The last time I saw Chanderpaul play was on the 2nd day of the 4th Test against England last year at Chester-le-Street. West Indies were in a sorry state and were already 2 nil down in the series having been beaten by an innings and 283 runs and 60 runs in the previous two Tests at Leeds and Manchester respectively. In contrast to the general ineptitude of his team mates Shiv shone among them.

Previous to that day, I had driven up to Durham from Cambridge in the pouring rain and funnily enough play on the first day of the Test was completely washed out and the second day did not get started until after lunch. I’m sure England had more than an element of glee after winning the toss and putting the tourists in to bat. Predictably, in what little play there was on day 2, West Indies lost 4 wickets leaving Chanderpaul and Bravo battling at the end in bowler friendly conditions before the rains came again. Out of a West Indian first innings score of 287, Chanderpaul made an unbeaten 136 runs. Pure class, but he’s been here time and again in the recent past. It was only in the second innings of that match that he was dismissed for 70. Before which he had been not been dismissed for over 18 hours.

His place in the Test team of the year is obvious:

• Graeme Smith;
• Virender Sehwag;
• Mahela Jaywardena;
• Shivnarine Chanderpaul;
• Kevin Pietersen;
• Jacques Kallis;
• Kumar Sangakkara;
• Brett Lee;
• Ryan Sidebottom;
• Dale Steyn;
• Muttiah Muralidaran.

Monty batted reasonably well for  his unbeaten 30 odd, but rightly so Klusener was roundly cheered by the sizeable crowd, considering it was a Friday.

Glamorgan were visibly flat in the field and looked to have an uphill battle to save the game after losing a wicket before bad light ended the day’s play. Hence I got to see Monty bat as well as bowl.

On Sunday I managed to see England’s last performance of the ‘summer’, beating South Africa in the 4th ODI at Lords in what turned into a 20 over slog in the gloaming. Pietersen’s captaincy has reinvigorated the England team and as a result had convincingly won the one day series before even getting to HQ. Which was just as well as the weather was shit. I have a friend that I regularly go to cricket with who seems to carry the rain around with him, I mean this summer he has literally always been under a cloud, that more often than not chooses to spill its guts.

Luckily the Lords drainage showed its worth and we were able to get underway shortly after 1pm. England choose to field and were going through fielding drills before the start.

South Africa actually started their innings really well with Amla and Gibbs hitting regular boundaries with Amla looking in especially good touch before a shambolic attempt at a run, ended in Shah running out the bearded opener. Gibbs was the only South African batsman to make a meaningful contribution before the rains came again in the 32nd over.

Between the innings I walked around the ground as is traditional at the innings break and got talking to one of the stewards alongside the pavilion, who like the rest of the people in the ground was disappointed at the reduced play. He was absolutely adamant that the ground should have a roof for such occasion! A well natured argument then ensured with I, even with having being continually been screwed over by the weather this year, advocating no roof as atmospheric conditions play such a large part in the game.

Continuing the walk around the ground I came to the Nursery Ground under the Media Centre where there were many people milling about. Suddenly a group of stewards parted the crowd and between the 2 support columns of the Media Centre came the serious looking Andrew Flintoff who strode purposefully to the nets to prepare for the innings. He looked in good touch when smashing a few throw downs in the nets.

It came in useful later when despite the near dark, Flintoff and Shah smashed several boundaries to reach the target of 137 with a few overs to spare. England had started slowly with Bell and Prior struggling to find the boundaries early on. After their dismissals, Shah, Pietersen and Flintoff played themselves in before teeing off. In the best of lights it’s a challenge to face the likes of Dale Steyn, so to watch the batsmen flog them to all parts in the dingy light was an immense end to the summer.

So was it illegal? Going by the letter of the law, yes it was. But how on earth do you police the consistency and make up of a players spit? Take a swab before the beginning of each session? And what sort of stuff keeps the shine on the ball? Something of a grey area really.

There are three basic goals in ball tampering depending on the stage of the innings. At the beginning of the innings you want to retain the shine on the ball (or rather one side of it) as long as possible to assist conventional swing. Once the ball is around 40 odd overs old, in the more abrasive environments, the un-tampered ball will become scuffed assisting reverse swing. Obviously the earlier you can affect the reverse swing, by scratching up the ball, possibly with suitably sharp objects such as fingernails or bottle tops, the longer the fielding side have to bamboozle and bowl a team out. The third main way to change, or in this case retain the performance of the ball is to pick or pinch the seam up so that the bowler can hit the seam making the ball deviate off the pitch. There is a good article on the merits and penalties of the various different methods on the CricInfo site.

Of these ball tampering methods, scratching and the scratcher are the easiest to spot these being very much physical elements against which to enforce any offence. Picking the seam too is a very obvious thing to be seen doing especially with the many many cameras present at top level international cricket. The less obvious is using foreign substances to shine the ball. Where do you cross the line from cleaning the ball and artificially retaining its shine? By the letter of the law, does the shining of the ball on a bowler’s trousers, as every bowler does, fall foul of the laws of the game? It probably doesn’t, but how far removed is this from Marcus Trescothick’s actions with his minty fresh spit? Who knows. Whether it is right to do it or not, it gives a bowling side some small solace in the increasingly batsman friendly world of cricket.

My season of going to the cricket comes to an end on Sunday with the 4th ODI of England vs South Africa at Lords, before which I have a trip to Northampton to see Northants take on Glamorgan in the LV County Championship, day 3 of 4. Earlier this year on discovering that a close friend had never seen any top level British sport, I made a pact to take him to top(ish) level football, cricket and rugby before he gets married in January next year. I think he will enjoy tomorrow’s day in the sun the best of the three, having been nonplussed by Wolves vs Ipswich at the back end of the 2007-2008 season.

The home nation not being in the rudest of health me thinks. With Australia far and away the best Test team and England, South Africa and the Subcontinental nations all supposedly close together in the chasing pack, England at home would expect to win Test series against all of those in the pack. However losing at home last year to India and this year to South Africa hardly gets any opposition boots quaking, let alone the Australians.

South Africa are not a bad team, in fact in my opinion they are underrated, the fact that they don’t have a “proper” spinner is often highlighted by Geoffrey Boycott among others, but is that such a bad thing? Where have a seen that before? A pre-Monty Panesar England perhaps? The one that won the Ashes in 2005 and several home series before that? Yes exactly. Stand up the King of Spain. The England team from that period is not so different from the South African team now. They should be congratulated on coming to England and not just being hard to beat but winning. Well done them. I can only hope this spurs England to take a long hard look at themselves to put things right.

Nothing ever fails for a single reason, so what went wrong?

Batting failures. The top order rarely put together the partnerships required to build the big scores needed in the first innings of a match to push home the advantage in each match overall. England batted first in the first 3 Tests making 593/8 declared, 203 and 231 respectively. In the latter 2 cases, at Leeds and Birmingham they lost comprehensively proving the scenario that a team batting first, if they are put in or chose to bat, need to put up good scores to not be significantly on the back foot with around 4 days of a game to play.

Lack of bowling penetration. In previous times, England have had a “go-to man”, a bowler that the captain could turn to, to break a batting partnership. In their pomp this would have been at different times, Harmison and Flintoff and arguably over the winter Sidebottom was outstanding. When the pitch was conducive to spin, even Monty Panesar chipped in, reference his performance at Old Trafford last year. The go-to man was not present in this series. Sidebottom’s form has dropped away and Harmison and Flintoff are only recently back in the team. Stuart Broad is an admirable cricketer but no strike bowler (8 wickets at 49) and lets not even mention the Pattinson episode.

Let’s look at the Test matches up to next summer. A paltry 2 Tests in India and 4 Tests in the West Indies before next summer where there may or may not be 2 or 3 Tests against Sri Lanka before the Ashes. What a way to prepare for the biggest Test series in world cricket.

• Of a potential 100 overs in the New Zealand game, I saw 54 overs;
• I saw all 90 overs of the day at the 3rd Test versus South Africa; and
• Of a potential 90 overs at The Oval, I saw a mere 17.5 overs!

So this year out of a possible 280 overs, I have seen 161.5 overs, just over half of those possible had there been full play on each day! Really gutted with that so far this ‘summer’, never more disappointing than in the New Zealand game. Actually I’ve never previously had to apply for a refund as I had to do in the final Test of the year. Absolutely gutting. One last chance to make it up comes when I go to the ODI at Lords at the end of the month. Please please please please please don’t rain!

Anyway of the day at The Oval, Pietersen’s first Test in charge no less, the highlights for me were, Stuart Broad ripping out McKenzie’s middle stump, the classy batting of Hasim Amla and the aggressive return of Steve Harmison.

A great atmosphere with people leaping to their feet when the young man rearranged the furniture! Definitely my favourite moment of the day.

The press conference on Monday was almost heart wrenching to watch as the man who had brought home the Ashes in 2005 and won landmark a Test series in the Caribbean struggled to fight back the tears as he announced his resignation.

But while it is a shame to see such a well liked man and stylish batsman walk from the captaincy and the England team, at least for the foreseeable future, it is with great interest with which the new England captain will be watched. He has led England to a good first day at The Oval in the 4th Test. However, the true test of a leader is not how he gets through the good days, but how he bounces back from the bad ones.

Good to see the return of Steve Harmison today who looked like the man who terrorised the West Indies in 2004. Being dropped from the squad must have made him realise the value of being an England cricketer and we all hope not to see the meek, scattergun bowler that Harmison was prior to his short stint out in the pastures of county cricket.

Michael Vaughan

Kevin Pietersen

Steve Harmison

It is currently just after lunch on the third day with England having been batting for over an hour in their second innings, with Cook out top edging a pull off Ntini’s second ball to wicketkeeper Mark Boucher for 9 runs and Michael Vaughan making a speedy 17 before driving straight to extra cover. England need to bat better than they have in recent times to get a chance of winning this game. At half past 2 on day three England were 27 runs behind with 2 wickets down, clearly still some work to be done.

I was at the game on the first day and was bitterly disappointed with England’s paltry batting performance. Getting bowled out for 231 on the first day was awful having chosen to bat after winning the toss for the first time in the series. To think it was all going serenely to start with, as I took my seat in the Priory stand half an hour after play had started. Cook and Strauss were relatively comfortable having seen off the new ball and had a solid partnership going with Cook being the aggressor of the pair, before Strauss stepped on his stumps which some commentators a bit unfairly, attributed to technical flaws. I just thought he was unlucky and I’d be surprised if he does it again.

The highlights of the day were the batting of Cook and Bell before they got out and the all-round performance of Andrew Flintoff. Bell played beautifully on his home ground for his fifty hitting several textbook shots.

Perhaps predictably the biggest cheers of a muted day for the crowd was for Andrew Flintoff. Batting with the tailenders he smashed a six through square leg followed by a four down the ground that the bowler Ntini nearly wore on his forehead. The cheap run outs of Anderson and Panesar afterwards spoiled the cheer.

Flintoff takes a single off Ntini

With just 11 overs of the South African batting innings at the end of the day it was essential that England made some inroads. Anderson and Sidebottom opened the bowling but failed to get the batsmen playing consistently with Smith and McKenzie able to play relatively comfortably.

Flintoff was given 3 overs at the end of the day and showed his intent immediately by beating Smith outside his off stump with his first ball, before dismissing him the very next ball when the South African captain nicked one low to Strauss at slip. Freddie roared and the crowd showed their appreciation. The English talisman had returned.

Where did the selection of Darren Pattinson come in? If England wanted a specialist swing bowler for the game rather than a pace bowler, ruling out Chris Tremlett who has been the 12th man for the past few Tests is understandable, but why then did the selectors decide against Matthew Hoggard? A former England player on his home ground with something to prove, will surely do everything he can to produce that massive performance that puts him in the team for the rest of the series. Does he not tick all the boxes? I guess not unluckily for him.

Can one player upset a team so much? Usually I’d say no, but on this occasion it may have. In the past few years, the players that get into the England Test team have already been talked about for many months beforehand and are on the periphery of the England set up before they get their chance, usually in the ODI side before getting promotion to Test team should they be good enough. This has several advantages as a player wishing to make the England Test team, can do the business in County cricket and catch the eye of the selectors, who may give them a try in the ODI side, before they push for the Test team. It is a very logical and understandable process, to get straight in to the Test team from County cricket you would need to be an exceptional player. So to pick someone on a “horses for courses” basis who is not in and around the England setup, like Pattinson, dents the confidence of all those players in and around the England set up because it gives an element of uncertainty.

Prior to the Pattinson selection, players in the team in the squad could identify the other players that are competing for their spot. The batsmen in the team know they have guys like Shah, Bopara, Key, etc pushing to get in. Known quantities. Similarly the swing bowlers like Jimmy Anderson and Ryan Sidebottom know their competitors. Hoggard, Jones, Onions are pushing for their places. Again known quantities. But the selection of Pattinson blows a hole in the certainty of knowing your enemy, how do you perform if someone can come randomly out of left field and take your place? Or indeed your place in the theoretical pecking order.

This is not to blame Pattinson himself as he tried manfully and did not completely disgrace himself. It was a measure of having a man he did not know about thrust upon him, that Michael Vaughan sent him into the deep field after the 3 overs that made up his first spell. The selectors have took a risky punt for only average results.

So where do England go from here? Their first innings batting in that game was irresponsible and though on paper England have the batsmen to match any team in the world, they rarely all perform to a necessary standard. To me though Tim Ambrose looks too high up the order at no.6, his keeping has been excellent and the criticism of his rival Matt Prior was that he dropped too many catches, though he is thought to be the better batsman. So is it better to score 30 and not drop any catches or score 50 and drop two catches? I would vote for the former so I would keep Ambrose in the team.

My team for the 3rd Test at Edgbaston would line up like this:

• Strauss
• Cook
• Vaughan
• Pietersen
• Bell
• Ambrose
• Flintoff
• Broad
• Sidebottom
• Anderson/Jones
• Panesar

To me this is a decent England batting side, but lacks a bit of pace in the bowling department, so should the pitch in Birmingham be deemed to have a bit of pace in it, I maybe tempted to pick Jones over Anderson, but it would be a seriously close call between them.

He would have brought that out and out pace that is lacking from the England side at the moment, but on a docile wicket like that found at Lords over the weekend, I reckon the result would have been the same. In the past few seasons he has never taken more than 3 wickets in an innings in Test matches at ‘HQ’.

So should he come back? He is in the squad for the 2nd Test at Headingley and although he is not yet the batsman he was in the past I think he is worth his place as a bowler alone. Also at his best he has the ability to inspire the rest of the team. So who do you drop to accommodate him?

Headingley Cricket Ground, Leeds

The most out of form player in the team is Paul Collingwood, though he was unlucky with his dismissal in the 1st Test, but based on the fact that Flintoff has little batting form to speak of either, to bring Flintoff into the side would change the composition of the team from 4 bowlers to 5 bowlers and on a pitch that traditionally produces a result from being a bowler friendly surface, do you need 5 bowlers? But then which of the bowlers, who have performed increasingly well as a unit in recent Tests do you leave out in the cold? If Ryan Sidebottom’s stiff back were to keep him out of the Leeds Test this ‘nice’ problem could be resolved, at least in the short term, though England will do all they can to get their left arm swing bowler fit for the game.

Assuming Sidebottom is fit for Friday’s start and England do go with 5 bowlers how should they line up? How about this:

1. Strauss
2. Cook
3. Vaughan
4. Pietersen
5. Bell
6. Ambrose
7. Flintoff
8. Broad
9. Sidebottom
10. Anderson
11. Panesar

As widely reported if he plays Freddie will bat at 7 for the game, but Ambrose like Collingwood is having a lean batting spell in Tests, so for this line up to work numbers 6 to 8 need to bat well. England have a long tail as it is, so for 6 downwards to fold cheaply could be firstly quite embarrassing and secondly put England in a dire position in the game and most probably the series. But that’s the pessimist in me.

So my predictions for the game:

• Ambrose and Flintoff to start shakily but get valuable 40s in a low scoring first innings;
• Even though I’m an England fan, Steyn to fire;
• Kallis to get a stodgy century after 20 runs in total at Lords; and
• KP to get in the headlines. For the right reasons.

Over the last 8 months or so England fans have had something of a Kiwi overdose, playing them away then at home. Whose great idea was that? Playing the same team back to back to back to back to… If that doesn’t make the cricketing public of both England and New Zealand stop watching the game I don’t know what will. Perhaps that’s what makes the forthcoming series against the South Africans so appetising. Finally! Some different opposition! Those suits at the ECB are real masterminds…

As such there’s been a fair bit of build up in the media, plenty of talk of the pacy firebrand Dale Steyn and the resumption of KP’s duel against his homeland. On a lesser scale the duels between the two captains Michael Vaughan and Graeme Smith is being talked up. Simon Wilde in The Sunday Times points to a real chance of England suffering a home Test series defeat for the first time since the turn of the century, which is pretty uncharitable to India having won albeit with some luck. But hey, England had their fair share of it in winning the 2005 Ashes series. So what of England going into this series?

The team has good batsmen, but for my money lack something in terms of aggression especially up the order. Strauss and Cook aren’t going to take the opposition bowling to task and set the agenda. Which is why Trescothick and Strauss were such an excellent partnership at the top of the order. One clearly had the task of pushing the run rate along while the other accumulated. Guessed which one was which? When Strauss and Cook are together, neither one looks truly comfortable dictating the pace.

The places of the captain and Kevin Pietersen are the most secure in the batting line-up, so it falls to the other two specialist batsmen to prove themselves. Ian Bell absolutely oozes the textbook talent, but there is a suspicion that he only makes the big runs in easy game situations. A glance at when he makes his Test match hundreds shows that another member of the team has made a hundred previously in the innings. He needs to prove his worth in tough situations. Paul Collingwood on the other hand is stereotyped as a scrapper, but again he has something to prove following a poor home Test match series against the Kiwis. Ambrose is a good ‘keeper, but has something to prove after a poor recent ODI series with the willow.

Looking at the bowling, Monty Panesar should have a key role in the series being the only spin bowler of any note on either side (Paul Harris? Didn’t think so). Of the pacemen Sidebottom, Anderson and Broad don’t look as good a unit on paper as Ntini, Steyn and Morkel and will have to work hard to stay afloat.

Sidebottom is the most consistent of the 3 and has for my money supplanted Hoggard as the reliable element of the England attack. I think Anderson is greatly underrated; look at his performances in recent Test matches, albeit against the New Zealanders. His struggles against left handers have been highlighted and how he deals with Graeme Smith at the top of the order will be a key battle. Stuart Broad gets better with every match but has yet to be put in a situation where he can get England out of a tight spot or into an unassailable position.

Hence, my key battles for the series:

• Graeme Smith vs James Anderson
• Monty Panesar vs South African batsmen
• Dale Steyn vs England batsmen
• Kevin Pietersen vs South African bowlers