Graeme Swann was England’s standout player in this series, troubling South Africa’s batsmen with dip, turn and determination even on unhelpful surfaces, while Alastair Cook, Paul Collingwood, Ian Bell and Stuart Broad all played valuable roles in England’

Andrew Miller18-Jan-2010England lost momentum towards the end of the Test series, but emerged looking a unified and dynamic unit•Getty ImagesAndrew Strauss – 5Made the wrong choice in each of the three tosses he won, and was visibly ruffled by Morne Morne’s round-the-wicket line, which accounted for three of his seven dismissals in the series. But Strauss’s influence on this squad cannot be under-estimated, and though his form was below his recent standards, he still managed key contributions in the first three Tests, including an invaluable tempo-setter in the victory at Durban, as he tore onto the offensive in a boundary-laden 54. Where he led, his team followed.Alastair Cook – 7Began the series with the vultures circling, and was conceivably in last-chance saloon going into the second Test, where he responded with a brilliant display of temperament over technique, as he left religiously outside off stump, and willed himself back to form in an indomitable six-and-a-half hour century. Carried that same mindset into the Cape Town rearguard before tailing off in the face of furious pace bowling at the Wanderers. But overall he has taken massive strides.Jonathan Trott – 5Began the series amid massive pressure, ramped up by endless column inches about his background, but responded with a bloodyminded 69 at Centurion to help put the first Test beyond South Africa’s reach. And yet, it all began to unravel thereafter. South Africa’s gripes about his dallying between deliveries appeared at first to have little effect, but the anxious batsman who flapped his way to a total of 13 runs in 17 balls at Johannesburg was not the same man who epitomised sang froid on debut at The Oval last August.Kevin Pietersen – 4One promising performance at Centurion (in which his own appalling running robbed him of a century in his first Test in South Africa), and a succession of mortal follow-ups. After a difficult year on and off the field, compounded by a four-month injury lay-off, Pietersen played like a batsman without foundations. In particular, he no longer had a solid base for his off-side repertoire, and got out far too cheaply to far too many rash swipes and rushed drives. Even great players lose their form, but it’ll take a renewed focus to get back to the player he was between 2005 and 2008.Paul Collingwood – 8Brigadier Block, as he will henceforth be known, revealed himself to be the reincarnation of Trevor Bailey in the course of an outstanding pair of rearguards at Centurion and Cape Town, in which he guarded his off stump with a GPS-like certainty of its whereabouts, and resisted all width like a dieter worried about his waistline. But then, at Johannesburg, while all about him crumbled, he changed his approach, climbed onto the offensive, and singlehandedly produced the style of resistance that could have saved the series. Rarely has he finished a campaign with his value to England more prominently displayed.Ian Bell – 7Has he, finally, surely, cracked it this time? The omens didn’t look great when he left that straight one from Paul Harris at Centurion, but with ridicule looming, he responded with the best hundred of his Test career to date to build an insuperable position in their crushing display at Durban. Then, one Test later, he confirmed his transformed mindset with a five-hour rearguard at Cape Town, where his late dismissal could not undermine the value of the effort that preceded it. Yes, his success has come at No. 6, where he cannot set agendas, but merely responds to them. But if that’s the formula that allows him to thrive, then England should nurture it, and banish forever the prospect of his return to No. 3.Matt Prior – 6Mixed performance. No qualms about his glovework, which was almost faultless to pace and spin alike. But his hyperactive batting wasn’t always suited to the situations into which England strayed. A total of four runs in three second-innings performances tells its own story, and he should have been out twice in two balls in an ugly sign-off at Johannesburg. But counterattackers aren’t designed for rearguard actions – instead, he seized the initiative as best he could in England’s first innings, helping Bell build the lead with his 60 at Durban, before clawing back the deficit with a stroke-laden 76 at Cape Town.Stuart Broad – 6Does one spell make a series? It did in the Ashes, and the same trick worked in South Africa, where Broad aped his efforts at The Oval in August with another scarcely playable matchwinning spell. Using his height to extract lift and seam movement from a taxing full length, he signed and sealed England’s most memorable overseas victory in years with three wickets in 15 balls on the pivotal fourth day in Durban. But either side of that performance, he cut a frustrated figure, prone to arguing with umpires and opponents alike, and it was interesting to note that he attracted more pantomime boos from the ground than any other Englishman. As an allrounder, he was off the pace – with a top-score of 25, and a solitary second-innings run.Graeme Swann – 9Outstanding in every respect. Midway through the 2000s, fingerspin was assumed to be dead, but Swann hauled the art out of the grave with 21 wickets in four Tests, and left South Africa’s left-handers looking like zombies as he allied an immaculate control of flight and line with an appreciable degree of turn on all surfaces. Ashwell Prince fell three times to the five deliveries he faced from Swann all series, while the number of times he struck in his first over of a spell had to be seen to be believed – at Johannesburg, each of his two wickets came from his very first ball. And then there was his unquenchably confident batting, which included a career-best 85 at Centurion, and a supporting role in the Cape Town rearguard. Right now, he’s the first name on the team-sheet.James Anderson – 6One outstanding performance on the first day at Cape Town, but by and large Anderson was marginally off the pace for much of this tour. He came into the series with concerns about a knee injury, and in a wicketless display at Johannesburg he was regularly overlooked at key moments of South Africa’s only innings. In between whiles he seemed to lose his ability to bend the ball back into the right-handers, a vital skill that turns his best spells from good to unplayable. His omission from the squad for the Bangladesh tour will give Anderson time for valuable rest and recuperation.Graham Onions – 7Only eight wickets at 45.75 for the series, but the wave of sympathy that greeted his omission at the Wanderers spoke volumes for his contribution to a superbly entertaining series. Onions’ wicket-to-wicket approach and appetite for hard yakka made him Strauss’s most reliable source of control on a series of shirt-fronts, and he was rightly promoted to take the new-ball ahead of Broad. But, of course, nothing compared to his exceptional efforts with the bat. At Centurion he faced down Makhaya Ntini, at Cape Town he withstood Morne Morkel. And in fact he was not dismissed in any of his five innings of the tour. Dropping him always looked like a bad omen.Ryan Sidebottom – 5Sidebottom hadn’t played a Test for England since Bridgetown in March, and his only previous outing of the tour came in a single day’s work at East London in a warm-up match. As gut instincts go, it was an odd punt from England’s think tank, and while he let no-one down in a wholehearted performance, he hardly set the Wanderers ablaze either.

Shane Watson has fought many struggles and his maiden century at the MCG will bring him enormous relief

Brydon Coverdale at the MCG29-Dec-2009Shane Watson has spent most of the noughties straining under great expectationsand a fragile body that couldn’t shoulder the load. On the second-last dayof Test cricket in the decade, Watson was finally unburdened and freed himselfof all the disappointments and heartache that the past few years havebrought him. He can now move on to greater things.As Watson raised his bat to celebrate his maiden Test century, he lookedrelieved more than excited. In part that was because he’d just been droppedat point on 99 and scrambled a quick single to reach the milestone, enoughto send any batsman’s heart racing; but Watson’s build-up to this momentspanned eight years, not just a few nervous deliveries.Ever since he first stepped out for his national team in March 2002, Watsonhas been tipped as the next big thing and the expectations only grew whenAndrew Flintoff’s 2005 Ashes showed Australia the value of an allrounder.For most of his career, Watson has looked like an action figurine and beenjust as inflexible and liable to snap. But now that his body is holding together,the full extent of his talent is on display.Chris Gayle said this month that Watson was soft. You can’t overcome thehurdles Watson has if you’re soft. His list of injuries includes problemswith his back, shoulder, hamstring and calf, and they have kept him out ofmajor moments like Australia’s triumphant 2003 World Cup campaign and the2006-07 Ashes whitewash.And yet, after every strain, tear or break, he has remained upbeat abouthis future, confident he would return. If he lost his right arm in afreak accident you’d half expect him to start bowling with his left and declarehe’d be back in the team within a year.It’s a resilience that makes him perfect for Test cricket. Following scoresof 96, 89 and 93 this summer, his persistence was rewarded when he becamethe first Australian to reach triple-figures in a Test this season, after the team had managed 20 half-centuries. Having starred with twin hundreds in the Champions Trophy and firmly established himself as a one-day and Test opener, it capped off a fabulous period.”The last six months have been for me my defining moment,” Watson said. “Thelast six months have been something I’ve always dreamt of, being able tostring so much cricket together throughout the Ashes, then the one-dayersand going on to the Champions Trophy and then on to India as well. For meleading up to the summer, that was a big accomplishment for me.”Despite the dropped chance on 99, he thoroughly deserved his century. SinceWatson came into the Test line-up as an opener during the Ashes tour, hehas been comfortably Australia’s best batsman. He has scored 716runs at 65.09, faced more balls than any of his team-mates and has more half-centuries to his name than any of his team-mates.And all this from a makeshift opener. The selectors were criticised for thrustingWatson, a middle-order player at first-class level, into the opening positionwhen they dropped Phillip Hughes before the Edgbaston Test. They’ve beenproven correct. Had Hughes returned to the team at the MCG in place of aninjured Ricky Ponting, Watson might not have even opened.His technique is sound, he drives and pulls with force and discretion, andthere’s a hint of David Boon in the way he shuffles the bat in his handsat the bowler’s release and then moves his body in behind the ball. A combinationof 93 and 120 not out in his first Boxing Day Test, after his previous successes,means he must stay at the top of the order permanently.The past decade has been full of hiccups, hurdles and hospital visits butWatson’s resilience got him through. Now it’s time for the rewards.

The fast bowlers have come to the party in a big way thanks to the exploits of Aavishkar Salvi and Abhimanyu Mithun in Mysore

Siddarth Ravindran in Mysore12-Jan-2010This Ranji season has been blighted by a surplus of batting snooze-fests. Only a third of this edition’s matches have ended in outright results, whereas in 2008-09 more than half ended decisively. The talk of a green-top in the lead-up to the final elicited hope that the ball would get a chance to talk before the season ended.Two days into the final, 25 wickets have tumbled, 22 of those to the quick men, and the batsmen have rarely stopped hopping. The denouement is yet to play out in its entirety, but one already gets the feeling that the last act could not have been scripted better.After R Vinay Kumar took centre stage on Monday morning, it was the turn of Aavishkar Salvi and Abhimanyu Mithun to step into the limelight on Tuesday. All season long, Mumbai has managed to find a player to pull them out of every hole they have found themselves in. It was Salvi’s turn today. Mumbai had folded for 233 after choosing to bat, and were up against a team that had made at least 260 in the first innings in each of their eight matches this season.On a responsive pitch, Mumbai’s new-ball bowlers, Ajit Agarkar and Dhawal Kulkarni, were tormenting the Karnataka batsmen with their movement, when Salvi got a chance. A bowler who relies more on accuracy than pace, he joined in the fun with a bunch of maidens, but was guilty of starting his swing from too far outside off to trouble the batsmen.Once he improved his line, the batsmen started to struggle to get bat on ball. In his fifth over, G Satish edged the first two deliveries but neither carried to slip. Three balls later, Satish drove hard at another off-stump delivery, and this time the edge was pouched at third slip.Glenn McGrath has long been Salvi’s role model, and the delivery to remove Manish Pandey for a golden duck was straight out of the Australian’s handbook – pitching just short of a length outside off stump and angling in.Pandey looked to work it to the leg side and missed the ball that was destined to strike off. That made it two in two for Salvi, and the Mumbai side knew that they were turning the match around on its head. Salvi prised out the opener KB Pawan in his next over, Ramesh Powar taking a screamer at short-cover. The three top-order blows put Mumbai in control after which Salvi picked up a couple of tail-end wickets to complete a deserved five-for.”I will rate it as my best performance,” he said after the day’s play. “It’s a dream come true to get a five-wicket haul in the finals of Ranji Trophy.”It was his first since November 2003, which was a heady time for Salvi. He had then just turned 23, and was in the Indian one-day side after two wicket-filled domestic seasons. However, a string of back injuries not only ended his national chances, but also cost him a regular spot in the Mumbai side. “The most important thing is that I am still playing cricket,” he said. “The injuries which I have had, it was really tough and now that I am still playing even after that gives me immense satisfaction.”The other fast-bowling hero of the day, Mithun, is a study in complete contrast to Salvi – he is a hit-the-deck bowler who depends on pace and swears by bouncers and yorkers. He has no concerns about picking injuries that could put him out of action. He has already had a glittering start to his first-class career, highlighted by barnstorming performances in two matches against Uttar Pradesh.Today, after a season in which Karnataka have swept all before them, Mithun found himself in the unfamiliar position of an opposition dominating the match. His response was superb, ripping out three specialist batsmen in his first eight balls, the last two scalps off consecutive deliveries. “When we lost the first-innings lead, we wanted to come all-out at them as this is the last chance in the season,” he said.The atmosphere around the ground at that stage was electric, the full house that had been stunned by Salvi in the morning were now baying for a hat-trick. It is hard to imagine such a scene at a Ranji game in one of the international centers, but the people of Mysore had turned up by the thousands, and domestic cricket was richer for their presence.There was one more wicket for Mithun, that of Mumbai’s first-innings rescuer, Vinayak Samant, which moved Mithun to the top of the bowling charts, ahead of his team-mate R Vinay Kumar. “It feels good to become the leading wicket taker in Ranji Trophy, but my focus is only on winning the match,” he said. “The match is still open and anyone can win from this stage.”

Cricket may not be top of the mind for Dharamsala’s Tibetan exiles, but a certain player is much in demand

Nagraj Gollapudi18-Apr-2010Tensang is laidback, sitting with his legs up on the arms of a plastic chair. About 18, he lounges with three of his friends from the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) on the porch of one of the many Tibetan restaurants lining the main drag of McLeodganj in Himachal Pradesh, home to thousands of Tibetan refugees, including their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.Half a century ago the young Lama managed to escape the Chinese invasion of his homeland. Traversing difficult terrain on foot, he made it to the village of Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh (McLeodganj is about five kilometres uphill), which went on to become the home of the Tibetan government in exile. Dharamsala is among the more popular global tourist hot spots, especially for those seeking vacations of the spiritual kind. This week, though, it is in the news for hosting a highly materialistic event – the IPL. Dharamsala is Kings XI Punjab’s second home ground and two matches will be played here this season, placing it on the global cricketing map.A thick, dark cloud hangs above the picturesque Dhauladhar mountains, which are covered by a thin veil of melting snow. I ask Tensang if he thinks it will rain. “No, no,” comes the confident reply in a heavy American accent, popular among many young Tibetans.I ask him who he will support in the first match. He says the Chargers are his favourite team. “I have a friend there,” he says. It turns out Mitchell Marsh, the Chargers’ young Australian allrounder, met Tensang when the TIPA group toured down under earlier this year as part of a cultural event. “He liked our performance there and last evening we met him over dinner,” Tensang says. I ask him if he would watch the match were it not for this connection. “I don’t think so,” he says.He isn’t alone. On the day of the match, April 16, the HPCA stadium is packed, but the Tibetan presence is miniscule. It is not as if the Tibetans are not keen on sport; just that soccer and basketball rank higher. The ever-smiling monks themselves have little interest in the game.Cricketers, though, are popular, even if many Tibetans are not sure exactly who’s who. As the Chargers’ players return after a special audience with the Dalai Lama, a group of Tibetan women start calling loudly, “Harbhajan Singh, Harbhajan Singh,” as a blushing Harmeet Singh walks past them.The IPL seems to have caught the imagination, however. About a thousand Tibetans have been hanging around at the Namgyal Monastery, the main Buddhist temple in McLeodganj, which also houses the Dalai Lama’s abode, from the morning of the day of the players’ visit. The maroon-robed monks, renowned for their zen-like calm, run around like excited kids, taking pictures of players and coaches from the Chargers and Kings XI Punjab teams. Lalit Modi makes an appearance, which generates a huge roar from the crowd. Many wonder where Preity Zinta is (she was reportedly set to appear in Tibetan garb).A banner says “Tibetan community welcomes IPL to Dharamsala. 51 years of refuge. Thank you India,” with a picture each of Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama.I ask two groups of monks, male and female, who their favourite player is. The unanimous response is “Yuvi” [Yuvraj Singh].The admiration seems to be mutual. For long, Yuvraj tells me the next day, he has been wanting to meet the Dalai Lama. “Five years ago I came here but I couldn’t get a chance. But this time I was lucky and it was an honour to meet him.”The Dalai Lama: more of a table tennis fan•AFPThough Punjab lost to the Chargers in a one-sided contest, Yuvraj and his team-mates, along with Tom Moody, their coach, and the team owners seem a happy lot. Yuvraj asks his mother, who is also present, if she managed to get the Dalai Lama’s blessings. She says she even got a good picture.”It is very warm, gives a lot of calmness to the mind,” Yuvraj says of the monastery. He isn’t a player you’d accuse of having a spiritual side, but he says he found listening to the Dalai Lama inspiring. How did it help him as an athlete, for whom winning is the most important thing, I ask. He speaks about how wanting to win creates stress, which a constant. “We get so stressed up because every day we want to perform. Now I am thinking of doing the same, but with a calmer mind,” he says.The Dalai Lama, with his resplendent smile, is known for being a magnetic speaker, who makes sure he has his audience listening, participating and laughing along to his words. He seems to possess an incredible lightness of being that is captivating and awe-inspiring.Yuvraj says he was at ease with the Lama immediately, and asked him a light-hearted question amidst the more routine moral and personal queries that everyone else was tossing up. “Everybody asks him about well-being and how can he get better, so I wanted to ask him what his favourite sport was,” Yuvraj says smiling. “He said, nothing in particular, but that he played table tennis and even competed against the Chinese prime minister once.”The mood turns serious after the convoy of IPL celebrities pulls away down the crowded mountain road. The Lama continues his press conference, this time attempting to alert the world’s media to the devastating earthquake in Tibet earlier this week. The Chinese claim only a few hundred Tibetans have died, but according to independent news reports from Tibet the figure is upwards of a thousand.Despite the tragedy, the Dalai Lama will honour his commitment to attend Punjab’s match with Chennai Super Kings on Sunday. Meanwhile, Tensang excitedly calls to inform that his group will be performing the traditional Tibetan Yak dance at the event.

Bradman was cricket’s first modern hero, a man who transcended his game, embodied the modern Australian journey, and became a symbol of mastery over fate

Gideon Haigh05-Sep-2010Some day in our lifetimes, the last person to have seen Sir Donald Bradman bat in a Test match will pass away. It may not be marked, like the deaths of the last survivors of the or the first day of the Somme, but in cricket’s terms it will be as significant.Of no cricketer has it been truer to say that their every innings was an event, in both the anticipation and recollection too. Only Sachin Tendulkar since has been accompanied to the crease by such uniformity of expectations, and even then these seldom ramify far beyond India. In fact, while assertions of Bradman’s uniqueness usually concentrate on the phenomenon of his record as a statistical outlier, it’s the combination of his level of performance with the fascination of his society that makes him not only a one-of-a-kind batsman but a one-of-a-kind cricket hero.Cricket in the 1930s and 1940s enjoyed a cultural primacy in the Anglosphere, since rather diminished, and a status in Australia enhanced by the country’s general modesty in other senses. “Who will write a biography of Sir Donald Bradman,” noted CLR James, “must be able to write a history of Australia in the same period.”Here was a nation of unparalleled emptiness, of more than one square kilometre per person. At the outset of Bradman’s career Australia’s population was about the same as that of Jordan today; when his cricket ended, Australians were still less numerous than modern Austrians. Bradman filled that hollow, made it echo, made it resound, throughout an Empire still worth the title, and a world that grasped mastery if it struggled to wrap its mind around cricket – the subject, on receipt of his knighthood of an editorial in the New York Times. “There is no other kind but cricket in the British lexicon,” the paper concluded. “Bradman was the unchallenged shining light for almost twenty years.”The tightness of the fit between Bradman’s feats and his public’s fancies was exquisite. His was the contemporary Australian journey. Still fewer than half Bradman’s fellow Australians lived in cities; Bradman himself was off the land, as it were. But he also embodied the country’s transition to an urban, white-collar future, and its belief in social mobility: he was the country boy who became an estate agent, retail assistant, stock broker and finally company director; he was the poor boy who came to walk among kings and prime ministers, and to enjoy an (unostentatious) wealth and (merited) honour; he was the ordinary man, small, compact, anatomically commonplace, prowess deriving not from fast-twitch fibres like a sprinter, or flipper-like feet like a swimmer, but from something about him, something in him, generally concealed, but when he came to the crease on show for the world to see.As a representative of Australia’s prevailing white Anglo-Saxon monoculture and its Protestant majority, Bradman grew into democratic privileges not really earned, and a dominant culture mainly imported. In the speech he gave at the Empire Theatre in February 1930 before departing on his first Ashes tour, Bradman faithfully espoused the values not of the bush frontiersman or the Anzac warrior but those of the English public schoolboy and muscular Christian:

“First my parents taught me to be a cricketer off the field as well as on. It was not ‘did you win’ but ‘did you play the game’ that made the man… I have no doubt that it [cricket] moulds in an individual the right type of character better than any other sport. If that can be substantiated, no other recommendation is required, because character must surely be one of the greatest assets any nation through its citizens can possess.”

The acute sense of national identification with cricket’s new hero, however, sprang from a deep and broad hankering for indigenous accomplishment. His feats, in their widely visible, verifiable and quantifiable nature, spoke not just of progress but of possibilities. In his lively 1951 memoir, Don Bradman, the poet and novelist Philip Lindsay, son of the artist Norman, provides one of the best descriptions of the particular pang of watching him.

No other cricketer had so resonated with audiences of his time. To see Bradman bat in a Test match was as ennobling as to have watched Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium and Ali at Madison Square Garden, and perhaps Caruso at La Scala and the Beatles at the Cavern as well

Reading poetry and watching cricket were the sum of my world, and the two are not as far apart as many aesthetes might believe; and when into this world came talk of a young phenomenon from Bowral, a lad of near my own age, I began to look towards him with nervous hope as though he were myself.Most of us need an ideal. Nor is it necessary for that ideal to symbolise one’s particular ambition. An actor can prove to be the spur, rousing one’s spirit to a realisation of the greatness in mankind and the latent powers within oneself, but more often it is a work of art, the reading of a poem, the hearing of music, the sight of a great painting… and to me Don Bradman became that symbol of achievement, of mastery over fate, all the more powerful because it was impossible for me, a cricketing rabbit, to compare myself with him.

Indeed, while the everyman aspect of Bradman’s achievements has been widely attested, his feats in the 1930s engaged the emergent Australia intelligentsia too. The critic Vance Palmer describes a visit to the great novelist Henry Handel Richardson in which the great novelist could scarcely speak of anything but Bradman; the historian Manning Clark reports the frustration of a foreign economist with local professors obsessed by cricket scores. Bradman offered Australians not just a corroboration of their sporting prowess but, to use Thomas Keneally’s phrase, a “great way out of cultural ignominy”.The other salient precondition of the rise of Bradman is the coincidence of his career with the diffusion of radio, cinema and wire photographs as forms of mass communication, and the adaptation of newspapers to the role of investigation, interpretation and lionisation. Radio in particular, with its exhilarating immediacy and its free availability, was the ideal messenger for the steady unfolding of feats of scale like Bradman’s scores. The merest fraction of those who revered Bradman ever saw him bat in person, yet in the 1930s and 1940s they were able to partake of his records and thereby feel a share in them.Australian cricketers before him had regarded writing about the game, and themselves in it, as almost taboo: Bradman published his first autobiography aged 21. Australian cricketers had been filmed only from far away for newsreel purposes; Bradman appeared in his own instructional movie, That’s Cricket. His captain Bill Woodfull introduces him in the film in terms of another entertainment technology, as having “more records than a gramophone company”. Bringing modernity to cricket, he brought it also to the game’s promotion and dissemination.In this way, Bradman became perhaps the first cricket hero to genuinely transcend his game. Watching the thrall he exerted on his English hosts in 1948, John Arlott noted astutely: “More people are interested in Bradman, and not in cricket, than are interested in Bradman and cricket.” Arlott summed Bradman’s up as a general rather than a cricket-specific remarkableness:

He is the supremely capable man. Satisfied with the terms of his employment, he would make the perfect executive. He prefers, however, to make his efforts on his own behalf… He was given, and has maintained, a good average body and a good average brain; he has directed them with rare, perfect single-mindedness which makes for the attaining of objectives.

Arlott expressed a certain pity of Bradman in his burden of expectation on that tour.Bradman embodied the country’s transition to an urban, white-collar future, and its belief in social mobility•PA Photos

An old-hand county batsman… can have a swish and get out and catch the early train home, or can say, “Don’t send me in skipper – give one of the lads a chance and put me down number ten, my feet are sore.” But when Bradman rests for one match or an arduous tour of England, the local spectators are hurt and they adduce fifty “good” reasons why Bradman ought to have played. If he moves himself down in the batting order he “insults our players”. If he throws his wicket away, he has robbed ten thousand people of the conversational gambit, “When I saw Bradman make his hundred at ________.”

But those spectators were on to something: to have been part of the legend at close quarters was something considerable, as perhaps for no other cricketer, in the sense that no other cricketer had so resonated with audiences of his time. To see Bradman bat in a Test match was as ennobling as to have watched Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium and Ali at Madison Square Garden, and perhaps Caruso at La Scala and the Beatles at the Cavern as well. In a choice tribute to the Australian, Michael Parkinson recalls his father, a miner from Barnsley in south Yorkshire, walking 30 miles to see Bradman bat, then wondering why this was thought at all strange.

Upon his return he faced a family who clearly believed he had a slate loose. Who, in their right mind, would waste that much precious shoe-leather to see a cricket match? My father went to his grave unrepentant. Retelling the story – as he did many times – he’d say, “But I saw HIM bat and they didn’t.”

Ajmal Shahzad’s reverse-swing antics have justified his inclusion ahead of Ryan Sidebottom

Andrew McGlashan at Old Trafford05-Jun-2010One of England’s stated aims for this series has been to expand their squad depth in order to find out about a few of their fringe players. With a busy year in store, Andy Flower wants to be able to select from outside his first XI without weakening the team, which is one of the reasons why they’ve taken the opportunity to give Paul Collingwood and Stuart Broad a rare break. However, there have been a few occasions, usually with Tamim Iqbal at the crease, when Flower may have had second thoughts.Bangladesh were cruising along at five an over while Tamim and his sidekick Imrul Kayes were adding 126 for the first wicket, and suddenly England’s 419 seemed far less imposing than it had done. Yet by the close the hosts were in a position to enforce the follow-on, although they are unlikely to take that route on a surface that will be even tougher to bat on come the fourth innings.Regardless of opposition or conditions, taking 10 wickets in a session is a notable achievement and Graeme Swann, who claimed five of them, couldn’t remember it happening before in his career. It was never really a doubt that hyper-confident Swann would relocate the mojo that went AWOL for a few days during his wicketless outing at Lord’s. Of greater interest was the late effort of Ajmal Shahzad, who found devastating reverse swing at a nippy pace to cut through the lower order.He has shown encouraging signs early in his England career and it confirms the importance of blooding him at this level, in preference to the tried-and-tested Ryan Sidebottom. Having seen the value of Finn’s bounce at Lord’s, they now know what Shahzad can do when given an older ball, and he blossomed after moving on from a nervous opening spell of six overs.He also seems to be fitting in well with Team England. “I thought I had a lot of enthusiasm before I meat Shaz,” Swann said. “The politest way to say it is he’s a loon. We were playing Top Trumps and I’ve never seen a man so excited at getting his Maserati card come round.”He’s like a big kid and he’s enjoying every moment. He had nerves and I know what it’s like before your first ball in Test cricket, you are like a jelly. He got his first spell out of the way and when we came back with the ball swinging he showed what he can do. I thought he was exceptional. He bowled fast and straight and even though it was at the lower order he did a fantastic job at mopping them up.”England have a habit of producing sessions in which they burst through the opposition in unexpected style. Old Trafford 2010 won’t go down in folklore like The Oval or Durban in 2009 – and is unlikely to force the football World Cup off the back pages – but it was a spectacular turnaround after Tamim’s second special innings.The dramatic change of events came after tea, when England had sat down with their new bowling coach, David Saker, having been given something of a run-around. On one hand it’s a worry that the initial plans went so awry, but on the other it’s another feather in Saker’s cap for his part in the turnaround. He played a significant role in the Twenty20 triumph and is looking a shrewd acquisition.”At tea time things weren’t great for us, but we have come to expect that from Bangladesh, and we regrouped at tea. We had a discussion with the bowling coach and came up with a plan that worked perfectly,” said Swann. “We’ve seen over the last four consecutive Test matches that Tamim’s a very destructive player and he was hitting it very sweetly. You always think you will have a chance sooner or later and it’s very important you take it.”Swann followed Shakib Al Hasan by finding sharp turn allied with helpful bounce to banish the memories of his blank Test from Lord’s. When England manage to induce panic in the ranks of their opponents, Swann is generally to be found at the centre of the action. After Finn had made an opening by removing Kayes, Swann finally collected his first wicket of the series when he removed Junaid Siddique.”It’s a relief to get your first wicket of the summer,” he said. “To be honest at Lord’s I’d rather have had a hole in the head than bowl on that. It wasn’t an enjoyable 30 overs. When you drive home you think you have been a bit of a charlatan in that game so it’s nice to have an impact. Hopefully I can do it again in the second [innings].”It was also another milestone for England’s Player of the Year as he claimed his first five-wicket haul on home soil after his previous six came around the globe from Trinidad to Centurion to Dhaka. “The others have all come away and you cherish them but to get one in England – and the dressing-room attendant has just said ‘I have to put your name on the board now’ – I’m delighted with that.”

At the start of the Ashes tour Kevin Pietersen said he was “on fire” and at Adelaide he was true to his word

Andrew Miller at Adelaide05-Dec-2010And just like that, it was as if he’d never been away. Kevin Pietersen had waited 21 months and 39 first-class innings for the chance to charge through for that manic quick single, to punch the air with the self-satisfaction of old, and break a hoodoo that had hung over him almost since the day he lost the England captaincy back in January 2009. By the time a downpour came to Australia’s aid, he was striking the ball with presumptuous ease, playing like a man restored to the plinth from which he had toppled, and ready to make his favourite foes pay for the indignities he’d endured since he was last in such a position of dominance.At face value, it all looked so laughably predictable. After all the agonising and pontificating, the doubts and column inches, Pietersen did what everyone, deep down, believed was his destiny, and turned in a performance that might have been lifted from one of Ian Botham’s scripts from the 1980s. With the one hand it provided closure, as a grim chapter of KP’s career was officially put to bed, while at the same time he set about carving a fresh new set of wounds for Australia – a team whose biggest weakness, no matter what how great or vulnerable the players therein may be, comes when they are challenged eye to eye by a player they both respect and fear.The only oddity about Pietersen’s performance was its context. The last time we saw him lapping up the acclaim for a hundred, at Trinidad in March 2009, the cult of KP was the central theme of the innings, just as it had been for each of 15 previous centuries that he’d racked up in his career, starting – of course – with that bewildering feat of ego-mania that sealed the Ashes at The Oval in 2005.Here he was, back at the Adelaide Oval, the scene of a contest four years ago so brimful of hubris that it might have been his career in a microcosm. After his first-innings 158 and his triple-century stand with Paul Collingwood, Pietersen had memorably stated that he’d got the great Shane Warne mastered. Three days later, Warne bowled him behind his legs for 2, to set in motion the mother of all Ashes collapses.This time, however, he tempted no fate and sought no extra attention, other than the requisite celebration pose that is sure to adorn the back pages of the British newspapers. “It’s wonderful to get runs, and it’s wonderful to put the team in a position where we can win a Test match in Australia,” were his first words as he addressed the press afterwards, which wasn’t an especially extraordinary thing to say, but notable nonetheless for its humility. Here was just another England cricketer checking in for duty, and you could almost hear Andy Flower’s pencil going “tick” in the requisite box. Oh good, KP’s back to form. We’re one step closer to our goal.The question of whether Pietersen buys into that collective goal is one that has stalked his career from year dot, and has been a particular obsession for Australia ever since his lone ranger performance in the 2006-07 whitewash. At Perth, as the last rites of England’s miserable Ashes defence were being played out, Pietersen’s disdain was self-evident as he prodded singles from the first deliveries of four of the last six overs, and left his lower-order colleagues to be scythed down by Warne. He was most certainly a man apart in that series, a brooding presence whose personal excellence could do nothing to nothing to halt the juggernaut, and once the series was gone, his interest went with it. Of his tally of 490 runs, 408 came in those first three games.

The selection of Xavier Doherty, on account of Pietersen’s recent failings against left-arm spin, is already looking like one of the most futile attempts at man-to-man marking since Maradona took on the entire Belgian midfield in World Cup 86

It’s different now for Pietersen, because it has to be. His downturn in personal form happens to have coincided with an upsurge in England’s collective ambitions, and whether or not that was a coincidence at the outset, it has become a fact of his career that he has had to deal with. The world ceased to revolve around him at the very moment that he was sacked as captain for his insurrection against Peter Moores, and he’s spent a few months feeling giddy while getting used to a new gravitational pull. In the circumstances, who wouldn’t?All the same, John Buchanan and Warne still delight in trumpeting the notion that he is an “outcast” within the England squad, and while KP could only offer a perplexed “Who? No” to an enquiry on that subject from an Australian journalist, a more resounding endorsement of his new-found credentials came moments later, when he walked back into the visitors’ dressing room to a raucous whoop of “Here he is. Yeah!” from his cock-a-hoop team-mates.Pietersen may never be the easiest man to warm to in the England squad, but there’s little question how valued he is within the walls of the dressing-room – not least because of the menace his record brings to their collective presence on this tour. Like Botham and Andrew Flintoff before him, he is a lightning rod for the pressure that Australia seek to impose on their oldest enemy, precisely because they recognise him as the biggest threat to the status quo.Everything about Australia’s preparation for this series centred around Pietersen and his new-found “vulnerability”. At a pre-series press call in Brisbane, player after player obsessed about his talent and the need to keep him in his box, allowing the lesser lights in the line-up – Ian Bell in his only innings at the Gabba, and most especially, Alastair Cook – to sneak round the blind-side and swarm through the gaps. The selection of Xavier Doherty, on account of Pietersen’s recent failings against left-arm spin, is already looking like one of the most futile attempts at man-to-man marking since Maradona took on the entire Belgian midfield in World Cup 86.Kevin Pietersen scored all round the wicket•Hawk-EyeThe only reason Doherty ever looked likely to ensnare Pietersen was that he had been padded up in the dressing-room for 11 straight hours before Jonathan Trott finally deigned to end his 502-run stand with Cook and give England’s gun batsman a chance to get to the middle. “I found it more tiring waiting to bat the other day than batting today,” said Pietersen. “You could probably see by the way I started… I was trying to get to fifty in five balls. But it was brilliant to watch, it’s brilliant to see and long may it continue for all of our batters to be in nick, because we will win a lot of Test matches if our batters are in good nick like this.”Pietersen is, as he admitted, a man for the big occasion. The last time he played this well was at the World Twenty20 back in May, a contest in which he was named Man of the Tournament as England captured their maiden global title. But the success on that occasion came at a price, as the gains he’d made with his patient approach to Test cricket in Bangladesh were scattered in a cloud of delinquent slogging. It left him unready for a singularly tricky home campaign against Pakistan, and left him in a scramble to find his form for the Ashes.But find it he has, with a busman’s holiday to his place of birth, Natal, giving him a chance to work with his original mentor, Graham Ford, who has known his game since his earliest schooldays. While Pietersen would not divulge the exact nature of the work they had done, a major feature of his innings was the clarity of his leg-side play, with a huge proportion of his first fifty runs coming in a flood of flicks through wide mid-on. His game brain has been reprogrammed, and having “done his head in” with the number of starts he had squandered in the past 21 months, he was not going to let this opportunity pass by.”The key to what I’ve done is the little things that I’ve worked on,” he said. “When you are batting for that amount of time you find a pace where you go through the gears to fifth, then back down to third and if needs be drop back into first and then go back up. It’s something I’ve worked hard on and it’s what the team needs and that’s how we play it, we’re not looking at two or three sessions ahead, we looking at ten minutes, ten run partnerships, hours and keeping things simple.”What the team needs is what the team gets in this current England set-up. Even the outcast has bought into that.

Bangladesh and Netherlands may have played each other only once in an international match, but they were involved in two World Cup qualification games that defined the future of Bangladesh cricket

Sidharth Monga in Chittagong13-Mar-2011Bangladesh and Netherlands might have played each other only once in international cricket – in Glasgow at that – but they share a bittersweet history; a history of tears of anguish and tears of joy for Bangladesh. Back in 1994, and then in 1997, the two countries were involved in two matches, which though not recognised as internationals, were key to the future of cricket in Bangladesh. Those were in the days of the ICC Trophy, where the Associates take part in tense contests – a tension followers of Test-playing nations can never truly appreciate, and that includes me – just to make it to the World Cup. Just to let the world know they exist.Akram Khan, arguably the greatest entertainer to play for Bangladesh, was involved in both those seminal matches against Netherlands. He is a national selector now, and often comes to watch the Bangladesh nets. On his way to the ground on Sunday, on the eve of a crucial match against Netherlands, all he could think of was those two emotion-filled games – emotion that perhaps surpasses what we have seen in Bangladesh this World Cup.In Nairobi in 1994, Bangladesh had restricted Netherlands to 205. Understandably, the coach, Mohinder Amarnath, then told them not to take any risks while chasing and just to knock the runs down. Bangladesh took the advice too seriously, as Akram remembers, and it turned out to be ” [fourteen overs, 12 runs].” It sounds funny now, but it was a huge setback. Bangladesh ended up losing by 47 runs.Zimbabwe had been granted Test status, thus opening up another slot among the Associates for the first large World Cup, to be played in 1996. Three teams were to qualify from the ICC Trophy, and Bangladesh were the favourites. Thanks to that defeat, though, Netherlands usurped Bangladesh.Akram and Bangladesh were inconsolable then. ” [It hurt us a lot],” he says, “that we didn’t qualify for the 1996 World Cup. We had got all sorts of help from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. They all helped us with the infrastructure and facilities. They used to send A teams. We thought we had let them down, our country down, everybody down.”Three years later Bangladesh went into another ICC Trophy, this time in Kuala Lumpur, as the favourites. They had a strong side, so strong they played the same XI throughout the tournament. The matches were covered live on radio, and the whole nation was hooked. They went unbeaten through the tournament, but rain was cruel to them. When they had bowled Ireland out for 129 in a league game, they had to settle for shared points because of rain. That left them in a must-win situation in their last league game against Netherlands at the Rubber Research Institute in Kuala Lumpur.Bangladesh bowled Netherlands out for 171, and they were just one solid chase short of going through to the semi-finals. However, after having gone unbeaten for seven games, they found themselves at 15 for 4. The dream was crashing. This would be too big a heartbreak. The rain arrived again, this time as the saviour. Or so it seemed at that point.Akram and Minhajul Abedin then put together a partnership. Abedin, a wristy batsman, also came from Chittagong, like Akram. The two street-smart cricketers not only got runs, they indulged in some time wasting too: asking for a helmet during an over, fiddling with other equipment, doing whatever they could to delay things. Arguments ensued. Akram now smiles and says, “I did some bad things. Not good.””We thought if we got away with one point from that game, we would qualify for the semi-final,” Akram says. “But when we came back, the match referee told us we to win the game. We were stunned.”This is where emotion makes the story hazy. All the journalists, the team themselves, and the fans present there, agree with this version: that when Bangladesh came off they thought a draw would be enough, but learned to their horror that nothing less than a win would do.That does not sound entirely accurate because Bangladesh went into that game with three points and Netherlands with one. Ireland had already qualified with five points. So a no-result would have taken Bangladesh to four and Netherlands would have been stuck at two. A defeat for Bangladesh, though, would have tied Netherlands at three points, in which case Netherlands would have advanced based on the head-to-head.There are two plausible explanations for the delaying tactics Bangladesh employed and the celebrations that greeted the rain. Bangladesh may have realised that with the partnership between Akram and Abedin, they were ahead of the Duckworth-Lewis par score, and by slowing the game down they were just ensuring that lead. However, just before they came off, Abedin was run out, which could have pushed them just behind on the reckoning, which would have meant they would lose if no further play was possible.Also D/L was a new beast back then, and perhaps Bangladesh didn’t realise they had already played the minimum number of overs required to constitute a game and were now going to lose.Then again, perhaps the version accepted in Bangladesh is correct, and this conjecture is merely conjecture. It’s all trivial, though. What is important is that the whole of Bangladesh, glued to the radio, was praying for rain, and once it stopped play, they celebrated.Bangladesh ended up winning the 1997 ICC Trophy•Simon King/ESPNcricinfo LtdThen came the news that this wasn’t good enough for them to qualify. The news was relayed on radio. Everybody who prayed for rain was now praying for the resumption of the game. “We worried about our futures,” Akram says. “All negative thoughts came to our mind. The failure in 1994. And now we thought we might never be able to play international cricket.” [It was a Friday]. A lot of Bengalis come to work in Malaysia. They all turned up at the ground. Everybody started praying. Luckily the rain stopped and the play resumed and we had a revised target.”Akram then produced an innings on which Bangladesh cricket stands today, as anybody in the country will tell you. Those who were present there say it was a chanceless innings, with no sense of panic or hurry. “I believed if I stayed there till the end, we would win this,” Akram says. “Nannu [Abedin] was a vital player. He had performed well in domestic cricket, and I got a partnership with him and then one with Saiful Islam. In the end I stayed not out.”That kicked off wild celebrations. Athar Ali Khan, who opened the batting in that game, says it was the same as what we have seen on the streets of Dhaka and Chittagong this year after the national team’s wins over England and Ireland. “My body was draped in the Bangladesh national flag, and we didn’t leave the ground for a long, long time.”Akram says everybody cried that day. The journalists, and their friends, say they cried too. “Gordon [Greenidge, their coach] cried the most. Everybody was crying, he couldn’t hold himself back.”Gordon Greenidge crying. Just imagine a win that makes Greenidge cry; a man who had come from a different country, a different culture. The owner of one of the fiercest square-cuts ever seen, the man with the double-century on one leg, the man whose image first comes to mind when the words “beware the wounded batsman” are said; Greenidge cried after that win. That’s how much it meant to the team.I ask Akram if he agrees with what everyone tells me. Was this the single most important innings in the history of Bangladesh cricket? He pauses. Says yes. Then laughs. Says yes again. It cannot be denied. For because of that innings, Bangladesh played the semi-final, then the final, then the World Cup, where they beat Pakistan and got Test status. If they had lost on that , there would have been no World Cup, and who knows how long they would have had to wait to qualify for a World Cup.We all talk about the pressure of expectation on the current team, but at least they know they will be playing international cricket even if they lose. They knew they would be playing international cricket even when they went 47 games without a win. The class of 1997, though, even after having gone unbeaten in that tournament until then, didn’t know if they would ever get to play if they lost that day. It wasn’t quite a Messerschmitt up the arse, but surely Keith Miller wouldn’t have scoffed if Akram told him he was under pressure that day.

Plays of the Day from the IPL game between Kings XI Punjab and Delhi Daredevils in Dharamsala

Sriram Veera15-May-2011A sacrificial lamb that escaped
When Paul Valthaty tapped the ball to point and didn’t respond to Adam Gilchrist’s call for a single, it looked a run out was inevitable. Gilchrist had charged too far across and even slipped when trying to turn. Yogesh Nagar had the ball and Irfan Pathan was near the stumps at the non-striker’s end. It should have been a dead ringer but Nagar fired the throw really hard and on the bounce at Irfan who couldn’t collect it. Meanwhile, Valthathy had decided to sacrifice his wicket and crossed Gilchrist. Both escaped.Revenge is best served cold
When Shalabh Srivastava took the wicket of Naman Ojha, who had tonked him for a few sixes, he should have been screaming in joy. Instead, there was no reaction. No, he wasn’t trying to be cool. He didn’t even realise he had got his man. He turned back after Glchrist collected the ball and saw that the umpire had ruled it out. He swung around in delight but by then Ojha had turned and disappeared from the scene.Leap, pouch and land safely
When Travis Birt pulled a delivery to deep midwicket, he must have thought he had hit a six. And he should have but Ryan Harris intervened in some style. Harris leaped, arched back in the air, put one hand up, plucked the ball and landed safely inside the playing arena. It was a classic Youtube moment.Clanger – 1
Dinesh Karthik waited at the deep midwicket boundary to intercept a lofted hit from Venugopal Rao. He pouched it and stepped back but he realised he was not to going to complete a legal catch as the boundary rope was too near. He tried to throw the ball back into play to avoid a six but just before he could do it, his back foot touched the boundary line. He earned some brownie points in the fair play award as he immediately signalled a six.Clanger – 2
Karthik fluffed his second chance at redemption. When Nagar pulled a short ball from Praveen Kumar to deep midwicket, Karthik stationed himself under it, swivelled towards his right and went with both hands but spilled the ball.

ESPNcricinfo presents the Plays of the Day from the World Cup, Group B match between Ireland and South Africa in Kolkata

Firdose Moonda at Eden Gardens15-Mar-2011The flat six of the day
Hashim Amla and Graeme Smith started tentatively, but in the fifth over Amla seemed to get in the mood. It wasn’t a particularly short ball, it wasn’t a particularly inviting one, but Amla decided that it was the one he would hit. He got under the ball and flat batted it over midwicket, with only the timing taking it over the rope. The mood didn’t last, because he tried to upper-cut the next ball and the shot had none of the timing of the first, making its way into the hands of George Dockrell.The hero turned antihero, turned hero again
Kevin O’Brien has a long way to go to recapture the magic he held in his hands against England in Bangalore. Since then, he has had two single-digit scores against India and West Indies. Looking for redemption against South Africa, Morne van Wyk fed him a ball at short cover off the bowling of Trent Johnston. He must have fed it in particularly spicy fashion because even though O’Brien didn’t have to move to get hold of it, he dropped it the instant it found him. O’Brien had both hands under the ball and should have held on to it. Just when it looked like his World Cup was fading fast, he managed to grab a well-judged catch, running backwards, to dismiss JP Duminy on 99.Desperate moment of the day
Graeme Smith and Morne van Wyk can make an equally desperate pair. One is looking for form and the other to cement his place in the national side. When two such desperations collide, the result can only be disaster. van Wyk was hitting everything he could and more, and his anxiety to turn the strike over saw him call for a run after nudging the ball no further than John Mooney at midwicket. Smith was keen to get to the other side too, heeded the call and when he realised it was time to turn back, Mooney had beat him to it.Sluggish moment of the day
Jacques Kallis had no-one but himself to blame for the way he was run out, the second time in four matches. He laboured through the run, called by JP Duminy, and was slow to get going and slow to reach the other end. Worst of all, he didn’t even put in a dive at the end. Niall O’Brien, the Ireland wicketkeeper, who had to collect a throw and break the stumps, did a far speedier job, and Kallis paid the price for braking when he should have accelerated.Most-active player who wasn’t playing
AB de Villiers was forced to sit out the match because of a muscle-sprain in his left thigh, and he has also been battling with a stiff back, but he can’t be kept out of the action. When it was time to serve drinks, de Villiers was the one carrying them onto the field, making sure his team-mates had had enough and even offering a few words of advice. The cameras constantly found de Villiers in the thick of things, talking to the playing XI and being as much a part of the team as he could.The look of death
Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel are supposed to hunt down wickets in a pair, and although they haven’t always shared the new ball in this tournament, they’re still regarded as a twosome. Morkel had the opportunity to help his partner twice, and both times he fluffed it. The first chance came when Porterfield pulled Steyn to fine leg, where Morkel was fielding. He overran it and the ball went for four. Steyn stared and Morkel trembled. The third ball of the next over, Morkel was offered a straightforward catch at third man off Paul Stirling’s bat. Morkel went down on his knees and made a mess of it. Steyn couldn’t even look at him that time, directing his angry gaze at the floor instead. It didn’t help that Morkel took both Porterfield and Stirling’s wickets at the other end.Body blow of the day
Kevin O’Brien had a rude reception to the crease courtesy of Jacques Kallis. He had faced just two balls when he was given a bouncer, which he wore on the back and made him roll on to the ground. He didn’t escape there and Morne van Wyk caught the ball and hit the stumps. The review, which found O’Brien to be safe, gave him time to rub the sore spot a little and recover in time to hit the last ball of the over for four.The catch that won the match
van Wyk faced some criticism after dropping two catches against India but made up for it with four catches in this innings. The last one, which ended the Irish innings, was the finest of them all. The ball came off the shoulder of George Dockrell’s bat and van Wyk had to dive to his right, full stretch. He took the catch one-handed, in picture-perfect fashion to seal the South African win.