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.

	Hawk-Eye extrapolates the trajectory and bounce of the ball to see if it was going to hit the stumps or not © Cricinfo Ltd

(The two-and-a-half months I've spent writing this blog and reading the comments responding to the posts helped me construct a stereotype of the contemporary fan. Here it is.)

One fan and a fielding position

I can remember the year I discovered that I had the wrong idea about deep fine-leg. I had played cricket right through my childhood and followed it enthusiastically on the radio afterwards (and at Feroz Shah Kotla whenever a Test came round), but I didn't know my fielding positions. I thought deep-fine leg stood near the boundary just a few degrees to the left of the keeper. I thought long-leg was deep fine-leg. Why was I so deluded? Because when batsmen glanced the ball past the lunging left hand of the wicket-keeper, radio commentators often used that ready-made phrase, "and he's tickled it fine, just wide of the keeper." Ergo, deep fine-leg.

The point of the story is not my ignorance (naturally) but the holes in the cricketing knowledge of my generation of fans. I can hear readers say, "speak for yourself, loser, I knew the difference between long-leg and deep fine-leg before I was five". I freely admit my special and particular stupidity, but I still think that the generation of fans who grew up after the mid-80s are better informed about cricket that those of us who were socialised into cricket in earlier decades.

The rest of the article can be read on The Week's website, here

	Chaminda Vaas had the game wrapped up in three overs of nagging swing © AFP

Why does watching Sri Lanka win give non-Sri Lankans so much pleasure? It's not because they're the little guys. They're not. The Sri Lankans won the World Cup eleven years ago: they've been big boys in the one-day game for over a decade now. No, we love watching the Sri Lankans win not out of chivalry, but because they're the new West Indians. Their crowds make more musical noise than Caribbean spectators ever did and their players do the gay cavalier business to the manner born.

Three of these guys are so old they should be playing veterans' charity matches. Vaas, Murali Muralitharan and Sanath Jayasuriya helped Sri Lanka win the Big One in the last millennium for god's sake! Sanath's even retired once. But instead of sitting on their rocking chairs waiting for their pension cheques, they're in the West Indies, terrorizing a new generation of cricketing infants.

Who can forget Vaas's return catch to dismiss Robin Uthappa? Young Uthappa decided to go after the slow-bowling ancient, whacked him for a couple of fours and then swatted another ball (that flat-batted straight hit that modern batting brutes so favour) only to have Vaas catch it with both hands on his follow through. Exit, bewildered youth, sent on his way with a few instructions.

If Vaas favours the cold steely look, Muralitharan is the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of modern cricket: like the giggling guru, he just never stops grinning. Watching him frolic with delight after taking catches in the outfield as the Sri Lankans picked off long-faced Indian batsmen, I wondered why Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar and the rest didn't smile more. Why did they always look like oppressed Atlases holding up a billion people?

And then there's Jayasuriya: he has held Sri Lanka's batting together for a decade now and he has bowled more balls in one-day cricket than most specialist bowlers. But does he go around looking as if he's in the trough end of a manic-depressive cycle? No. He gets hit by Shane Bond (consensually the most fearsome fast bowler on view in this tournament) and then takes the Kiwi attack apart in trademark fashion. I look at him and think, if he can carry on batting exactly the way he has always done at the top of the order, why is Tendulkar batting like a barnacle at number four?

Nor do the young ones show any sign of being mass-produced mediocrities: as an Indian fan I've seen a lot of those in the last two years. Lasith Malinga's so wonderfully strange they should freeze him in his delivery stride and suspend him in formaldehyde for posterity. Chamara Silva is the kind of young batsman Team India would die for. Even the middling Sri Lankans, neither young nor old, are remarkable. Sangakkara is on the brink of batting greatness, he's a fine wicket keeper and he talks such a good game that most countries would have fast-tracked him into captaincy by now. Dilhara Fernando, after years of waywardness is bowling fast and straight again.

They won this one without Malinga, but they'll need him against the Australians. I'll be rooting for the Sri Lankans to win for many reasons and one of them is that Sri Lanka is the only team on show that brings the variety of Test match bowling to limited overs cricket: medium, fast-medium, fast, plus left-arm orthodox and right arm off spin, absurdly unorthodox! Blond highlights, round-arm thunderbolts, leg-spinning off-spinners, deadly old men: weird and wonderful is what they are—it's why we love them.