even get him over the embarrassment of KP revealing in a Sky TV interview that the players refer to him as ‘Petals’.

	The horror of horrors: Stuart Clark will get essential match practice playing for Kent ahead of the Ashes © Getty Images

The ECB are getting themselves in a lather about Kent signing Stuart Clark to play county cricket before the Ashes, stopping only just short of seeking an indictment of the Kent Committee on charges of high treason. What nonsense, not to mention piffle, poppycock, balderdash and claptrap.

This is the same ECB which was very pleased when last year the New Zealanders allowed Jimmy Anderson to play some state cricket to help him recover from injury, following which he got picked for the Second Test and ripped through the New Zealand top order as England went on to win the match and then the series.

This is the same ECB which arranged an England Performance Squad tour of India to coincide with the senior team’s tour before Christmas, a transparent way of making sure they would have a pool of reserves fit and acclimatised if they suddenly needed someone to step in (otherwise what was Michael Vaughan doing in the party?). It could not have been organised without the good offices of the BCCI, who did not turn the idea down on the grounds that it might help the visitors win a match or two – not that it did, but that is hardly the BCCI’s fault.

The Australians are double-dyed villains who won’t let Poms play in their precious Shield competition so why should we be nice to them, goes the line from some people. But Shield cricket isn’t the only game in Australia: when Ray Illingworth failed to pick him for the 1994-95 Ashes tour, Gus Fraser arranged himself a gig to play grade cricket with Western Suburbs – and was in the England Test team for the Third Test.

Fraser himself is on a subsidiary indictment now because Middlesex, where he is the new director of cricket, have signed Phil Hughes for the early part of the season. But Hughes has been signed to fill in for Owais Shah, whom the ECB have seen fit to allow to swan off to India to play in the IPL, an offer which Hughes turned down. Perhaps the ECB should have put their foot down about IPL stints rather than whingeing when counties respond by signing the best replacements they can.

It says little for the ECB’s confidence in its team if how the opposition prepare is an issue even worth commenting on, let alone vituperating about. It may be understandable, given that the only team to lose the First Test of a series to England in the last four years was Bangladesh, but the obvious fact that the ECB are incapable of preparing a side which is ready when a series starts is a poor excuse for trying to sabotage opponents.

Sure, winning the Ashes is the best thing that can happen to an England team. No other cricket contest reaches into the collective national unconscious the same way or stirs as many young players to redouble their efforts to get good enough to win an Ashes series themselves. But sticking artificial obstacles in the Aussies’ path is a pathetic way to try and engineer it.

So I wholeheartedly agreed when Gus said to Cricinfo, "What should the ECB do next summer? Abolish all comforts for the Australians ahead of the Ashes? Put them in dirty hotels and make them travel on a rickety, old school bus with springs coming out of the seats? No, you want a situation like in 2005, where you had two teams at the top of their games battling each other, and hopefully England coming out on top."

You tell ‘em, Gus!

West Indies have won their first series against serious opposition for five years. For anyone who wishes West Indies cricket well, celebrations are in order. Let’s all have a rum punch or two and dance for joy.

And then let’s wake up and assess what has really been achieved.

Some people were offended that in my last piece I said that England had been slightly the better side, as if winning a series automatically confers superiority, but England themselves are no strangers to winning series against better teams. With a little luck and a lot of grit, England beat a massively superior South Africa in 1998, won in both Pakistan and Sri Lanka in 2000-01 and beat Australia in 2005, but only in the last case was anyone deceived that the better side had won.

England are only now recovering from the self-deception which followed that Ashes win; West Indies will make more progress faster if they don’t allow an upset victory to distract them from the serious business of building their side.

A year or so ago, West Indies ambushed a complacent South Africa in the First Test of a series which they went on to lose as the home side recovered their true form. This time, after mugging an equally complacent and ill-prepared England in the first match, they were able to hang on and stave off defeat in the other games and thus take the series. It was not pretty to watch - but then rearguard actions never are, however much honour and even glory we bestow on defenders like those at Thermopylae or Rorke’s Drift.

Ramnaresh Sarwan’s magnificent performance would have come as no surprise to someone who had seen his early forays in Test cricket back in 2000 and then gone to live on the moon until now. Back then, the 19- and 20-year-old newcomer looked very much like a superstar in the making. His poise, style, and elegance of technique evoked memories of the teenage Tendulkar playing for Yorkshire, when the future Little Master made no centuries but exuded class. That the mature player should become a run machine reeling off ton after ton was surely only to be expected.

His progress has not been inexorable, however. There have been some highs but also plenty of lows; just before Christmas in New Zealand he was hanging on to a spot by the fingernails of reputation, batting as though he were late for an important appointment. It’s been simple to build a case that he is a flat-track bully – a case for which these performances could be used as further evidence. But he is only 28, so likely to be still short of his peak: time will tell whether he has now graduated to the ranks of top batsmen or merely had an amazing purple patch.

The big surprise was Brendan Nash. A few weeks ago I wrote that replacing Chanderpaul was going to be the most difficult problem any side in world cricket faced, a prediction now shown to be hopelessly wrong by Nash’s excellent impression of a limpet. He doesn’t punish bad balls as effectively as the Guyanese barnacle, but he is as resolute a crease-occupier as you could wish for. The trouble is that he was only supposed to be a stand-in for Dwayne Bravo, whose return to fitness now causes a problem. Bravo, Chanderpaul and Nash all want to bat at six, and putting one of them down to seven effectively commits to a strategy of playing for draws. One of them will really have to fill one of the holes currently being papered over by Smith and Simmons at two and four.

The problem remains that the bowling attack lacks penetration. While much attention was focused on England’s inability to bowl West Indies out twice at the ARG and Queen’s Park Oval, the sobering fact is that in neither match were West Indies able to bowl England out even once. When you take the 'Borebados batathon' into account, Andrew Strauss was able to declare six innings on the trot.

Jerome Taylor and Fidel Edwards have become dangerous bowlers, but there is not a lot else. Suleiman Benn was successful at Sabina Park when England had persuaded themselves that his height made him an extremely awkward customer but ineffective and easily frustrated into bowling rubbish when England changed their minds and played him as if he were mediocre. Daren Powell’s resistance with the bat at the ARG was as irrelevant to whether his bowling merits a place as Robert Croft’s in similar circumstances in 1998, and Lionel Baker’s early showings give little cause for optimism.

It was a mighty effort of collective will for West Indies to hold firm and win the series. They have successfully reached “hard to beat” status, making them at least a competitive side. But this is only base camp; a lot more will be required of them if they are to scale any nearby summits.

There is obviously an element of sour grapes to English criticism of the pitches in the Caribbean. Appalling batting in one session back in Jamaica has cost England an entire series, so carping about the conditions seems like bad-tempered refusal to acknowledge how poor England are or the advances made by West Indies, but really, this has not been a series which has been worth the watching.

All that has been revealed by the Tests in Antigua, Barbados and Trinidad is that neither West Indies nor England possess a spin bowler of the quality of Shane Warne or Muttiah Muralitharan, nor do either team have a pace bowler of the calibre of Michael Holding, Malcolm Marshall or Wasim Akram. This, however, is not news and two tense final hours were not really compensation for the rest of the fifteen days in which they were embedded.

Pitches which so effectively extract the teeth of bowling attacks that batsmen are only in danger of being gummed to death make Test cricket a test only of endurance. If it makes little difference who is bowling, we are denied the varying conflicts which make the sport exciting.

Still, from an English point of view, it cannot hurt for the batsmen to remember what it is like to score hundreds and run up big totals.

Alastair Cook, Paul Collingwood and Kevin Pietersen scored tons which told us nothing of interest beyond that they were in decent nick, and Matt Prior’s merely turned the spotlight back on his inability to gather the ball cleanly when behind the stumps.

Andrew Strauss’s hundreds were of more consequence. First, they emphatically showed that his batting is not adversely affected by the captaincy, but also welcome was a new adventure in his shot-making. The lofted drive over wide mid-on has not previously been a feature of his game at Test level, and it makes the prospect of shoe-horning him into the ragbag which masquerades as an England one-day team somewhat less horrifying.

The one who failed to cash in was Owais Shah, who did nothing to convince anyone that he is going to fare any better in the poisoned number three slot than Ian Bell. Amazingly, he is a worse judge of a run than either Bell or Mark Butcher; he is also building up an unfortunate record of going off with cramps when one of the chief requirements of a number three is to be able to bat for seven hours. Ravi Bopara’s hundred, albeit from the No.5 position but in hot weather and without cramps, therefore makes him look even more appealing.

The Strauss/Flower regime seems far less afraid of dropping under-performers than we have been accustomed to. Bell, Steve Harmison and Ryan Sidebottom were left out because they failed to do their jobs and there were viable alternatives available, which is as it should be. No-one wants to return to the 1980s/90s one-bad-match-and-out roundabout, but talking about competition for places if the incumbents always win is mere bluster.

So it was fascinating to see Monty Panesar’s reaction to being demoted to second spinner. The Monty who played in Trinidad was almost a new bowler, far more inclined to experiment than the old one and much the better for it. Graeme Swann’s experience and canniness made him the leading wicket-taker of the series; it may now have penetrated even Monty’s extra-terrestrial consciousness that just being able to spin the ball is not enough. Oh, and his wild appealing is no longer endearingly naïve but stupidly annoying.

Stuart Broad continues to progress and Amjad Khan made a shaky debut, but for me James Anderson was England’s player of the series. He is now a bowler of genuine quality, quite credible as the leader of an attack. His haul of nine wickets at 38 is not very impressive, but Fidel Edwards, his effective opposite number, managed to take his nine at a cost of 55 – figures which reflect the unforgiving pitches far better than the awkward hostility both men showed, but also demonstrate that Anderson has conquered his previous habit of having spells where he gets mercilessly collared. In English conditions where his talents for swinging the ball are usually more valuable, he could even be the key to unlock the display case containing the Ashes.

In Test cricket, being the better side means nothing unless you can close the deal by taking the wickets necessary for wins. England were slightly the better side in this series, but not by enough to compensate for an hour of madness at Sabina Park. Underdogs can still win series if they play well and catch their opponents off guard once or twice – a lesson which England may be able to take some comfort in while apprehensively watching the highlights of the series currently in progress in South Africa.

It’s not that Twenty20 isn’t very good, just that it gets rather samey. Our local kebab shop does some wonderful variations on grilled lamb and chicken but man cannot live by shish alone – there is also a time and place for lobster thermidor, sweet and sour pork or macaroni cheese.

And what you cannot get at your local Twenty20 outlet is cricket reduced to its primal essence, as occurs in a last hour when the batting side has no chance of winning and only a couple of wickets left. The outfield is empty and irrelevant, the only figures on the scoreboard which matter are the wickets and the overs remaining, and the only point of each ball is to see whether the batsman can prevent it hitting his stumps without giving a catch to one of the ravenous mob surrounding him.

The electricity in the crowd has the crackle of static, the batsmen’s fans squawking their approval as a ball is safely fended away and yelping their fear at misses or miscues while those supporting the fielders catch their breaths at each run-up and snort their disappointment at each survival. And at the end, whichever way it goes, there is overwhelming relief for those who succeeded and agonising disappointment for those who failed to reach their objective.

That is the cricket of pure emotion, not played or watched with the brain, but felt through the heart.

At the end of the ARG Test, I felt both the disappointment and the relief, since I have realised that I want this series to be drawn.

I don’t want England to lose, mostly because it will unleash a torrent of tedious doom and gloom articles which we will be swimming through for months – and all of them will drone on and on about the internal workings of the ECB and none will acknowledge that West Indies played well. But I don’t particularly want them to win either because I want West Indies back as a major power.

Every country has their own style. A good Australian team is ruthlessly tough, a good English team displays the virtues of classicism while a good Indian team does the same for the baroque, a Pakistani team will be furiously aggressive, good South Africans functionally efficient and good New Zealanders will be patronised for punching above their weight and given a lollipop. But the West Indies on song bring joy, the pure joy of exulting in excellence, the feeling that nothing can be so much fun as being good at cricket, and that is a joy we need in these otherwise depressing days. It’s no surprise that Usain Bolt played cricket in Jamaica before taking up sprinting: showboating to the world record in the Olympic 100m final is something only a West Indian cricketer could do. (I apologise if Sri Lankans feel left out of the above, but the only thing that has so far characterised good Sri Lankan teams is Murali taking hatfuls of wickets – they need some more history yet.)

As every team which has had to pick itself from the floor has discovered, the first step is becoming hard to beat. Allen Stanford may affect indifference, but right now even he ought to be able to see the pleasures in getting out of jail as Chris Gayle’s men did at the ARG. They have probably gained more from this whole-team backs to the wall effort than they did from the win at Sabina - which came off a once-in-a-lifetime performance from a single bowler and an English batting order in outright panic, a recurrence of which one can dream about but not plan for.

Test cricket’s image has suffered because too many recent games have been mismatches, the eventual result predictable by tea on day one. Yet though the boards are doing their best to distract us by ostentatiously sacking coaches, captains, stadiums and financiers, this series is advertising why Test cricket remains the game’s most fascinating form.

They are probably making omelettes with the egg being scraped off the collective face of the ECB following the collapse of the Stanford venture. Whether it was a blunder of such incompetence that resignations would be appropriate, though, is quite another matter.

The main criticism appears to be that their inquiries into Stanford’s business were not adequate, because all they really sought to establish was whether Stanford would be able to cough up the cash that he was promising and did not seek to penetrate the convoluted structure of his financial vehicles in as much detail as the US SEC.

Arguably they should have delved a bit deeper than they did, but it grates more than somewhat having this criticism levelled by counties whose teams paraded round the cricket grounds of England in 2008 sporting the logos of financial institutions which are now largely owned by the government because the perpetrators of what amounts to institutionalised fraud are being propped up rather than prosecuted. What due diligence did those counties undertake before accepting the cash of bankers whose declared wealth was based on loans which would not be repaid, and why are they so different from Stanford whose declared wealth was based on deposits he allegedly did not make?

It is easy after the fact to say that the ECB should have seen through statements about fantastic rates of return on investments as being impossible, but a year ago the press were still running gosh-wow stories about hedge fund managers who made millions every day through aggressive betting on stock market gyrations. By the standards operative in the business world of early 2008, it’s hard to see how the ECB are exceptionally culpable.

But it provides another useful soapbox for the Get Rid Of Giles (GROG) brigade to shout from, and they have been predictably vociferous.

Clarke does himself few favours. Charm is not a trait one readily associates with him. Courting Stanford has been a bad mistake, but its inspiration was of a piece with the TV rights saga. Clarke is identified as the chief architect of the deal which took live Test cricket off free-to-air – which has doubled the amount of money coming into English cricket from that source at the cost of annoying a lot of people. Stanford’s dismissive view of Test cricket compared with populist Twenty20 would never endear him to English traditionalists, but Clarke saw a potentially lucrative business opportunity and went for it.

In both, the aim was to bring more money in so as to allow more money to be spent within an English game constituted roughly as at present.

The GROG supporters, though, want to demolish the present structure. They are the prime movers behind the schemes for scrapping the counties and setting up city-based commercial franchises whose object would be to make money for their owners. Their real beef with the present ECB direction as led by Giles Clarke is that all the money the ECB raises gets ploughed back into cricket rather than handed out as dividends for the owners of the property companies which will own the multi-purpose stadia.

Clarke’s county, Somerset, have thrived commercially by building on their traditional strengths and assiduous marketing in their catchment area. Writ large, Clarke has sought to pursue the same strategy at the ECB. His opponents, at bottom, invite us to believe that there are huge as yet untapped reserves of potential punters in a few large cities who can easily be wooed away from their football obsession, thus replacing the troublesome public which currently provides the majority of support for the game. As a model, it may well work in India where cricket can generate far more income than it can usefully reinvest, thus allowing the promoters to take profits without detriment to the sport, but hoping that something similar could be achieved in England is the sort of wild optimism which would have been difficult to sustain in the boom times but is unthinkable in the present recessionary climate. Were they to get their way only for the whole thing to collapse because their optimism was ill-founded, English cricket would be devastated, quite possibly beyond salvaging.

The ECB is far from perfect, and Giles Clarke is one of its more imperfect manifestations, but I am far more sympathetic to their general approach than to that of the revolutionaries who put Viscount Marland up as their figurehead.

With the WI-England series only four completed innings old, both Andrew Strauss and Chris Gayle had produced uncharacteristic centuries of considerable stature. Neither were the traditional “captain’s innings” played when the side is in big trouble, but they were important innings for them as captains. As one of the ex-England skippers in the Sky commentary box observed, it is one thing to stand up in front of a team meeting and say how you want people to play, and quite another to go out in the middle and give a practical demonstration.

Pre-captaincy, Gayle had a one-track mind. He would go out and hit the ball as hard as he could until he was out, which could be anything from five minutes to five hours later, depending on the skill or luck of the bowlers. Since acceding to the captaincy, however, his batting has become more richly-textured and better attuned to the situation his team is in.

England’s first innings in Jamaica raised only a moderate challenge on an uninteresting pitch. There was no need to hurry in reply; what mattered was achieving a first innings lead and Gayle was perfectly content to reach it at whatever time it arrived, just so long as it eventually did. He only broke from patient accumulation for a calculated thwacking of Panesar’s fragile composure, and was dismissed by an awkward ball which snaked through his defence rather than holing out. Of those who followed him, only Xavier Marshall failed to hang around and chisel out hard-won runs.

The horrors of England’s collapse in the second innings required immediate exorcism to arrest the downward spiral. Strauss’s centuries in 2008 had been measured exercises, exuding calmness and responsibility, but the team now needed more than reassurance. He responded by playing in the bellicose style of Graham Smith, giving his most rousingly watchable display for years. He normally plays almost entirely off the back foot, with the odd drive thrown in by way of variation. He only comes forward regularly when he is seriously confident, so his assertive off-driving at the ARG not only spoke volumes about his own state of mind but sent a powerful message to the team. In their turn, they were enterprising in the push to a declaration total, in marked contrast to the neuralgic scratching they had employed before Christmas at Chennai.

A captain establishes his right to lead his players by doing important things which merit his players’ respect. Without achievements on the field, authority dissipates. An ability to play conjuring tricks with bowling attacks and field settings can do it, but agenda-setting hundreds are much more reliable.

Gayle’s century at Sabina extended his register of significant deeds and thus augmented his leadership credentials. England have been in need of stable leadership for some time, so it does Strauss no end of good to have played such an authoritative innings so early in his reign.

Neither were first choices as captains. The WICB did everything they could to prevent Gayle getting the job until passing over him would have been excessively bizarre even by their own high standards. England chose passionate superstars in the hope of fireworks only to have them explode prematurely or fly off in the wrong directions.

Maybe the convulsions which preceded their appointments were necessary to clear their passage. Maybe if they had been appointed earlier, almost nothing could have quelled the rumblings in favour of one of those who failed. But now both of them look as secure in their jobs as anyone can reasonably be in international sport, for their times have (finally) come.

Ouch! In fact, ouch and double ouch! That hurt.

Stuart Broad managed his first Michelle in Tests, which is a useful milestone on the way to a successful career, but otherwise the only England player who had a good match was Owais Shah.

But let us not get too carried away.

Tempting though it is to blame the off-field shenanigans and distractions, my view is that far too much is being made of them.

Most of the England players were in the team for at least one of the comprehensive series thrashings which England have administered to WI these last five years, and WI’s ICC ranking remains stubbornly poor. All the pre-series talk, both in England and in the Caribbean, was of how England were expected to win, as the form book would predict. It is asking an awful lot of the England players not to have gone into this game with a general attitude that they ought to be able to win it with something to spare.

They were not expecting to find a West Indies side full of fight and determination, nor were they expecting that Jerome Taylor would bowl by far the best spell of his life. Some of the batsmen played injudicious shots but the ball which dismissed Pietersen was as near to perfection as you can get, and when you couple it to all the other surprises the Windies had sprung, it’s almost understandable that England just fell apart.

As wake-up calls go, this Test was the equivalent of thirty churches pealing the summons to matins while forty roosters crow themselves hoarse and the hotel management sends in SWAT teams to roust people out of bed.

It is early, though, to be deciding that England are in complete disarray and will probably lose the rest of the matches – at least until they’ve had their orange juice and a good strong cup of coffee. Most of this team played in New Zealand a year ago, looking like lemons in the first Test but coming back and duffing up the Black Caps for most of the next five games. And last time England were rolled over in the Caribbean, when Curtly Ambrose scythed them down to 46 all out, the same XI went into the next game and became the first visitors to win in Barbados for 59 years.

England are more likely to repeat what they did after Hamilton than after Port of Spain: surely nobody is going to fall for the idea that the people who dug the hole should be told to dig out of it. If they aren’t going to give Owais Shah a go after that debacle, then he might as well pack his bags and go home – although the appalling weather we are having in England might make him hesitate before booking the plane ticket. Whether the bowlers should be changed will partly depend on what the Antigua pitch looks like, but Swann and Anderson did their chances of selection for the second Test no harm at all by not playing in Jamaica.

But it is also early to be elevating Jerome Taylor to the WI pantheon of great fast bowlers. I’ve had my eye on him as a much-improved bowler for a year or so now, and he could yet make it to the pinnacle, but there is a long way to go yet. After all, look where the bloke who took 7-12 last time these two sides met at Sabina has got to. The whole attack is certainly not as potent as the 1983 edition, but there is no longer any need for West Indians to be ashamed of their bowlers because they now have a group who are as good as anyone else’s bar South Africa for sure and maybe India.

And while the batting leaves something to be desired, it can no longer be said that collectively they lack grit. I don’t remember ever seeing West Indies make 392 in such stupefyingly dull fashion, especially with the Rock of Guyana only making 20 of them – but I’m certainly not complaining. Turgid though the cricket was as spectacle, it did the heart good to see that this West Indies side is prepared to buckle down when the situation and tightness of the bowling demand it.

The terms of trade for this series have been radically altered. Being 1-0 down, England are now technically the underdogs, but their paper superiority is such that it is more realistic to see this series as being between equals. However you choose to view the prospects, though, this will be a much more interesting series than most people thought two weeks ago.

What with captains resigning, bombs going off, or arguments with Stanford (whether about over-familiarity with the WAGs or huge sponsorship), there has been a deal too much off-field nonsense for both England and West Indies these last few months. We can but hope that dramas in the forthcoming series are confined to the field of play.

England start as favourites, a position they usually dislike but will have to learn to cope with if they are ever to fulfil their stated ambitions. West Indies are near to having a very handy bowling attack, with Fidel Edwards and Jerome Taylor looking increasingly convincing and Suleiman Benn’s height making him an unfamiliar and therefore awkward sort of a spinner, but their top order is still far too dependent on Chris Gayle and the Rock of Guyana for any sort of comfort. England ought to be too strong for them, but Australia got a bit of a fright in the Caribbean last year so there will be no room for complacency.

Captain Strauss and his fellow tour selectors have three main decisions to make, so the warm-ups will be of considerable importance.

Stuart Broad’s incipient all-rounderism guarantees him one spot, which leaves two for Anderson, Steve Harmison and Ryan Sidebottom to fight over. Sidebottom is probably the one who most needs an eye-catching performance to get picked, but his prospects will rise quickly if either of the others turns up unable to bowl fast or straight.

Monty Panesar was clearly short of match practice in India but has now had some bowling in South Africa to get into shape. Further in his favour is that his best bowling for England was when Strauss was captain before: not being the greatest player of spin ever probably leads him to treat Monty with a bit more respect than Vaughan or Pietersen did. On the other hand, not every pitch is suited to a spinner who bowls at a robotic 90kph, and Graeme Swann’s experience of canny variation asked a lot of questions of the Indian batsmen before Christmas; they may only have been in a spirit of courteous enquiry rather than searching interrogation, but they were much more numerous than those which Panesar posed. Swann can also field and bat a bit, which Monty still cannot do to anything resembling the standard we ought to be able to expect. For my money, Swann did enough in India to get first crack.

Lastly, Ian Bell or Owais Shah?

Unlike Strauss or Paul Collingwood, say, Bell finds the atmosphere in the Last Chance Arms stifling rather than stimulating. It is time for the bartender to tell him he is depressing the other patrons of that convivial watering-hole and should go home.

However, Shah lacks the gravitas ideal in a number three, and making him play there has every chance of making him look a twit. Unless Collingwood has some debilitating superstition about coming in first drop, he would be a far more reassuring presence at three, leaving Shah to go in at five.

The Windies problems are not so much who should be picked as how to get them all to play well at once, and the main obstacle to it is their lack of experience. The first stage in rebuilding a side is to become hard to beat, but they are still some way off. But if they make progress towards that, this should be an interesting series.

Let’s just hope we can spend the next few weeks talking about cricket rather than whether Andy Flower ate breakfast alone because everyone hates him.

	Will India's batting crumble with the exit of Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid? © AFP

Politeness dictates that when a long-serving player retires, it is said by all and sundry that he will leave a big hole and be missed greatly. For Shane Warne, it has obviously been true or we wouldn’t have had people wishfully hoping that he might come out of retirement for the 2009 Ashes, but for plenty of others it’s merely a gracious fib.

Nobody will miss the Matt Hayden who played in 2008, for instance. Were the 2007 version still available, it would be a different story, but Hayden’s retirement was that of a man who in earlier times would have been provided with a bottle of whisky and a pearl-handled revolver. After his horrible performances against South Africa, there’s little doubt the selectors would prefer to see Phil Jaques playing instead. Since Jaques had almost established himself before his injury and Katich has since done so, Hayden’s departure simply completes the handover from a great opening partnership to at least a pretty good one.

It is only partly a reflection of the merit of the retiree, though, whether he is missed. Losing the greatest batsman of the age in Viv Richards caused the Windies only a year or so’s worry before Brian Lara exploded on to the scene. Assuming Ajantha Mendis is not this generation’s Narendra Hirwani, Muttiah Muralitharan will be able to make his farewells without inflicting on Sri Lankans the deep feelings of bereavement which Warne’s departure has caused Australians, and Amit Mishra is already easing the pain of Anil Kumble’s passing.

Fred Flintoff was the end of a search for the new Ian Botham which had lasted 20 years – for the first seven or eight of which England made do with the old but very unreliable one. But when Fred rides off, England may well be able to take it in their stride: at least one of Adil Rashid, Stuart Broad and Matt Prior should then be a convincing No. 6 and worthwhile out-cricketer while the other two will make for a very strong lower middle-order.

I will not be surprised if Sachin Tendulkar is replaced fairly quickly. It’s pretty unlikely his successor will be as near to being a replica as Lara was of Viv, but finding a forceful middle-order batsman who can dominate attacks should not be too hard. Despite my long-held doubts about him, it could even be Yuvraj Singh. What will be much more difficult is replacing Rahul Dravid; what’s the betting that five years from now, as India have their third embarrassing collapse in five innings, people will be shaking their heads wondering when a new Wall is going to be erected?

Sometimes, what people miss most is not a player’s primary skill but his back-up. Sanath Jayasuriya was usually unrecognised as the allrounder he was, but his left-arm spin was very much of Test class. From his final really-and-truly retirement until Mendis turned up, Sri Lanka got themselves involved in various experiments involving Farveez Maharoof in an effort to balance the side, with little convincing success. Underwhelmed by his bowling though I remain, it’s not Jacques Kallis’s batting that South Africa will miss. Prince can easily do what Kallis has been producing recently with the bat, and quite probably more, but he is no more a bowler than any of the others in the SA top six (since the spin of Graeme Smith or JP Duminy are little more than mildly amusing jokes), which will leave them rather unbalanced.

But problems like that pale before the humdinger soon to confront West Indies. Where in a group of countries whose batsmen have always accentuated the positive do you find someone to replace Shivnarine Chanderpaul?

The merciful difference is that the average Ludlum doorstop weighs in at 700 pages, whereas the KP-as-captain interlude lasted less than five months.

The point to realise is that it was inevitable. Whether it’s Bradman, Sobers or King Viv, Botham or Flintoff, Lara or Tendulkar, whenever you have a superstar towering above a team, especially a team of relative nobodies, the superstar will inevitably be made captain at some point whether or not he is fitted for the job.

There are two possible good outcomes to this: one is the Bradman result, where it turns out that he is a brilliant captain; the other is what has happened with KP – it takes very little time for it to become apparent that he is the wrong man for the job and he leaves, whether voluntarily or not. The saga of Brian Lara, who by the end was so hated by his team that only Dwayne Bravo was prepared to speak his name, shows what disasters await the team which does not lance the boil early.

So it’s much better to have had the inevitable row now, when the team can go and pull itself back together on Caribbean beaches, than in the middle of an Ashes series in six months time. Pietersen will no doubt be very disappointed, but I expect him to get over it quickly. His overriding aim has always been to be recognised as the world’s number one batsman and after this setback, the only route to the king’s castle lies over mountains of Test runs.

It’s unfortunate for Peter Moores that he got frazzled in the shootout, because his reputation has been unfairly tarnished. His failure to inspire the England team of 2007-08 only means that he was wrong for this team at this time, not that he’s a rubbish coach who shouldn’t be employed by anyone. He would have been praised to the skies by Graham Gooch as being just the man to instil some discipline in a squad infected by the Botham-Lamb-Gower wine-quaffing axis of the late 1980s, and when he was captain, Alec Stewart would have been totally sincere when saying “Very much so” in response to Charles Colvile’s question as to whether Moores was a good coach.

The pleasant surprise in all this has been the thorough and decisive way in which the ECB have dealt with it. Hugh Morris quickly assessed the true levels of support that KP and Moores had from both the playing and support staffs, and the board did not temporise, appeal for calm and set up a working party. There’s been a big foofaraw and a lot of heated language, but it’s blown up and been settled in less than a week where under previous adminstrations we’d have been subjected to months of faction-fighting in the press while the team disintegrated. When we come to look back on this episode, we will see that it was a relatively painless rite of passage.

	Moores was a hugely successful coach of Sussex but he had grown up with the club, playing for them for 14 seasons before his appointment © AFP

In England the new year has begun with a row, as the simmering dissatisfaction with Peter Moores as head coach of Team England boils over into the public domain. My estimate is that Moores is now a dead man walking since neither the current captain nor his predecessor seem to have any confidence in him, and that makes his position just about untenable.

I have to disagree with Samir’s scepticism about the value of international coaches. A coach is as important to an international team as a wicketkeeper: a great one can be the fulcrum of a side and a bad one can be a major weakness.

At the most basic level, every player has occasional need to work on eradicating faults in his technique or improving his play against different types of opposition or in different conditions. And on the international merry-go-round, players are continually experiencing things for the first time. With the possible exceptions of very stable great teams, every touring party includes players who have never played in or against India or England or Australia or wherever it is. With hardly any time now spent in-country before the first Test, someone has to be the fount of knowledge about conditions and opposition on whom at least the newbies, but more usually also the experienced ones, can call. And someone has to make sure that there will be the proper facilities for practice, that there will be enough net bowlers of the right types, and so on.

What a good coach does is make sure that his players are as well-equipped to play the next game as they can be, but who is best to do that differs for any group of players.

John Buchanan was a great success with Queensland and Australia but a disaster with Middlesex. He was hampered in part by reactionary forces in the county club, but the fundamental problem was that he was simply too advanced for a team of youngsters. He was a professor trying to conduct postgraduate seminars on advanced cricket science with students still struggling with their secondary school leaving exams.

Moores was a hugely successful coach of Sussex but he had grown up with the club, playing for them for 14 seasons, one as captain, before being appointed coach. Just about all his players were ones whose development he had overseen and who had responded to his coaching from an early age. He seems to be brilliant at basic skills, but first Vaughan and now Pietersen (and several senior players if the rumours are true) have found him unable to deliver the expert-level training they require, and found him inflexible in his methods.

Stephen identified Duncan Fletcher’s advice as a likely factor in South Africa’s defeat of Australia as it most certainly had been in England’s in 2005, and as it certainly was when Glamorgan won the county championship in the 1990s. He seems to have a magic touch with any team.

	The fundamental problem for John Buchanan at Middlesex was that he was simply too advanced for a team of youngsters © Getty Images

One of the main reasons for his success is his own understanding of what he is for. He sees himself as a consultant, not a dictator. In an argument with the captain, the captain always has the last word and makes the final decision. The press may have talked of “Fletcher’s England”, but Fletcher thought it was Hussain’s England or Vaughan’s England or Flintoff’s England and behaved accordingly.

He isn’t unique, of course. The late Bob Woolmer, John Buchanan, John Wright and Graham Ford have all operated in roughly similar fashion and have achieved a fair amount of success.

What does not work is allowing the coach to assume serious authority. Most failures as coaches fail because the players they are meant to serve object to being treated as puppets or naughty children. The worst examples are Ray Illingworth and John Bracewell, who demanded supreme powers and ruled with an iron hand, in both cases with the result that their teams descended to the foot of the international ranking table.

No, Samir, not just anyone can coach. Not just anyone could be Leo McGarry for Jed Bartlet or Obi-wan Kenobi for Luke Skywalker. But the right man is often the difference between moderate achievement and outstanding success.

The most striking thing to me about India’s performance in the pair of Tests against England was that they have finally solved their opening batsman problem.

From the time Sunil Gavaskar retired until very recently, opening India’s batting was as thankless as batting at three for England. Around the turn of the millennium, Indian opening batsmen were rather like Indian opening bowlers of the Seventies, mere hors d’oeuvres before the introduction of the Fab Four – spinners or batsmen, depending on decade.

Eventually Virender Sehwag, a promising middle order bat, realised that he could either wait seven years to get a chance in his preferred position or have a go at opening. For those raised on the cautious principles which Gavaskar followed as an opener, Sehwag was either a shock or an abomination, since caution was a concept entirely unknown to him.

It took some time for India to be happy with this; wise men would shake their heads and murmur about the need for solidity at the top of the order, but gradually his value came to be recognised.

That value is not so much in the runs he scores as in the fear he has implanted in every opposition. Sometimes he hardly disturbs them, sometimes he is but a few violent gusts, but he is as closely observed as the weather systems in the western Atlantic because of the danger that an unstoppable Hurricane Viru will lay waste to them. Until Sehwag is out, every captain and every bowling attack is on edge. Unless they get him quickly their nerves fray and their confidence saps, making life for those who follow him that much easier.

Even better, it allows his partner to play himself in unnoticed. Several batsmen were offered this opportunity, but until Gautam Gambhir came along, none had really made very much of it.

Gambhir looks to me to be the true heir of Sunil Gavaskar, a Gavaskar for the twenty-first century.

Batsmen are of their time. In the Seventies and Eighties, the adhesive caution which characterised Gavaskar or Boycott was highly esteemed. Spectators understood that although it was very dull to watch, this was how Test cricket was played.

A generation on, teams start every match trying to win it rather than insuring against loss, so more enterprise is required in opening batsmen. The great thing about Gambhir is that he seems perfectly equipped for today’s strategies.

21st-century engineering makes shifting gears in the Gambi much smoother than in the older Sunny. Today’s model effortlessly spots the bad ball on the wrong length from a pace bowler and walks down the track to caress it over long on for six, changing back down to low gear for the next ball without the passengers noticing a thing, while the earlier version tended to have to get into a particular gear and stay there for a period. One could wish for a little more elegance in the external styling, but the power unit and transmission have a silky flexibility usually absent from twentieth-century vehicles.

The next Indian middle order may not be up to the standard set by the Fab Four, but the new opening partnership is now the most fearsome in world cricket.

PS: As spoilsports posted the answers to the puzzle within a few hours, reposting them seems superfluous – though I’m obviously very pleased that so many seemed to enjoy it. This blog will not be turning into Puzzle Corner, but I hope to offer the odd similar amusement from time to time. See you all in the New Year.

Here’s a little amusement to while away a dull half-hour over the holiday.

The main answer is a well-known cricketing name, which is spelled out by the initials of the answers to the eight clues. If the first two clues led to Mohammed Azharuddin and Rob Key, we would be looking for someone called MARK…..

The answers to the eight clues are all Test cricketers, one from each of the eight main Test-playing countries (ie not Bangladesh or Zimbabwe). Most of them are recent and at least reasonably well-known, though a couple are one-Test wonders of older vintage who just happen to be the only Test players I could find with the relevant initials.

1. A wicket keeper who played his only Test against New Zealand in the 1970s. He scored 7*, took two catches and conceded 16 byes.

2. A modern great with 26 Test centuries to his name, but an average of only 36 against South Africa.

3. A between-wars bowler whose only Test was the match before the one in which the main answer made his debut. He took no wickets, returning 0-60 and 0-12, but scored 8 and 44 with the bat.

4. A 1980s batsman who scored over 4000 Test runs, including centuries against West Indies when the rest of his team kept folding, and memorably won an ODI with a lot of runs off the last over.

5. A current all-rounder who has a century and a six-wicket haul in different matches on tour in Australia, but has yet to reach 100 wickets and 2000 runs.

6. A batsman and part-time bowler more usually thought of as an ODI player, he only averaged 28 with the bat, though he made three Test centuries, the highest being 123 against Pakistan.

7. A 1990s pace bowler who took 160 wickets but is more usually remembered for some lengthy stonewalling innings at number 11, including 14* in a last-wicket partnership of 106 against England.

8. A current bowler who has 123 Test wickets to his name – although he says his name changes to something German when he gets out on the field.

Have fun, and I’ll post the answers after Christmas. If you celebrate either the birth of Jesus or the passing of the winter solstice, may I wish you the compliments of the season. If you don’t, please just tolerate my wintry whimsies.

Spare a thought this Christmas for poor Ian Bell. Unless he manages a hundred in the second innings at Mohali, he will spend the festive period wondering anxiously about his future.

There has always been an air of impermanence about Bell. He is one of those players who fails to inspire confidence even when he scores runs by the cartload. A couple of years ago, he was getting hundreds for fun at number six but there was still a general reluctance to acknowledge him as having arrived as a fixture in the Test team. When he got 199 against South Africa at Lord’s this summer, it looked for a week or two as though he had achieved acceptance but as soon as Paul Collingwood also got runs, the murmurings about him restarted.

And then came the fatal blow. He was “promoted” to bat at number three.

The main function of an England number three is to serve as the focus of the complaints about the fragile batting for a decent period before being dropped or moved to somewhere more congenial. In the last forty years, only one batsman has occupied the spot without anyone railing against him: Mike Gatting – and he only got the position because he had failed multiple times in every other slot from one to eight.

David Gower was the best batsman to try the role but it was not long before we stopped praising him for his brilliant strokeplay and started laying into him for giving third slip catching practice by feebly waving his bat at balls outside off stump. Apparently such behaviour is more acceptable in a number four, which was where Gower batted as often as he got the chance, such as when he was captain and could insist, the escape route also taken by Nasser Hussain.

Mark Butcher spent four years in the job expecting to be dropped after just about every game. If he got a hundred he reckoned he could feel safe for a game or two, but otherwise he was relieved when the team was announced for each match and he was still in it. Like Bell, he was a very pretty player to watch but he always seemed too skittish for the gravely serious position of coming in first wicket down.

But seriousness is no guarantee of public or selectorial affection. Chris Tavare was certainly grave – indeed, some even maintained that his scorelessness was because he was in fact already dead – but he simply became the butt of jokes about statues.

The only ones to escape regular opprobrium were those who were clearly only batting at three because they were not opening. One way round the eternal problem has been to pick three openers, so people like Alec Stewart, Mike Atherton, Graham Gooch, David Steele, Tim Robinson, Kim Barnett, Rob Bailey and even, heaven help us, Mike Brearley have played there, but no-one holds it against them. (There may be other reasons to recall some of them with derision, but their performances at three do not feature high on the list.)

Ian Bell is not an opener, though, so he is the latest recruit to the club most famous for including Mark Ramprakash, Graeme Hick, John Crawley and Bill Athey – batsmen reckoned to be supremely talented who somehow just didn’t cut it in Test cricket.

If England fans want a mystery to on the long winter evenings until the Caribbean trip, why we cannot unearth someone who can bat convincingly at three in our Test side seems like a good one. Answers to Geoff Miller, please.

This was the stuff of which dreams are made. If it had been made up, it would have seemed unbelievably mawkish. As reality, it was intoxicating.

While England were still debating whether to come back to India, Andrew Strauss was the one who said that they had to make every effort to come back because they owed it to the game of cricket. Whatever debt he was referring to, it was paid back with massive interest in Chennai.

Instead of cricket doing duty in the war on terror, terror was unceremoniously dismissed as cricket pursued its own sense of history. All the horror in Mumbai achieved was to make it that much more exquisite that in this match it would be Mumbaikar Sachin Tendulkar who hit the boundary to simultaneously post his own century and top off the fourth-highest run chase in Test history, thus wiping away the pain of January 1999 when at the same ground he scored 136 in what many think of as his greatest innings but India fell so agonisingly short. This game was due to be remembered as the one which defied the terrorists, but that will now be but background colour adding extra lustre to the tapestry which should be woven in commemoration of one of Test cricket’s greatest epics.

There will be time enough tomorrow to strip down the engines and see which parts functioned according to specification and which failed – and the pit crews are no doubt already embarking on that given that the next match starts on Friday – but today we can but revel in such a glorious affirmation of our infinitely resilient sport.

India won the first and fourth days, England days two and three, so it was dead even as the last day began. That is roughly the ideal for Test cricket, which is at its best when four days of intense struggle get thrown out of the window and it’s down to a bowling attack and a batting order and may the best team win. Of course I’m disappointed that the best wasn’t the team I support, but a match like this needs both a euphoric winner and a dignified loser – and to be honest, no-one does dignified losing better than the English, so perhaps it’s for the best that it was this way round.

As I write, the game has been over for an hour. Usually when England have lost a Test, I want to kick the cats and I’m difficult to talk to until at least the next day; strangling seems too good for the incompetent bunglers responsible for throwing the game away and the opposition team can go and burn in the nearest waste incinerators for all I care.

But today, well, apparently we drew the short straw and had to play the losers’ parts not because we particularly deserved to but because someone had to if the game were to have a fitting conclusion. Today I just want to get on a cloud and float, happily burbling about what a fantastic game Test cricket is.

Tomorrow, though, the cats had better not annoy me….

The England player I shall be keeping the closest eye on in this two-parter (you can’t call two matches a “series” with a straight face) is Jimmy Anderson, who could show that he is at last coming into his own.

His performances in the ODIs may make this seem far-fetched, but he has always been fairly poor in limited-overs cricket whereas his Test performances this year have been in a different league to those which went before.

How poor an ODI bowler he is was not apparent until he was partnered by someone who isn’t. In the 20 ODIs in which they opened England’s bowling this year, both Anderson and Stuart Broad conceded 747 runs. The difference is that Anderson took 10 wickets and went for 5.66 an over while Broad took 31 and went for 4.78.

In nine Tests this year, on the other hand, Anderson has taken 42 wickets at 27.60. Where one struggles to find ODIs in which he has even performed acceptably, in Tests he has had only two poor innings this year, the worst being at Old Trafford when Ross Taylor climbed into him. But he responded in the next game at Trent Bridge with the best spell of bowling by an England bowler since 2005 (at least), the figures a career-best 7 for 43.

Blowing away the 2008 New Zealand top order is admittedly not all that difficult – a light breeze would usually suffice – but Anderson’s spell of late swing at speed would have accounted for at least four of any top order you care to name.

The big difference for Anderson between the two forms comes in the field settings. When not bowling his victims or having them caught by the keeper, first slip catches off him are comparatively rare. In Tests, Anderson’s chief collaborators stand in the arc from third slip to gully. In ODIs, batsmen hit him through that arc with great regularity but no-one is around to catch them.

It was not ever thus. For four years from his England debut while Duncan Fletcher still headed the coaching staff, constant efforts were made to get him to change his bizarre action. In particular, they wanted him to look down the wicket at the stumps or batsman when releasing the ball rather than gazing at the bowler’s end umpire’s shoes. Very occasionally during this purgatorial period there would be a gem of a searing spell to remind us that there was a talented bowler lurking somewhere in the neighbourhood, but we would wait months for a repeat.

But since Fletcher moved on and Ottis Gibson has taken over the bowling coach’s job, Anderson has been allowed to revert to his natural action and the results have been dramatically better.

The fascinating question is whether he will be able to continue his Test success streak in conditions rather different to those encountered in England and New Zealand. It ought to be possible: both Ishant Sharma and Zaheer Khan bowl the same general sort of stuff and do well in India, but then they’ve been doing it forever whereas Anderson still has a lot of learning to do about Indian pitches.

If England are to do well, there will need to be big contributions from several players. If Anderson does to Sehwag what Matthew Hoggard did to Matt Hayden in the 2005 Ashes, he will have taken another big step forward as well as giving underdogs England a fighting chance.

In a city which endured 25 years of an IRA bombing campaign as well as the bus bombs of 7/7, I know what it is to live with the shadow of terrorism over one’s home town.

We carried on playing cricket even in London despite explosions, and India is a vast country compared to ours. A bomb in London is an unlikely pretext for calling off an event in Rome, though Rome is nearer London than Chennai to Mumbai. On the other hand, none of our atrocities were on the scale of the Mumbai massacre, nor were they targeted at a specific group of foreign visitors.

Whether the Indian authorities, let alone the British Foreign Office or the ECB’s security advisor, would consider the India v England cricket matches to be safe to continue with, I could not know from thousands of miles away. I somewhat envy those who were able to sound off on air and in print with the certainty so many arguing both for staying at home and flying back to India displayed, but I did not feel able to post. It’s a relief that a revised series is going ahead: it’s what I had hoped for, but galumphing on people’s sensibilities by saying so without any worthwhile understanding of the circumstances just seemed tasteless or downright rude.

It’s hard to remember in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity, but a billion Indians and the entire English cricket touring party survived the Mumbai massacre completely unharmed. While one square mile was the scene of death and destruction, nothing out of the ordinary happened in over three million other square miles in the country.

The evil is impossible to ignore but, coldly looked at, it really is extremely unlikely that the next attack will hit an India v England Test match, of all the possible targets available.

What 9/11 did to us all was make it clear that nowhere can be completely safe. Whether we are going on holiday or business (and you can choose for yourself which category playing Test cricket comes into), we have a non-zero chance of arriving at the scene of a terrorist incident wherever we go. There is also a non-zero chance that the plane will crash, but we don’t stop flying because plane crashes are unpredictable as to where they will strike and usually cause enormous loss of life.

India is a riskier place than it was. There will probably be a next attack in India, just as there is almost certain to be one in Britain because London especially is an outrage venue currently fashionable in terrorist circles.

But we now live in an age where risk has to be assessed and managed since it cannot be eliminated. It’s unfortunate that men like Reg Dickason are the crucial decision-makers on whether tours should proceed, but it is inevitable. Sometimes trouble-spots will be too hot to go to, but it will always depend on the exact circumstances pertaining at the time. And even if the security consultants give their blessing, the caveats that they will inevitably attach to some reports will fail to persuade the odd player, which will be regrettable but not a cause for derision or condemnation.

We do not yet know whether the original party England selected will go. I shall not be surprised if one or two opt out, whether because they themselves are scared or they cannot bear inflicting heartache and worry on their families by being away in a dangerous place. Having lived through years of bombs in my home city, I would have few qualms about going, but if others do not share such a robust attitude, well, so be it. Cricketers are only required to show the courage to withstand a few hours of hostile fast bowling, not to be in fear of losing their lives by the hands of persons unknown.

It’s a pity about the disruption, because England will be far less well-prepared than they should have been. The one-day outfit are pretty clueless, but the England team knows how to play five-day cricket. While the batting is weaker than Australia’s, the bowling attack is better balanced because it will contain at least one and probably two serious specialist spinners, and if Flintoff, Harmison and Anderson continue with the form they showed during the English summer, they make a better pace attack than Australia had – so India’s batsmen might be challenged rather more than they were by the Aussies.

If that doesn’t happen, either because they don’t turn up at all or because they do but bowl badly, we can pick up the comfort blanket of the disturbing circumstances as a catch-all excuse – but let’s hope that won’t be necessary.

My campaign to get Kevin Pietersen to open the batting has gained another welcome recruit in the person of the proprietor of the Confectionery Stall. His support is most welcome as recent events have demonstrated how essential it is.

For a start, we have to preserve what little is left of the sanity of the TV commentators. If the first wicket falls and Pietersen does not come out to bat, they immediately start weeping and wailing that Pietersen has to bat at three because you need your best batsman coming in early. If he does come in at three, as happened at Cuttack, they then start weeping and wailing that Owais Shah should have come in at three because he is the man in form. Round and round they spin, and nervous breakdowns beckon.

If KP continues to refuse to open, the only way of settling Botham’s tiny mind is for Pietersen and Shah to come out together at three.

As tactics go, this is not a promising one. I was at a Sunday game in the 1980s when a Middlesex wicket fell. As was usual, a barrel with the word “Gatting” on its back rolled down the pavilion steps and out to the wicket, but the innings which followed was most uncharacteristic. There was poking and prodding, but no short-arm jabs for four as was customary.

My friend Paul got out the binoculars and scrutinised things.

“That’s not Mike Gatting out there,” he said, after a long look. “That’s Aftab Habib and some other bloke from the second XI sharing Gatting’s shirt.”

All was now clear, of course. That lack of technique or talent was definitely Habibian – those who saw his later appearances for England may well remember the bat held in random positions vis-à-vis the ball during his mercifully brief appearances – but the results were less than gratifying as the two of them departed for 7.

I can’t help but think it would be unlikely to work in this case either. Pietersen and Shah are both inventive, to be sure, but what happens when KP wants to play a switch hit and Ace wants to flip the ball over short fine leg’s head? Either they start fighting or we discover how truly elastic those shiny new strips are.

The other reason for KP to open is to avoid further embarrassment to Alastair Cook. Cook is in the squad in his official capacity of Next England Captain, a post which is as ceremonial as that of Prince of Wales.

Prince Charles may declare the odd public building open when Mumsie can’t make it, but mostly his duties consist of moaning about modern architecture and entertaining trees with his Goon Show impressions. What he doesn’t do is the real stuff of monarchy, such as opening Parliament or getting the nation to gather round the TV after lunch on Christmas Day and watch the royal holiday videos.

Similarly, Cook should not be expected to play ODIs, as he is even less suited to opening in 50-over cricket than Ian Bell. Making up the numbers in the touch rugby and giving indiscreet press conferences in which he lets slip that Stanford really was all about the money are much more the thing for him until KP retires.

Unless Pietersen does the decent thing, and soon, Cook’s royal personage will continue to be insulted. With the captain enjoying immunity from prosecution, such treason may lead to the coach being imprisoned in the Tower of London on the team’s return to England.

Hmm. Now that’s an idea …..

At least the third game wasn’t quite as embarrassing as the previous two. If they continue to improve at this rate, they might win a game before the series is out. It is frustrating because the players in the team are actually pretty good. Individually, these boys can play: where it goes wrong is when they all have to do it together, because the team does not know how to function collectively.

That is not an allegation that the team is faction-ridden or fighting amongst themselves – they at least appear to be a harmonious bunch – but that the cogs of the machine rarely mesh together and produce something more than a bunch of independently-spinning axles.

But I am convinced that each individual in the England team is a good enough player. Changing the personnel is unlikely to have much effect (although I have no idea at all why Alastair Cook is in the one-day squad). The selectors should now leave well enough alone and let them work out how to win a game which is not at Chester-le-Street or The Oval.

The one possible exception is Monty Panesar, who is now in India but not officially part of the squad.

However, I don’t see him providing any useful answers. That he cannot bat is not the problem: at worst we end up with a tail of Harmison, Anderson and Monty. That he is feeble in the field is something of a problem, but it ought not to be beyond the wit of the rest of the bowlers not to bowl lines and lengths which encourage the batsmen to hit it in his direction all the time. The real problem is that he is so slow to learn anything.

In Kanpur, Harbhajan effectively throttled England’s middle order by bowling differently to the way he had at Indore, and he will no doubt bowl yet differently in Bangalore because he will be able to read the pitch and the situation when he bowls and produce something appropriate. The chance of Panesar being able to emulate that is zero. At least Swann has some chance of doing so, even if he is much less of a bowler to start with.

So what hope is there for the line-up we saw today? Some, if you ask me, though I don’t claim to know anything much about 50-over cricket.

KP chose not to follow the advice I proffered in my last post but did the next best thing by promoting Bopara to open. He may have no experience of it at county level, but anyone who can get a double hundred in a 50-over game has to be worth a go, and today’s effort makes it a good move. But Bell seems to have taken some notice, so I will desist from sharpening the axe I was threatening to bring down on his neck.

I am agnostic about the captain dropping Shah to six and going in at three himself. I’m not sure how much more Pietersen offers than Shah: Owais is a faster starter than KP and would do more to keep up momentum when a wicket falls early, but KP would be the first to 70 assuming either of them get there.

I suppose there’s enough evidence that improvement is possible to make it worth watching on Sunday. At least it’s on at a less unsociable time.

There are two things which England need to do to improve their fortunes. First they need to break Yuvraj Singh’s ankle, kneecap, wrist or whatever other body part will force his absence for the remainder of the series. The other is to admit that the experiment of having Ian Bell opening the innings has proved to be a failure.

I admit that I am always bemused by Yuvraj’s success. There is no guarantee that an overseas signing will light up the county championship, but few turn out to be as disastrous as Yuvraj was at Yorkshire. So dire was he that he was relegated to the Second XI, and even there he did little of note. A nickname was rapidly coined, though it does seem a little awkward now to be referring to a man who keeps making one-day hundreds as 'Yuseless'. He has yet to shake off the tag when it comes to Test cricket, but in the one-day arena he is as clean a striker of the ball as you could wish for - unless you happen to be bowling to him – and his spin bowling is more than handy.

England need to get rid of him, and soon. Fair means having failed to dislodge him, the only alternative is skulduggery. Getting him arrested on some trumped-up criminal charge and held for questioning until mid-December would be effective, as might arranging to have him discovered in flagrante with the wife of the chief of selectors, but in the end you can’t beat some good old-fashioned violence.

Ian Bell has eight hundreds and nineteen fifties among almost 3000 Test runs at an average over 42. He is as delightful to watch when on song as Mark Waugh was, the ball sent skimming to the boundary with delicately-timed, seemingly effortless strokes, classy as a Waterford crystal glass containing a martini as dry as the Atacama.

His batting is the perfect cocktail party guest, sparkling with elegance and debonair charm, but batting in the top three in international cricket is not a cocktail party. At the sharp end of the innings, the batsman is facing the charging bulls who use the new ball, so he must be either a matador who feints and dances before administering the coup de grace or a rough, tough cowpuncher capable of wrestling the beast to the ground – and Bell is neither.

Since Marcus Trescothick opted for a quieter life on the county circuit, England have not had an opener who can regularly subdue an attack before it gets on top. This matters less in England, where a strategy of keeping wickets in hand and accelerating throughout the innings is usually very effective, but overseas it is almost guaranteed to cede the initiative.

Bell is trying to be more assertive but it comes off as Bugsy Malone let loose in “The Godfather”. It is possible that he will develop a tougher crust, in time – but can England afford to wait around while he does?

Part of the problem, of course, is that there are no obvious alternatives. Some county openers adopt the desired aggressive tactics in domestic games, but several of them have been tried out by England and been found wanting. Prior does it for Sussex and is now making an unimpressive fist of it for England, just as Luke Wright, Phil Mustard and Darren Maddy have. They could try Scott Newman of Surrey, but that is scraping the barrel.

The bolder course would be for the captain to take the job on. If there is anyone in the side who is capable of facing down pace bowlers and giving them a piece of his bat, it’s Pietersen. Yes, his preferred position in real cricket is at number four, but there’s a certain Indian gentleman currently taking a bit of a rest who bats at four in Tests but has spent a long career opening in ODIs with great success. And if Tendulkar can do it, surely Pietersen can too.

So come on, KP, lead from the front.

In theory, England and their new captain are on a roll after beating South Africa in September. While conceding that England looked almost competent during that series, I feel it only reasonable to point out that they win ODIs at home quite regularly and the trouble invariably starts overseas. It’s not so much that the wheels come off when they play abroad as that the wheels fall victim to airport baggage handlers and never arrive.

The dismal history notwithstanding, England fans are obliged to clutch at any straws of optimism which offer themselves before the games get underway and grim reality sets in. We can try hoping that India will be so drained after beating Australia in the Tests that they will do a South Africa and roll over and play dead, but since they are replacing almost the entire batting line-up with fresh faces anxious to impress, it’s a faint hope. However, that means that for the first time in living memory the Indians will not be five times as experienced as our lot and may lose their heads once or twice and give England a chance to blow an easy win rather than being crushed as per usual.

There are seven ODIs to endure, so I suggest we play a bit of bingo to keep our spirits up. Just keep this list handy while you’re watching and see your score mount:

Ian Bell gets well set but fails to push on for a ton - 1
“I’m not thinking about the IPL. I just want to do my best for England." - 1
James Anderson goes for more than 16 in death over - 2
Paul Collingwood drops easy catch - 3
Commentator reacts to above with “You don’t see that very often.” - 1
Yuvraj Singh hits Stuart Broad for six sixes again - 50
Broad hits Yuvraj for six sixes - 100
Patel takes Patel’s wicket - 10
Ravi Bopara makes significant contribution - 25
Ian Botham says that Pietersen should be batting at 3 - 1
Luke Wright plays but scores no runs and doesn’t bowl - 2
Harbhajan Singh hits team-mate - 10
Peter Moores ascribes latest loss to players’ existential angst - 20
Run out as Pietersen attempts impossible single to get off the mark - 2
Fellow-commentator patiently explains Laws to Botham - 5
Three Indian fielders collide underneath Flintoff skier - 3
Alistair Cook plays while series still alive - 50
Umpire Bowden dislocates shoulder while signalling six - 20
Pietersen caught off switch hit - 4
Reference to Stanford as cameras pan across to England WAGs - 1
Batsmen forget about third powerplay (or are all out before taking it) - 10
Play interrupted by insects or birds - 2
David Lloyd mispronounces “Guwahati” - 3
Zaheer Khan gets revenge by bowling Matt Prior with giant jellybean - 40
Steve Harmison bouncer clears boundary - 6
Elephant stops play - 100
Gautam Gambhir given out caught off elbow - 15
Graeme Swann wins car and complains it is neither pink nor Ferrari - 8
England win dead-rubber game - 1
England win game while series is alive - 100

Eyes down and look in. Good luck, all!

The election of Barack Obama prompts a thought or two. Before he could become the first African-American President of the USA, smaller mountains had to be climbed by other African-Americans. Long before there could be a black president, Jackie Robinson had to be the first black major league player in baseball, our sister bat-and-ball-sport.

Professional sport is one of the things which drives ethnic integration in a society. In the end, teams which want to win will hire the best players no matter what colour they are. Bigoted fans who initially object eventually come round when the “wrongly” coloured player keeps winning games for them, and so society gradually evolves.

The English population contained very few non-white people until the government encouraged large-scale immigration from the Caribbean and South Asia after World War II. Those immigrants’ children grew up in England, and by the late 1970s some naturally became good enough at cricket to be hired by counties.

When Roland Butcher, Norman Cowans and others were picked for England in the early 1980s, a number of people choked on their gin-and-tonics and said these players were not English and should not be playing for England. In one sense they had a point because the players had not been born here, but the true nature of their objection was proved by them not protesting about, for instance, the Zambia-born Phil Edmonds. The press was full of articles debating what it meant for English cricket, what it meant for the national identity and so on.

In 1998, an enlightened friend and I were discussing the merits of Nasser Hussain and Mark Ramprakash, the two obvious candidates to replace Alec Stewart as the next captain of England. A thought struck us. The next captain of England would be a man with brown rather than pink skin. That in itself did not seem particularly remarkable to us: what caused us to feel good about it was that we could not see that anyone would turn a hair – and we were right. When Hussain was appointed, even the right-wing newspapers failed to run any splenetic diatribes, and most pieces which commented on his being the first non-white England captain had a tone of slight surprise that it hadn’t happened before.

Yorkshire were very slow to hire non-white players. Until 1991, the county insisted that their players had to have been born in Yorkshire, which clearly prevented them hiring non-white overseas players, but there were strong suspicions that the county were deliberately ignoring players who were born in Yorkshire but had surnames like Patel or Choudhury rather than Illingworth or Sidebottom.

The club stoutly maintained that it was not so, but a lot of the Yorkshire fans were very happy that Asian-descent cricketers were not progressing through the county’s ranks. I remember having an unpleasant conversation in about 1985 with a man we’ll call Seth, who was proud he never left the borders of Yorkshire if he could possibly help it and wanted all the immigrants to go back home.

Last season, Seth was sitting with some of his cronies at a table in the Long Room at Headingley, and I overheard part of their conversation as they grumbled about the uselessness of the Yorkshire team this year.

“Nay, nay,” Seth was saying, “yon Rashid’s no bloody immigrant. ‘E were born in Bradford, and ‘e’s got a Yorkshire accent just like thee.”

There is still a long way to go before we achieve a society in which ethnicity is irrelevant in Britain, but little by little we are moving towards the more perfect union of which the President-elect spoke so movingly back in March.

They fixed the pitch, they fixed the lights and Sir Allen Stanford kept mainly to his own hospitality box, so most of what had been at fault earlier in the week was cleared out of the way for the big event.

Instead of a cricket match, though, what we got was a conjuring show.

In the first half, each member of the England team was dragged up on to the stage to be made to look ever so slightly foolish as one of the magicians made his leg stump fall over or willed him to bash the ball high in the air to fall neatly into the hands of a fielder placed just there. After the interval, The Great Gayleini spent the second half repeatedly performing his magical ball trick in which perfectly decent bowling disappears in a puff of smoke and the big screen lights up with a huge figure six. It was a consummate performance by the entire troupe.

Sir Allen was clearly delighted that his team won, and will have taken great pleasure in creating a few more Caribbean millionaires. JJDW took me to task after my last post for not expressing outrage that Stanford chose to spend his money on building a pleasant cricket ground rather than a hospital: I take the point, but at least his team’s triumph means that all his money is staying in West Indian economies. A couple of other respondents were keen to point out that he will be ploughing money into West Indies cricket, which may be the intention but depends on the venture becoming profitable. As it will probably make a loss this year, massive financial benefits will not accrue to WI cricket just yet, if at all. But I can’t really get myself worked up either way just because this event centres around amounts of money which are very large by previous cricket standards but small beer when measured against golf, Premiership football or major league baseball.

Even so, some of Stanford’s money went on getting West Indian cricketers to knuckle down to a six-week training camp. This looks to have been well spent. It has been ages since a representative West Indian team has been so fit and sharp in the field or so fired up and determined. When England return to the Caribbean in January, they will not be facing the shambolic underperformers of recent years but a team which has the potential to rip them apart.

After the show, Kevin Pietersen admitted that England had committed the grievous strategic error of allowing themselves to be distracted by side issues to the detriment of their cricket. In the long run, this may be no bad thing. Whether taking a catch wins the Ashes or a million dollars, it still demands coolness and concentration on the job in hand rather than dreams of pink Ferraris or open-top bus parades, and the lesson will not be lost on any of the England squad.

Nor is it a bad thing that the illusion of KP’s invincibility has been exploded. For some of us, England’s being completely outclassed was a reassuring return to form after the disquieting episode of the ODIs against South Africa, when England had shown disturbing signs of being good at one-day cricket. Pietersen needs to realise that tampering with hallowed traditions like England being hopeless in coloured clothing is dangerous iconoclasm and could well be against the spirit of the game.

I find it hard to work up the degree of passion that drives this event’s opponents to apoplexy. Many things will have a greater effect on the sum of human happiness than the Twenty20 For 20, even if we confine ourselves to cricket. Next year’s Ashes will depress one or other set of fans and bring lasting fulfilment to the winning team in far greater measure than a benefit game which does not even count in the official international records. It provided some cricket entertainment at a time far more convenient for the UK viewer than the Indo-Australia Tests, thousands of Antiguans had a great night out and some West Indian cricketers are now much wealthier than they were before. Nobody died, and life goes on. Is that so evil?

The Stanford circus has never enjoyed a high reputation in the English press, so the first hint of problems has caused the vultures to descend on it before it has even died. One report went so far as to say that it was hard to see any “positives” from the venture, and that is surely going too far.

First, there’s the venue. The Stanford Cricket Ground looks to be an excellent place for watching cricket, with comfortable stands, informal grassy banks, and pavilions and other buildings which please the eye. Transplant this to Worcester, below the magnificent cathedral, or even Taunton with the old church at the corner, and you would have a perfect English county ground.

But the playing surface is not ideal. Sir Allen has made clear that he does not think much of Test cricket: this is a pity, because the pitches used so far would have been ideal for the fourth day of a Test match. Crumbling, two-paced and bouncing unpredictably, it could provide a fascinating duel as batsmen attempt to grind it out – Test cricket at one of its bests.

As a stage for Twenty20, though, this is inadequate. I don’t like slogfests much: watching a team rattle up 220 in 20 overs gets monotonous. The ideal is a game where par is about 156, nudging eight an over, but on Stanford’s pitch par seems to be about 128, or barely above a run a ball, the kind of total which does not encourage the enterprise and invention which characterises the best Twenty20 batting.

Then there’s the umpiring scheme, in which the players do not appeal but the on-field umpires and the third umpire can consult on anything, with the third umpire having a responsibility to alert the on-field umpires if they make a mistake which he can pick up on the TV. There hasn’t yet been a third umpire override, but there have been two or three decisions where the on-field umpires have asked questions of the man with the replays to check things before giving out or not out, and it has worked well to my eyes at least. I hope that Simon Taufel and the others agree and tell ICC so.

And then there has been Trinidad & Tobago, who deservedly won their (relatively) big money game against my Middlesex boys. In the spirit of Ted Dexter, whose bizarre excuses for poor English performances entertained us so much 15 or so years ago, I shall hypothesise that Middlesex were put off by T&T’s strip, which gave them the appearance of having walked through a trough of whitewash on their way out to the middle.

In truth, though, Middlesex were undone by the money.

I have argued before that prize inflation a la Stanford does not pose an existential threat to civilisation; if he wants to offer vast prizes, then I don’t see why cricketers should not play for them if they are so inclined.

But at a practical level, the size of the prize may be counter-productive in terms of spectacle. Players terrified of errors are all the more likely to commit them – and the drops in the field this week have matched anything Wall St or the FTSE have had to offer this month. The danger is that jangling nerves will mean that the winning team is the one which makes the fewer dreadful mistakes rather than the one which plays the best, that it becomes a freak show rather than a vibrant cricket spectacle.

In theory, there are ways of fixing problems with the pitch or the fear factor. What is less easy to fix is Stanford himself, who seems the sort whose main topic of conversation is how awesome he is, which makes the timing of this event unfortunate, because this month the market in awesomeness has been cornered by Barack Obama.

So Middlesex are jetting off to Antigua for a post-season jaunt during which they will play a game for the largest prize ever offered to an English county club – at least until next year, when the prize for winning the Championship goes up to £500K.

Things have changed a lot since Brian Brain recorded his month-by-month thoughts on his 1980 season with Gloucestershire and their post-season Caribbean excursion to Barbados for a few friendly one-day matches against club sides in “Another Day, Another Match”.

Brain was a pace bowler who made his debut for Worcestershire aged 18 in 1959 but did not get capped until 1966, which meant that he was a year short of qualifying for a benefit when they sacked him in 1975. Moving to Gloucestershire prolongs his career, but he spends much of 1980 worrying about his financial future, and there is a happy ending when the county grant him a testimonial for 1981.

He would therefore have approved of the increases in player salaries. As a senior professional in 1980, he was paid £4500. In the wider economy, salaries have roughly quadrupled for equivalent jobs over the period, but his successor is now paid more like 10-12 times as much, which in real terms means that he would be earning two to three times as much today.

Interestingly, it appears that the rewards for playing in high-profile media circuses have increased by the same factor: Brain could easily understand why his county colleagues Mike Procter and Zaheer Abbas had gone to play for Packer at £20,000 a year, which scales up to about $500,000 today, or what such players might reasonably expect for an IPL contract. (Those who think Procter would have been worth more may not realise that his powers were waning by 1980; he came off his full run in only three or four of Gloucester’s games and mostly bowled off-spin when using the old ball.)

On the other hand, Brain might not have appreciated the change in his after play routine. The hot bath followed by a trip down the pub for a few beers and a game of darts is now an ice bath and a quiet Powerade before an early night. Worse still, he is pictured waiting to go into bat against the touring West Indies: that he has on a then-new helmet with a perspex visor is merely nostalgic, but the caption exults in his ingenuity in managing to smoke a cigarette while wearing it. Brain would not have enjoyed today’s healthy asceticism.

But whatever has changed, I hope that today’s players still get wonderful invitations such as the one Brain received from the Indoor Corridor Cricket Association at St Andrew’s University. Indoor corridor cricket was apparently ‘a quasi-religion which involves a squash ball of gruesomely variable pace and bounce, a plastic beach mat, mega-long-hops, the occasional kitchenette, plenty of nicks and a perpetually humid atmosphere that favours the bowler who keeps plugging away there or thereabouts and is always looking to do a bit.’

The letter went on to say that the Association had elected him, by a 7-1 majority over Leicestershire’s Ken Higgs, their Honorary President, ‘a position which carries with it absolutely no responsibilities whatsoever except a letter of delighted acceptance and permission to use your name when recruiting new members. The term of office is one year, whereupon you will become a life member which will entitle you to absolutely nothing except our veneration, which you already possess.’

The difference is that today’s player might feel able to afford slightly more than the nil donation which Brain enclosed with his acceptance.

	Bangladesh stunned New Zealand in the first one-dayer on Thursday © AFP

Last week I predicted that Bangladesh would be massacred by New Zealand, so they promptly went ahead and recorded one of their rare wins against a major country.

Unfortunately, though, I cannot regard it as any great evidence that they have improved. As when India and Australia were beaten, it was the senior country’s first competitive outing in the tournament or series and they were caught on the hop. Normal service was rapidly resumed.

Bangladesh's performances recall those of the minor counties in the English Gillette/NatWest knockout cup, the first one-day competition in county cricket which has since been displaced by Twenty20. The first round of that pitted fifteen of the first-class counties against minor counties, the combined universities, Ireland or Scotland. Every couple of years one of the minor sides would win because they played very well and the first-class side played very badly, usually with the help of a difficult pitch, and everyone would have a good laugh at the first-class side’s expense.

Durham won two or three times in the Eighties, which bolstered their application to graduate to first-class level no end, but when they were promoted in 1992 they had to import a swathe of experienced old hands from Boon to Botham to be even semi-competitive on a regular basis rather than riding their one-off luck.

But Bangladesh do not have that option. They can’t go into the market to recruit Stuart Law, Graeme Hick, Shaun Pollock and the about-to-be-ex-international Sourav Ganguly to flesh their team out and coach the younger guys while they find their feet in international cricket.

And that consigns them to limbo for a generation if their schedule remains as at present. Playing only against national sides is futile since the gulf in ability is too great. There are plenty of teams who would provide very reasonable opposition, but they are called Warwickshire, Warriors or Western Australia rather than West Indies. But how to do it?

An obvious answer is to have them play in the Ranji Trophy and the Hazare one-day competition, but this could easily turn out to be rather embarrassing. Bangladesh would probably not win and questions would then be asked about why a team which ranks below an Indian state side is playing international cricket. So it will not be done, more’s the pity, and neither will anything similar in some other country, because it would not look good.

Bangladesh’s cricket is thus being stunted because it would mean a loss of face at the ICC’s top table. By insisting that Bangladesh are a fully-fledged international team they delay almost indefinitely the day when it will actually be true. Instead of helping Bangladesh develop, political horse-trading dictates that they shall be kept as pathetic pets to be taken round the world for ritual thrashings with the occasional reward of patronising comments about how well they did when a proper team falls over its bootlaces.

It’s hardly surprising that getting the chance to be taken seriously in the ICL proved an attractive prospect, and unless something constructive is done, more will be enticed there. Putting a few more Bangladesh players in the next IPL auction is mere tokenism: there is no guarantee that franchises will bid at all for players whose records are as unexciting as most of the Bangladesh team are, and those who are picked up will be support actors when they need to learn how to be the leading men.

Bangladesh’s cricketers deserve more respect than this. What is so sad is that I see no prospect of them getting anything else.

	Bangladesh had a tough time even against a depleted Australia © AFP

Are you ready for the historic series which starts on Thursday? No, not that one, the other one. The ODI series between Bangladesh and New Zealand will be the first in which the batsmen can disrupt the fielding captain’s plans by demanding a Powerplay.

This rule change opens up tactical challenges for both sides. Fielding captains will have to at least consider holding certain bowlers in reserve until the batsmen’s Powerplay is taken, and the batsmen will be seeking to take the Powerplay at the most advantageous point. It remains to be seen whether it will make much difference.

Under the previous dispensation, it was uncommon for fielding captains to deviate from using the first 20 overs as Powerplay. It is entirely possible that batsmen will decide that the best time to take the Powerplay is almost always going to be immediately following the mandatory ball change, with the consequence that ODIs adopt a different but still predictable rhythm.

Even so, we are unlikely to get any useful intelligence about it from Bangladesh v New Zealand.

When Bangladesh visited Australia last month, the Australians looked short of cricket and were weakened by the absence of two or three key players, yet Bangladesh were incinerated. Even when they bowled well enough to restrict Australia to a sub-200 total, a feat which would give most teams a pretty fair chance of winning, they lost by a huge margin. Against the Black Caps, another massacre is extremely likely.

Daniel Vettori made more than the usual ritual noises about taking Bangladesh seriously as his team left NZ. He knows enough history to sympathise with Bangladesh’s plight, recalling that it had taken 26 years for New Zealand to register their first Test win, and saying that the experience of playing against better opposition was central to a team’s development.

The trouble is that this is a partial reading of history.

The value of New Zealand’s early tours to England was not to be found in three gala Test matches where the tourists could sometimes scrape a draw in the allotted three days but in nearly thirty matches against the counties and invitational sides like MCC or HDG Leveson Gower’s XI, which were usually genuinely competitive.

Though counties might rest their premier fast bowler, especially in the later stages of the season when his energy was better preserved for the Championship, they would generally be at full strength. Top teams like Yorkshire and Lancashire would beat them while weak ones like Somerset and Northants would usually lose; thus the tourists would be able, in the modern jargon, to take plenty of positives from the tour even though they had largely failed in the Tests.

No such educational opportunity now exists for Bangladesh, but without one, they seemed doomed to wander the international circuit getting thrashed, thereby acquiring the dubious skill of losing cricket matches and having it drummed into them that they are not good enough to compete at the international level.

One could open up, though, if the various promoters of Twenty20 competitions had the imagination. I think I would back Middlesex to beat them, but I’d only make that a 60% chance compared to the 99.5% chance of a major national team winning. A three-way between the Stanford 20/20 winners, the English Twenty20 winners and Bangladesh would be unpredictable, nor do we really know how well Bangladesh would do if invited to the Champions League when it expands.

Admittedly, this would not give them the experience of competitive first-class cricket I believe they require if they are ever to make a decent fist of Test cricket, but it would be a start.

	A dejected Michael Vaughan stands down as captain © Getty Images

In the early 90s, rumours circulated among the Yorkshire faithful of a schoolboy in Sheffield, said to be the best batting prospect seen in the Broad Acres since the young Len Hutton sixty years earlier. In 1995, soon after he made his Yorkshire debut, I saw him play against Gloucestershire. He made 74 runs with an elegance and class which bore out the rumours, so I became a devoted fan of Michael Vaughan.

After establishing himself as a Test player, in 2002 he embarked on a year playing as regally as anyone I have ever seen. He was my idea of batting perfection apart from a tendency to throw things away in the nervous 190s, and at the start of 2003 the ICC rankings briefly agreed that he was the best batsman in the world. Had he carried on like that, the phrase “the great Michael …” would not today inevitably end in “Phelps”.

But he took on the England captaincy and the spell was broken. His batting descended to the mortal plane, then he got. Following physical rehab and his resumption of the captaincy - a mistake about which I have written before - his batting continued to deteriorate until his resignation this summer.

That this would happen was unknowable in advance: batsmen take captaincy in different ways, as Vaughan and his predecessors and contemporaries show. It adversely affected Vaughan, as it did Rahul Dravid, but had no discernible effect on the batting of Mike Atherton or Ricky Ponting while propelling Graham Gooch and Mahela Jayawardene to performances at your favourite level of the upper atmosphere. Ever the contrarian, Nasser Hussain began by finding captaincy a burden but went on to perform above his average level.

Giving up a burdensome captaincy can work wonders. Paul Collingwood recovered his batting form within 24 hours of deciding to resign as ODI captain. But since he quickly found that he was not much good at being captain and began to dislike it not much later, giving it up was clearly liberating.

Vaughan, though, was a brilliant captain in his dream job. The feeling that he would have to give it up grew over months and when the end came it was heartbreaking. Being driven to resignation like that cannot be far different from seeing a parent slip into terminal illness or realising that your marriage is on an inevitable course to shipwreck. He is bound to need considerable time to recover his equilibrium.

Awarding Vaughan a central contract but leaving him out of the squad to tour India is thus a signal that the selectors believe that he will be able to bat at a level somewhere near his old standards once he has recovered his mental fitness, although rehab for the soul will take quite some time.

There being nothing I enjoy more in cricket than seeing Michael Vaughan score Test centuries, I fervently hope they are right.

A lot of the press reaction, though, has implied that they are either nuts or ridiculously sentimental. Since I can weep at the end of “The Return of the King”, I’ll plead guilty to sentimentality, but I will also pose a question.

If it had emerged that a player had been batting in considerable pain and had had surgery to remove the problem, but that it would take three months’ rehab and he would therefore miss the tour of India, it seems unlikely that anyone would bat an eyelid at the award of a 12-month contract. Why is it different when the pain has been in his mind rather than his right shoulder?

	It is rare enough for a centrally-contracted player to make a significant contribution to his county, let alone insist on it © Getty Images

Before getting down to the serious business of congratulating them, a word of thanks to Durham for their efficient demolition of Kent in the final match, which quelled the nervous palpitations of this Yorkshire fan during the last round of matches. At the beginning of day two, with Yorkshire starting on 84-6 and looking destined for zero points, relegation had looked certain but the heroics of David Wainwright and Adil Rashid down at Hove and the lack of same from Kent at Canterbury allowed me to follow the last couple of days with equanimity.

So, all hail Durham!

If any single number other than the points total can sum up why a team won the championship, Durham’s collective bowling average for the season was 23 compared to 28 for Nottinghamshire, their nearest rivals, and about 30 or more for everyone else. (I am indebted to Paul Hyett, a statistician of my electronic acquaintance, for that observation.) Batsmen can win one-day trophies but winning in two-innings cricket requires bowlers - and Durham have certainly had bowlers.

Steve Harmison’s 60 wickets at 22 were impressive enough to earn a recall for England but his less-renowned pace partners, Mark Davies with 39 wickets at 15 and Callum Thorp with 50 at just under 20, have had better returns without grabbing the headlines. And this is a county which also has regular members of the England Lions, Graham Onions and Liam Plunkett, on its books. All of these are home-grown, so the Championship win is a massive endorsement of Durham’s system of talent identification and development, at least in pace bowling.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said about their batting, which relied heavily on long-serving imports, Michael di Venuto and captain Dale Benkenstein, or spin bowling, which was rather inadequately provided by New Zealand mediocrity Paul Wiseman. The bright spot up the order was Will Smith, who returned home after trying his luck with Notts, averaged 51.38 at No. 3, and started the wagging of tongues about future international prospects. Word is that he is likely to succeed to the captaincy now that Benkenstein has stood down.

In the end, though, this championship was Steve Harmison’s. Rob Steen’s otherwise excellent article about him turns out to have been inaccurate in one respect by attributing his failure to take a break after the ODI series to his being turbo-charged by the prospect of Stanford millions, a suggestion which keeps being cynically made without a shred of evidence in its favour but copious evidence against.

It has emerged Harmison originally asked not to even be considered for Stanford, and that his return to the one-day side was on the strict understanding that he would not be told to desert his county on the Championship run-in. He had achieved his personal target, that of getting back into the Test side, and was determined to help his main team of the season achieve their target too. It is rare enough for a centrally-contracted player to make a significant contribution to his county, let alone insist on it; doing it and covering himself and his team in historic glory seems more the stuff of epic poetry than Wisden.

I would have preferred that a modern Virgil sing of the elevation of Darren Gough to the roll of Championship-winning Yorkshire captains in his final first-class season, but he will instead extol the deeds of Stevius and his companions in ‘The Dunelmiad’. It will be a stirring tale, leaving no-one in doubt that Durham thoroughly deserved their success and our congratulations.

	Graeme Hick bids adieu to Worcestershire © PA Photos

Another Indian season gets underway, so Samir and Fox start to quiver with anticipation while I get wistful as another English season comes to its close. As they look forward to new arrivals, I reflect on departures.

Graeme Hick has gone. One day this summer, he was dismissed cheaply and walked calmly back to the pavilion. For it not to hurt when he was out meant that it did not matter, and if it no longer mattered, it was time to step away. It was entirely his own choice to end one of the greatest county careers of all time.

Few, though, have the luxury of real choice.

Mushtaq Ahmed, the legspinning lynchpin of Sussex’s recent championship-winning sides, faced surgery and rehab to have a chance of playing again and decided retirement was less trouble. Sussex already know how badly they will miss the irreplaceable Pakistani and will do well to get an overseas player even half as influential next season.

I’m not betting against Darren Gough taking up Yorkshire’s invitation to play in next year’s Twenty20, so Derbyshire’s much lesser-known Kevin Dean is as yet the only other one committed to retirement. His legendary feat was hitting the winning runs when Derbyshire beat Australia in a thrilling three-day game in 1997, though he was actually a bowler. At the beginning of the decade he was one of the most effective bowlers in the Championship, though he was never in the frame for England: the specialist medium-pacer’s main prey is the merely adequate, a species never seen in the international highlands but still common on the world’s domestic plains. Having been injured for more of the last couple of seasons than not, he has faded out of contention and has given up the unequal struggle.

However, I suspect a few others who have been released by their counties will be unable to persuade anyone else to hire them for next season.

Surrey’s Ali Brown still holds an amazing world record, having scored 268 for them in a 50-over game. He was by far the best one-day batsman in county cricket for several years, but the selectors gave him inexplicably few chances for England. Apparently they thought him flaky and unreliable, but this only deepens the mystery about his non-selection as those were the chief characteristics of the batsmen they actually picked. Now 38, he has only played one innings of note in two years and seems a spent force. If Surrey no longer want him, it’s hard to see who else would.

Northants have released Lance Klusener and Jason Brown. ‘Zulu’ was Man of the 1999 World Cup, a time when ODI crowds round the world thrilled to his spectacular firework displays; nowadays he lights a desultory couple of roman candles and hands out some sparklers before ambling off to collect his pay. With the end of the Kolpak era in sight and an ICL connection, he seems an unattractive prospect. Brown was once thought to have a future as an England spinner, but it never came to pass and after 13 good and decent years the pitches have dried up. Nine championship wickets at a cost of 80 this season will not be much of a recommendation to a county which is bound to be less spin-friendly than the one which plays at Wantage Road.

Some younger men will also be going, having failed to make the grade and leaving no lasting mark, but all of the above have provided many memories for those who saw them play. They have my thanks and best wishes for their futures.

Vulgar, tasteless and divisive. Such are the adjectives attached to the Stanford Twenty20 jamboree.

It is allegedly divisive because if the 'England XI' beat the 'Stanford All-Stars', the players who actually play will get a million bucks each and the four who sit in the dressing room will only get a quarter of a million, and those England players who only feature in the Test squad won’t get anything at all.

What a terrible prospect. There will be big differences in the income levels of the various members of the various England squads, and this will have a hugely damaging effect on team unity, or so we are told.

Things could get as dreadful as they are in the Indian team dressing room, where Sachin Tendulkar is a squillionaire and Gautam Gambhir is not. I am sure there are tensions in the Indian dressing room, and that some of the fault lines are between the seniors (mostly very rich indeed) and the juniors (not yet very rich but hoping to be so), but they do not seem to be caused by money. If you, dear reader, are in your mid-thirties, consider how many 20-year-olds you know who aren’t irritating, and then think what it must be like to be cooped up in a dressing room with a bunch of them.

But we do not need to go to India to see inequality of income. There are already vast disparities in the England dressing room, even among the centrally-contracted. Those at the bottom of the scale get about £200K from the ECB, while captain of everything Kevin Pietersen gets something more like £500K. And that’s just basic pay.

The top order get paid considerably more by their bat makers for sporting the company logo on the face of their bat than does James Anderson. There are pictures of Kevin Pietersen and Paul Collingwood on large advertising hoardings promoting exciting ranges of menswear and the like, but none featuring Matt Prior. Attaching his name to a ghost-written mid-career “autobiography” is unlikely to have left Flintoff or even Monty Panesar a poorer man, but insomniacs have yet to be afforded the opportunity to be bored silly by a similar tome featuring Alistair Cook. And so on.

Tastelessness and vulgarity seem to derive from the huge purse riding on a single game as though this was something totally new rather than a return to cricket’s origins. When Lord Frederick Beauclerk and the Duke of Devonshire competed for purses of 5,000 guineas in the 18th century, the stake was the equivalent of a million quid today. Substantial prize money for single games was commonplace until the mid-19th century, when the balance of power shifted.

No longer did the gentry have the basic assurance that the money would simply slosh around between one very rich person and another: the riff-raff professionals had become so good at the game that they would walk off with the dosh. The lower orders could not be trusted to know their place if they acquired great wealth, so the practice of offering large purses ceased, replaced by the hypocrisy of ‘shamateurism’. But really, how terrible is it that players should be able to rake in huge jackpots by winning games of cricket as well as by standing around in a studio in borrowed gear and letting the resultant photographs adorn billboards?

There will be problems caused by the influx of new money. Some players will gamble, drink or otherwise fritter both the money and their careers away, and some who miss out for unlucky reasons will no doubt get insanely jealous.

But the most plaintive predictions of the imminent collapse of civilisation seem to emanate from former players whose experience of international cricket was slight. Having ridden the gravy train in the second class carriage for a couple of suburban stops, they object to a new generation being pampered in first class on a round-the-world tour and from a position of moderate comfort presume to tell the newly rich how bitter and twisted they should feel about the newly very rich indeed.

What was that about vulgarity and tastelessness again?

How much does having a memory hinder us when watching cricket? How hard is it to change your mind?

Or, to put it another way, how accurate is it to describe Jimmy Anderson as inconsistent, as some people did replying to my piece about Matthew Hoggard?

Imagine, if you will, an Andy Jameson. Without a past to live down, Jameson comes into the England team at Wellington and gets a five-fer on debut. Then he has a horrible match at Napier where he goes for plenty. A decent match at Lord’s is followed by a truly dismal performance in the first innings at Old Trafford, and then a devastating 7-43 at Trent Bridge shoots New Zealand out for 123. In the series against South Africa which follows, he has match returns of 3-114, 3-136, 4-132 and 5-127.

After nine matches this year, he has 42 wickets at just under 28 apiece. He has had a spectacular peak and a couple of nasty troughs, but generally he seems to be doing pretty decently and getting better.

If those were the only facts in evidence, would not the discovery of Jameson be lauded as one of the finds of the year, and would anyone be going on about his inconsistency?

Back here in the real world, though, Jimmy Anderson came into the England side trailing a wagonload of baggage. For four years he had been making occasional appearances when other people were injured, collecting 62 wickets in 20 matches at the depressing cost of 39. Sure, there was the odd good spell, but all too often he was off target or lacking in pace and batsmen just helped themselves to boundary after boundary from the all-you-can-eat buffet.

To me - and to most England fans, I’d guess Anderson’s bowling at Napier and the first innings at Old Trafford were not unfortunate wobbles but reversion to type. I still assumed that Hoggard would soon reclaim his spot.

It was Trent Bridge that convinced me that Anderson had supplanted Hoggard in the pecking order. Even with a favourable wind, atmosphere and pitch I could not conceive of the Hoggster delivering a spell that deadly.

As the South Africa series progressed, I was won over. By The Oval, I was no longer nervous as he prepared to bowl. In fact I had become pretty confident that the South Africans would not be getting off to a flier, and had even begun to watch the first over of a spell of his with mild optimism that it might be a very good one. Though I was usually disappointed, it showed the balance of my expectation had changed.

If I only had this year to go on, I am fairly sure that I would be a lot more enthusiastic about Anderson, but as it is I wonder whether Ryan Sidebottom should not replace him once he is fit again. At least until Trent Bridge, Sidebottom had been obviously superior as a bowler. Afterwards, though, is it attaching residual blame for his previous transgressions to doubt that he has also surpassed Sidebottom given that he basically outbowled him all summer?

The question becomes critical as soon as the next Test in Ahmedabad. Captain Pietersen is clearly keen on Harmison, Panesar and Flintoff will certainly play, and there will be an all-rounder from Nottinghamshire, though whether Broad, Swann or Patel remains unknown. That only leaves one place for Sidebottom and Anderson to fight over.

My heart tells me to pick Anderson. My head says that Sidebottom has the proven record.

I am so glad I am not a selector.

	He will be heartbroken that it’s over, but Matthew Hoggard can be proud of a worthy Test career © Getty Images

Somewhere between Hamilton and Wellington, two crew members were thrown overboard from the good ship England and told they’d have to swim for it. Steve Harmison swam strongly enough to catch up and be hauled back on board, but with the announcement that he will not be getting a central contract, Matthew Hoggard’s Test career looks over.

As a Hoggard fan I am saddened; as a Yorkshire fan, hopeful that he will think it worth carrying on to keep taking 40 or 50 championship wickets a season at 24; as an England fan, I’m delighted that the transition was timed so brilliantly. It was pretty obvious from the first few times we saw him that Jimmy Anderson would one day take over as our premier swing bowler, and the performances he’s put in this year are evidence of a baton being passed with an efficiency the Great Britain 4x100m track teams could usefully study. Just as the Hoggster runs out of steam, the lad from Burnley is off and running hard

Hoggard is the kind of sporting hero we English treasure: self-deprecating, a wholehearted trier, and not quite world-class.

The featherbeds and billiard tables which so often pass for Test pitches these days offered him little help when he used the old ball. Later on, he developed a (slightly) slower ball and some cutters, so he could be brought on in the 50th over without risking too much carnage, but before 2005 or so he could be as much liability as asset once the ball lost its shine. He was cannon fodder for the likes of Matthew Hayden (in Australia), unless bowling negatively as on the “Bore Them Out” tour of 2001-2, when Hoggy bowled as far outside off stump as Ashley Giles pitched outside leg and the whole of India snored.

After that tour, Nasser Hussain said Hoggard was a dream to captain because he was the kind of guy who would run through walls for you – he never gave up. The other great thing about him was his dependability; you always knew what you were going to get from him. He was as predictable and as reliably satisfying as the full monty breakfast in your favourite caff.

His old-ball stuff may have been mediocre (I don’t care much for the tomatoes anyway), but the meat of his bowling was with a new ball.

By his own account, he just ran up and ‘wanged’ it down the other end, but that is taking modesty too far: he is much more skilful than that implies. The deftness with which he executed the three-card trick on Hayden (in England) and Graeme Smith (anywhere) suggests that he can make a fine post-cricket living fleecing gullible punters at fairgrounds with a Find The Lady stand.

Being a new-ball specialist overseas when the Kookaburra ball is used almost everywhere bar England and India seems like an impossible task, but his two best matches were abroad.

The first was in Christchurch in 2001-2, when his opening spell, broken after three overs by close of play and after another ten by lunch on the following day, read 20-7-59-5. He came back later to mop up the tail, ending with 7 for 63. In the second innings, both sets of batsmen went gloriously wild with Thorpe and Astle scoring two of the four fastest double hundreds in Test history, but the first innings lead Hoggard had ensured with magnificent swing bowling saw England home.

‘Hoggard’s Match’ though, was Johannesburg 2005. He took a fearful clattering from Herschelle Gibbs, who was in rollicking form, but disposed of most of the rest of the top order for very little, ending the innings with 5-144 and restricting South Africa's lead to 8. A commanding 180 from Trescothick set South Africa a possibly gettable target of 325, but again it was only Gibbs who could make a fight of it. Three wickets in Hoggard’s first five overs set SA back on their heels, and his eventual career best 7-61 clinched England’s first series victory in South Africa for forty years.

When he goes to the great cricket ground in the sky, he won’t be eligible for membership of the Great Players CC, but Johannesburg will earn him an invitation to turn out for their XI as a guest for one match.

He will be heartbroken that it’s over, but Matthew Hoggard can be proud of a worthy Test career.

	Matt Prior is, without doubt, the best batsman among the current candidates © Getty Images

I’ll come back to the batting, but is there an accepted definition of the best keeper?

Keeping for England, Read has not impressed me because he minimises obvious errors rather than maximising chances. He didn’t drop as many as Matt Prior (on his first go-round) but there were a few that he ought to have gone for but didn’t, thus making it look as though first slip was at fault; the new version of Prior has no such qualms.

His other main fault was one common to all England glovemen since Jack Russell – standing too far back to the quickies. This makes it easier for the keeper to take the ball routinely, but too many edges fall short of the slips who align themselves with him. If those missed edges were properly seen as keeping errors, it would concentrate keepers’ minds wonderfully.

But taking the ball is not the whole job. The keeper is the only fielder with the same privileged insight into how much movement bowlers are getting and how batsmen are shaping as the TV viewer. In “Calling the Shots”, Michael Vaughan went out of his way to praise the intelligence-gathering of Geraint Jones, the implication being that Read was a less useful spy.

The skipper manages which bowlers to use and where to place the fielders, but it is the keeper who acts as the foreman of the fielding team: it is his job to chivvy the sloppy and applaud the brilliant, to encourage the bowlers and generally exude energy and keenness. Paul Nixon in the last World Cup was the best energizer in recent years while Prior was simply an annoying loudmouth and Read was almost Trappist.

There is more to keeping than is immediately visible; even so, it is unrealistic to ignore batting unless you intend him to bat at nine or below.

The last regular England keeper to be a rabbit was George Duckworth back in 1930 – but with all-rounders like Gubby Allen, Walter Robins, Maurice Tate and Jack White in the team, you can afford a keeper who can’t bat, and England are not in that fortunate position.

Alan Knott and Godfrey Evans were superb, but they were not the best technically in their times – Bob Taylor and Keith Andrew were even more brilliant (though much less flashy) but were unlikely to deliver regular half-centuries. (Despite that, Taylor succeeded to Knott’s berth because the “keepers” who could bat could not keep to even a minimum standard for Tests.)

Tim Ambrose’s time is up. He has had ten Tests but his batting was vastly overestimated. Most batsmen mentally map the pitch as “play forward”, “back” and “hmmm”, but Ambrose’s mental map is marked “back” and “Here Be Dragonnes”, which is useless unless the bowlers are exceptionally generous.

Prior was clearly chastened by the criticism of his first run as England’s keeper. In the recent ODIs he showed marked improvement both technically and at curbing his blabbering gob. He is without doubt the best batsman amongst the current candidates, so he should be confirmed as the new(-ish) Test keeper when the India Test squad is announced – quite a turnaround, since I had previously hoped that his dropping would be permanent.

But who should be taken as the reserve?

Ideally it would be James Foster, who has overtaken Read as the best technical keeper on the circuit, but the Test leg of the tour is only one three-dayer and two Tests as against seven(!) ODIs, so it may be more sensible to take the like-for-like Phil Mustard.

Opinions, anyone?

	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.

	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.

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.

	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.

	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.

“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.

	Middlesex’s chances of retaining the Twenty20 Cup in 2009 will disappear entirely if Shaun Udal retires © AFP

Incredible! Not only was the Twenty20 Final a fantastic game of cricket, but Middlesex won their first trophy since Mike Gatting was playing. And in a format which they have been useless at for the five previous years of the tournament.

But it was the semi-final which really showed up the injustice of the Man of the Match system. Tyron Henderson got it for his quickfire 59 but the real engineers of the win were, as usual, Murali Kartik and Shaun Udal, the two spinners who delivered overs 7-14 for a mere 36 runs. Throughout the tournament their typical combined figures have been 8-0-43-2, the equivalent of putting the opposition batsmen in a box and sitting on the lid for eight overs, or 40% of the innings, and it’s been the ‘Flash Harries’ who’ve got the 60 in 40 balls who walk off with the Man-of-the-Match awards.

The big difference in Middlesex this year is that they had found the missing piece of the machine. Whereas last year Kartik’s four overs of excellence got lost amid the dross, this year he has had Udal to back him up and they have been oppressive enough to ensure that the batsmen have rarely had to trouble 160. Middlesex’s rickety Twenty20 contraption which fell to bits as soon as it was pushed last year gained in Udal the cross-strut which made it into a stable and powerful engine.

“The Udal Story” ought to be a Frank Capra movie starring Jimmy Stewart. The young man gets his first job as a cricketer and does pretty well, then falls into bad company and loses his way. Running around with the feckless ne’er-do-wells who laughingly call themselves England’s one-day team rarely does anyone any good, but Udal sees the error of his ways pretty quickly and then settles down to a life of honest toil as a good county spinner. Years later, as he begins to coast to retirement, a stranger arrives from across the sea and reinvigorates him, and then by a strange set of accidents there’s a vacancy in the England side and he gets picked. Off they go to India, and in a dramatic vital match the new young pretender [Monty Panesar] loses his nerve and bowls rubbish while the old guy bowls his team to victory.

Thinking his career over, though at least he’s now got the tale of how he won the Test in Mumbai to tell his grandchildren, he decides to hang up his boots, but then John Emburey, coach to a bunch of kids who have failed over and over again, asks him to come and help them out. “Please, mister, will ya, please?” mew the little kittens, and Udal can’t disappoint them so he agrees.

And he and his new kids then go out and win every match (just about), go to the play-offs and win the grand final. How heartwarming can you get? You’d need a Capra not to make such a movie sickly.

We haven’t yet seen the closing scenes: we don’t know how this film will end. There’s going to be one in Antigua, and maybe another in India or somewhere, and then there’s the question of whether he will want to come back again next year. At the age of 39, Shaun Udal may not feel like a full County Championship, but Middlesex’s chances of retaining the Twenty20 Cup in 2009 will disappear entirely if he retires.

Maybe my naming him my Man of the Tournament will persuade him to at least be around for the Twenty20. If Shaun Pollock, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath can manage these four-over spells in their dotage, surely Shaun Udal can too.

The difference is evident long before one reaches the ground. The bus to Lord’s fills up with elderly men wearing red-and-yellow ties, whereas the bus to Headingley is packed with groups of young men dressed as medieval knights or popular chanteuses. On the top deck, a beach ball is tossed around, occasionally descending downstairs to be propelled back up with some force.

I get off before the more fancily-dressed, heading through the members’ entrance to the sanity of the East Stand while they go two more stops and take up position in the West.

Headingley on Test match Saturday is divided into four zones. In the Football Stand to the south Yorkshire’s plutocracy grace this premier sporting event with their presence. To the north and northeast are the general cricket followers, while the southeast and east is filled with the Yorkshire members, possibly the toughest conversational company known to cricket.

The MCC member’s view of cricket is an impressionist painting, the Yorkshireman’s a sheaf of detailed engineering blueprints. Suggest at Lord’s that Ashwell Prince reminds you of that West Indian fellow Gomes and someone will nod understandingly. The Tyke will snort and give a point-by-point dissection of exactly how Gomes’ technique was different, his range of shot completely other and generally make it clear that you do not know what you are talking about. Only when countered with an encyclopaedic treatment of the parallels will a grudging truce be offered.

But what makes Headingley Headingley is the West Stand. This is where Sir Drinkalot and Amy Winelake (and their clones) are spending their Saturday. Round the ground at lunch, I spotted three separate groups wearing t-shirts proclaiming this to be some lad’s stag do. Enough of them know enough to spot when England are doing particularly well or badly and can organise suitable cheering, but for many the cricket is almost irrelevant.

They spend the morning session quietly enough, sluicing down the beer which will sustain them through a hard afternoon. Thereafter, the rival groups indulge in posturing and taunting each other. They used to make beer snakes, formed by stacking the hundreds of empty plastic pints, but there are signs at the gates now warning that such manufacture will result in ejection from the ground and only one is attempted. They practice the toxic variant on the Mexican wave which involves tearing up newspapers and anything else to hand and chucking them up in the air, the prevailing wind ensuring that the debris will interrupt play as the batsmen clear the wicket of litter.

And so they while away the afternoon, getting louder and drunker, some of them get thrown out or arrested for disorderly or violent behaviour, while a few yards away there is a cricket match going on. It is simply an extension of their normal Friday night routine of wandering around in packs and getting bladdered – they’re just doing it at the Test rather than at the Scarbrough Taps in the centre of town.

And it’s impossible for anyone else to concentrate wholly on the cricket while they’re at it. Your eye is ineluctably drawn to the knot of policemen burrowing their way into the noisiest bunch or the huge clump of balloons they have launched for no obvious reason. If this coincides with a wicket falling or a brilliant shot, the distraction is highly annoying, but at times when the cricket is flaccid one can almost be grateful for their unquenchable enthusiasm – at the safe distance of 180 yards in the members’ area it can even be amusing.

But why they come remains a mystery.

The Mexican wave may be the highlight of the day for crowds in Test grounds around the world © Getty Images

The house was only 98% full on the fourth afternoon and the cricket was enervatingly tedious to watch, but still the group in the Upper Compton stand who were trying to start a Mexican wave found no takers. Not until the game’s corpse was twitching its last on the final afternoon did one get going.

A Lord’s Test crowd needs little more than the cricket to keep it entertained in the main arena. Announcements of the names of the new bowler and the incoming batsman and instant replays on the big screens are all we get during play.

The only irrelevancies come during the lunch intervals on the first three days, when marching bands are deployed to persuade the lazier punters to get out of the stands and into the numerous catering outlets. Some years ago, MCC were prepared to apply the ultimate sanction, but incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into English law has put a stop to the use of bagpipers.

It’s not that a Lord’s crowd is unresponsive. The mighty bass rumble of the massed ranks of the MCC getting to their feet and bull-roaring the England bowlers on as they shot West Indies out for 54 on the Friday evening in 2000 will echo long in my memory, as will the four hours of anxious silence the following day as England inched towards the target, and the near-hysterical yells of relief as Dominic Cork clattered the last dozen or so runs to level the series.

It’s just that you need to do something special to impress a massively-experienced Lord’s crowd. I’ve just completed my 20th full Test there, but there are thousands of people who have many more spectator caps than I in attendance every day and are not going to be fobbed off with any old rubbish.

But it takes more than a Mexican wave to impress the Lord's crowd© Getty Images

Nor is Lord’s too posh to get down and dirty. At the county Twenty20s the previous month, we had all the modern trimmings. When Sky didn’t turn up to get in everyone’s way, we had pre-match entertainment in the form of highlights packages from a Middlesex one-day final win from the 80s and an IPL game, instant replays on the screens, a plethora of announcements, constant yelling and cheering from the 15000 crowd, a fair amount of it fuelled by copious drinking – and those infernal musical stings every time a boundary was hit or a wicket fell.

“Infernal”, yes, but I’m not sure whether my objection is a principled one or simply on grounds of execrable taste. I hate just about every song they excerpt; perhaps I’d be a lot less irritated by them if they were sampling the “Hey-ho, let’s go” intro to The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop”, the “Oh My God, I can’t believe it” bit from the Kaiser Chiefs, Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” and Roy Harper’s “When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease”. (Sadly, I can’t think of an occasion when it would be appropriate to use my all-time favourite cricket-related song, Half Man Half Biscuit’s “F***ing Hell, It’s Fred Titmus!”.)

Twenty20 is not Test cricket and does not lend itself to quietly contemplative appreciation as the game unfolds its subtle drama. If you want that, all you have to do is avoid limited-over games and attend domestic first-class cricket – whichever cricket country you are in.

Nor is Lord’s entirely typical of English grounds. Headingley is an altogether different barrel of monkeys, whose delights and disappointments I shall discuss following the next Test.