VVS Laxman steered India to within a boundary of Pakistan's total © AFP

I took in a session of the second day of the Delhi Test from a strange angle: very high up in the West Stand and perpendicular to the wicket. The novelty of watching the action side-on (fast bowling seems faster because you can't see the ball once someone like Akhtar lets it go and it's startling to see how far forward batsmen stretch in defence) soon wore off because it was hard to tell why someone was beaten or what the ball was doing.

Wasim Jaffer plays the flick to the square leg boundary as well as any man alive. He brought one off against Akhtar in the first over of the Indian innings and for a fleeting moment he looked like Greg Chappell in his prime, all upright elegance. He hit three more like that, two off Sohail Tanvir and another one off Akhtar and they all went for four. Jaffer is an enigma: it's hard to reconcile the man who plays the grand on-drive and that lordly flick, with the anonymous player who will wait inertly upon events, over after over, whose bat sounds like cracked sheeshum instead of seasoned willow each time he pushes or drives on the off-side. I like him very much: I just wish he'd hurry up and make another hundred so that we can begin to take his place for granted at the top of the order.

Yuvraj strolled into the arena occasionally in his capacity as twelfth man or something. Each time that happened lots of people rushed to the front of the stand and peered down and screamed "Yuvi!" The man in front of me, who stood and obscured the action whenever a shot was played (he'd leap to his feet, adjust himself and press his cell phone to his ear in practiced sequence) complained to his seated friend about Yuvraj's exclusion. Not playing him in Delhi—saalon nein Dilli mein nahin khilaya—seemed to aggravate the injustice done him. I began to feel like an Arsenal fan marooned among Man U maniacs. Yahoos for Yuvraj to the left of me, Lumpen against Laxman behind me. Unwilling to watch VVS make his magic among these brutes, I left the stadium when Tendulkar ran himself out and found myself a sympathetic television set.

The rest, I hope, will be history. Laxman came in when the score was 88 for 4 and inspite of losing Dravid on 93 and Dhoni at 208, he steered India to within a boundary of the Pakistan total by close of play. He was, as he often is in Test matches, the best batsman on show. It is absurd that he bats at six. Kumble has done nearly everything right in his debut as captain. Before the match began he was forthright in his endorsement of Laxman as an automatic selection for the Test team. Now that VVS has vindicated his judgment, the skipper should promote him to five in the batting order, ahead of Ganguly. Number three would be better, but down here in the VVS dugout, we aren't in a hurry. Test cricket's our game: we're used to taking things one day at a time.

	After initially alleging that he was racially attack on him, Greg Chappell played down his remarks © Getty Images

I feel for Greg Chappell. It's bad enough that he was punched by a disgruntled fan so hard that he thought his jaw was broken. What made his trauma worse was that he knew the brute was a bigot. And then the really horrible part: the BCCI covered it all up. He wrote to the board about it but the Board did nothing. In a documentary about his time as coach made by the ABC, Chappell told us how he knew the man was a racist : "There are plenty of Indian cricketers the guy could have attacked but he chose to attack me." Right. Chappell was the only white man there. His assaulter was black. What other conclusion is possible? Not only was Chappell punched, the Herald Sun reported that Judy, his wife, was pushed over.

The Punch and Judy show is a puppet play that's been a traditional entertainment in English seaside towns since the seventeenth century. It features a hunchbacked brute called Punch who amuses his audience of little children by beating his wife Judy with a stick, trying to murder their baby and generally behaving in a grotesquely criminal fashion. The puppet master is called the Professor.

In Chappell's new rendering of the show, Punch represents the BCCI, racist Indian fans and scheming Indian players. Judy represents the nurturing Chappell, and the Baby is Indian cricket. Judy does everything she can to raise the baby right but Punch doesn't let her. He hits everyone with his stick and his audience instead of being horrified is amused, in keeping with the child-like, amoral nature of oriental spectators.

This would be an amusing play but Chappell keeps changing the script. A day after the newspapers filed stories on Chappell's racist ordeal, the BCCI rubbished the reports, saying that it had done everything necessary to upgrade Chappell's security and categorically denying Chappell's claim that he had been the victim of a racist assault. You would expect the Board to say that, only in this case, Chappell seemed to agree.

"It's old news," he told the Indian television channel CNN-IBN. "It was a very emotional time when I made these remarks. It's a long way back and I'd like to talk about other things now."

This is more than a little odd. Chappell seemed happy enough to let the documentary be completed without comment or correction and a charge of assault aggravated by racism is a serious one. The documentary is called 'Guru Greg' and gives us Chappell's take on his time in India. The 'racist' assault happened in January so Chappell's had plenty of time to ask its producers to work in any second thoughts he had into the narrative of the film. So why would he let the allegation of racism stand in the film only to pass it off as an emotional outburst later?

The answer as supplied by Chappell himself, seems to have to do with business. Chappell has just accepted a three year contract with the Rajasthan cricket board to take charge of the state's cricket academy. So he wants to move on. It's hard to know what to make of this. Is Chappell asking us to accept that he had a hissy fit then and cried 'racism' when it wasn't? Or is he saying that it was racism and what he said in the film stands, but his current contractual commitments make it inconvenient for him to repeat the charge, given that Lalit Modi of the Rajasthan cricket board is also a grandee in the BCCI? Neither explanation flatters Chappell. The first makes him seem neurotic, the second suggests a cynic playing two different markets with alternative versions of the 'truth'.

Or maybe Chappell doesn't know what he means. Perhaps his Punch and Judy show, like the traditional seaside entertainment, is meant to play as farce. And perhaps Greg isn't Judy. Perhaps he's Punch, flailing about with his stick not because there's a reason but because that's what he does.

	If we want to see the top order trying to take the initiative, the captain would do well to promote VVS Laxman © Getty Images

In a perfect world he'd bat at number three with Rahul Dravid at five and Sourav Ganguly at six. In my dreams. We're going to be treated to the sight of Dravid with a point or two to prove, hunkering down in the number three trench, prepared to wait out the enemy for the duration of the battle of the Somme.

If we want to see the top order trying to take the initiative, the captain would do well to promote Laxman, who is more likely to play his shots than Dravid. In the semi-old days, Virender Sehwag used to supply the momentum at the top. In his absence the team needs someone else. Dravid is the Indian team's best batsman but his recent Test form has been iffy. Wasim Jaffer and Dravid in partnership after the loss of Dinesh Karthik's wicket is a batting vanguard designed to fight rearguard actions; not the best strategy to take to Australia.

Laxman at three would carry the fringe benefit of pushing Ganguly down to six. Ganguly has earned a place in Test team against Pakistan and if he performs, he will have earned his berth to Australia, but he should bat no higher than six. Given his fragility against the short ball it would be silly to have him bat above someone like Laxman against an Australian pace battery on bouncy pitches.

Which is why Captain Kumble might turn out to be an inspired choice. He's the one player who can disregard the hierarchies of Indian cricket and force a rational batting order on the team. Dravid was too compromised by his closeness to Greg Chappell to impose his authority on the line-up after the Australian's departure and though Mahendra Singh Dhoni doesn't seem to have a deferential bone in his body, he is possibly too 'junior' and too unproven at the Test level to tell his 'seniors' where they should bat. Kumble has been given the captaincy at the end of a magnificent career, he has nothing left to prove, he's not a batsman (and has no personal stake in the matter): consequently he's the closest India gets to the beau ideal of the selfless, disinterested leader.

With him in charge, I live in hope that the eccentric moves to replace Laxman as a Test batsman with Yuvraj will come to nothing. One reason for not making Dhoni Test captain is that it would have been harder for him to keep players who had done well for him in the shorter versions of the game, out of the Test team. The clamour to include Yuvraj in the Test team is fuelled by his limited-overs performances. A captain like Kumble who doesn't play that form of cricket any more, is insulated from those pressures.

Harbhajan Singh has his critics who argue that he isn't the wicket-taking force he once was. He had a wretched time in Pakistan in 2005-6 and an indifferent series against England soon after, but in fairness, he did pretty well against the West Indies in the last Test series he played. He took eleven wickets in two Test matches. I think he's owed an opportunity to prove himself and the Pakistan series is the right proving ground. If he doesn't take enough wickets, he ought to be dropped from the Australian tour.

It is unusual to have two keepers in the playing eleven. There's an Indian precedent in Farokh Engineer and Budhi Kunderan, but it's an unstable condition. While a specialist opening batsman is cut some slack in the matter of big runs so long as he delivers partnerships (Chetan Chauhan comes to mind), a ‘keeper-batsman playing as a specialist opener is, paradoxically, under huge pressure to score a hundred to justify the exclusion of the specialist batsmen clamouring to play in his place. It's unfair, but that's how it works and the Test series against Pakistan should be time enough to judge if Karthik is good enough to become a fixture at the top of the order.

I'd have had S Badrinath in Yuvraj's place because after nineteen tests and a batting average of thirty-three, the Punjab batsman has done enough to demonstrate that he'll never be a significant Test batsman. He's that rare creature: a great specialist limited-overs player. But it's politically impossible to drop him from consideration given his great deeds in one-day and Twenty20 cricket, so the selectors can't be faulted on that score. All things considered, they've done a decent job.