David Morgan will succeed Ray Mali as the presidnet of the ICC © Getty Images

Dear David Morgan (or is it Dai?),

First and foremost, may I offer my heartfelt if somewhat belated congratulations. In graduating from the Lord’s Management Training Centre to be “elected” as the next president of our beloved game’s occasionally respected and ritualistically derided governing body, you have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Welsh takeover of cricket knows few bounds.

I’m sure you had your sights trained on the top job in rugby union (and may well still do so), but as consolation prizes go, this is preferable, surely, to a wooden spoon. Not least when it involves taking charge, albeit in mostly name only, of a business whose latest “consolidated financial statement” (accounts to you and me, squire) reveals a net surplus that has inched up, year-on-year, by the small matter of 700% ($4.98m to $39.45m).

Of course, I realise that there is only so much that is within your power – and, if you’ll accept a bit of advice, squabbling with Indians is less than heartily recommended as a means of enhancing said power. And then there’s all those advisory committees populated by meddling do-gooder ex-players instead of honest-to-goodness businessmen-turned-administrators like your good self. Listen to them with half an ear, yes, but remember that, while they have nothing to lose, you and the other members of the Ooby-Dubai-Do branch of the Frank Sinatra Appreciation Society have pensions, profit-sharing clauses and vested interests to protect.

The last thing I would want to do is to add to your burden, David/Dai, but remember, it will be on your watch, in 2009, that the ICC celebrates its centenary. Given that the first 98-and-a-half years have not exactly been marked by uninterrupted brotherly love, you’ll have your work cut out changing public perceptions, but I’ve got confidence in you.

You could do worse than launch your reign with a spot of pomp, circumstance and Shirley Bassey singing “Hey Big Spender” – patriotic AND multi-racial. Or even splash out and get Abba back on stage doing “Money, Money, Money”. That would certainly demonstrate your commitment to being on-message. That said, by way of balancing the books, you might deem it appropriate to bring on Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder for a rendition of “Ebony and Ivory”. I’d suggest a blast of “War – What Is It Good For?”, but Edwin Starr, sadly, is no longer with us. And besides, Steve or Mark might take offence.

I do have one fairly major concern. Unless what I read in the papers is woefully wide of the mark, it seems you have not, as yet, mapped out anything that could be described as a strategic masterplan. Or even, for that matter, an unstrategic so-so plan. If that is indeed the case, may I humbly offer some pointers on behalf of your most passionate constituents? Or, to make things simpler, a wish list. Just to make your life that wee bit easier, don’t feel obliged to make all five come true: three or four will suffice.

1) Insist – and if that means stamping your foot and singing Sospan Fach, be my guest - that Zimbabwe should play no further part in officially-sanctioned events until that bounder Mugabe has vacated the crease;

2) Tackle the burnout beast and sort out the slackers by tearing up the current Future Tours Programme and replacing it with a fixed annual requirement. We can’t have some sides playing two Tests a year and another 16. How are Bangladesh going to improve? How are we going to persuade anybody under the age of 15 that it might be worth trying to bowl fast for a living? Impose a minimum of eight and a maximum of 12 Tests, 15-20 ODIs and as many Twenty20s as you can pack into either a week or a sardine can;

3) Renegotiate the current TV deal, ensuring:

a) An annual Twenty20 World Cup replaces the Champions Trophy, the latter to be ceremonially cremated at the earliest possible opportunity and the ashes sent to Siberia;

b) Highlights programmes last a minimum of one hour (excluding any Mark Nicholas extemporising);

c) Richie Benaud, or a deft impersonator of same, commentates on every match (for exception, see d);

d) Ian Chappell and Ian Botham do three-hour shifts during every Ashes series, refereed by Bob Willis and David Boon;

e) The banning of expressions such as “crackerjack shot”, “My word!” or any other exultations that ought only to ever issue forth from the mouths of chaps named Jeeves or Bertie;

4) Change the voting system – the longer a nation has been a full ICC member, and hence the more deep-rooted its sense of invincibility, entitlement and moral rectitude, the less say it should have. Give Bangladesh four votes, Pakistan three, New Zealand, West Indies and India two, England, Australia and South Africa one, and Sri Lanka three and a half – on condition the Muppets retire forthwith, gracefully or otherwise. And give Nepal the veto;

5) Legalise ball-tampering for the last 15 overs before the new ball is due. Introduce legislation, however, decreeing that, before the start of every session, each member of the fielding side is subjected to a strip-search for metallic objects, creams, liquids and jellybabies, followed by a nail-filing session from a qualified pedicurist. An independent and/or neutral one, ideally.

	Muttiah Muralitharan’s attempt to overhaul Shane Warne’s Test-record tally is all set to be blacked out after news agencies decided to extend their boycott after a dispute with Cricket Australia © Getty Images

The immediate and shameful result of this utterly indefensible policy – and I say this even more as a fan than a journalist with a defensive axe or three to grind - may well be a blackout for the most eagerly-anticipated and poignant feat of the century to date, arguably in any sport: Muttiah Muralitharan’s attempt in Hobart later this week to harvest the seven wickets he needs to overhaul Shane Warne’s Test-record tally.

The broader picture is even more scandalous. In heedlessly, greedily following the lead of the Rugby World Cup organisers over the use of photographs on the web, and the flat racing authorities in Britain before them, Cricket Australia have chosen to ignore an inescapable verity. To wit, the written media provide the best free advertising in town. When newspapers here were asked to stump up a fee to print racing cards a few years ago, a one-day blanket blackout by the editors was all it took to force a rapid rethink and red-faced retraction.

Can you imagine a world in which Warner and his multitudinous Brothers charged correspondents for the privilege of sitting in dingy screening rooms and reviewing their movies? Or where Sony imposed a fee on those charged with reviewing their CDs? Or where correspondents were obliged to stump up money to cover a General Election? Easier to picture a racoon winning the Tour de France without the aid of a copious helping of drugs, right?

The ultimate sufferers in this case, of course, are not reporters, editors and filthy-rich newspaper magnates, but cricket lovers across the world, notably those millions without access to broadband connections and satellite dishes. To impose accreditation bans for publications and agencies that refuse to pay for this alleged privilege is to deny the public the detailed, insightful reports that deepen their knowledge and fuel their interest. In other words, to put it in a way that might chime rather better with contemporary mentalities at board level, to deprive the public is to risk alienation and an almost certain drain on future profits.

Of course, we all know those boards tend to focus on short-term forecasts and jam today, but still. However impractical it might seem, a suspension of newspaper coverage might be just the ticket. All you editors out there: come on, take a stand – and teach these buggers a lesson.

	“Human error” is no longer a get-out-of-jail-free card: too much is at stake. © Getty Images

As befits a game where millimetres, fingernails and the teeniest of deflections can make or break a match or career, no sport has drunk so heavily from the technological well as cricket. The contrast with baseball, a kindred spirit in so many ways, could not be starker.

Indeed, the unthinkable happened in Dubyaland this week. By a vote of 25 to 5, the general managers of the 30 Major League Baseball franchises endorsed, in principle, the use of instant replay to assist umpires with boundary calls: whether potential home runs are hit fair or foul, whether shots carry over fences or hit the top and bounce back, and whether fans interfere with possible homers. One small step for man, one mighty leap into the dark for baseball-kind.

To date, the game’s outright, almost snooty, rejection of technology has been in direct contrast to the way cricket – and, for that matter, American football – has embraced it. Even in 1985, when the outcome of the World Series between the St Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals was effectively decided by a blown call at first base by Don Denkinger, the clamour for electronic assistance amounted to no more than a few harrumphs and the odd rant.

The players’ largely calm acceptance of their lot is not that hard to comprehend: when a team plays 162-plus games a season, and each batter can anticipate at least four innings per outing, the belief is that rough and smooth tend to cancel each other out. Even now, there is no specific timeframe for the advent of the replay umpire on the diamond. And anyone who watched last month’s World Series cannot have been left in any doubt about the frequency of erroneous judgements by the four onfield umps, most notably with regard to whether a pitch has located the strike zone. Which is, admittedly, even more taxing a decision than a leg-before ruling, for the simple reason that the target is strictly invisible as well as open to subjective stretching and squashing.

Meanwhile, back in cricketland, following the England and Wales Cricket Board’s recent announcement that it would not be continuing its trial of referrals in county cricket (another neglected Duncan Fletcher legacy, albeit one aped from American football), the MCC World Cricket Committee has gone in the opposite direction, rightly pointing out that the flaw in the British system was that the third umpire could only be referred to if one of his onfield brethren had made “a clear and obvious mistake”.

The palpable flaw in the ECB experiment, deployed in televised one-day games only, was to entrust judge and jury duties to a colleague of the onfield officials: another umpire. Expecting these particular team-mates and soul brothers to rat on each other was always a massively naïve proposition. Small wonder no verdicts (or at least none of which I am aware) were overturned. The blindingly obvious solution – so blindingly obvious it was blithely ignored - is to invest the match referee, or some other disinterested observer, with the casting vote.

The MCC committee, whose members include Michaels Atherton and Brearley, Steve Waugh, Courtney Walsh and Majid Khan, also proposes that the third umpire “be able to make his own decision with the help of much more expensive and sophisticated technological evidence”. Such as “Ultra Motion” cameras to detect those gossamer-thin edges that so often elude the official judging lbws and bat-pads. What was unclear from the press statement was whether the third official should be empowered to be proactive rather than simply reactive. Of course he should.

MCC has offered to help finance these cameras for any trial period, which should take place, the committee concluded, during a Test series, where “the highest quality of technological presence is assured”. Athers and co also argue that Hawk-Eye should be utilised to track deliveries for lbw decisions up to the point of impact with the batsman, but not Hawk-Eye’s "Predictive Path", currently used on TV to forecast the ball’s likely subsequent direction. All of which seems eminently sensible.

So who’s right? Is cricket correct in bending over backwards to ensure the squarest, fairest deal possible for the players – and stuff the umpires’ egos? Or has baseball been justified in insisting that the revolution should not, on any account, be televised?

	Nobody’s perfect; not even the machines. But they’re still cleverer than us mere mortals © Getty Images

The arguments are likely to plague sport in general for some time yet, not least in the aftermath of last month’s rugby union World Cup final, where a potentially decisive England try was ruled out, possibly in error, after an extensive consultation between referee and TV official. One camera angle told one story, another told a different one. Nobody’s perfect; not even the machines. But they’re still cleverer than us mere mortals.

During the closing stages in Mohali today came a priceless example of why we cannot trust the players – if we ever could. As Rohit Sharma chased a boundary-bound blow from Shahid Afridi, he reached down, collected the ball and threw, but not before his right hand touched the hoarding. When the camera alighted on Sharma a moment or two later, he was wearing a bemused expression of purest innocence. But he knew his hand had made contact, and one assumes he knew the law. The only conclusion to be drawn therefore, at least from one’s armchair, was that he thought he’d got away with it. Fortunately, he didn’t. Fortunately, in the interests of fairness and legitimacy, umpires seldom take fielders at their word these days. Why should they? That said, to pretend that rises in salaries have been accompanied in inverse proportion by a decline in manners and honesty is to buy into the hoarily romantic old theory, and wholly unproveable assumption, that previous generations were more honourable.

To retain credibility, professional sport, its practitioners and audience, deserve as much justice as is humanly possible. And if the humans can’t do it on their own, let the machines help wherever and whenever possible, within reason. “Human error” is no longer a get-out-of-jail-free card: too much is at stake. As Van Morrison seldom tires of pointing out whenever he performs his 40-year-old showstopper Cyprus Avenue, it’s too late to stop now. Far too late. Pandora’s box is open. Live with it.

	Besides, even if he has actually revealed very little that we haven’t heard or suspected before, why shouldn’t Fletcher have his say? © Getty Images

The Daily Mail isn’t one of the planet’s best-selling newspapers for nothing. They know what they’re doing in Kensington. Snapping up serialisation rights to the former England coach’s autobiography was a guaranteed winner. Here was the perfect subject: a scorned public figure with a year’s salary and a hefty publisher’s advance in his pocket, nothing to lose and an axe or 50 to grind.

Boycott’s displeasure is the most laughable. As he admits himself, he wasn’t above firing a few darts during the course of his own literary ramblings. Like Fletcher, only immeasurably more so, Boycott felt as if it was him against the whole wide world (bar his mum and a portion of the Headingley faithful). That’s what made his books so readable and engrossing, regardless of one’s sympathies. Given that sporting autobiographies almost invariably throw up more anodyne tosh than the average party conference speech, we should be grateful for the exceptions.

Besides, even if he has actually revealed very little that we haven’t heard or suspected before, why shouldn’t Fletcher have his say? It may all be somewhat self-serving, but so what? Surely, having been constrained and discreet for so long, he is entitled to give his point of view. That he should have kept those lips firmly buttoned while he was in charge of the England dressing rooms and tour buses went with the territory. He was evasive, yes, but, in declining either to draw attention to himself or criticise players publicly, he was only doing what you or I would do in his shoes. Those particular shoes, of course, being those of the foreign coach of a national squad, England’s first such in a major team sport. He was certainly a more robust advertisement for Zimbabwe than Sven was for Sweden.

Fletcher’s most serious complaint, about the panic-stricken response to England’s Ashes debacle, is also well-founded. Thanks in no small part to media overkill, the hand-wringing dismay that greeted that 5-0 massacre was understandable, even forgivable. Much as we Poms tried to kid ourselves, the facts remain: muddle-headed selection, opponents who just happened to be one of the greatest sides ever to grace a greensward, vengeance-hungry home crowds and the weight of excess expectation were always going to prove too potent an antidote to English hope. To launch an inquiry into the health of the game back home, less than 18 months after those same opponents had been vanquished in one of the most memorable of all Test rubbers, was knee-jerkiness at its most repugnant.

The result of all this navel-gazing, the so-called Schofield Report, headed by the former chief executive of the European PGA, seems merely to have created a couple more layers of authority at the ECB while emphasising how vast the gulf remains between cricket and thoroughly individual pursuits such as golf. Sir Clive Woodward, a man steeped in team culture and club versus country squabbles, might have brought something worthwhile to the party, but Ken Schofield, ex-Holy Roman Emperor of the world’s most selfish sport? Pur-lease!

How soon we forget. Before Fletcher brought his forward presses and clamped lips aboard, England had not won a Test series in Pakistan since 1962, nor in South Africa since 1965, nor in the Caribbean since 1968. Never had they won a rubber in Sri Lanka. That all these droughts ended on Fletcher’s watch, thanks in no small part to his technical innovations against spin and that insistence on favouring players of a multi-dimensional nature, was anything but coincidental.

I’m not suggesting he should have kept his job. His time had come. He’d done his bit. If that Ashes triumph represented a career-defining peak, injuries and sudden loss of form ravaged any medium-term plans. Come next month’s Tests in Sri Lanka, there may be just five survivors of the XI that beat Australia at Trent Bridge in 2005: Michael Vaughan, Ian Bell, Kevin Pietersen, Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard – and lack of match fitness may keep out the last two. A new team had to be rebuilt far sooner than anticipated, which meant checking out the counties’ wares, an option Fletcher was ill-placed, not to say ill-disposed, to take. Too quick to make up his mind, too slow to admit errors, stubbornness nobbled him, as it can be relied upon to do with those who enjoy prolonged success so much their egos prevent them from adapting to changed circumstances. Had Peter Moores not been at the helm, Owais Shah, Ryan Sidebottom and Graeme Swann would not be limbering up for five-day duty.

The major casualty in all this, sadly, is Andrew Strauss. Had Flintoff not been handed the captain’s stripes for Australia, a decision fit to rank among the most grievous selectorial cock-ups in the boob-riddled annals of English cricket, it is difficult to imagine that the Middlesex man would now be preparing for a winter in Ealing. While skippering the side to victory against Pakistan, he had done little wrong, and quite a lot right. Flintoff’s suitability, on the other hand, had already been brought into question when he overbowled himself against Sri Lanka at Lord’s. Imran Khan and Richie Benaud may have defied such a generalisation, but genuine all-rounders find life too easy to make good international captains.

Granted, perhaps Strauss has been found out by a few bowlers, especially those happy to feed that compulsive hook, but he strikes me as too intelligent not to be able to come up with an alternative strategy. Unfortunately, having to suppress his disappointment over the captaincy, not something Boycott was ever shy about doing, may well have undermined the pace of his recovery.

Unlike the now unemployed Fletcher, Strauss has kept schtum, albeit less out of choice than contractual obligation. But what was the worst he could have said? That the decision to appoint Flintoff was misguided but that he’d have to lump it? Blimey. Stop the presses. Alert the libel lawyers. I’ll bet Strauss would have felt better for getting it off his chest; Mrs Strauss too, not to mention the family cat.

One can only conclude that the world would be a better place if those of us gazing into that goldfish bowl, let alone its inhabitants, were treated like adults.