Bill Cooper and his meddlesome instrument © Getty Images

They are noisy, nauseating, and unspeakably tuneless, and when you’ve heard that witless chorus once, you’ve heard it 1000 times - usually when you are right on deadline and desperate for some peace and quiet. And yet, for the first (but on today’s evidence, maybe not the only) time in my life, I was delighted to hear them break into song. Never mind the noise pollution, it was a victory for free speech, free spirits and futility - which, like kittens and warm-woollen mittens, are a few of my favourite things.

But if we thought the nonsenses at the Gabba had been forgotten amid the tranquillity of the Adelaide Oval, then today’s press release from Cricket Australia has confirmed once again that, in this country, good humour is an item to be surrendered at all turnstiles. “Cricket Australia clarifies Barmy Army trumpet,” read the improbable headline, followed by 16 (sixteen!) paragraphs of justification for the continued expulsion of the Army’s cause célèbre, Bill Cooper, and his meddlesome brass instrument.

Continue reading "Trumpet involuntary"

	'It was here that Ali Bacher's world-beating side had its last hurrah, completing a 4-0 rout of Bill Lawry's Australians' © Getty Images

St. George's Park is South Africa's oldest venue, the first ground outside of England and Australia to host an international game. It was also where Ali Bacher's world-beating side had its last hurrah, completing a 4-0 rout of Bill Lawry's Australians before more than two decades of isolation imbued them with near mythical status.

For some of the Indian fans I met before the match started, this was a chance to buck a miserable historical trend. One fan had seen all of India's three one-day matches here, dating back to 1992-93, and been disappointed every time. The last defeat was the most humiliating, with luminaries like Joseph Angara and Thomas Odoyo sending them plummeting to
a 70-run defeat.

The ground has a fantastic atmosphere, with the stands and even the press box so close to the action. The beer sales were in full swing by early afternoon, with the sun beating down and the infamous wind keeping still. And the Indian flags were being waved loud and proud, despite the emphatic nature of the defeats at Durban and Cape Town.

Graeme Smith walked out for the national anthem giving one of the mascots a piggyback ride. It's a nice touch that the authorities back home would do well to adopt. Not only do the anthems gets the crowd primed for the occasion, but it also provides an invaluable experience for each small boy and girl asked to escort the players onto the field. There's a now-famous
photograph from a Liverpool-Everton match in 1996, with a pint-sized 10-year-old lining up as the Everton mascot.

Wayne Rooney went on to bigger and better things, and even if none of the kids who lined up this afternoon scale such sporting heights, occasions such as these help immeasurably in inculcating a love of the game. Australia do it with the Milo-sponsored hit-abouts during the breaks in games, and India could do worse than to follow the example shown by the southern hemisphere nations. Who knows, the next Sachin Tendulkar might be the one who escorts him onto the field during a game at the Wankhede.

	Unlike the Gabba, Adelaide is a cricket ground, not a stadium © Andrew Miller

But in spite of this sensory bombardment, something had been missing throughout. Something obvious, but utterly overlooked as the chaos of the cricket unfolded. It's only now, as I sit in the press box at the Adelaide Oval, watching the sun setting on the famous old scoreboard, as the earthy red roof of the Sir Edwin Smith stand begins to turn deep pink in the fading light, that I've realised what it is. It's context, stupid!

Continue reading "This is the real Australia"

	D'Oliveira: one of South Africa's finest © Getty Images

Despite the fact that he was nearing his 37th birthday, Basil D'Oliveira was considered a certainty when England's selectors met on August 28 1968 to pick a team to tour South Africa. A day earlier, England had managed to draw the Ashes series, with D'Oliveira's first-innings 158 instrumental in a 226-run victory at The Oval. But with many in the corridors of power being fossils from the days of Empire, D'Oliveira's name was left off the list, a display of spinelessness that delighted South Africa's pernicious Apartheid regime.

Those with a conscience protested against the blatantly political decision and when Tom Cartwright pulled out through injury, Dolly - as he was known - was called up. But there would be no triumphant return to the Southern Cape for one of South Africa's greatest cricketing sons. Enraged by the MCC going back on its initial decision, John Vorster's government refused to let D'Oliveira play on its soil. The tour was scrapped and though they thumped Australia 4-0 in a home series a year later, South Africa were soon to feel the cold touch of international isolation.

Continue reading "Remembering Dolly"

	A rash of Green and Gold at the Gabba © Getty Images

The massive media interest in this series has been a blessing in disguise for any member of the press corps who enjoys a bit of atmosphere while they go about their work. The modern trend in press boxes is for uber-sanitised sardine cans, usually stuffed deep in the bowels of the stand behind the bowler’s arm, where 50 sweaty hacks seem to breathe the same recycled air for five days on end, and hardly a peep from the stands gets through the sound-proofed walls.

But for this Test the pattern is very different. With every man and his dog wanting a share of the Ashes action, the Gabba authorities have had to erect a temporary gantry high in the Vulture Street End. They’ve obliterated 400 precious seats to do so, but the treasurer’s loss is journalism’s gain, as we perch on our precarious-looking scaffolds and peer down on the action below. A full Gabba is a truly impressive sight, with its uniform bullring seating towering over the players in the middle, and it‘s a blessing to be out in the midst of it, sampling the real atmosphere.

We can hear the nicks (not that there have been many of them), feel the sixes being sucked over the rope by a record-breaking 39,315 crowd, and sense the hairs standing on Alastair Cook’s neck as he sweats and circles under (and ultimately drops) a steepler at backward square-leg.. And we can feel the breeze as well, and on another stifling day that’s not to be sniffed at at all.

Continue reading "An over-sanitised atmosphere"

	Too much cricket makes Jack......Omar Henry echoes a sentiment that is gathering strength © Getty Images

Omar Henry now coaches the university cricket team in Stellenbosch, but as recently as two years ago, he was convener of the selection panel that picked the side to tour India (2004-05). These days, Henry, who became the first Coloured cricketer to play for South Africa in 1992-93, focuses more on his family, and his 14-year-old son Riyad, who aspires to be a seam bowler, rather than a spinner like his old man.

"I loved the work I did with Cricket South Africa," says Henry, "but you spend so much time away from home that you wonder whether it's worth it." It's a feeling that the likes of Graham Thorpe and Marcus Trescothick have expressed in the past, but with the game's administrators interested only in shoehorning in more and more matches, who's listening?

Henry says he's excited by some of the young talent coming through in South Africa, though there continue to be whispers about the transformation process that will never please every section of society. This is a country moving away from its racist past, but the undertones can
still be felt at times. During the Durban game, when people were encouraged to send their SMS messages to be flashed on the giant screen, one person wrote: "Why are there so many traitors in this ground? You should go live in India then" - a view inspired no doubt by Norman Tebbitt, and the multitude of Indian flags that were being waved before the evening
collapse.

Continue reading "Little India in Durban and discordant noises"

	Barry Richard's wand pales in comparison to Mahendra Singh Dhoni's mace © Sunandan Lele

The drive from Johannesburg to Durban is a beautiful one, but once you enter Kwa Zulu Natal, you pass the scene of many a battle. There's Estcourt, where King Dingane's Zulu warriors massacred the Voortrekkers from the western cape, and Volkrust (The nation rests), where Boer soldiers gathered to regroup after the first war of independence. Perhaps it's a good thing that an embattled Indian team subjected to relentless criticism in recent months flew down, even if it meant skipping the chance to pass through towns like Pietermaritzburg, where Mahatma Gandhi was thrown off the train.

Kingsmead occupies a special place in South African cricket lore. It was here that Graeme Pollock scored the last of his seven Test centuries, an epic 274 (401 balls) that inspired a crushing innings-and-129-run thumping of Bill Lawry's Australians. Along the way, he added 103 with Barry Richards, who smashed 20 fours and a six en route to 140 in only his second Test.

In the media centre, there's a glass cabinet that houses bats used by both - the Gray Nicholls favoured by Richards and the Duncan Fearnley blade that Pollock used to such devastating effect before the isolation years. A senior Indian journalist doing a story on modern equipment for a TV channel managed to borrow one of Mahendra Singh Dhoni's bats, and we stare in amazement at how the new differs from the old. Pollock was reputed to use one of the heaviest bats of his time, but next to Dhoni's ship-hull-shaped one, it's an average Joe standing next to Jean Claud van Damme. The Richards bat may as well be Twiggy.

	Brisbane: hillier than you might think

It's an incongruous city. Peaceful almost to the point of self-parody, the locals have their tongues wedgely firmly in cheeks (I think!) when they dub the place "Bris Vegas" or "BrisneyLand". Even the Interstate Highways are unknowingly comical with their large-letter signposts on the slip roads. "No Tractors, No Animals, No Pedestrians" they scream on one side. "Wrong Way! Go Back!" bellows the other in unmissable white-on-red characters. I can't imagine the M25 ever has such a problem.

It's a country town made good. The tuft of skyscrapers in the Central Business District is proof that Brisbane has shrugged off its reputation as a backwater, as indeed is the new-look Gabba – although this vast speckle-seated amphitheatre with room for 42,000 punters is so far removed from its roots that it's almost impossible to recall the grassy banks and dog track that once made the ground so unique. Impressive it most certainly is, and a fitting venue for Thursday's showdown of a lifetime. But the redevelopment is not to everyone's taste.

What remains on the outside of the ground is perhaps as revealing as what lurks within. Take the wonderfully monickered Vulture Street for instance, one of the most evocative names in the game. This is a road that turned out to be exactly as I imagined it. A little bit dingy, a little bit ugly, but strangely majestic nonetheless. Okay, so there weren't any big hook-beaked birds circling over the carcasses of road-killed ‘roos (to give my mind's eye its full and warped licence), but there was a wonderfully grotty 7-Eleven shopping centre, situated just a stone's throw from the main entrance to the ground.

Continue reading "Germans in Bris Vegas"

	Groupies? What groupies? Michael Clarke just gets on with his game © Getty Images

The sun tends to rise at 4.30am up here (a habit that plays havoc with those suffering from jet-lag) and hangs high in the sky for hours on end, beating down mercilessly on anyone who ventures out in the midday heat – people such as the knot of journalists who rocked up to the Brisbane Grammar School ground in Northgate today, to watch Australia's latest training session.

If the battle of Waterloo really was won on the playing fields of Eton, then England might as well surrender forthwith in their battle for the Ashes. The Grammar School grounds, situated just off the motorway and a stone's throw from the airport, consist of a vast expanse of yellowing spongy grass, sculpted into three immaculate ovals and overseen by a grandstand pavilion that wouldn't look out of place at The Rose Bowl.

With its hills and mounds and general undulations, this is a venue that feels more like a links golf course, especially on a day when Australia's stars were as spread out as Tiger Woods and his colleagues on the final round of an Open. On the main ground, ringed off by a white picket fence, was Brett Lee – working himself into a furious sweat in the company of a cast of grammar schoolboy fielders. Somewhere in the middle distance was Shane Warne, going through his fielding drills with John Buchanan, while Ricky Ponting was in the nets, finding his timing against the Queensland Under-17s.

Not everyone was having an easy time against the kids though. On a particularly juicy end strip, Justin Langer was flinching and cursing as the ball zipped regularly off the seam, while Adam Gilchrist – taking his licks with greater equanimity than his team-mate – found the bullish left-arm line of a young Ian Austin lookalike very tricky to cope with. He nearly chopped a lifter onto his off stump before being rapped on the pad just outside the line, while the bowler, a 16-year-old named Michael, later claimed a caught-behind against his hero as well. Not a bad way to make an impression.

It was a brutally hot day, and clearly not the sort to encourage hard labour. Shane Watson was reduced to running in off three paces as he tested his damaged hamstring, while the taxi driver who brought one of the English journalists to the ground decided that pickings were so slim he might as well hang around and indulge in some autograph hunting. Mike Hussey – Mr Cricket himself – was particularly busy in that regard, as he prepared for his return to the ground where he made his Test debut. Incredibly, that was only this time last year.

By the end of the session the full entourage of English press corps had arrived, freshly jetted up from Adelaide. They had gathered for one purpose only, the traditional pre-series media bunfight, where all of a team's players are paraded in front of the microphones to talk at length in whatever direction an interviewer so wishes. So Michael Clarke was asked his opinion of groupies ("say what?"), while Warne declared he had "had enough of talking to you guys and answering the same questions", before going right ahead and answering them all anyway.

Thankfully the talking is soon to stop, which will relieve players and media alike. But there was one hot topic that remained on all the journos' lips – the need to book Brisbane's best restaurants well in advance, to guard against the voracious influx of 10,000 English fans. To survey the city after dark, however, was to scoff at such a notion. Admittedly it was a Monday night, but rarely can there have been a quieter conurbation this side of Windhoek. Things are about to get rather exciting in the sleepy old town.

	'When he was around the very idea of anyone else opening the batting is almost sacrilegious' © Getty Images

As the drizzle continued and an expectant crowd gradually emptied out, the stadium’s sound system keeps up a steady stream of modern rock hits to keep the feet tapping, even as the skies above the beautiful green outfield become ever darker. There was not much to do at the Wanderers but sample the grub and wander the corridors, bumping into a childhood hero or two. With so many cricket luminaries on commentary, the easiest thing to do to pass the time was to think up a dream team based on those present, either with SABC, SuperSport or ESPN-Star.

The first name on the teamsheet was invariably the easiest. For most Indians of my generation, and especially those fortunate enough to watch that matchless 96 in his farewell Test, the very idea of anyone else opening the batting is almost sacrilegious. Alongside Sunil Gavaskar would be a man who many reckoned was in the same league, someone who scored 508 runs in four Tests before South Africa’s dubious politics ended his international career. Barry Richards’s attacking ways would also be the perfect foil for Gavaskar’s more studied approach.

Two more South Africans follow. The first played for Australia before heading back to his native land in the mid-1980s. Kepler Wessels made a century on debut against England, and was as pugnacious as they come. Just below him in the batting order is an individual who most think of as Shane Warne’s bunny. But against teams that didn’t wear the baggy green cap, Daryll Cullinan was a formidable batsman, a fluent strokemaker who managed the transition from child prodigy to international star far better than most.

Continue reading "Stargazing in the rain"

	Sachin Tendulkar tries his hand at seam bowling ahead of India's first ODI against South Africa at Johannesburg © Getty Images

As you approach the ground, you begin to see glimpses of South Africa's unsavoury past. Centurion itself was formerly Verwoerdburg, named after Hendrik Verwoerd, prime architect of Apartheid and a man whose tenure saw the Sharpeville massacre and Nelson Mandela's trial for treason. The road to the stadium is also redolent of the past - John Vorster Drive being a tribute to the prime minister whose intransigence over Basil D'Oliveira's inclusion in England's tour party (1970) led to the Springboks feeling the cold touch of isolation for two decades.

Continue reading "Last-minute preparations before the big battle"

	The breathtaking Wanderers © Keith Lane

Continue reading "There is something about the Wanderers"

	Savouring the surroundings: Carlton Baugh enjoys a different kind of ride © Getty Images

At Hawa Mahal, that most famous of Jaipur landmarks, in the heart of the district known as the Pink City, a procession straight out of a mini zoo held up traffic. There were two elephants, decked out in finery at the head, a clutch of camels behind them, and then horses, giving way to people on foot. They were celebrating – quite obviously and noisily, oblivious to the fact that they had brought traffic to a grinding halt – and part of the celebrations was some genius setting off firecrackers. One particularly loud boom, and the elephants had taken it enough, they began to backtrack, and the camels, fearing for their lives, followed suit, sending the whole procession into pandemonium. If he had scripted a scene to capture with his camera, Imran Khan, the West Indian media manager, could not have come up with something better.

Ever since he has been in India, his first time to the country, Imran has been taking pictures and posting them on his blog, named Blue Billion, after the cola advertising campaign that has caught the fancy of the nation, and has people yelling “Ooh aah India, aa-ya India” at matches around the country. He’s not the first foreigner to do that, and he won’t be the last, and already some of his pictures have ruffled feathers, with some Indians writing in to his blog complaining that he was only taking pictures of poverty and filth. Imran’s been around a bit, though, and it takes more than a few comments of this kind to deter him.

Continue reading "Footloose in the Pink City"

	No India, no crowd - Empty stands for non-India matches have proved that India's just crazy about Indian cricket © AFP

1. Asia is not cricket's power centre, it's just a power centre for driving
cricket.

For the first time since the 1975 World Cup, no Asian team made it to the semi-final of a major event. Curiously they played a part in each others demise. Sri Lanka walloped West Indies, topped the qualifier leg and entered Group B. That left West Indies in Group A and having got India's number in five out of their past seven meetings, they duly pushed them to the brink of elimination.

In Group B, Pakistan beat Sri Lanka and left them in a tight situation. They hurt themselves as well - as coach Bob Woolmer himself realised later - by getting complacent and sleeping through the rest of the tournament. Had they lost to Sri Lanka, Pakistan might have been far more determined and who knows, both teams might have gone through.

Continue reading "Taking a reality check"