The Surfer

The pain that has been dredged to the surface has been horrible to see, and pity abounds for the players, umpires and others who have given evidence. But too many casual observers have given this pain a greater weight than the Hughes family's grief. They should "move on". So easy for the uninvolved to say!

The wider community's sympathies rest decisively with the agonised players who have been examined; can we not also respect the all-consuming suffering that has been sitting in the courtroom in barely contained silence, and which wants the game of cricket brought to account? Is it too hard for us to understand that the inability to accept an accident as a mere stroke of fate is precisely what grief is about?

To what extent will you go to back a player?

The BCCI has been ignoring the Supreme Court deadlines with an arrant disregard for propriety or legality. The Supreme Court has been getting into the nuts and bolts of administration and laying itself open to charges of judicial overreach. The cricket board has some genuine issues but in choosing hubris over humility, it has thrown the system into turmoil.

The BCCI has no one to blame but itself. When it was still possible to explain its position to the Lodha Committee, it assumed a divine right to administration. The combination of inaction and arrogance upset the Committee.

Kohli lost "about 11 kg in eight months". He monitored his diet with military discipline, zeroing in on a specific brand of mineral water and setting himself hourly reminders to drink specific amounts. Out went all the junk food. In came a hundred squats a day and a lower-body workout regimen that would enable him to hare between wickets.

Spencer's first high-profile match was against England, or rather England A, during a tour match at the WACA in 1992-93. He bowled 42 no-balls in 35 overs, a reflection of how things could go wrong when his rhythm was not quite right, yet he still made an impression and dismissed Mark Lathwell, Graham Thorpe and Graham Lloyd. He was so quick that the keeper Campbell stood outside the 30-yard circle. "He had us hopping around," remembers Lloyd. "Very unpleasant to face: short in stature, quite erratic, but extremely fast through the air. Our batsmen were saying things like, 'I don't think I've faced anyone as fast as that.'" Lloyd played with Wasim Akram at Lancashire and felt Spencer's pace was comparable: "I'd say he was as fast as Wasim, possibly even a bit quicker through the air in certain spells. He seemed to come and go pretty quickly. But as a one-off, and certainly at Perth, he was as fast as anything I faced."

"He once told me he was able to score boundaries of similar deliveries in Tests, but couldn't get the desired results in T20s," Trent Woodhill, the Royal Challengers Bangalore batting coach, said. "I told him maybe he was thinking too much or trying too hard or maybe the pressure was getting the better of him. I assured him it was just a matter of one good innings"

Jesse's team of therapists plan his weeks out together. His interests - sport, music, the news - have been a big focus of his sessions, which are also designed around his personal goals. He works with a speech therapist, and a physio. His occupational therapist is teaching him how to live with one arm: how to shower, get dressed, make a sandwich. His neuropsychology registrar helps him work through his feelings, does brain function games on an iPad with him and helps him work things out; compensating, and finding new ways to do things, is how he is recovering. Jesse's favourite word is "independent" and he has won his new friends over with his determination. He pushes them hard, too. In a rehab session this week, the physio asked him to lie on the bed and do 10 hip raises. By the time she looked back over he had done 20.

This article was supposed to be a series review, but the series review is: Herath. As the dust settled, his achievement's magnitude grew more distinct. A haul of 28 wickets, at fewer than 13 runs apiece, and one every 31 balls. No left-arm bowler of any stripe has taken more in three Tests. Of all spinners, Abdul Qadir and Muttiah Muralitharan once managed 30. The only greater is Harbhajan Singh's 32 in his 2001 opus (morally 33 given Steve Waugh palmed a stump-bound deflection from its target and was instead out handled the ball). Just those three, then Herath, alongside another series of 28 from Muralitharan. As so often for the current man, their two careers twinned, inseparable.

"Ashwin stayed where he was. Kohli and Rahane, India's two most reliable Test batsman, left their settled places in the batting order to vacate No 5 for the returning prodigal, Rohit Sharma. Sharma is a specialist batsman in a very special sense of that term: he can only bat at No 5. There was no question of him replacing Pujara at 3. The last time he batted at No 3 was last year in Galle, and he scored 9 and 4 in two completed innings. A total of 13 runs. It was a sign: 3 was an unlucky number for Rohit. KL Rahul can bat at No 3, Pujara can be made to open the innings, Kohli can be moved up the order, Rahane has to take what he's given, but Mistah Sharma? He jive at five."

Hatchett, a tall, athletic and engaging 26-year-old with cropped hair and piercing blue-green eyes, was, by his own admission, not built to play cricket, let alone to ply his trade as a seam bowler. It is, after all, the discipline of the sport that punishes the body more than any other, with constant twisting and pounding that makes aches, pains, injury and ibuprofen a way of life for the foolhardy souls who choose to make a career of it.