Prithvi received encouraging words from the batting legendat an U-14 camp in the MCA’s Indoor Academy at the BKC. Tendulkar was impressed with his technique and temperament and advised him not to change his style. “It was a dream come true,” recalls Prithvi. “He told me to stay focused and play my natural game.” Prithvi now wants to be like Tendulkar. Prithvi has also done a shoot with the Little Master. He is seen in an insurance company commercial with the Indian star. Tendulkar has also offered to extend any help Prithvi needed. “It was a great gesture from him,” says his father Pankaj. If Prithvi shows a maturity that goes far beyond his age, it is because of the hardship he has undergone at such a tender age.

He lost his mother when he was only five. He lives with his father in Virar. Cricket for him is a luxury but his father wants to ensure Prithivi gets to play the game he loves. “He has seen the worst of life so early in his life. The maturity, I think, is because of that. He can withstand any setback,” says father who used to run a garment shop. Having shut the shop, he doesn’t have a permanent source of income but the dotting father wants to ensure every thing is in place for his son’s cricket career. He thanks the school management which has taken care of his career. Pankaj wants his son to play for India. “We found out his talent when he handled the bat for the first time at the age of two. Everyone told me to make Prithvi a cricketer. I want to make him an India cricketer,” the dotting dad signs off.

Performance is the sole criteria for selection. It is the prerogative of the selection committee consisting of former cricketers to chose the national squad,” Shukla said. In an interview to Bengali television channel Star Ananda, Ganguly was asked if he could have served the Indian team well if he had continued to play at the top level like his contemporaries Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar. In reply, he reportedly said: “Yes, I had the ability. Had I played, I would have performed. But the rules are not the same for everyone.”

She smiled, “Sure, all the time, but the press hits on me as well!” Sobering up, she added, “But I’m the same person, with the same values, just because I’m single it does not mean I’m breaking marriages. Don’t link me with every Tom, Dick and Harry.” With this kind of straight-talk, nobody would!

Ponting also wonders how the inconsistent Ian Bell will feel attempting to fill Pietersen’s enormous shoes. “Now England has a much more sound, technically correct, but scratchy player like Bell, if we happen to get him in at the right time he’s a pretty nervous sort of bloke as well.” There is increasing indignation in England over the role that the Indian Premier League has played in damaging the country’s two biggest cricket stars. Pietersen and Flintoff have both sustained major injuries from competing in the Twenty20 extravaganza for contracts valued at almost $2million each. Indeed, the right knee injury Flintoff suffered during the IPL last April, which required surgery, appears to be a major factor in his decision to retire from Test cricket at the end of this series.

Flintoff was man of the match in the second Test at Lord’s, bowling a 10-over unbroken spell on the last morning to finish with five wickets, but he was forced to see a knee specialist last week. There have also been more questions raised about what further damage was done to Pietersen’s injury while playing for the Bangalore Royal Challengers. Evan Speechly, Bangalore’s assistant coach and physiotherapist, claimed Pietersen felt pain in his right achilles while running along Durban’s beachfront during the Twenty20 tournament. He had more problems during the two-Test series against the West Indies in May and the subsequent World Twenty20 Cup in England. “We knew there was a problem there and we monitored it very carefully,” Speechly told Cricinfo. “I think he was just feeling so good about it that he got a bit carried away and tried to run on it too soon. He woke up one morning and decided to go for a run along the beachfront in Durban. It flared up again after that.”

The England and Wales Cricket Board dismissed claims that Pietersen aggravated his achilles injury after going against medical advice during the IPL. The ECB firmly denied that Pietersen’s IPL training constituted a break with his prescribed training plan. “Pietersen was passed fit to join up with Bangalore,” an ECB spokesman said in a statement. “ECB medical staff sent Bangalore a fitness program and at no stage did Kevin Pietersen do anything to contradict that and at no stage was he told not to go running. “Kevin Pietersen is the most diligent and responsible of trainers and prides himself on his physical fitness and preparation for playing cricket. “The ECB medical staff hold him as one of the best examples of a player who does everything within his power to achieve maximum fitness to play cricket.” A spokesman for Pietersen reinforced the ECB position. “Kevin had a medical before he went on the trip. He would not have been allowed to get on the plane if there was anything wrong. “They gave him a program and told him to stick to it, but he was never told not to go running.”

But, of course, nobody will suggest that they are weak against it, like everybody and his aunt would have, if it had been Indian batsmen who were seen hopping. At least Indians have an excuse that they don’t play quick bowling at home in domestic cricket. What is the excuse for Australians, English and South Africans when they are fending deliveries as if trying to swat flies off their faces? This stereotyping will continue as will the blame for injuries being laid at the door of the Indian Premier League. At least Andrew Flintoff has gone on record to say that it was fortunate that his knee injury came about in the IPL because it was one, as his doctor then and physician now confirm, that could have occurred any time.

The injury having come in April allowed him to treat it and get fit for the Ashes series but just imagine if it had happened in the middle of a Test and he was out of the series. Flintoff’s sustained spell of quick bowling has come in for universal praise including from those who likened him to a second hand car. He bowled at more than 90 miles per hour for more than an hour on the final morning and it not only showed his commitment but also his determination to go out on a high. It was during this spell that he unnerved even the centurion Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin and once again showed that when it comes to facing fast, short bowling there is no country that can say it is truly comfortable.  It is just a matter of coping with it as best as you can.

Hughes’ dismissal in the ninth over gave Watson his chance after the stand-in captain Mike Hussey sent him in at three. The right-hander, on his first appearance of the tour, seldom looked ill at ease, although against an understrength Second Division county the runs should be viewed in context. After 15 fours and a six, it was the left-arm spinner Graeme White, who does not make the first team when Nicky Boje or Monty Panesar is available, who denied Watson his century. In front of a 5,000 full house, Hussey, the former Northamptonshire batsman, hit a scratchy half-century but is unbeaten overnight. Given that Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain, had indicated on Saturday that Mitchell Johnson, his misfiring fast bowler, would have “no excuses” should he fail to improve here on his wayward performance in the second Test, it can be taken as read now that the left-armer’s participation at Edgbaston is in serious jeopardy.

Johnson, who had been touted as the man to blow away England’s expectations, has been working closely with Troy Cooley, Australia’s bowling coach, to try to remove the flaws in the 27-year-old’s action that are at the root of his faltering form. But there has been little evidence of improvement. Relegated to first change, with Peter Siddle and Stuart Clark entrusted with the new ball, Johnson was restricted to three expensive spells at a cost of 107 runs. The impression drawn was one of a man whose confidence has dipped alarmingly. Taking the last wicket, when David Wigley sliced not his first expansive drive to gully, was no consolation. His first spell yesterday produced almost identical figures as the combative Irish wicketkeeper Niall O’Brien and 21-year-old Ben Howgego, willingly took advantage, hitting him out of the attack with a sorry analysis of 7-0-45-0, including nine boundaries, in an opening stand of 99.

Hussey watched in sympathetic frustration from second slip as Johnson, bowling to a heavily off-side field, struggled to maintain his lines. The end of every over brought an arm round the shoulder or a pat on the backside, an unmistakable sign that things are not going well. When Johnson came back into the attack, with Northamptonshire eight down, his first over went for 12 as the tail-ender David Lucas successfully wielded the bat. The maiden over with which he followed up prompted ironic cheers. Australia might yet reassure themselves that Johnson’s form before this summer has been that of a bowler with undoubted talent and keep faith with him, at least for one more Test. But with Clark, surprisingly left out at Cardiff and Lord’s, eager to add to his 90 Test wickets, the temptation to take Johnson out of the firing line must be gaining strength.

The reports say further, the IPL season 2 captain of KKR New Zealand’s Brendon McCullum is not available for IPL Season 3 due to national duties. There are also reports that six New Zealand players are unavailable for IPL season 3.

Ponting’s reaction?
“We were outplayed from the first ball of the first day. England have been the better team and we have to bounce back pretty quickly.” Asked directly about the dubious dismissals he added: “That’s all irrelevant. At the end of the day we were beaten by over 100 runs by a team that totally outperformed us.” Whatever you think of Aussie arrogance, that’s a pretty classy comeback. Alex Ferguson, Neil Warnock, Sam Allardyce and co …. take note.

The Australian cricket team’s star Ricky Ponting shared a hotel with a journalist who apparently was infected with the deadly virus earlier this week, leading to widespread concern in the country and causing team medical officials to ask that he be quarantined. The crisis in Australia is particularly severe now because the southern hemisphere’s flu season arrives months earlier than in the United States. The long wait may be just enough time to stave off a similar crisis in the U.S. this winter. Vaxine, a biotechnology company in Australia, and Melbourne-based CSL are using hundreds of people to conduct the world’s first study aimed at producing a vaccine for swine-flu.

The study is expected to take seven months, but researchers have tempered expectations. “There is no guarantee any of these vaccines will work. Swine flu is a very peculiar beast, it’s a very different virus that we’re dealing with. But we are hopeful,” said Vaxine research director Nikolai Petrovsky. Some insist, however, that the costs of failure are not particularly great. Ian Barr, the deputy director of the World Health Organization’s Influenza Center in Melbourne, is effectively telling everyone who will listen to chill out. “If you look back on the statistics for a normal influenza season, it’s not unusual,” he said. Barr noted that Australia faced a comparably severe flu season just two years ago that was not swine-flu related, but nonetheless claimed the lives of numerous adults and young children. “So I wouldn’t put this year to date as anything unusual in terms of comparisons to seasonal influenza,” he added with the dispassionate calm that characterizes a weathered veteran of the deadly Australian flu season, chiseling his brow as he effortlessly flicked another cigarette from his chapped lips.

The identification of Australians with no-beg-pardons cricket provokes bristling and cries of “hypocrisy” when he invokes the “spirit of cricket”, as he did at the end of the Cardiff Test in the context of England’s time-wasting. Yet Ponting’s remarks in Cardiff were actually the acme of restraint. He honestly admitted to some annoyance with the home team’s tactics, then frankly dismissed them as insignificant. Strange that straight answers to straight questions could give such offence among the same constituency that always bemoans spin doctoring and doublespeak. Ponting was the same at Lord’s in the face of umpiring so execrable, and consistently favourable to his opponents, that regular counting to six seemed the best that could be hoped for: mild irritation on the spur of the moment, neither complaints nor excuses in the aftermath.

Lord’s, meanwhile, which preens itself as the locus classicus of the spirit of cricket, actually boos the best Australia Test batsman since Bradman. The irony is that if a single player in the world could be regarded as a cricket traditionalist, even a bit of a reactionary, it is Ponting. He is a Test cricketer to the marrow, obsessed enough with the Ashes to have forgone the riches of the Indian Premier League before this series, so dedicated to its symbolism that he attends Test press conferences in his whites and wearing his baggy green – unlike England players, who are studies in sponsor-friendly casual wear. While Ponting does not publicly fetishise the cap as his predecessor, Steve Waugh, did he privately honours it, maintaining the custom of Australia XIs presenting a united baggy green front in the first session of every Test.

A few years ago at Newlands in Cape Town, noticing that Shane Warne had opted for the white floppy, he even pulled rank and brought the leg spinner into line. In the most recent of his surprisingly thoughtful tour diaries, too, Ponting professes a healthy scepticism about Twenty20, which he sardonically observes reminds him of “schoolboy games when it was two or three stars in a side who scored all the runs and bowled all the overs”. He complains of the favouritism it shows straightforward hitters over more complete players, for he is universally admiring of good technique. Elsewhere in the book, in fact, there is a fascinating account of a spell he faced in last year’s Perth Test from Ishant Sharma, of India – one from which Ponting emerged second-best. Nonetheless, he concludes: “It was great sport and I was lucky to be part of it.” The form of words may be his ghostwriter’s; the sentiments sound authentically Ponting’s.

Above all, where decisions regarding low catches are concerned, Ponting and the Australians have striven, over many years but without success, against the tide in favour of yet more ineffective replay technology, promoting instead the idea that players accept one another’s words. It has been greeted sceptically – admittedly, not without reason – but, in principle, what could be more in the spirit of cricket that MCC holds so dear? Ponting’s unpopularity is partly of his own making. He can be gruff. He has a temper. And where umpiring is concerned, he also has prior – far too much prior, and for which he was insufficiently chastised at the time. Now he is being judged in that light; he could ask an umpire to check his watch and detractors would construe it as flagrant disrespect for Greenwich Mean Time.

Thus the mistaken conclusion of bullying taken by several commentators in the wake of Nathan Hauritz’s probable fair catch of Ravi Bopara a week ago, when Ponting was merely asking about “the process” of the adjudication: a fair question, seeing that it was as explicable as the Schleswig-Holstein Question. Perceptions of Ponting and his Australians, however, are out of date. The captain felt harshly judged after last year’s Sydney Test against India, but has worked hard to make amends; media perceptions often moving in arrears of reality, he is perhaps due more credit than he has received. The Australia players’ recent disciplinary record is hard to fault. Ponting delivered the Sir Donald Bradman Lecture last year; his erstwhile deputy, Adam Gilchrist, delivered the recent Cowdrey Lecture.

Ponting’s resolutions were sternly tested at Lord’s, but he lost well, even courageously, at least by Hemingway’s definition of courage as “grace under pressure”. Meanwhile, in the floridness of the commentaries and the boorishness of the booing classes, the true nature of his offence is revealed. Ponting dared to mention philosophies about which it is the prerogative of cricket’s privileged castes – its administrators, its commentariat and the members of its most exclusive club – to pontificate. Hands off our game, Tasmanian ruffian! In future, in the tradition of panto, Ponting will have to remember to look behind him.