Print Wrap: Daily dose of headlines

Every morning Cricketnirvana brings you a roundup of headlines from the leading national dailies across the cricketing nations. Here's what some of the newspapers are talking about…

Monty Panesar determined not to become the forgotten man

Left-arm spinner Monty Panesar criticizes his county, Northamptonshire for not supporting him and also says he is determined to remain in the contention for the national recall with his domestic performances, writes British daily, The Times…

Monty Panesar has identified the moment his England career began to slide — when plans to play in Sri Lanka fell through last autumn — and criticised Northamptonshire for failing to offer the help he wanted. 

The normally reticent Panesar spoke with rare feeling during a break from commitments with Highveld Lions, which he hopes will propel him back into the thinking of Geoff Miller, the national selector. 

Panesar struggled in India last winter, lost his England place to Graeme Swann and was even dropped by his county to end the most disappointing season of his career. He believes he suffered before the tour to India when a four-week stint with Bloomfield, based in Colombo, collapsed because the ECB refused to meet a last-minute demand of £7,500 from the club. 

“Instead, I trained in Northampton and then went with the England development squad to Bangalore before the shootings in Mumbai unsettled everything,” he said. “When I faced Sachin Tendulkar in Madras, it felt like fighting a heavyweight boxer in his own ring. I was only going to last so many rounds. It went downhill from there.” 

Panesar left Northamptonshire for Sussex this week because his former county could not afford wages to compensate for the loss of his central contract. He felt ready for a change of scene. “I needed to play a dominant role in a team’s success and being made to feel welcome is part of that,” he said. “I felt Northants were no longer working with me to become an England player. I regarded it as my home club, but I had to go where I felt most wanted and where was best. 

“The bizarre thing is that they have also lost Graeme White [another left-arm spin bowler] to Nottinghamshire, so they have lost two England-qualified, locally produced players in favour of Nicky Boje, a South African….” 

South Africa's wily ways are more of a let-down than a wind-up

Another English daily, The Guardian writes about the tactics of South African coach and captain to indulge in the war of words against England and their attempt provoke aggressive reactions from Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower…

It must be frustrating for Graeme Smith and Mickey Arthur. Their normal whipping boy, Kevin Pietersen, is keeping an uncharacteristically low profile on this England tour. Perhaps he has matured; perhaps his missus is about to launch her solo career; either way, KP has deemed it fit to renounce his normal belligerence, even in the land that likes to look on him as America looks on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

So the South African cricket captain and coach have decided to attempt the impossible. They are trying to pick a fight with Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower. You have to admire them for this. It's the equivalent of trying to goad a right hook from a Carmelite nun. 

England's cricket captain, who has the impeccable manners and smiling geniality of Lord Peter Wimsey and Boris Johnson combined, is generally acknowledged to be the nicest man in sport. The mild-mannered Flower, meanwhile, he who made the stand of his life against Robert Mugabe's wicked rule in Zimbabwe, is presumably rather beyond such trivialities as what Arthur thinks of his coaching style.

But still they try, bless them. Arthur's most recent shots – attacking England's predictability in their latest Twenty20 defeat, and their "criminal" underuse of leg-spinner Adil Rashid – have indeed provoked a response from his coaching counterpart Flower, although not the one he wanted. "I have gone through my career as a player, and I will continue to do so as a coach, in as modest fashion as possible," he said, while the strains of Heal The World seemed to echo around him. "I will not be commenting." It was restraint to make a Zen master weep.

You have to give the South Africans credit for their efforts. They have been trying to inspire antagonism ever since they were knocked out of the Champions Trophy by England in October. On that occasion, Smith took offence when Strauss refused him a runner for cramp, despite the umpires agreeing with Strauss that it was against the laws of the game. Smith's solemn retort – "the world is round and that will come back on him" – sounded ominous. Even if the rest of us struggled with the syntax.

You imagine that the suggestion that Strauss was unsportsmanlike and had tarnished his honour was likely to hit the Englishman where it hurt. As accusations go, however, it's still fairly mild. This is the problem when cricketers try to trash-talk each other – they really are not very good at it. Perhaps it's the pressure of being the most cerebral of sports; perhaps it's the gentlemanly tradition. 

Either way, the art of slighting a fellow whites-wearer seems to have become so nuanced that it's no fun to the outside world at all.

For instance, the most severe way to diss your opponents in cricket nowadays is to express surprise. Arthur showed one classic use of the tactic when he wondered aloud why Steve Harmison was not part of England's touring squad. Smith followed by announcing his surprise that Strauss was not playing in the Twenty20 side. They have no doubt been learning from the master, Ricky Ponting, who has been finding things surprising since he started leading Australia five years ago. Selections, team tactics, crowd antics, Andrew Flintoff's captaincy – all of these things have been exposed to Punter's withering wonder.

It is, perhaps, a mark of how dull pre-match banter has become that one of the edgiest Ashes stories this summer was Justin Langer's leaked email to the Australian team, in which he supposedly "damned" the England players. What was all the fuss about? He said they liked to make excuses, which sounded a fair cop. And he called them "flat and lazy". Disappointingly, the first "l" wasn't even a typo….

Hayden strides in to bat for the relevance of the game

Former Australia batsman Mathew Hayden, who is now a board member in Cricket Australia expresses concerns over the diminishing value of cricket due to its over-exposure and tries to find ways to save the game, reports The Australian…

Mathew Hayden's passion has moved from playing cricket to saving it. 

Less than a year out of the game and already a Cricket Australia board member, the recently retired modern-day great fears that the sport he dedicated decades to is being overplayed and undervalued. "I don't buy this 'more is better' mentality," Hayden told The Weekend Australian . "We should have an obsession with perfection."

Meaningless cricket abounds, with Australia's crammed seven-match one-day series against India the latest example as part of a record 40 one-day matches played by Australia this year.

Despite a frantic post-cricket schedule of his own, Hayden has compiled a detailed dossier titled The Future of World Cricket which proposes that Test cricket play finals every two years to decide a Test Champion. He is not claiming to have devised the definitive solution to cricket's many often self-inflicted wounds, but is determined to ensure the game travels a more enlightened path.

It is a timely document given that the International Cricket Council is putting the finishing touches to the new Future Tours Program, which will map out in detail the international schedule from 2012 to 2020.

"The future tours program in its current format does not work," Hayden says in his dossier. "It creates too many meaningless matches."

There are grave fears that instead of producing a program with context and meaning, it will simply be another calendar cluttered with matches which often lack context or substance.

The FTP's of the past can easily be viewed as a format for generating money rather than enhancing cricket. Some decent planning could achieve both.

Hayden makes it clear that he is speaking as a concerned former player, not a CA board member, and his aim is to find answers, not highlight or create problems.

"The only really significant stakeholders are the fans," Hayden said this week. "It doesn't matter whether you're in a small town in country Queensland, on the Tiwi Islands playing cricket with indigenous kids or following the Ashes tour in England, the message is always the same. The fans want quality cricket.

"I know a lot of people will say I'm optimistic, even idealistic but by the same token we can't ignore the messages from the fans and we've got to start somewhere."

There are many parts to Hayden the former player, who has taken the hard lessons he learnt during almost a decade at the top into a new management company he has formed called The Hayden Way.

Hayden is just as comfortable in a suit and tie in a Melbourne boardroom with Macquarie Bank executives, as he was yesterday, filming a lifestyle program in the Queensland bush with a "chook whisperer" or taking cricket to indigenous communities. And he recently replaced Allan Border on the CA board. It was poacher-turned-gamekeeper after spending his senior playing years as a strongly spoken advocate of the Australian Cricketers' Association. But at his core is a concern about cricket, particularly Test cricket, and the desire to keep it relevant in an instant world.

"I'd hate to think we're having the same debate in 20 years," Hayden said.

"It's a great game with three wonderful formats which give us a chance to globalise it. I want to promote the game from a different way of thinking…."

Call to take game to China

Cricket Australia Chairman Jack Clarke, in Australian newspaper, The Age, bats for Test championship and the need of taking the game to countries like China and the US in order to popularise the sport…

For all of cricket history, a Chinaman has been a left-armer's wrong-'un. Soon enough, a Chinaman might be leading the bowling averages. Cricket Australia chairman Jack Clarke revealed yesterday that China is planning to become a leading cricket-playing nation - women first, then men. Already, it has six centres of excellence.

Clarke said the onus was on the sport's member nations to preserve Test cricket's standing by introducing a world championship, speed up play and avoid boring run-fests.

In a further pitch to keep the five-day game as the sport's pinnacle, Clarke said minnow countries should not be forced into playing Tests given the costs involved and the potential for mismatches against the higher-ranked teams.

He told an Australian Cricket Society lunch Cricket Australia and its players were determined to keep Tests as the highest form of the game despite the worldwide Twenty20 boom.

But he warned the format had to overcome some hurdles if it was to continue to occupy the minds of its followers.
Clarke said CA still supported the concept of a Test championship - where sides would play opponents home and away over a cycle of two or three years for the right to play in a final - despite opposition from India and England. ''Cricket must have context and it's got to have quality otherwise people get sick of it, simple as that,'' he said yesterday.

''China has a vision that India and China will be the two most powerful countries in the world, and cricket will be the bridge.''

He said cricket had to push to new frontiers in China and the US, rather than prop up smaller countries with crude infrastructure and limited horizons. ''It's unfair to force countries to play Test cricket if they don't want to,'' he said. He called for the ICC to revamp its membership, saying it was reasonable for some countries to concentrate on limited overs cricket only. He cited as example Ireland, now highly competitive in the game's shorter forms, but without Test prospects….