South Africa’s stirring series triumph against the world champions killed the last of Australian cricket’s modern dynasty. If Mohali and Nagpur set their pedestal wobbling, Perth and Melbourne have reduced it to a heap of dust. From that day on, Australia have been stripped of bragging rights, sniggering rights and most certainly of hectoring and preaching rights to the rest of the world. Sharda Ugra in her blog on the India Today website believes cricket’s older natural order has probably re-asserted itself.

Even while delighting in the quirkiness of a fellow with a French name and a fast bowler with a sense of humour reducing the macho Australians to rubble and rabble, it has been strangely uneasy watching them flail about. The natural order of things dictated that Australia at least fight back from reverse or adversity, but cricket’s natural order for the last 15 or so years has been irrevocably altered.

With almost a decade of international cricket under his belt, Virender Sehwag stands at an interesting juncture of his career. With Sourav Ganguly and Anil Kumble already hanging their boots and the likes of Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and VVS Laxman expected to leave in a year or two, the dasher will be an important link between past and the future. Amit Gupta in the Mumbai Mirror has more.

Among Kapil Dev's best moments in cricket are his debut against Pakistan in 1978, captaining India to the 1983 World Cup win and becoming the world record-holder for the most number of Test wickets in February 1994. He speaks to Lokendra Pratap Sahi in the Kolkata-based daily, the Telegraph, on his 50th birthday.