Shoaib Malik's comments were were just that, comments © AFP

"I was personally quite disappointed with Mukul's article. Yes, it was wonderfully written, factually accurate and it conveyed some excellent arguments. However, as his first post after the spectacular end to a fantastic final, I thought it was rather sour to focus half of the article on Shoaib Malik's crass comments. There were so many positives from this tournament, none more so than the excellent final, and after the turmoil that has affected cricket over this year I think it would have been far more apt to express gratitude and praise for the recovery of the game. I think any reasonable person can conclude that Malik's comments were in bad taste. I'm a Muslim in Pakistan and they certainly made me wince. However I think a paragraph expressing distate for the comments would have sufficed, rather than the torrent of negativity shown by Mukul and in numerous comments since..."

And in a second comment, he shows us, with joy and passion, how the thing is done:

"Oh, and after my previous post about what Malik said, I would just like to say that I enjoyed this tournament, and especially the final thoroughly. I absolutely loved how after being written off by so many journalists, especially in England (Hello Jonathan Agnew, whatever happened to your English team winning the World Twenty20), it was Pakistan and India that were by far the two best teams of the tournament. Pakistan won every match, except the two against India, very convincingly. India won match after match under extreme pressure in knock-out conditions. Together, we beat England, South Africa, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, and above all, we both beat Australia - comfortably! A match that looked like Pakistan's bowlers were all over, turned around with some fantastic batting by the underrated Gautam Ghambir, decent bowling by [Irfan] Pathan and RP Singh (or 'Rudra the smiling assassin', as we like to call him in our house) and some long overdue pressure-induced poor shots from the top and middle-order Pakistani batsmen. With 54 runs needed of four overs, only 22 having come off the last four overs and only one batsman left, the match looked all over and it seemed like the tournament would fizzle out into 24 balls of anti-climactic cricket. But old man Misbah-ul-Haq, Mr Calm-Until-Only-One-More-Shot-Is-Required ul-Haq, changed the course of the match once again. The Pakistani fans (well, speaking for myself) had hope again, and the Indian fans watched anxiously as the runs required started to get lower and lower with the balls required not going down anywhere near as much. Then when Joginder-Look-Like-A-Rabbit-In-The-Headlights Sharma took centre stage, bowled a big wide and got wallopped for a Misbah special, it looked like there would only be one winner. Jogi bowled again, Misbah crouched down and we all knew what was coming. The Ashraful scoop duly appeared, the ball went up into the air past [Mahendra Singh] Dhoni and millions, nay billions perhaps held their breath. There it was, the ball in the air and the crowd in the background. Is it clearing the rope, have Pakistan won this? Oh yes...oh no, the ball is coming down and it doesn't look like it's going to clear the boundary - a four perhaps, I'll take that!.. oh no, it's not even going that far...oh no, there's a fielder under it, it's Sreesanth, it's out. Pakistan have lost, India have won! Gutted, we were so close but my God what a match! Look world, forget that last World Cup, now this is cricket, this is entertainment! Look at those Indians, wild with jubilation and ecstatic with happiness, look at those Pakistanis, shocked and distraught, look at Misbah, who will be re-playing that shot in his dreams for the rest of his life. What an amazing start to the tournament. Chris Gayle, you finally woke up for an hour and that was out of this world. What fantastic cricket throughout the tournament. Yuvraj Singh, you can forget about that crazed Dimiti Mascarenhas belting you for sixes forever now. What an unbelievable ending, Sreesanth, you must have been shaking like jelly but the ball ended up safely in your hands and how good must you have felt. Shoaib Malik's comments? They were just that, comments. I love cricket. And my God, that was cricket, that was entertainment, that was life."

I was thinking about who the next captain of the Indian Test team might be (or should be) when I read this first-rate post by Kaushik Sunder Rajan on his blog DailyCric.You can read it here

	The successful ICC World Twenty20 was capped by a thrilling final between cricket's fiercest rivals - India and Pakistan © Getty Images

After the disastrous, 50-over World Cup in the West Indies where the death of a coach, an absurdly stretched-out schedule, exorbitantly priced tickets, and the early exit of India and Pakistan meant that everything that could go wrong did go wrong, the ICC World Twenty20 has been an administrator's dream.

The matches have attracted respectable crowds, the South Africans have been efficient hosts, the abbreviated format which many thought would make cricket a meaningless slugfest has resulted in matches played on remarkably level terms with canny bowlers more than holding their own against rampant batsmen.

Best of all the final played on Monday featured the fiercest rivalry in cricket, which, happily for the ICC, is also its biggest money-spinner.

It was an improbable outcome.

No expectations

The Pakistan team has been beset by disciplinary problems, it was bringing in a new coach and its batting stalwarts had either retired or been deemed unsuitable for this ultra-compact version of the game.

The Indians had played only one Twenty20 match. Unlike England (which pioneered the format) and South Africa, there is no domestic tournament worth its name in India built around the new format.

The Indian cricket board had been less than enthusiastic about Twenty20 because conventional ODIs have been such a reliable source of revenue.

Nobody in India, as India's captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni keeps pointing out, expected the Indian team to make any headway in the tournament.

And now they've gone and won it by a whisker after a heart-stopping final. What does this mean for the future of cricket?

The rest of the article can be read on on the BBC News website here

	Mahendra Singh Dhoni impressed the pundits with his captaincy during the ICC World Twenty20 © Getty Images

So India won.

I know it's silly to get carried away, but not since Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi have Indians watched their cricket team being led with such nerveless flair. And the Nawab was born hosed and shod with Winchester to help and a silver service in his mouth. Our current skipper does a commercial where he talks about how he could have been a ticket-collector in the railways! There's something about Dhoni …

People keep saying that he represents India's new mofussil man, the hungry provincial, but he's more than a stereotype. If stamping their feet and scowling at errant players is typical of the find-someone-to-blame reflex of Indian captains, then Dhoni is the first grown-up skipper we've had in decades. I don't think giving Joginder Sharma the last over twice-running was such a stroke of genius: he bowled short and wide and it was the tension of the game rather than Sharma, that kept Misbah-ul-Haq at bay, but Dhoni had his reasons and he backs his hunches without looking oppressed by the need to make big decisions. For that we should all be grateful. They should give him the Test captaincy. Not because Twenty20 is a guide to Test form, but because he's the only adult in Indian cricket.

Deciding to bat first turned out to be the sensible thing to do. I think the Pakistanis bowled brilliantly, better, collectively, than our lot, but Dhoni had gambled that runs on the board, batting first, would be worth a few wickets in a World Cup final and he was dead right. Umar Gul was unplayable: to bowl yorker after yorker at nearly ninety miles an hour in the bedlam of a Twenty20 game, you have to be a very superior player. And Shoaib captained like a young genius: the decision to go with spin at both ends the moment Yuvraj walked in at the fall of the second wicket was inspired. He thought him out.

When the team was announced at the start of the match, half-a-dozen times through the match and then after it was over, I thought of the parents of the Brothers Pathan. To have two sons in India's eleven, to have your older boy hit the second ball of his international career for six, to see him bowl an over, then to watch your younger son return triumphantly to form when it mattered most, to see him made the Man of this Mother of all Matches, must have been more magical than a fairy tale. Rajdeep Sardesai tells of the time Irfan took him to the home he grew up in, just to show him the improbable origins of an Indian champion. Two rooms in the compound of the mosque where his father was the Imam. Talk about happy endings!

	Shoaib Malik's decision to have spinners at both ends as soon as Yuvraj Singh came in was a masterstroke © Getty Images

"First of all I want to say something over here. I want to thank you back home Pakistan and where the Muslim lives all over the world."

This is what he said word for word because it's important to quote him correctly. The problem here isn't the syntax, it is the sentiment. I don't expect Shoaib Malik to be a politically correct intellectual, but it is reasonable to expect him to know the world of cricket that he inhabits.

It is a world where Muslims, Hindus and a Sikh currently play for England, where Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and a Hindu play for Sri Lanka, where Hashim Amla turns out for South Africa, where a Patel plays for New Zealand, where Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and Hindus play (and have always played) for India. Why would Shoaib think, then, that the Muslims of the world were collectively rooting for the Pakistan team or that they felt let down by its defeat? Did he stop to think of how Danish Kaneria, his Hindu team-mate, might feel hearing his Test skipper all but declare that the Pakistan team is a Muslim team that plays for the Muslims of the world? It is one thing to be publicly religious—Shahid Afridi thanked Allah and Matt Hayden and Shaun Pollock are proud, believing Christians—quite another to declare that your country's cricket eleven bats for international Islam.

Is this the forum to talk about this? Shouldn't Cricinfo and cricket's online community stick to cricket and leave issues like this alone? No we shouldn't, because Shoaib Malik chose to make it our business by saying it in team colours at the end of the ICC World Twenty20 final. He said something that goes to the heart of cricket's loyalties, its culture, its plurality of race and faith and language. If Shoaib took in nothing else about the final, he must have noticed that the bowler who took his wicket was called Irfan Khan Pathan, that the Indian team's most visible cheerleader, the guy who was hugging Indian players in turn at the end of the game, was one Shah Rukh Khan. I feel a residual distaste in even mentioning their names because both Shah Rukh and Irfan are admired in India for what they've achieved, not who they are. But sometimes it is important to spell things out and Shoaib could do with the instruction.

	Kevin Pietersen: One of England's South African-born stars © Getty Images

They had a genuine claim to being innovators: Tony Greig pioneered a fielding position, silly point, and a remarkable new shot, the upper cuff (where the batsman deliberately helps the ball over the slips) against that demonic fast-bowling firm: Thomson & Lillee. Pietersen's on-side play is original, specially his stork shot, where, one-legged on his front foot, he smacks the ball hard through midwicket.

As a spectator, though, I found the way Greig played to the gallery irritating and I find Pietersen's narcissism tiresome. Fans willingly indulge genius: I was happy, for example, to watch Shane Warne act out his little turns, ball after ball — the pantomime anguish, the chin-in-hand Thinker — because he was the best bowler in the world and his antics seemed part of the riyaz, the routines, of greatness. With Greig and Pietersen (good players, not great ones) the look-at-me mannerisms came across as a huckster's props; there was always the nagging feeling that their onfield swagger was a bluff waiting to be called.

They even made the same motor-mouth mistakes against the world's best sides. Greig promised to make Vivian Richards's West Indians grovel and Pietersen, before the Twenty20 game against Australia, spoke of the opportunity of 'humiliating' Ricky Ponting's team. England was pulverised on both occasions, though the formats were different: Test and Twenty20, tragedy and farce.

	The ICL has hastened the formation of the IPL - the most important re-structuring of domestic cricket in India since the abolition of the Pentangular © AFP

When Mohammad Yousuf signed up for the ICL, I felt a stirring of anticipation. Every other signee was a has-been or a never-will-be. But Yousuf was different. He was Test cricket's best batsman last year, he has years left in the game, and if someone like him was willing to take the risk, maybe there was something to Zee's league after all.

But keen though I am to see a commercial league for cricket in India, I don't see Zee delivering it. They don't have the grounds (though that's not an insuperable problem) and, more importantly, they don't seem to have the attention of India's current players. No one in India is going to turn on their sets to watch Andrew Hall bowl to Rohan Gavaskar. Anand Vasu's excellent survey in Tehelka of all the obstacles that made Zee's league a long-shot, ought to make Kapil Dev and Subhash Chandra nervous.

However, Zee's proprietor has always maintained that his scheme isn't payback for the TV rights the BCCI didn't sell him, but a pioneering scheme for improving the lot of the Indian cricketer, a token of Chandra's commitment to the greater good of Indian cricket. History might bear him out—though not, perhaps, in the way he meant.

The historical significance of Zee's league is that it has goosed the BCCI into announcing the Indian Premier League, a Twenty20 competition. Like the ICL the IPL will be made up of clubs operating franchises, in this case, sold by the BCCI.

If this happens it'll be the most important re-structuring of Indian cricket since the abolition of the Pentangular (made up of teams based on religion and ethnicity) and the institution of the Ranji Trophy (which instituted the territorial principle in domestic first-class cricket). In fact this is so important that it is hard to believe that the coterie of politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen who run the BCCI have thought through the implications of their move.

If companies invest in franchises, if they pay large sums of money for the the privilege of participating, if they spend millions buying and selling players, they will want a share of the gate money and the television revenue that the league generates. The BCCI has already announced that they have foreseen this and franchises will be given their share. Which begs the crucial question: why would the franchisees in the long term leave the running of the league to a bunch of shamateur administrators voted in via shambolic elections who have no money invested in the league's success or failure? The BCCI seems to believe that it can privatize the game while keeping its honorary featherbeds intact. I don't think it can.

If the IPL works in its first two seasons, the pressure to franchise other forms of the game will be pretty much irresistible. Fifteen years ago the idea that a first-class cricket team ought to represent a franchise rather than territorial belonging would have appalled Indians. But the example of live league football beamed in from Europe has persuaded many of us that teams can generate excitement and loyalty without being tethered to the principle of territorial representation. Once a cricket competition based on franchises succeeds, I predict there will be no resistance to renaming Mumbai's Ranji trophy team, the Bombay Banshees. Maybe there'd be more than one Bombay first-class club team given the richness of its cricket culture. The Worli Whirlwinds, perhaps, or (why not) the Colaba Clubmen?

The prospect of India hosting cosmopolitan cricket leagues for Twenty20, ODI and First-Class cricket, run in a business-like way, with decent ground facilities and players from anywhere—Kenya, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, the West Indies—would so tickle the fancy (and vanity) of Indian audiences that I'm certain that the system would have a sporting chance of making money. If it did, the cannier members of Indian cricket's bureaucracy would see the writing on the wall and make their peace with the club barons by inviting them into the boardroom of what once used to be the BCCI.

And Mr Subhash Chandra would not only have the opportunity to bid for television rights all over again, he would have the priceless satisfaction of knowing that he, out of his disinterested concern for Indian cricket, was responsible for the revolution. That, surely, would be its own reward.