I told you last time how much I wanted to beat the company record for the number of consecutive completed deals, mate, how I wanted to stop people comparing me with You Know Who © Getty Images

The curtain opens on a therapist’s office. We hear David Bowie sing – “Alllll … you’ve got … to do … is … wiiiinnnn ...”

On the back of the door is a dartboard featuring the face of a man in a battered green cap, a dart in each eye and a third through his neck. The walls are bedecked with posters of Steve Waugh, Don Bradman, Paul Hogan, Kylie Minogue, Phar Lap and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, and a Mike Hussey “Diets for Hungry Cricketers” calendar. Lying on the couch is a man wearing a sports jacket, chinos, open-neck shirt and battered green cap. He is sweating profusely, a paperback entitled “How To Make People Stop People Hating Your Guts” clasped to his chest.

Therapist: So…[puffs on pipe]…how’ve you been?

Patient: Not too clever, mate, not too clever at all.

Therapist: Had a bit of a bluey after that trip to Perth, did you?

Patient: Biggest one I’ve ever had, I reckon.

Therapist: Did you feel a bit of a prat, then?

Patient (angrily): Prat?! You know better than to use that word with me, mate. You know it brings back bad memories.

Therapist: Of course, how could I have forgotten? Many apologies. Had a heavy session last night. Let me rephrase it more delicately. So you felt a bit of a loser, right?

Patient (even angrier, shouting): Whaaat!? That’s no better, is it, mate? I thought we managed to work that word out of my vocabulary three years ago!

Therapist: Whoops, sorry. I’ll shut up. Tell me.

Patient: Okay. Well, you never like to come off second-best, do you mate? Almost forgotten what it was like. In a way, I missed getting the passions roused, having something to prove, you know. I just wish I didn’t have to go straight to Adelaide on another job.

Therapist: Come on, you’re avoiding the issue. Why’d you have that bluey?

Patient: Because, mate, I knew we didn’t approach the Perth job in the right frame of mind. We were too nice, too soft. And because, mate, I’m supposed to set the tone and dictate strategy, I’m to blame, mate. I should have told them not to listen to what everyone back at the office was saying.

Therapist: What were they saying?

Patient: Oh, you know, mate. A load of guff about how getting the job done wasn’t enough, about how we needed to be … well, more polite, less ruthless. They were peed off, mate, about the Sydney business. There’d been letters, mate. They felt we were spoiling and betraying the company image, though I’m not sure how they work that out, mate. After all, mate, given their treatment of migrant workers and minorities in general, the company image has never exactly been as white as an albino’s balls. Anyway, mate, the fact is, once we start being nice, being chummy, being Pommy … we just don’t operate the same, mate.

Therapist (puffs on pipe with almost manic vigour): So why did you insist your team be nice?

Patient (waving away clouds of smoke): Look, mate … [cough] … had to give my … [splutter] … word … mate. They demanded it. Even the … [cough] … managing director had a word … [splutter] …mate. My job was on the line. Mate.

Therapist (through gritted teeth, snapping pipe in two): But losing one deal isn’t that big a deal, surely? You’ve got to forgive yourself.

Patient: Ain’t that easy, mate. I told you last time how much I wanted to beat the company record for the number of consecutive completed deals, mate, how I wanted to stop people comparing me with You Know Who.

Therapist (plucking another pipe from a well-stocked rack on his desk): Oh yeah. You Know Who. The bloke who met Mother Teresa and wrote all those bestselling books …[barely suppressing a giggle] … what was his name? You know you’ve got to get beyond this.

Patient (clutching book even harder and slowly turning blue): I’m not ready. Soon … just not yet. Not now, mate. Have a care, mate.

Therapist (grinning): Of course. Silly me. Carry on.

Patient: And I was off my game, mate. Hopeless. Let some kid outsmart me. Not once but twice, mate. Same kid, mate. Had the worst haircut I’ve seen since Dizzy was on the staff but boy, he knew his stuff. Maybe my time has come.

Therapist (nods slowly but firmly): Now, now, what’s all this defeatism? You’re better than that. One blip, that’s all it is. There’s only a couple of guys better than you.

Patient: Yeah, mate, thanks, mate. But now they expect us to up our game but still be nice. The MD said he’d had letters and emails from all over the place, mate, saying how much they admired the company, and thanking us for all our good work, but they were switching suppliers. Maybe they’re right to think we’re not what we were. I had quite a few rookies in my team and only one of them was up to scratch, mate, one. The rest of us thought we’d be able to cope okay without the guys who retired last year, partly because we have so much experience, partly because the competition isn’t much cop. But there’s something about that lot we came up against in Perth and Sydney, mate. We’d smacked them good and proper in Melbourne, mate, but my opposite number is smarter than anyone ever gave him credit for. He’s got a couple of rookies too but they seem to respond better to him than mine do to me.

Therapist (smiling): Have you thought any more about what we discussed a couple of years back?

Patient: What? Doing that sponsorship deal with Jack Daniel’s?

Therapist (stifling a giggle): No. Changing career.

Patient (shifting uneasily): Well,sort of. But I’m still not sure I’m ready, mate, to run my own betting website. There’s still so much to do, mate, so many goals, mate. I’m only just short of 10,000 deals now, you know, mate. Not many in this company have done that, mate. Can’t stop now.

Therapist (impatiently): Yes, yes, but you’ve done so much, conquered so many mountains. How many Tasmanians have got to where you’ve got, done what you’ve done? You can rest on your laurels. Remember our mantra?

Patient (wearily): Yeah, yeah. “Been there, done that, earned this …” But really, I’m still hungry for this.

Sighing, the therapist rises from his chair, reaches into his desk drawer and gets out a gun, with which he proceeds to shoot the patient dead. Returning the gun to the drawer, he taps out a number on his mobile phone.

Therapist (whispering urgently): Here, mate, it worked. No name, no pack drill, right? Had to take the ultimate option, mate, but hell, when it comes to national security, you did say anything went. [Pause] No worries, mate. Just make sure I get those tickets to the company ball, right. Next to that Pommy shrink, what's his name … Spike Dreary. I hear he’s a well-connected boy as well as a bundle of laughs.

	Sir Ricky Ponting, back in 2008, in the middle of the Bollyline series © Getty Images

The WACA, January 2028: A father and his teenage son are sitting together in the sparsely-populated Lillee-Marsh-Hussey stand, watching Australia play India in a Test match. Virtually ignoring events on the field, the boy flicks through a magazine.

Son (grumpily): Here, dad, help me with this question. I only need one more answer to win tickets to next year’s Ashes Twenty20 – some proper cricket, not like this crap.

Father (sighing heavily): OK, you philistine, hit me.

Son: What was “Monkeyline”? Twenty words or less.

Father: Ah yes, I remember it well. Bollyline they called it at first. Sorry business all round.

Son: Do go on.

Father: It was about a lot of things, mostly power, on the field and off. It all started back in ’08 while Sir Ricky Ponting’s side were going for their 16th consecutive Test win in Sydney. They were trying to equal Lord Waugh’s team’s record but were still well short of the 25 Mohammad Ashraful Jr’s lot set last year. The Indians tended to be erratic but they had some fabulous batsmen like Sachin Tendulkar and the legendary VVS Laxman, who later became prime minister, and they were making a decent fist of it, which annoyed our boys no end. Even I’ll admit they overstepped the mark when it came to sledging.

Son: Hang on…I didn’t know cricket pitches were ever covered in snow.

Father: Well, no. Sledging was just the current buzzword to describe attempts by teams to unsettle the opposition with verbal taunts that were, well, about as subtle as a sledgehammer. And back then players weren’t miked up as they are now, so they weren’t as careful with their words.

Son: I wish they weren’t. It’s so quiet out there. They even limit you to three appeals per batsman in our games at school. And when was the last time anyone got suspended for misbehaviour? They’re like saints. There’s no passion, no fun…no reality.

Father (wearily but forcefully): Don’t let’s get started on that one again! Anyway, India’s offie, Harbhajan Singh, who’d been getting Ponting out time and time again and REALLY getting up a few noses, was batting them into a first-innings lead when Brett Lee…

Son: The DJ?!

Father: Is that what he does now? Anyway, Lee says something to Singh, who proceeds to pat him on the bum with his bat. Andrew Symonds sees this…

Son: You mean Symmo the AFL coach?

Father: The very same. So Symonds has a few choice words with Singh, telling him how ordinary he thought patting a bloke on the bum was, whereupon Singh, he later claims, calls him a monkey. Charges are brought by Ponting and Singh is suspended for three matches.

Son: Why? Was Symmo hairy? Did he have bad table manners?

Father: Well, he did have these dreadlocks, but no, it wasn’t about hair. In the old days, before the Aboriginal Truth and Reconciliation Commission changed things here, just a few years before you were born, black people were often likened to monkeys.

Son: But my teacher told us a couple of weeks ago that monkeys are considered holy in India. Anyway, why would an Indian be racist towards a black man? Didn’t they refuse to play South Africa during apartheid?

Father: Very confusing, I know. These days crowds almost always mock players for their fashion sense but back then, when it wasn’t possible to have cheap pigmentation transplants, racism often reared its head when sporting passions were aroused, especially in cricket. And that was a time, remember, when the former Pommy colonies were beginning to assert themselves, and before China, Ireland, France and Germany became Test nations.

Son (eyes glazing over): Ah, I see.

Father: Then the papers here started saying Singh actually called Symmo “maa ki” – a mother…well, something that couldn’t possibly be confused with a compliment. The other issue, claimed Symmo, was that he’d been called a monkey in India a few months earlier, both by crowds, which was reported, and by Singh himself, which wasn’t. On that first occasion, he claimed, he had felt that, rather than report Singh, the two should settle the issue between themselves. What happened next remains shrouded in mystery, though rumour had it that Singh sent Symmo a signed copy of the St James’s Bible and the matter was dropped.

	'Was Symmo hairy?' © Getty Images

Son: What I don’t understand is how it could have caused such trouble. Which I presume it did because you don’t tag “line” on to a word just like that, do you? I mean, there was Bodyline of course, but all those other big incidents only had a “gate” at the end, didn’t they?

Father: Well, the Indians threatened to go home if the decision wasn’t reversed and there was a spell of a few days, halfway through the series…

Son: Series?

Father: Oh, back then teams would play each other up to five times in succession, with the overall result helping to determine the world championship. Remember, this was before they legalised the teleporter: flying players in and out for one match made no sense when it took up to 24 hours to get here rather than 24 nanoseconds.

Son: Gawd. Imagine how knackered they must have been. No wonder Lara’s 400 wasn’t beaten until last year.

Father: Anyway, it looked as if the Indians would go through with their threat, although the appeal, for political reasons, was delayed, allowing Singh to play in the next Test. The Indians seemed to feel they had a pretty good case. After all, it was Symmo’s word against Singh’s, and Tendulkar swore he never heard Singh say “monkey”, which was pretty shrewd of him when you come to think of it. What was he going to do? Rat on a teammate? Some even argued that Symmo had wilfully misheard, and/or misquoted Singh, in order to get his captain’s tormentor into trouble and hence impair his effectiveness as a bowler.

Son: Who did you believe?

Father: To be honest, even now, I’m not sure, if only because it was so hard to trust people back then, before we all had to have this confounded honesty chip inserted in our brains. But the additional problem was that the match was atrociously umpired. In fact, Symmo benefited hugely, and even admitted as much, and this game is now seen by some historians as the trigger for the referral system we have now. But that didn’t help the Indians, who lost with less than 10 minutes of the Test left, and were so unhappy they demanded action. The International Cricket Council, which was the largely powerless body they had before the International Cricket Board, stepped in and agreed to replace one of the umpires for the next Test, who also happened to be black. The chief executive, who later ran a major internet dating agency from a caravan in Darwin but whose name I always forget, denied that the ICC were bowing to pressure, but nobody believed him, not for a second.

Son: Why would a powerful governing body be scared of one country?

Father: Well, as I say, the ICC was pretty impotent back then. And besides, even before the abolition of religion in ’21 and the reunification with Pakistan in ’23, India had more than a billion inhabitants, most of whom were cricket fans, not soccer crazy as the Indistanis are today, so they generated most of the TV revenue. And when the Indian board saw film of people in Kolkata and Mumbai burning effigies of umpires being sent round the world, that, fuelled by the sense of shame at having their national team accused of racism, convinced them they had no option but to take a stand. Pulling out of the tour would have cost the Australians a lot of money in refunds and so on.

Son: OK, but so what? Hadn’t this sort of thing happened before?

Father: Well, to a very small extent perhaps, but there’s more to it. While all this was going on, the Indian tour manager claimed that Brad Hogg - who you only know as the bloke on those posters welcoming Chinese immigrants - had called both India’s captain and vice-captain something rude, using the same word. Theoretically, this carried the same three-match punishment, which seemed perverse. This in turn prompted all manner of debate all over the world as to whether a racist comment was really on the same level as personal abuse, which you and I both know is not the case at all. At the height of it all, some Pommie journo living here wrote a column calling for Ponting’s resignation, for the way his team’s behaviour had shamed the country and undermined the spirit of the game, which in turn led to a two-year investigation of the journo for espionage.

Son: Well, the Poms did win the Ashes back in ’09, didn’t they?!

Father: Blimey. You’re not as ignorant as you make out, are you? Anyway, it was all shaping up for an almighty explosion, with enormous potential repercussions for cricket, Australian national security and world peace, when, in the space of 24 hours two days before the next match, two important things happened. First, the Indian board announced that the tour would proceed regardless of the outcome of Singh’s appeal. Then, equally suddenly, the Indian team withdrew all claims against Hogg. Which was another clever move, putting pressure on the Australians to drop the charges against Singh.

Son (stifling a yawn): So, did they?

Father: Yes, although I wonder whether they’d have done so if their new prime minister, a forceful man eager to change our international image, hadn’t made a major speech before the Perth Test began. He stressed that cricket, since it was the national sport, should always present Australians at their best and that winning should always run second to upholding the principles of fair play. The trouble, he added, was that racism was far more widespread than Australians would readily admit to, and then announced that he would be taking steps to rectify matters for the Aboriginals. How many Australians, he wondered, actually saw Symmo as the first player of African lineage to represent Australia in a cricket match? By ignoring his colour, were they not exposing their embarrassment? That was the way the PM saw it. And that speech in turn is said to have persuaded the author Salman Rushdie to write a blog, accusing Indians of institutionalised racism, for which he spent the next 10 years receiving death threats, but the arguments that ensued led to an important change in the Indian constitution and, ultimately, the reunification with Pakistan and...

Son (patience wearing thin): Yeah, yeah, yeah – thanks, dad. I’ve only got 20 words, remember.

Father: OK. How about...”the 2008 Indo-Australian storm in a teacup that changed cricket, ended racism and made the planet a better place”?

Son (laughing softly): Dear dad - such a softy. How about “Disgraceful international incident involving two cricketers that steered the game down the road to politeness, silence and utter boredom”? Yeah, that’ll do me.

	Geoff Boycott proclaimed that, for all his one-day virtues Symonds would never make a five-day cricketer. How wrong he was; how wrong so many of us were © Getty Images

A respondent signing themselves “swaugh” has just taken me to task for declining to address events at the SCG and focusing instead on a pair of “apparent backstops”. (In the improbable case that it was really you, Steve, many humble apologies, but I am supposed to be a mere Pom commenting on primarily Pom-related matters.) What better way to start making diplomatic amends, then, than by hailing the godlike, even biblical feats of the man Indians currently love to hate even more than ICC umpires: Andrew Symonds.

In this morning’s Guardian, I read a report from Sydney by Reuters’ Julien Linden, detailing Harbhajan Singh’s punishment for calling Symonds “a monkey” and describing the latter as “the only black player in the Australian team”. Now I don’t know about you, but that’s the first time I’ve seen the greatest allrounder to hail from Birmingham depicted in such terms, in those express words. Andy Afford, the former England A spinner who edits the magazine All Out Cricket, swears he recalls once seeing Symonds labelled “half-aboriginal”, enough to rouse the ghost of Eddie Gilbert, but never “black”.

Whether or not Linden’s reference was a first, it cannot be said that Symonds is widely characterised by his pigmentation. Nor, more significantly, does his blackness appear to be being marketed as proof of a post-Howard, non-racial, all-inclusive national game. In which case, Cricket Australia has missed a trick.

Ever since Symonds decided to let his hair down a couple of years ago, trading in that menacing shaved head for those increasingly lavish, loud and proud dreadlocks, he has grown inexorably in stature. To attribute this to the confidence imbued by that breakthrough hundred against Pakistan at the 2003 World Cup in Johannesburg is probably correct but lacks depth.

No less an authority than Geoff Boycott proclaimed that, for all his one-day virtues – ferocious hitting, versatile bowling and superlative fielding – Symonds would never make a five-day cricketer. How wrong he was; how wrong so many of us were. Riddled with unwarranted luck as his SCG century was, that unconquered 162, followed by those three crucial wickets on Sunday, showed him beginning 2008 much as he had spent 2007: as the most adaptable, arguably most valuable, cog in the Australian machine. To fail to forge a link with that reclamation of hair and heritage seems irresponsible.

With the exception of the admirably militant Henry Olonga and some fellow Zimbabweans, Test cricket had not hitherto witnessed a tonsorial arrangement to compare with that sported by Symonds, who has never, to my knowledge, made any noteworthy public utterances about his colour.

Even when the West Indies were routing all and sundry, not even as politically-driven a figure as Viv Richards dared being mistaken for a Rastafarian; for a rebel. Afros were no less hip yet eminently acceptable – witness the bushy barnets of Garry Sobers, Larry Gomes and Ezra Moseley – but dreadlocks? No fear. Neither the West Indies board, still influenced by white administrators such as Steve Camacho and Peter Short, nor captain Clive Lloyd would have countenanced such an indelicately overt statement of black power.

This is only an educated, possibly prejudiced guess, but I suspect it takes inordinate courage to inhabit an Australian dressing-room in dreadlocks. In acquiring that degree of self-assurance - perhaps even regarding hirsuteness, and hence nature, as something he simply HAD to embrace if he was to discover the wherewithal to prove himself a worthy Test player, to fulfil himself - Symonds can be seen to have come to terms with his mixed and confusing origins.

I will not pretend to know exactly when the switch began, but suffice to say that it was the flamboyantly hirsute Symonds who leapt into fishing partner Matty Hayden’s arms in exultant celebration of that maiden Test century at the MCG two Decembers ago. Since the outset of that 156, nearly three times his previous best, he has ransacked 609 runs at 121.80. Now he has that budding beard, the possibilities may be limitless.

Throw nasty ol’ WG into the equation, mix in MS Dhoni’s precipitous decline since he lopped off his locks, and the message seems plain. When it comes to maximum, unfettered impact, Samson knew best.

	Matt Prior, for all his gutsy runs in Sri Lanka, has paid the price for flawed handiwork © AFP

“It is possible that the gauntlet-swapping of Matt Prior and Tim Ambrose will one day attract Hollywood - or, better still, Ealing.” Much as I deplore self-referential journalism, it was pretty much impossible, in light of the announcement of England’s New Zealand party, to resist plucking that little one from the attic.

It was written midway through the 2004 county season, at the height of the struggle for ownership of the wicketkeeper’s gloves at Sussex between a couple of ambitious south-hemispherian chappies who were born in the same year (1982), made their first-class debuts in the same season (2001) and also happened to be flatmates.

The latest chapter of the story, in what could prove to be David Graveney’s final act as chairman of selectors, has seen Prior, for all his gutsy runs in Sri Lanka, pay the price for flawed handiwork and Ambrose profits: a turn of events scarcely untypical of their tussle for supremacy. See-saws should be so: up and down.

Things first came to a head in 2004. Having traded places halfway through the 2003 county season, the South Africa-born Prior, then the England A stump-minder, found himself second choice for his county until the third week of May, whereupon the Australian-born Ambrose's plunging batting form saw him dropped for the C&G Trophy tie against Lancashire; not uncharacteristically, the pugnacious Prior, who had hitherto been confined to outfielding duties, had recently muscled a career-high 201, albeit against the unmight of Loughborough University.

At that juncture, Peter Moores, the erstwhile keeper then overseeing the pair as Sussex coach, was probably being tactful when he insisted he did not regard the rivalry as a problem. By the same token, there was no doubt he knew this particular town was nowhere near big enough for the both of them. In fact, Ambrose lasted one more season before leaving for Warwickshire. Last summer, his second in the Midlands, saw him post an unbeaten 251 - albeit off a weak Worcestershire attack - and average over 70 in the pyjama game.

"It's difficult to compare them," Moores admitted four years ago, then did just that with consummate ease. "Timmy is much more laid-back, phlegmatic. He has a natural rhythm. Matt is intense.” Very little has occurred subsequently to contradict that insight.

Another had come while conducting a poll of county keepers in 2002. While both Ambrose and Prior told me they believed Alec Stewart was then the right man to don the gauntlets for England, Prior’s touting of Mark Boucher as the best of Stewart’s contemporaries (“a keeper I like watching”) stood in stark contrast to Ambrose’s lionising of Ian Healy as much the best he’d ever clapped eyes on. “He was a perfectionist,” he enthused almost breathlessly, ”and as close to perfection as I've ever seen … a role model for any wicketkeeper, a workaholic and gave his all.”

Since relocating to Edgbaston, Ambrose has evolved into one of the most productive keeper-batsmen in England. Among First Division stumpers, only Surrey’s long-and-sorely-neglected Jon Batty scored more Championship runs last year; no England batting candidate period could match his one-day form. But are his prospects of nailing down a national berth, for a tenure of Knottesque or Stewartian proportions, really all that much better than Prior’s? Or, for that matter, Chris Read’s or James Foster’s or Stephen Davies’s or Phil “Colonel” Mustard’s?

Moores’s points about Ambrose’s phlegmaticism and lower intensity levels augur well, but the fact remains that wicketkeeping, like goalkeeping, is another area of expertise that the English no longer master with quite such unchallenged proficiency. Freed as they now apparently are from those customary trappings of caution, stoicism and stiff-upper-lippiness, no longer, it seems, are the worthy-but-unsexy jobs so attractive to the average teenage and 20-something Pom.

Still, if that sounds a tad unpatriotic, consolations are thick on the ground. Among the current major stump-tenders, only Prasanna Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara, I would argue, are not, at the very least, an occasional affront to the art once practised so exquisitely by the likes of Knott, Healy and Wasim Bari. And the only time they can ever be directly compared in even half-meaningful match conditions is if Sri Lanka top an ICC table and take on the Rest of the World. Come to think of it, wicketkeeping, along with slow left-arming and stonewalling, can be considered the only departments of the game that have declined in comparison with half a century ago.

The reason is not unobvious. These poor, put-upon custodians, every flaw and blemish highlighted ad infinitum by the unrelenting, unforgiving slo-mo replay, are now doubly burdened, expected as they are to average 30, minimum, with the bat. In other words, acknowledged classicists such as Bert Oldfield (22), Don Tallon (17), Wally Grout (15) and Bari (15) would never have stood an earthly of continual selection. Most of their successors, indeed, have rather too much in common with contemporary English goalkeepers: athletic, even gymnastic, yes, but unencumbered by either keen-eyed anticipation or suitable footwork. The qualities, in short, that demand more of mind than body.

The tide has turned, seemingly for good, even though the improvement in pitches as well as in contributions from Nos. 8 to 11 ought to infer otherwise. Unfortunately, caution remains the watchword: given that batsmen are now more inclined to get out through impatience than was the case 50 years ago, how many of today’s selectors are prepared to risk trading a batting place for a larger hand of bowlers? When Durham’s richly-gifted Andy Pratt, then 30, quit the game in 2005 to become a plumber, it was clear a watershed had been reached.

Andy Flower and Adam Gilchrist can be considered the spearheads of a new wave: the batsman-keeper. Or, to be slightly more precise, the bloody-good-batsman-cum-half-decent-keeper. That said, it is worth noting that, aside from Gilchrist and Flower - the only regular ever to boast a career average of 50 while wearing two types of gloves, the last stumper to score 350 runs in a Test series was not a Boucher or a Dhoni or a Stewart or even a Sangakkara, but the one and only Healy.

Sadly, if young master Jayawardene can forgive such a slight, the odds on us never seeing the puckish Aussie’s likes again are horribly short.