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ScorecardKenya dominated the first day of their ICC Intercontinental Cup tie against Bermuda, bowling them out for 133, and then finishing on 119 for 3. Thomas Odoyo got his third five-wicket haul in first-class cricket as he ripped through the Bermuda batting line-up.In the first seven overs Bermuda lost three wickets, all courtesy Odoyo, with just 16 runs on the board. A 32-run partnership between Clay Smith and Saleem Mukkudem seemed to steady things a bit but two more wickets fell by the time the score reached 50. Wickets continued to fall at regular intervals and another brief attempt to revive the innings was thwarted by Odoyo when he got Dean Minors, the top-scorer for Bermuda, trapped leg before for 28. Nehemiah Odhiambo and Hiren Varaiya, a slow-left arm bowler, chipped in with a couple of wickets each, and though the last two wickets hung on to add 39, Bermuda were bowled out in just 59 overs.Kenya slumped 61 for 3, with Mukkudem taking all three wickets, but Steve Tikolo scored an unbeaten 45 and added 63 for the fourth wicket withTanmay Mishra to steady the innings as Kenya ended the day just 14 short of Bermuda’s total.

It’s becoming a familiar, sorry tale. Simon Jones has suffered yet another injury setback – this time it’s his calf. He has hardly played this season with his knee injury and, after 11 overs at Colwyn Bay, has broken down againHe won’t play any further part in Glamorgan’s Championship game against Northamptonshire and will miss the Pro40 with Somerset on Sunday.Jones was out for most of last season following a knee operation, and the same knee flared up again this year. His contract is up at the end of the season, but Glamorgan are keen to retain him.The latest match was only his third Championship match since mid-May, when he suffered another knee problem. His comeback for Glamorgan during the 2006 season, following his aborted return on England’s tour of India, lasted four matches before he broke down against Ireland in the C&G Trophy.

Scorecard
How they were out

England’s bowlers, Simon Jones in particular, cranked up the pace andspectacularly turned an impending draw into a 238-run victory by routingCCI President’s XI in only 26.2 overs on the final day at the BrabourneStadium in Mumbai. Their effort came after Marcus Trescothick and IanBlackwell notched up fifties to boost England’s second-innings score to265.After playing most of the game with a practice-match attitude, Englandwere confident that 36 overs were enough to wrap up a win and bowled withdefinite intent. Jones, who in the first innings bowled with a MarkEalham-esque run up and pace, shared the new ball with Matthew Hoggard,bowled at a much faster clip and extracted appreciable bounce. He struckin his first over, trapping Robin Uthappa on the crease and snared VinitIndulkar with one that rose, to finish with 2 for 9 from five overs.Andrew Flintoff induced an edge off Sahil Kukreja’s half-hearted prod andat one stage bowled with four slips and two gullies. Hiken Shah took threeboundaries off Liam Plunkett before he played down the wrong line and losthis off stump.The President’s XI folded without a fight, losing their lastfive wickets for eight runs. They were no match for Stephen Harmison’ssteep bounce. Both Wilkin Mota and Kshemal Waingankar edged deliveriesthat got big on them from just short off a length to slip to 71 for 8.Monty Panesar and Ian Blackwell chipped in with two wickets apiece asEngland completed a very satisfactory victory after getting all thebatting practice they were looking for.The early-morning atmosphere was relaxed and the intensity was almost zeroas the batsmen approached the game with little more purpose than a netsession. Having missed the first innings due to illness, MarcusTrescothick made his recovery count. He had signed off in style on thesecond day, carting Aniket Redkar for four consecutive fours off the finalover, and he carried on in the same vein on the third day, lookingcompletely at ease against the fast bowlers. He pulled Abid Nabi forconsecutive fours to get going and followed up with crisp back-foot punches off Waingankar.On 44, he had a stroke of luck when Vinayak Samant dropped an edge offWaingankar but Trescothick didn’t let it faze him. He had a couple ofuncertain moments against Hitshu Bachani – surviving a bat-pad appeal andmissing a couple of sweeps – but replied with authority by lofting himover long-on for six and following up with a sweep for the same result.Blackwell followed up his four-wicket haul on the second day with ahalf-century and if he didn’t have a foot in the Test eleven before, hecertainly has one now. Blackwell treated Swapnil Hazare with disdain,slapping him to the point and midwicket fence and not bothering withanything wide. Hazare had a lot of aggression in his body language but waswoefully short of it in his bowling and was soon taken off. Blackwellswept the spinners powerfully to and over the midwicket boundary andshowed that he could hit straight as well with three hoicks that cleared theropes comfortably. But he tried one too many and holed out to long-on offHitshu Bachani on 59.Apart from Trescothick, Blackwell and Geraint Jones, who scored 30, none of the others got going. Kevin Pietersen, Michael Vaughan and Flintoff were all out to soft dismissals. Jones was stumped trying to charge down the track to Redkar in the first over after lunch and Trescothick holed out soon after. Blackwell and Plunkett, who made 26, posted 65 runs forthe ninth wicket and pushed the score to 265.How they were outCCI President’s XI
Robin Uthappa lbw Simon Jones 4 (6 for 1)
Vinit Indulkar c Andrew Flintoff b Simon Jones 0 (6 for 2)Sahil Kukreja c Geraint Jones b Andrew Flintoff 12 (35 for3)
Hiken Shah b Liam Plunkett 21 (38 for 4)Hrishikesh Shende c Marcus Trescothick b Monty Panesar 8 (59 for5)
Wilkin Mota c Geraint Jones b Stephen Harmison 17 (67 for 6)
Vinayak Samanth c Shaun Udal b Monty Panesar 6 (71 for 7)
Kshemal Waingankar c Geraint Jones b Stephen Harmison 0 (71 for8)
Abid Nabi c Marcus Trescothick b Ian Blackwell 0 (75 for 9)
Swapnil Hazare c Shaun Udal b Ian Blackwell 0 (75)
England
Kevin Pietersen run out Munish Ansari 10 (36 for 2)
Michael Vaughan c Vinit Indulkar b Kshemal Waingankar 13 (67 for3)
Andrew Flintoff c Samant b Munish Ansari 5 (79 for 4)
Geraint Jones st Vinayak Samant b Aniket Redkar 30 (147 for 5)
Marcus Trescothick c Hitshu Bachani b Aniket Redkar 88 (162 for 6)
Ian Bell c Robin Uthappa b Nilesh Kulkarni 15 (194 for 7)
Shaun Udal lbw Aniket Redkar 0 (199 for 8)
Ian Blackwell c Wilkin Mota b Hitshu Bachani 59 (264 for 9)
Liam Plunkett c Wilkin Mota b Hitshu Bachani 26 (265)

Gamini Lokuge, the sports minister, has expanded the interim committee of Sri Lanka Cricket from its present size of five members to seven. Sidath Wettimuny, the former Test opener, Premasara Epasinghe, a commentator, and Dion Gomes, president of the boxing association, have been added to the committee along with Lalith Wickremasinghe, a representative of the ministry.Prakash Schaafter and Damien Fernando, a representative of Jeevan Kumaratunga, the former sports minister, have been replaced. The replacement of Fernando was expected following the appointment of Lokuge, who replaced Kumaratunga as sports minister during a cabinet reshuffle in March.The top three members in the interim committee however remain unchanged, with Jayantha Dharmadasa as chairman, Kanganan Mathivanan as secretary and Sujeewa Rajapakse as treasurer. The new-look committee is due to have its first meeting on July 11. Sri Lanka cricket has been under interim administration since April 2005, after the elected body was accused of misappropriation of funds by Kumaratunga.

What a wake-up call! Two Jamaican fast bowlers are learning some of the finer points of their craft from an Australian at India’s pace academy. It’s like the ladies at the breakfast shed travelling to Moscow to get certification from a Moroccan on how to make a decent callaloo.This is the reality of West Indies cricket. It doesn’t really matter whether the Stanford 20/20 is staged again next year, the year after that or ever again. It makes no fundamental difference to the state of the game in the region whether the money-spinning Super Stars showdown with South Africa comes off any time in the foreseeable future.Ken Gordon and Dinanath Ramnarine can sign off on MOUs, agreements and procedural protocols till they run out of ink and the situation will remain the same. Former players can fall out with administrators, and vice-versa, and all we will have at the end of the day is more bacchanal to sir into the mix.The fact that Jermaine Lawson and Andrew Richardson are benefiting from the tutelage of Dennis Lillee in Chennai is not in itself reason for alarm. No one in the Caribbean should be so swell-headed as to believe that it is a step down to learn from others about fast bowling, especially from someone so accomplished as Lillee, a man generally accepted to be one of the greatest fast bowlers of all time.Nor should we be holding our noses at our players seeking to brush up on their technique by journeying to India, a country that, before the advent of Kapil Dev almost 30 years ago, seemed to consider fast or medium-fast bowlers as the human equivalent of sandpaper.What this reality reinforces, however, is that other nations are well advanced in their recognition of the need to implement effective systems, along with importing the necessary expertise, to literally get up to speed with the requirements of the modern game.The likes of S Sreesanth, Munaf Patel, Irfan Pathan and RP Singh may be a poor imitation of the fearsome Holding, Roberts, Croft and Garner, but the point is that Indian cricket is progressing significantly in one aspect of the game that they previously ignored altogether. And, of course, we don’t need any reminding of who won the decisive final Test just over two months ago on a “result” pitch at Sabina Park.To suggest that bringing an end to two years of bitter disputes between the West Indies Board and the Players’ Association with some words on sheets of paper, or trumpeting that the glitz, the money and the organisational efficiency of the Stanford Twenty20 have put our cricket back on track are utter foolishness.Just in case anyone forgot, West Indies were at the bottom of the ladder among established Test-playing nations before all of these threats and stand-offs began. The confrontational climate certainly would not have helped the situation, but the fractious arguments didn’t trigger the decline.Ironically, it was just as WIPA was starting to rumble that Brian Lara captained the regional side to a remarkable Champions’ Trophy triumph in London almost exactly two years ago. Now, in his third stint at the helm, Lara leads the Caribbean squad on a three-month journey through Asia that I expect will underline why we should be one of the favourites to lift the World Cup in our own backyard next year, although a potential downside is that we will also again realise how far behind we are in the longer version of the game.Put aside the embarrassment of having to qualify for a competition in which we are defending champions, and the upcoming schedule offers real possibilities to solidify a limited-over squad that performed so impressively against the Indians in the Caribbean earlier this year. A potential 18 one-day internationals, from Kuala Lumpur next Tuesday to Karachi on December 16, represent an ideal proving ground to not only fine-tune skills and tactics, but, more importantly in the context of the West Indian psyche, to build momentum and confidence in the countdown to the World Cup.Yet along with all of that fast-paced action, there is a three-Test series in Pakistan where we will get a true appreciation of how far we have to go to get back to being consistently competitive in what is still the ultimate proving ground in cricket. Even in the heyday of the pace quartets and the great batsmen, the West Indies struggled to win in Pakistan, so expecting a series win, or even a draw now seems decidedly unrealistic.But, more important than the actual results will be how these talented but still inconsistent cricketers play the longer version of the game. There is no question that the talent is there, however it is the attention span that remains the greatest challenge to captain, coach and the individual players themselves. The shorter the game, the better we are. Bowl with discipline, bat brilliantly, field spectacularly, we can do all of that. But sustaining that effort for session after session, day after day remains an elusive quality collectively.Given the current trends in our cricket, this is more than likely to be an Asian adventure of mixed returns, underlining why, for all of the God-given ability, we probably need to take more of our players away from their comfort zones-to Chennai or elsewhere-to re-learn the disciplines that once seemed to come so naturally.

ScorecardThe Dophins were on the verge of a comprehensive win after the third day of their four-day game against the Warriors at Durban. Chasing 101 for victory, they ended on 80 for 3, needing only 21 more. Resuming at 261 for 5 in their first innings, the Dolphins powered their way to 362 for 7 declared, a first-innings lead of 151. The Warriors were then bundled out for 251 in their second innings, with only Abongile Sodumo getting a half-century. The Warriors lost three wickets in their quest for a small target, but they ended the third day with victory a mere formality.
ScorecardA superb performance by the Eagles in the field put them in charge after three days at Potchefstroom. Replying to the Eagles’ total of 418 for 9 declared, the Lions were bundled out for 190 in their first innings. Following on, they fared slightly better, reaching 222 for 7, but still requiring six runs to make the Eagles bat again. Justin Ontong, Martin van Jaarsveld and Neil McKenzie all scored half-centuries for the Lions in their second innings, but no-one managed more than 58. Thandi Tshabalala, who took three wickets in the Lions’ first innings, took three more in the second, while Ryan McLaren has a match tally of five wickets so far.
ScorecardDespite an excellent 138 from Darryl Cullinan, the Titans were struggling to keep pace with Western Province Boland at Paarl. At close of play on the third day, the Titans, following on after being dismissed for 280 in their first innings, had reached 130 for 3, still trailing by 21 runs. Cullinan’s 138 shone through in their first innings, when no other batsman made more than 33. The Titans were in more trouble early in their second innings, losing three wickets for only 26, before Albie Morkel and Justin Kemp put together an undefeated 104 for the fourth wicket.

Scorecard

Sri Lanka took every opportunity to give their batsmen time in the middle on the second day of the tour match against Sussex at a chilly Hove, piling up 521 for 5 before declaring at tea. By the close, Sussex had reached 41 for 1 in reply.Yesterday it was Upul Tharanga who took centre stage, and today it was the turn of Chamara Kapugedera and Thilan Samaraweera who both reached hundreds, in Kapugedera’s case the first of his career.James Kirtley struck early to remove Mahela Jayawardene without addition to his overnight 45, but that was to be Sussex’s only success for almost two sessions as Kapugedera and Samaraweera smashed 248 in an unbeaten sixth-wicket stand. Samaraweera hit exactly 100 from 203 balls, including seven boundaries, while Kapugedera, who faced one more ball, scored 134 including 15 fours.The Sri Lankans finally declared at tea, but bad light forced Sussex to wait more than an hour to start their innings. When they did, they soon lost Richard Montgomerie who was caught behind for 27 off Lasith Malinga.

Duncan Fletcher has been granted British citizenship after 15 years of trying after Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, stepped in to review his application. All it took was an Ashes series victory, although the Home Office are saying it is just a “happy coincidence” that it occured the day after England’s 2-1 series triumph.The cries for Fletcher to be given a British passport had grown increasingly vocal during the summer as England got closer and closer to regaining the Ashes. However, his application was rejected because he spends more than three months of the year outside the UK.Fletcher, 56, qualifies for British citizenship as both his parents and all four grandparents were born in the UK. But he had been caught out by the small print which says those applying must have lived in Britain for five years, with no more than 450 days outside of the county, including 90 within the past year.But Home Office sources confirmed that it was discovered at least half of his time outside the UK was spent touring overseas with England. A spokesman said: “It is right to say the home secretary used his discretionary powers and it was decided Mr Fletcher deserved to be granted citizenship.” Fletcher must now attend a citizenship ceremony to confirm his new status.

Sussex were in trouble at the end of the second day closing at 112 forfive in reply to Glamorgan’s mammoth first innings total of 718 forthree declared. Sussex made a poor start losing their first wicketsinside the first five overs for 11 runs. There was a brief revivalwith a stand of 66 between Chris Adams and Richard Montgomerie (23)before the latter was out caught behind by Maynard of Dean Cosker.Sussex lost a further two wickets when Robert Croft took a brilliantcatch at first slip to dismiss Will House and Robin Martin-Jenkinsfell to a reckless hook shot. But Adams, playing a lone hand, made ahalf century for Sussex and remained unbeaten on 55 at close of play.Earlier Glamorgan’s Steve James made an unbeaten 309, the first triplehundred by a Glamorgan batsman and erased the 61-year-old record heldby Emrys Davies (287) against Gloucestershire at Newport in 1939. Histriple century was made of 440 balls in 602 minutes which included 41hits to the fence. His lone chance was on 285. There were a fewmilestones during the course of the innings. First, James helped theWelsh county to post a record total of 718 – the county’s highest inthe championship since they were admitted in 1921. And when Jamescompleted his 200, he also became the first batsman to score fivedouble hundreds for the county.James shared a few partnerships during the course of his unbeateninnings of character and concentration. He shared a record firstwicket partnership of 374 with Mathew Elliot (177), then a secondwicket partnership of 123 with Mike Powell (64), a stand of 134 withMathew Maynard (67, three 4s, five 6s) for the third wicket andfinally an unbeaten 87-run partnership with Dale for the fourthwicket.At the end of the day, talking to the media, a relaxed and satisfiedJames said “It was a great honour to pass the best Glamorgan scoreever made. I did not think about it when I continued my innings thismorning. I treated every ball on its merits and did not think aboutthe milestones because the next ball could have got me.”James added “I was only tense when I reached 287 (set by the lateDavies) and was pleased to get that single to pass his score. But thenI never thought too much about reaching 300 until it came along. I nowfeel very tired but very relieved.”

Bennett King, the West Indian coach, has hit out at reports claiming that he called former players “dinosaurs”.”This is completely and totally inaccurate, it’s an outright lie,” King said in a statement released by media liaison Imran Khan. “I’ve worked with former players here in the West Indies and all over the world and I have the utmost respect for their outstanding contributions to the game as players and what they can provide to players now.”King was reacting to comments made by Rudi Webster, the sports psychologist who had recommended King to the West Indies board, and who, according to reports, was regretting that decision.”I’m seeing a side of him now that I didn’t recognise,” Webster had said during a conference for senior Caribbean sports journalists. “I’m sorry to say that I’m the person who recommended him to the WICB. Having achieved his goal, and having been given the enormous power he has, and being an academic coach who describes people like some of our great players, and some of the great Australian players as dinosaurs. I think that is the greatest insult from someone who has not had any achievement in international cricket, just two or three titles with Queensland.”King, however, hit back strongly at these allegations, saying that he had regularly enlisted the help of former cricketers. “Currently my staff and I work with the ultimate legend Sir Garry Sobers, and other former player as well, and I personally endorse a greater involvement of former players in order to contribute to the improvement of the contemporary players,” King said. “Only a few months ago in Australia I invited Courtney Walsh to offer his advice and he did so most willingly and most graciously.”It was not the first time that I had done this, it is well documented how we facilitated and encouraged Ian Healy to give his expert opinion in the area of wicketkeeping both when we were in Sri Lanka last and then again in Australia. They have a wealth of information and we cannot afford to let that slip away, and what makes this report even more farcical is that I am currently actively involved in urging the greater involvement of former players.”