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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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

A couple of weeks ago, I announced my intention to give this year's IPL a go, i.e., to try and see if I could get myself to support a team in cricket that was not a national representative side. I picked two teams: the Delhi Daredevils, because, I'm from Delhi (I still say that even though I left 'home in 1987), and Kings XI Punjab, because, well, my last name says so. I went for hometown and ethnic affiliation. I bought myself a broadband video package that gives me live telecasts,replays and highlights of all the games. I even baited Mumbai fans, just to get myself pumped up.

There is one scenario in which Pakistan's legal confrontation with the ICC over World Cup 2011 hosting rights could prove an intelligent move: if it forces both the ICC and Pakistan into a compromise that relocates the Pakistan-based games to Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Indeed, this may well have been the ultimate strategic outcome in the mind of the PCB officials as they planned a litigious attack on the ICC.

Deep inside, even the PCB hierarchy understands that no visiting team will feel safe in Pakistan after the calamitous events of March this year in Lahore. Pakistan as a political and social entity has to enjoy a long run of peace and stability before the prevailing mood on that situation can be expected to change. But don't expect the PCB to admit as much; as the official protector of Pakistan cricket, it cannot afford to give the appearance of surrender.

Five of the players involved in the Wisden Trophy series went to South Africa with the IPL, which many thought would be very poor preparation for playing Test cricket. So how have they done?

Ravi Bopara and Chris Gayle both both recorded similar figures, averaging about 28 with the bat at a strike rate of about 117. Gayle’s contributions were generally useful without being outstanding, while Bopara played one match-winning innings and some small ones. Both were thus moderately successful.

Bopara is the batting success story of the Tests so far. Gayle was going pretty well in the first innings at Lord’s before dragging one on, and was done by Anderson’s swing for a duck in the second.

Kevin Pietersen had a disappointing IPL, failing to record a hundred runs even in total over six innings. At Lord’s he was out first ball, beaten by a superb delivery from Fidel Edwards, who was the best bowler in the Test. Edwards had also been to the IPL, where his returns were adequate, being neither as impressive as Lasith Malinga’s nor as laughable as Andrew Flintoff’s.

It’s clear that Cricket Australia viewed him as a risky proposition and have therefore left him off their contract list. He’s not long returned to the game after battling a bout of depression/anxiety/battle fatigue, call it whatever.

His return from that mental injury did not stop him from breaking down with more physical ones. Unable to sustain his pace for more than a few overs, Australia’s selectors obviously felt they cannot afford the luxury of a fast bowler who can’t bat and is ponderous in the field. Perhaps when Warne, McGrath and Gillespie were in their prime, they could have contemplated a high-risk match winner but those halcyon days are long gone. They now need 11 fit players, each of them operating at full throttle. That’s what happens when you’re back with the rest of the pack. Like the global economy, this is a time for consolidation rather than speculation. Fair enough. Even Tait wouldn't argue with that logic I'm sure.

I can’t help but feel for the poor chap though. Denied the chance to play in the IPL because he was supposedly being rested for national duties, he is then informed that his contract will not be renewed. What exactly was he being saved for?

West Indian cricketers are not supposed to fear anyone – except their mothers. So what must have happened is that when Chris Gayle got home with the Wisden Trophy, his mother took one look at it and told him that it wasn’t his and he was to give it back to the people it really belonged to as soon as possible or there would be trouble. And if the other boys’ mothers said similar things, then we can understand why their performances at Lord’s and the Riverside were so abject, and perhaps even forgive them.

All right, so it was pretty chilly out there in the middle and the ball moved in the air and off the seam at times, but international-level cricketers ought to be able to make a better fist than that of conditions other than idyllic. Fidel Edwards managed to make some good use of the moving ball but his colleagues did not even get the ball to whisper, let alone talk. The batsmen decided to play as if the ball was not moving at all and trust to luck for survival, a policy with predictably grim results.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, the announcement of the Ashes touring squad has been completely overshadowed in Brisbane by torrential rain, the likes of which the folk in Old Blighty are probably more accustomed to than us tropical folk. The sight of people marooned up creeks without paddles, confined to an indefinite period of loneliness is probably something that Andrew Symonds can relate to. His exclusion owes nothing to Mother Nature but it is still a sobering thought that his Test career may be over. One can only hope that ‘sober’ is a word that is now part of his lifestyle because his talent, though waning with age, is still worth the entrance money.

My initial gut feeling was that this was a squad without any major surprises. Australia have usually sent away at least one ‘bolter’ on most Ashes tours, a young tyro who has been identified as having potential and is picked on instinct rather than numbers. Wayne Holdsworth, Greg Campbell and Dirk Welham rank amongst the under-achievers. Terry Alderman and Michael Slater spring to mind as success stories. I’m not sure if Andrew McDonald really qualifies in that “young tyro” category but his selection might have been one of the more contentious ones in an otherwise predictable squad.

Phil Hughes’s early-season stint as Murali Kartik’s stand-in has finished and England’s limited-over squad has gathered, which results in the dispersal of Middlesex’s remarkable quartet of unorthodox batsmen – Hughes, Owais Shah, Eoin Morgan and Dawid Malan.

Born in four different countries and learning their cricket in a slightly different set of four countries, they have independently arrived at the conclusion that the stance in which they take guard is merely a take-off point. The conventional batsman does no more than go forward or back, and possibly move his front leg outside off stump to prevent the lbw, but when the ball is delivered, these four go a-roaming in search of the best place to play the shot they intend. There are a fair number of such batsmen these days, but it is rare to see virtually a whole top order made up of these crease-gypsies. Not that these four have much more in common – each has a highly individual style.

From S Giridhar and VJ Raghunath

This piece like earlier ones began as an animated discussion between the two of us. This time about umpiring in general and LBW in particular. The essence of the LBW Law has remained the same over time: a) to be LBW the ball must hit the batsman in line with the stumps and is likely to hit the stumps beyond any reasonable doubt; b) if the ball pitches outside leg you cannot be leg before even if that delivery was likely to hit the stumps; c) one can be LBW even if the batsman is struck outside the off stump provided the batsman is not offering a stroke in the opinion of the umpire (this rule was introduced around 1970).

From Andrew Hughes, United Kingdom

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an English cricket lover with an opinion on the IPL must be in want of an Empire. It seems that every one of my irregularly scribbled posts provokes at least one stinging missive from V.Angry of Bangalore, who, presented with a typically shaped stick invariably seizes it firmly by the pointy end and runs off with it, singing the Indian National Anthem.

I don’t know what else to try. I have disavowed county cricket, I have proclaimed my profound and yawnsome indifference to all things Vaughan and everything that is Bell in the world. I have even paraded my Jeremy Coney fetish for all to see. Yet it avails me naught. The words ‘United Kingdom’ seem to be the only two that certain readers notice. So I might as well give people what they want.

From Ravi Kumar Putcha, Singapore

How do you defend someone who is so overtly aggressive? How do you try to make a case for the talent of the IPL’s much maligned and much abused bowler when it is the sideshow everyone seems to care for? It is not easy, but if players who use performance-enhancing drugs have a right of appeal and if bowlers called for chucking have a shot at rehabilitation what, crime has Sreesanth committed that we are all being so hard on him?

This whole thing started off with Matthew Hayden - 486 runs from 11 matches, the orange cap, and a good match against a guy returning from a long lay-off - and Hayden was off. People should have realised that for a player who called an opponent "obnoxious weed" and who thought nothing of the contradiction between calling India a "third world country" and then running after the money the Indian Premier League offered, even after retirement, calling a struggling quick an "overrated bowler" was no great leap of imagination or faith. Nor is this a big deal for a man who criticized his Indian opponents for batting for their ODI hundreds, only for Cricinfo to prove, with statistics, that the slowest player to go from 50 to 100 in ODIs at the same time he offered this precious gem was, unsurprisingly enough, Matthew Hayden.

From Andrew Hughes, United Kingdom

Like a band of rogue plastic surgeons, Lalit Modi and his IPL cronies are changing the face of our ancient, rather wrinkly game. We have already had injections of entertainment and enthusiasm, concepts without which cricket has managed perfectly well for hundreds of years. And it is possible that with all this whooping, shouting and high-fiving, the human gene responsible for polite applause might pass into obsolescence.

No nook or crevice has escaped their beady eye. Even the sacred ritual of the pitch report is being tampered with. Long ago it was writ that the least useful or most annoying member of the commentary team should venture out onto the cut strip and hitching up his slacks, should bend, haemorrhoids permitting and solemnly prod the turf with a car key whilst chanting mystically about loam, root stock and water tables.

KARACHI (Reuters) - Mohammad Yousuf has met with Pakistan board officials and is confident of a rapid return to test cricket following his resignation from the rebel Indian Cricket League.

CENTURION, South Africa (Reuters) - Delhi Daredevils beat Mumbai Indians by four wickets in their Indian Premier League match at Centurion on Thursday.

KARACHI (Reuters) - Pakistan fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar has been ruled out of the World Twenty20 due to a skin infection in his groin, a Pakistan Cricket Board spokesman said on Thursday.

REUTERS - Indian Premier League results and standings on Thursday.

KARACHI (Reuters) - The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) will submit new proposals to get back its share of 2011 World Cup matches at a meeting called by the International Cricket Council in Dubai on June 3.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia batsman Phillip Hughes arrived home from a successful few weeks in England on Friday and said he could not wait to get right back on the plane to Europe for his first Ashes series.

CENTURION, South Africa (Reuters) - Manish Pandey smashed the highest score of the Indian Premier League season as his unbeaten 114 helped Bangalore Royal Challengers to a 12-run win over Deccan Chargers and third place in the table.

CENTURION, South Africa (Reuters) - South Africa have restored cricket relations with Zimbabwe, Cricket South Africa said on Friday.

CHENNAI, India (Reuters) - Strike bowler Ishant Sharma is looking to sharpen his yorkers and widen his repertoire to help India defend their title in the Twenty20 World Cup in England next month.

CENTURION, South Africa (Reuters) - Australian Adam Gilchrist blasted 85 off 35 balls to lead Deccan Chargers into the Indian Premier League final with a six-wicket victory over Delhi Daredevils on Friday.

This week, England picked five specialist bowlers and defeated the West Indies inside three days in the earliest Test Match ever held in England – starting a full five days earlier than the previous record-holder. Debutant Tim Bresnan only bowled seven overs despite nudging the 90mph mark on the radar speed gun, but the other four bowlers all contributed towards the victory with crucial wickets

Yorkshire has launched a staunch defence of its new 600,000 pound drainage system after the opening match of the one-day international series ended in farcical scenes at Headingley.

Paceman Dirk Nannes played a crucial role and Virender Sehwag marked a timely return to form as the Delhi Daredevils defeated the Mumbai Indians in their final league match of the IPL at Centurion.

Commonwealth Bank Southern Star Ellyse Perry takes a look at preparations for the the ICC World Twenty20 and then the ultimate, the Ashes.

Former Australia all-rounder Ian Harvey has joined Northamptonshire ahead of its forthcoming Twenty20 campaign.

England is refusing to panic over potential injury scares to its two most influential players in the build-up to the ICC World Twenty20 tournament starting in less than a fortnight.