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POTCHEFSTROOM, South Africa, Feb 2 AAP – Can bowl, can’t throw.Shane Warne has made a remarkably rapid recovery from his dislocated shoulder but he remains unable to safely throw the ball overarm more than about 15 metres.Australia’s great leg spinner, embroiled in the “Can’t Bowl, Can’t Throw” controversy involving Scott Muller in 1999, will have to be carried in the field during the early stages of the World Cup, remaining inside the 30-metre circle when he’s finished at first slip.Warne under-armed and cautiously side-armed his throws during Australia’s boisterous, enthusiastic fielding session today, occasionally lobbing Courtney Walsh-style returns into the gloves of wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist.The 33-year-old is able to bowl without discomfort from the shoulder he damaged on December 15 but attempting to launch powerful throws from the outfield is too risky. The shoulder might pop back out.”I think it’s just going to be sort of side-arm stuff from ten or 15 metres from Warney, that’s about the maximum we’re going to get out of him for a little while,” said Australian captain Ricky Ponting.”Hopefully he can get us a run out and a few catches in the circle.”When Australia’s World Cup squad was announced on December 31, coach John Buchanan revealed a plan to save at least 15 runs per innings through razor-sharp fielding. Fringe players like Andrew Symonds were selected because they were better fielders than their rivals.”If they’re an outstanding batsman or outstanding bowler, in other words they’ve got big numbers, possibly you can give some leniency to that argument,” Buchanan said at the time.”Generally we look at players who have batting and bowling skills but they need to have something else, particularly fielding.”Warne’s big numbers are of 291 wickets from 193 matches at an average of 25.82, strike rate of 36.4 and economy rate of 4.25.He was accused of muttering “can’t bowl, can’t throw” during a Test between Australia and Pakistan in Hobart in ’99 after a return from Muller sailed over Gilchrist’s head.Warne was at the bowler’s end and it was thought stump microphones had picked up a comment from him. But Warne denied it, Joe The Cameraman confessed and Warne was off the hook.

The Punjab Cricket Association approved a budget of Rs 3.5 crore for2001-02 at its annual general body meeting at the PCA stadium inMohali on Sunday, laying emphasis on coaching and equipment fordistrict associations beside creating a unique benevolent fund schemefor former Punjab cricketers, a huge increase in the inter-districtchampionship prize money, and advancement of the Centre of Excellenceplan.Addressing newsmen after the meeting of the PCA, its president,Inderjit Singh Bindra said that the association would spend a majorchunk out of the budget amounting to Rs 30 lakh on coaching of playersand providing equipments.The association had increased the prize moneyfor the inter-district championships from Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 5 lakh.Besides, the winners and the runners-up will be awarded a cash prizefrom this season onward, he added.Bindra further said that the association commended the outstandingperformance of state team in various age groups of the North Zonechampionship. At least five Punjab players played for the Indian teamlast season. The AGM also decided to honour Harbhajan Singh and formerIndian player Navjot Singh Sidhu for excelling at the highest level.The meeting also complimented MP Pandove for successfully pleadingPCA’s case in the Board’s Tour and Fixture committee meeting held atJaipur to host the first Test against England from December 3 to 7 andthe first One Day International against Zimbabwe on March 7 next year.Bindra revealed that a provision of Rs 25 lakh has been made in thebudget for present and past cricketers of the state under thebenevolent fund for players. The association from this season willregister every player.The executive committee also authorised the technical committee to fixall the venues of the Ranji Trophy and Deodhar Trophy matches allottedto the PCA during the ensuing season. The state teams in all agegroups, including the Punjab Ranji team, will also have a sponsor fromthis year.In an amendment of the PCA constitution carried out at the meeting,the AGM also approved the election of Prabhu Chawla (Editor, IndiaToday) and Lalit Modi (of Modi Group) as two new vice-presidents inthe association, thus bringing the number of vice presidents to five.The Modi group has agreed to sponsor the “Centre of Excellence” schemeof the association from this season, Bindra added.

Scorecard and ball-by-ball details
How they were out

A chanceless 159 from Hashim Amla, buttressed by vital contributions fromMark Boucher and AB de Villiers, was the springboard for South Africa todominate the first two sessions of the second day, but India’s openersthen inflicted some punishment of their own on a dozy pitch where thebowlers were seldom more than peripheral players. By the time stumps weredrawn, with four of the scheduled 90 overs still to be bowled, India hadknocked off 82 in pursuit of an imposing South African total.Amla’s superb innings spanned 262 balls and ended only with a runout, but there was still time for Boucher, who made 70, and Morne Morkel,with a brisk 35, to flog sagging spirits before Harbhajan Singh returnedto mop up the tail and finish with 5 for 164. The 100 minutes of battingthat India faced had the potential to be tricky, but Sehwag’s insoucianceand Jaffer’s elegance made light of the challenge posed by a three-manpace attack.Sehwag started with a crisp cover-drive for four before rocking back tocarve Makhaya Ntini over third man for six. A magnificent square drive offDale Steyn and a couple of rasping cuts also roused the crowd, and Jafferwas quick to follow suit at the other end.There was a gorgeous on-drive off Steyn, and an unexpected slap over thirdman for six as Ntini again dropped short. The first 10 overs produced 47runs, and though Ntini and Morkel exerted more control in the final hour,Sehwag still found time to slash over point and drive languidly throughthe covers on his way to a half-century from just 59 balls.The run glut helped India forget a wretched fielding display, with runsleaked in every conceivable fashion. After 19 had been conceded inthe opening three overs, the new ball was taken. There was no immediatereward, though both Amla and de Villiers were extremely fortunate to seethick outside edges fall short of the slip cordon and speed to the rope atthird man.There was nothing fortuitous, however, about the three gorgeouscover-drives with which Amla, unbeaten on 85 overnight, reached hishundred. Sreesanth, as he had on the opening day, tried to do too much,and Amla cashed in with superb timing. He reached his century in 173balls, and India’s plight then got worse as de Villiers cut and pulled theinsipid RP Singh for fours.With such tripe being dished out, it was hard to see where a breakthroughwould come from, but Anil Kumble kept faith in Sreesanth and was soonrewarded for it. After a couple of entirely unnecessary sledges in thedirection of de Villiers, Sreesanth suddenly remembered that wickets aretaken with the ball and not the mouth. A superb delivery just outside offstump induced the edge and Dhoni dived to his right to hold-on.With the fast bowlers leaking runs, Kumble turned to the medium pace ofSourav Ganguly. The over-rate was abysmal and wasn’t helped by a ballchange and frequent consultations with the fielders, and Sreesanth’s lucktoo ran out as Boucher edged one and then survived a huge leg-before shoutcourtesy the thinnest of inside edges.By the time Kumble pressed himself into the attack with Harbhajan, South Africa had cruised past 400, and it only got worse on a real dog-day afternoon for the home side.

Amla’s grip on proceedings was absolute, and with RP and Sreesanthproviding comical examples of how not to stop the ball in the outfield,the scoreboard ticked along merrily. The ease with which the runs came wasembarrassing and Kumble was reduced to bowling into the pads from roundthe wicket to try and limit the damage.Sreesanth was brought back for another burst, but both batsmen continuedto cut and nudge at will on a pitch that might as well have been a fluffypillow. In such situations, the fielding side can only pray and any divineentreaties were answered with Amla being run out. Boucher played the ballinto the vicinity of Sreesanth at cover and though he threw to the wrongend, Mahendra Singh Dhoni was alert enough to rifle the ball through toKumble, who did the rest.Amla, whose ancestors went to the Cape from Surat a few generations ago,left to a richly deserved standing ovation, but India’s misery was farfrom over. Morkel was gifted a full toss by Sreesanth to get off the mark,and two confident off-drives further ruined RP’s woeful afternoon. Boucherand Morkel stretched the partnership to 54 before Boucher’s attempt toswipe Sehwag over midwicket ballooned off the top edge to Rahul Dravidbehind the stumps.Morkel then chipped a return catch to Harbhajan and it was left to Steynto swell the total a little more with some hefty slogs, the pick of whichwas an impudent reverse-slog-sweep off Harbhajan. Harris, reprievedearlier after gloving one to slip, was caught behind, and Harbhajan thenhad Steyn caught in the deep to end the innings. By then though, Indiawere playing catch-up.

Monty Panesar’s outstanding performance in the third Test against West Indies at Old Trafford has lifted him to a career-best 12th position in the ICC rankings for bowlers. Panesar finished with figures of 10 for 187, his first ten-for in Tests, as England pulled off a 60-run win to take a 2-0 lead and seal the series. Panesar is now the third-ranked spinner in the list, behind only Muttiah Muralitharan and Anil Kumble. Steve Harmison, who also had a good Test with six wickets, retains his 18th place.

Among the batsmen, Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Alastair Cook both moved up eight slots after scoring exactly 166 runs in the Test. Chanderpaul is now in 13th place, one spot ahead of Cook. The news wasn’t so good for Andrew Strauss, though, who has dropped out of the top 20 for the first time since December 2004 after scoring just 78 runs in five innings in the ongoing series against West Indies. Kevin Pietersen retains the third spot, though his rating has slipped below the 900 mark.

Division One

Nottinghamshire and Durham managed to collect a third bonus point each in the play that was possible at Trent Bridge. The action did start until 3.45pm, then Graham Onions removed Mark Ealham and Graeme Swann quickly as Notts looked set to fall short of 300 despite being 163 for 1 during yesterday’s play. Mick Lewis had Paul Franks caught behind but Ryan Sidebottom and Andy Harris eked out 28 runs for the tenth wicket before both teams shook hands on the draw.

Division Two

No play was possible on the last day between Derbyshire and Leicestershire. There was an outside chance Derbyshire could have claimed 16 wickets in the day with Leicestershire still 115 runs short of saving the follow-on, but the weather had the final say.For a full report on an amazing final day at The Oval between Surrey and Worcestershire click here.

Harbhajan Singh has slammed the International Cricket Council for the confusion over the legality of his bowling action and claimed that the allegations had had an adverse effect on his performance during the recent series against Pakistan. Harbhajan, 24, was reported for a suspect action twice in the space of three months and wondered how many more times he would have to undergo a similar procedure to get his action cleared.”It’s very frustrating for me,” he told the Press Trust of India, “as I have lost my mental peace for no fault of mine but just due to a mere drama by ICC. Instead of concentrating on the game, I am just passing the time to wait for a clearance from the ICC.”Harbhajan said his lukewarm performance in the one-dayers against Pakistan, where he managed just three wickets in five games, was because of the uncertainty surrounding his action. “I could not fully concentrate on the game due to my disturbed mental status,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how strong you are, but such a controversy always affects your performance.”Harbhajan’s action first came under scrutiny in 1998 before he was reported in December last year, on the tour of Bangladesh, and again in March during the series against Pakistan. “How many times [should] a bowler have to undergo the test, for which he has already been cleared,” Harbhajan asked. “I am playing international cricket for the last seven years and it is really frustrating that you have to undergo the test every time, whenever you are pointed out for the same suspect action.”Under the revamped bowling review procedure, Harbhajan had to undergo a biomechanical test within 21 days of his action being reported but the ICC had delayed the appointment of a panel, thereby hampering his plans of playing county cricket in England. “I wanted to participate in the English county championship,” he added, “but in such a state of mind how will I be able to do justice to the game and the club which I am going to represent.”

I remember eagerly buying and reading, as a schoolboy in the mid-1980s, Kapil Dev’s two earlier shots at autobiography: Cricket My Style, written with the assistance of R Mohan of the Hindu, and By God’s Decree, written with an Indian journalist settled in Australia, Vinay Verma. The most gifted cricketer India has ever produced was then at the height of his popularity; people in all parts of India claimed him as one of their own. As schoolboys we could imagine no greater man in all of history. Kapil was the bowler who had shown that Indians could also bowl fast, the batsman whose incandescent hitting we all held in awe, and the leader who had brought home the World Cup.Both Cricket My Style and By God’s Decree were slim books – the latter just over a hundred pages long. From these books thousands of Indian cricket fans learned, from Kapil himself, of his background and early life as the son of a timber merchant in Chandigarh, his comparatively late entry into organised cricket, his hard work under coach Desh Prem Azad, and his rapid development as a national prospect. From this platform he took off – one chapter in By God’s Decree is called “I Find my Wings” – capturing the Indian cricketing imagination on his debut tour, to Pakistan in 1978-79, during which he made the Pakistani batsmen call for helmets, and lashed the bowlers for sixes even as a night-watchman. We read about Kapil’s memories of the 1983 World Cup, and carefully noted his opinions on various matters of interest: his thoughts on captaincy, what it meant to be an allrounder, his relationship with Sunil Gavaskar. By God’s Decree ended with these striking words, almost like a volley of fierce strokes: “My philosophy is simple. Play to win. Get your runs and your wickets. Never stop trying. Hit the ball, over the slips, over the ropes. Runs on the board count. After seven years of non-stop cricket I have achieved more than I set out to … Cricket has been good to me and for me.”The autobiographies of cricketers are complicated and often multiple affairs: players often have to deal with the approaches of publishers when in mid-career, at a time when their popularity is at its peak, and then sit down again when their decade or two in the spotlight is over, and produce another book that traces a longer arc and supplies opinions on the major issues of the time. Certainly there was much in Kapil’s career post-1986 that was worth describing at length: he played two more World Cups, bowled as well as he had ever done on a tour to Australia, and passed Richard Hadlee as the highest wicket-taker in Tests. These matters, his career in business post-retirement, his embroilment in the match-fixing affair, and his selection as Wisden Indian Cricketer of the Century, are all dealt with in Straight From The Heart, a weighty 374-page tome.Cricketers are rarely good writers, nor are they expected to be, and the preparation of a readable cricketing autobiography, therefore, usually requires the involvement of some competent support staff, such as a good sports journalist or a capable editor. But the only investment made by Kapil’s current publishers in this book appears to have been in a dictaphone and some tapes. Much of this book reads like an unedited transcript, and this explains its rambling and somewhat tedious character. Perplexing statements, of the kind that sometimes enter into speech but not into writing for publication, litter these pages.Curiously, some portions of this book, especially those that deal with Kapil’s career in the early and mid-eighties, seemed to read much better than the others. It required a little background work to explain why: the source for all these events is Cricket My Style, from which enormous chunks have been lifted almost verbatim. Straight From The Heart has made its precursor redundant by consuming it whole.The book’s emphases and omissions are rather irregular. Kapil speaks at length about the events leading up to his overhauling of Hadlee’s record, but there is little insight into Indian cricket in the early nineties. The World Cup in Australia in 1992 is not even mentioned, and nor is Kapil’s blistering century, his last in Tests, against South Africa at Port Elizabeth. There is a long section about the match-fixing allegations levelled against Kapil by Manoj Prabhakar, and the sense of grievance he felt at what seemed to be a trial by press. In this book, as in his responses to the press at that time, Kapil seems to feel the need to make a protracted defence against these charges. One almost sees him glower at his detractors as he once did at opposing batsmen.This is a lengthy book, but as a cricketing autobiography, it offers little that is new, and in fact there is much of interest in the second half of Kapil’s career that finds no mention here. Someone with no personal memories of Kapil, and desirous of finding out what was really so special about him, would gain more from reading the two previous books, even if they cover virtually the same ground, than from this one, which ostensibly covers his whole career.