The ability of sporting bodies to hype their own products should never be underestimated. Rarely does an event seem to pass without it being heralded as the “most watched” in history.

In 2007, the organisers of F1 claimed a global audience of several squillion before someone noted that appeared to assume that everyone in China watched the brief clips on the evening news rather than sat glued to the entire race.

Now Stephen Brenkley in the Independent has pulled up the ICC. Earlier this week it gushed that the World Twenty20 will be seen in 218 countries around the world. He noted that there are only 194 recognised countries on the planet.

Perhaps any readers in Burkina Faso or Tuvalu would let us know how they are enjoying the event?

	© Getty Images

Before the inevitable jibes about the sun never shining in England, there’s a mini heatwave on at the moment (OK, it’s still chilly for most visitors but the British have low heat tolerance) and the forecasters are predicting a hot summer. And scientists have found that the right type of sunglasses could improve catching ability by up to 28%.

Most sunglasses worn by cricketers are too dark, so some clearly underutilised boffins decided after months of painstaking research carried out in bars next to cricket grounds the length and breadth of the land. As a result, players have been told how to optimise their vision by wearing the right coloured lenses for the conditions from a selection of yellow, red, gold, silver and orange.

Alarmingly, the researchers said that one of the people asked to test the sunglasses to assess the impact they made was … er … Monty Panesar. “We wanted to see what improvement they made to their performance and were put through their paces by fielding machines under a range of different lighting conditions,” said an aforementioned boffin.

It seems that the ECB is so taken with the research that it has even experimented with tinted contact lenses, but the idea was dropped after some players expressed unease.

The petty bureaucracy that still blights English cricket reared its ugly head again last month when Ryan Sidebottom’s comeback attempts were blocked by red tape. Recovering from a long-term injury, Sidebottom tried to test his fitness with an outing for Nottinghamshire Premier League side Plumtree, only to be turned down by league officials on the grounds that his appearance would infringe their rules governing player registration.

“I wasn’t ready for a Championship match but I was desperate for a game,” Sidebottom told the Mail on Sunday. “I did find it a bit strange that I couldn’t get a game in my own county.”

He eventually did find someone willing to allow an England international to take to the field and he played for Leek in the North Staffordshire and South Cheshire League. He said he would do so again “given the chance”.

Back down in Surrey, it took endless debates to persuade the people running the Surrey Championship that a teenager good enough to play for his country, a resident for six years and still qualified for Surrey and England, was eligible to play in their league.

For pre-game and mid-innings entertainment at the World Twenty20 how about some cricket pop? Songs like ‘Meeting Mr Miandad’, ‘Test Match Special’ and ‘Jiggery Pokery’ would be a refreshing change from Bollywood remixes and billboard hits from two years ago.

Neil Hannon, songwriter for the band Divine Comedy, and Thomas Walsh, from Pugwash, have collaborated on a concept album called The Duckworth Lewis Method which they call “possibly the least necessary album of recent years”.

Jiggery Pokery, a song inspired by Shane Warne’s first ball of the Ashes, could probably be played just after the national anthems at the start of this year’s England-Australia series. And you can sing along as well:

Jiggery pokery, trickery chokery, how did he open me up
Robbery! Muggery! Aussie skull-duggery! Out for a buggering duck.
What a delivery I might as well have been Holding a child's balloon
Jiggery pokery who is this nobody Making me look a buffoon?"

There were two overs to go in Derbyshire’s innings during their Twenty20 Cup match against Durham. Stuart Law was batting on 32 and the need for acceleration prompted him to change his weapon. He switched the conventional bat he’d been using for the Mongoose – a bat with a short blade, long handle, 20% more power and 15% more speed – which is supposedly tailor-made for shredding bowlers.

“You need to get used to it,” Law said, cautioning those who may have been rushing to improve their strike-rates. “The greater bat-speed means you’re more inclined to go through early with the stroke — which is a good thing in a way.” In the end Law scored only ten runs with the Mongoose but six of those came via a monstrous hit over midwicket. Are ball manufacturers already working on the Cobra to level the playing field?

He might not have played a game in the IPL, but Glenn McGrath will be remembered forever in his home town of Narromine. McGrath will be the subject of a life-size bronze statue that is certain to attract interest from local birds, who will be keen to drop in on the fast bowler known as ‘Pigeon’.

The Sun-Herald reports the work will cost more than A$70,000 and will be unveiled next month. McGrath grew up in the western New South Wales town before heading to Sydney and turning into one of the game’s greatest bowlers. His reputation didn’t impress Delhi, who didn’t call on him at all in South Africa.

Javed Miandad recently alleged that IPL games, often decided off the last ball this season, were being fixed. Now you can find out of yourself, if you’re an ace mathematician that is.

Professor David Forrest, a renowned gambling researcher, believes it is possible to calculate whether or not match result has been influenced by cheating players and corrupt officials. He and his colleagues came up with a complex formula, which takes into account how many years of competition an athlete has left, the probability of their being caught, their current wealth and the potential damage to their reputation. "An industry estimate is that on a weekend of Premier League football, half a billion dollars is wagered, most of that from Asia,” Forrest was quoted as saying in the Manchester Evening News. “Even more money is spent on cricket, with a billion dollars of bets each day on a Test match."

The likelihood of a match being “fixed” is higher in matches where teams have nothing to play for, Forrest said. All the more reason then, to closely examine the trend of dead rubbers yielding favourable results for weaker team.

It promises to be as revolutionary in cricket as graphite rackets and titanium clubs were in tennis and golf. That’s the Mongoose bat, designed for Twenty20 batsmen – long handle, short blade, 20 per cent more power, 15 per cent more speed and a silicon chip that can predict the swing of the ball. Okay, we made the last one up but you get the drift – this bat can apparently do almost anything and, best of all, it’s legal, having received the MCC’s seal of approval. The bat will make its first-class debut next week in the Twenty20 Cup as Derbyshire’s Stuart Law takes on the Durham attack. The manufacturers aren’t afraid of hyping it up; it is the “single most radical change to cricket equipment since 1771”, a “game-changing weapon” ensuring that “run accumulation has been replaced by all-out attack”. Or, as Law put it, a “weapon of mass destruction”. Maybe it does have that silicon chip after all.

We’ve heard of streakers, insects and mysterious vandals either holding up play or preventing it entirely, but a pitch invasion by a single person having a substantial effect on the result of a game? That’s a new one. But it happened, and Scotland were left rather annoyed after a loss to Warwickshire during a Friends Provident Trophy match in Edinburgh. Chasing 242, Scotland were 131 for 3 when a baffling intruder – later identified only as “Ginger” by a bunch of traveling friends from the English Midlands – ran in and nicked a bail from in front of everyone. Said invader then proceeded to get away Scot free (no pun intended), dodging the minimal security and jumping over a boundary wall with the loot. The actions of the “idiot” as Scotland captain Gavin Hamilton dubbed him, led to a five-minute hold-up that was quickly followed by Neil McCallum's dismissal as Scotland lost their sixth game in a row. "We were doing so well when the guy ran on and took a bit of the momentum we had achieved away,” said McCallum. “It was frustrating.” Talk about getting away on bail.

India’s general elections were a vindication not only for the Congress party but for one of its debutant candidates. And soon after his win was announced Mohammad Azharuddin celebrated his return to the headlines as a leader once again. “I was overwhelmed,” he told The Telegraph after being elected from the Moradabad constituency. “Till recently I didn’t expect to be in politics... Now, I’m in the Lok Sabha... That’s why I got overwhelmed and, in a way, felt I finally got to play my 100th Test.” He was referring, of course, to his exile from cricket after 99 Tests on being implicated in the match-fixing case. While he couldn’t draw a direct comparison between this achievement and his feats on the cricket field, he said it was it could be on a par with his “No.1 achievement” in the game - a hundred in each of his first three Tests (at home against England, in 1984-85). Azhar’s gradual return from the cold began in 2006 and his second innings has got off to a positive start.

At the start of the English season, Lawrence Booth wrote on Cricinfo about the country-wide culling of cricket writers. The sports desk of the Daily Telegraph was among those to trim back, but satirical magazine Private Eye reports on how it has tried to disguise the fact.

The more alert of its readers would have noticed a new batch of writers treading the county circuit of late The only thing, Private Eye claims, is that many of them don’t seem to exist.

For a number of years the bylines of Nelson Clare and Austin Peters have appeared regularly to cover for occasions when the paper had nobody covering overseas series (on one occasion bemused readers noted Peters covered matches in Sydney and Colombo on the same day). However, this time it’s closer to home.

“It’s a glorious wheeze,” the Eye claims, “take some agency copy, stick a fake name on the top, and hey presto, a cricket page which costs almost nothing.”

It might not have come to light had the same bylines been used to cover reports on sporting events hundreds of miles apart on the same day. For example, one reporter was apparently covering Somerset at Taunton and also reporting on the World Snooker Championship at Sheffield.

Durban has happy memories for Yuvraj Singh – it’s where he hammered Stuart Broad for six sixes in an over during the World Twenty20 in 2007. Now, he’s set to use bat and ball to spread some of that happiness around. Come May 19, his charity foundation will host a fundraiser for ‘Cricket Beyond Boundaries’, a project to introduce cricket to children of diverse communities in the Western Cape’s Gansbaai region as a means of breaking barriers and promoting integration. Tuesday’s event, planned as the first of a series, will include an auction of cricket memorabilia and features as its guest of honour Vikas Swarup, the author of Q&A, the book on which the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire is based. Now that’s not a bad inspiration for anyone trying to break barriers.

Matthew Hayden striding down the pitch to smash bowlers during the IPL is an ominous sight from afar and one can empathise with Daryl Harper for wanting to wear a helmet while officiating in Twenty20 games.

“In one of the games Sanath’s [Jayasuriya] shot hit me so hard that I was feeling breathless for a while. And Hayden’s hits have brushed my ears a few times as well,” Harper told Times of India. "I was talking about this to some of the other umpires and they were also of the same opinion. Given the pace with which some of the players hit those shots, it's becoming really dangerous for us. I guess it's just a matter of time before you see us using those [baseball helmets].”

And what do the umpires do during the strategy breaks? "Well, that's a sock for us,” Harper says. “We can discuss where we would dine."

Haroon Lorgat, the ICC's chief executive, wants to add some glamour to the tired old Champions Trophy, unquestionably the least loved of the three major global events, when the tournament returns in South Africa later this year.


"We want to remodel the Champions Trophy and distinguish it slightly from what it was before, and make it a bit more attractive for the players and the spectators," Lorgat told reporters at Lord's. "We would like to do that up in the form of a Cricket Masters.

"Maybe we need to think about that's where you get the green jacket, so that it's the one event that will distinguish itself from the other." It was, as Lorgat admitted, an off-the-cuff idea, but seeing as three of the competing nations - Australia, South Africa and Pakistan - already sport green jackets, such a plan would be the perfect way to disguise the competition even further.

	Graeme Hick and Michael Kasprowicz with actress Tracey Ullman, who tossed the coin for the 'Ashes' encounter © FilmMagic

The Ashes have already been decided…in Hollywood. The second Westfield Hollywood Ashes, at the picturesque Woodley Park cricket ground in suburban Los Angeles, ended with Australia, led by Michael Kasprowicz beating England, led by Graeme Hick, by 29 runs in the Twenty20 encounter.

Hick was joined in the England side by action Julian Sands, who stars in 24, and Dancing with the Stars judge Len Goodman, while the most popular member of the Australian side appeared to be former Calvin Kline model Travis Fimmel.

"It is one of the greatest wins of my entire cricket career," Kasprowicz, told AAP. "Nineteen years of first class cricket, so yeah, as you can see it is a big moment. I'm glowing."

Around 800 watched the action, but the game still appears a mystery to some Americans who couldn’t fathom why they were playing for the Ashes. "Who died?" she asked.

England's World Twenty20 campaign is only a month away, but was it really the wisest decision by ICC's advertisers to depict gorillas playing the game?

You be the judge.

Ever wondered if Michael Hussey had a crush on one of the brat pack while in school? Whether boy-next-door-meets-bad-boy MS Dhoni likes actions flicks or chick flicks? Well you may soon find out.

In a new PR drive, the normally reserved ICC has decided to release information on the game’s top players in order to generate more hoopla for the ICC World Twenty20 this summer. The ICC will circulate 19 questions to leading players from various countries in an attempt to get more out of them than the standard ‘opening-batsman-offbreak-bowler’ routine they often mumble on TV.

According to the Express, the survey will include questions ranging from retirement plans, nightmare opposition, childhood heroes, favourite films, songs, actresses and food, and even if any relative has played competitive cricket. The ICC will then share the hallowed information with its broadcasting and internet content collaborators before the World Twenty20 kicks off on June 5.

Talk about creative mojo.

The rural community remodeled as the fictional village Champaner in the 2001 Academy Award-nominated Hindi film Lagaan is set to actually host a cricket tournament. No, this won’t be a real-life battle against high taxes between peasants in a barren village and their oppressive British rulers. Instead, in keeping with times, it’s going to be called the Kutch Premier League, planned along the lines of the IPL, and will feature eight local teams vying for the tag of Twenty20 champs in an arid corner of Gujarat.

Rajnal, 50 kilometers from Champaner's inspiration Kunaria, will play host to teams with names like Wagad Royal Challengers and Kutch Gladiators, owned by former Indian Test offspinner Rajesh Chauhan. The other teams are owned by local businessmen, who paid Rs 50,000 (US$ 1,017) for each. Running the show is the Ratnal Sport Club, which auctioned the teams. There are even 24 icon players out of a pool of 150 auctioned on May 1. Raking in the top amount was allrounder Nirav Pandya, for whom Bhuj Black Hills paid Rs 20,000 (US$ 407).

Each game will be a day fixture and telecast on local cable television, though hopefully without DLF maximums and Citi moments of success. Local steel company Nilkanth Steel owns the title sponsorship. Add a dash of glamour in the form of popular Gujarati actress Hemali Shejpal, and this is one proper shindig.

The winner will pocket Rs 1.5 lakh (US$ 3,050) in cash and a trip to Canbis County Cricket Club in Kenya, which has a large Gujarati population.Doing a rustic take on Lalit Modi, event planner Trikam Ahir said the tournament’s intention was to provide a platform for local players as well as “good entertainment for locals” during the summer vacation. The times they are a-changin’.

Dilawar Hussain, of Blackburn, is an angry man. And £475 short. Hussain, who plays for Gujarat and Niles cricket clubs, ordered a kit from Lahore and arranged for it to be shipped to the UK via DHL.

But before reaching him, eight bats and a few pairs of pads were ruined by officials searching for explosives. Each bat and pad arrived with holes drilled in them. Worse, no one has owned up to the damage. "It is unbelievable. What were they thinking? They're ruined,” said club captain Dilawar Hussain.

True to form, the governments of both Pakistan and the UK are engaged in a battle of passing the buck. Last heard, British customs said it would have provided paperwork if it did the check.

Shane Warne walks on water but is famously partial to beer – even in the middle of an IPL game. Leading his Rajasthan Royals back on to the field after a strategic time-out against Bangalore at Centurion on Thursday, Warne was walking along the boundary when he spotted a spectator holding a glass of beer. He reached out, the beer was proffered, a quick swig ensued, a few drops were spilled and one spectator was left with a glass he probably will keep forever. It was all over in a few seconds and, though captured live by the TV cameras, was studiously ignored by the commentators. Warne, typically unfazed by the potential for controversy, carried on from where he’d been interrupted by the break: leading Rajasthan to yet another win and, by the end of the night, to second spot in the table.

Cricket clubs are used to not being able to honour fixtures because of the weather or player shortages, but Roborough Cricket Club in Devon have a more long-term issue after a group of so-called travellers set up camp on the outfield earlier this week and let their children loose on the square.

“They've been riding across the wicket,” said club treasurer Mike Gaylard. “We're going to inspect it on Monday morning and carry out any necessary repairs. We're hoping we'll be able to play in the afternoon. They just think they've got a God given right to be there.”

“We're just passing through; it's our way of life,” one of the travellers countered. “It's the only way you know when you've been brought up with it.”

The police washed their hands of the situation and the local council, who own the ground, said that they could “only move as fast as the law allows”.

Just how far the ECB is prepared to bend over to earn an extra buck - and it would probably win many limbo competitions – might be gauged by its reaction to ESPN-Star’s reported multi-million dollar bid for rights to cover the planned new domestic Twenty20 tournament, due to launch in 2010.

The Daily Telegraph claims that it is a condition of ESPN-Star's bid that every team taking part in any televised match must contain an Indian player. This will leave the ECB between a rock and a hard place. In the past it has tended to follow the dollar and risk public opprobrium, as evidenced by its decision to take live English cricket completely off terrestrial TV and place it in the hands of BSkyB.

But if it does accede to ESPN-Star's demands, then it raises the prospects of all future bids being accompanied by similar demands. Where does that end? Could we see BSkyB have a place on England’s panel of selectors, or picking overseas players for counties?

Australia haven’t had a match-winning spinner since Shane Warne hung up his boots after the last Ashes series and the situation is serious enough to warrant calling a ‘spin summit’ next month to discuss the issue. The country’s spin bowling experts – including Terry Jenner, Warne’s mentor, and John Davison, the spin bowling coach at Cricket Australia’s Centre of Excellence (COE) - will meet at the COE in Brisbane to find a solution for the lack of quality spinners in all formats. According to AAP, the reluctance of captains to use attacking spinners is the reason for the lack of spin options. Australian selectors are expected to pick Nathan Hauritz, a containing offspinner, for the Ashes ahead of more attacking spinners like Jason Krejza and Bryce McGain. But Andrew Hilditch, the chairman of selectors, felt “attacking” was an over-rated term, saying "to assert pressure from one end is attacking cricket". That, presumably, will be up for discussion at Brisbane as well.

It’s not been a good year or two for Bermudan cricket, with poor on-field performances and lurid off-field tales dogging the side. Hopes that the only way was up after the recent failure to qualify for the 2011 World Cup were dashed with news that fast bowler George O’Brien had been charged with using a Taser stun-gun against what local papers described as a “love rival”.

O’Brien pleased not guilty when he appeared in court, his lawyer claiming the incident was related to “matters of the heart”. The magistrate was duly unimpressed and expressed concern that O’Brien actually owned a Taser in the first place. He will stand trial in August.

O’Brien has a chequered record. In 2005 he was handed a two-year suspended ban after reportedly punching an opponent during Bermuda's Cup Match, the biggest game of the year. In 2006 he was dropped from the national side after he missed a number of training sessions and failed to impress at the ones he did attend. That led to him being excluded from the 2007 World Cup squad, and days after being left out he broke his leg playing football.

Which IPL team opens with the ‘Rock at the top’ and the ‘Cannon’? If you guessed Rajasthan Royals you’d be right, but bonus points if you said ‘Desert Roses’ for those are the nick names Shane Warne (aka ‘King’) has given to Graeme Smith, Swapnil Asnodkar and his team.

The rest of the players also have fitting aliases. Rajasthan’s hard-hitting match-winner Yusuf Pathan goes by the name of ‘Lethal weapon’, while the ‘Terminator’ (although he hasn’t terminated much as yet) is Dimitri Mascarenhas, the Times of India reported. Abhishek Raut is the ‘Young gun’, wicketkeeper Mahesh Rawat is ‘Reliability, while the team’s ‘Rockstar’ is allrounder Ravindra Jadeja.

There are a couple of natural disasters as well, ‘Tornado’ and ‘Cyclone’ (Kamran Khan and Shane Harwood respectively) which would fit right into an X-Men movie. ‘Home run’ and ‘Big fury’ refer to Tyron Henderson and Munaf Patel while Darren Berry is the team’s ‘General’.

Rajasthan also have a ‘Secret weapon’ which they deployed in the last game against Deccan Chargers. It fired as well with Lee Carseldine contributing important runs towards the victory.

Not to be outdone by the Englishmen who played cricket on Mount Everest, Mark Waugh and thirteen other tough Aussies climbed three of the highest mountains in Australia in only three days. They did it to raise money for The Smith Family charity.

The group was split into two teams Middle Order (cricket) and The Super 7 Blues (rugby, because former Wallaby, Michael Brial, was also part of the event) pitted against each other to scale Bimberi, Australian Capital Territory’s highest mountain, Mount Kosciusko and Victoria’s Mount Bogong.

“The last climb really took it out of us, our legs were starting to cramp and the early morning starts were beginning to take their toll,” Waugh said. The group didn’t play a Twenty20 match, like the Everest trekkers did, but Waugh did hit a snow ball on Mount Kosciusko.

When Shahid Afridi walked out to bat for the first time in a one-day international, against Sri Lanka in Nairobi in 1996, the bat in his hands once belonged to someone who had played many memorable innings, and several of them against Pakistan. It had belonged to Sachin Tendulkar and found its way to Afridi via Waqar Younis, who said “it could prove lucky as it belonged to a great player”. It was lucky indeed for Afridi reeled off the fastest ODI century off 37 balls, a record that still stands.

“Waqar gave me the bat in Nairobi where I made my debut for Pakistan. He told me Tendulkar had given him the bat and asked him to make similar model bats from Sialkot,” Afridi told PTI. “That record [fastest hundred] still stands today and makes me proud. I also got other good scores with this particular bat so it is very valuable for me and I have no intention to auction it off to anyone.”

Afghanistan, the newest ICC country to be inducted into their enjoyably competitive list of one-day nations, have won their first ODI. Well, sort of. That’s what the Afghans will tell you after thumping an English village XI containing names such as Matthew Fleming, the former Kent and England allrounder, and Jamie Theakston. Yes him, off the telly.

	© Leslie Knott

Ditchling Cricket Club, captained by Theakston, were walloped by 124 runs at a heavily-secured NATO base in Kabul on a humid and rainy Friday. Afghanistan, who recently and sensationally qualified as a one-day international nation, took great pleasure in smacking six after six out of the compound, as one journalist told Cricinfo. “There were sixes all over the shop,” said Leslie Knott, a film-producer covering Afghanistan’s rise from obscurity. “And then a giant storm came in and blew the tent down.”

Fleming, who was once an officer in the now-redundant Royal Green Jackets, is out in Afghanistan on behalf of MCC, unveiling pitches to local communities, as revealed in Cricinfo’s interview with him this week. "We believe that cricket can change people's lives,” he told AFP. “We just want to give the people who wouldn't necessarily have the opportunity, the opportunity. The challenge for them now is to become more experienced and harness that talent, and that intensity, and enthusiasm."

Theakston, who made 20 out of Ditchling’s thoroughly village 138 for 7, remained benevolent in spite of the hammering. "I think it is important for people to understand there isn't a suicide bomber on every corner... and that Afghans live their lives and do things like play cricket.”

For more information on Leslie Knott's work, and the documentary being made, click here