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Australia’s preparation for the NatWest Series suffered a further blow when Brett Lee, their strike bowler, injured his shoulder in the warm-up game against Somerset at Taunton, where Australia stunningly failed to defend a target of 342. It was Australia’s second successive defeat on the tour, after they were thrashed by England in the Twenty20 fixture at The Rose Bowl.Lee, who has been Australia’s leading wicket-taker in the last two one-day tournaments, was forced to leave the field after bowling just four overs and was sorely missed in the rest of the innings as Sanath Jayasuriya and Graeme Smith plundered the Australian bowlers during their magnificent 197-run opening partnership.Ricky Ponting, who was visibly angered with his team’s performance, felt that Lee’s injury was a major concern. “He said the second last ball of his spell that he bowled he felt a really sharp pain in the back of his shoulder,” Ponting was quoted as saying in the ABC News website. “I knew something was wrong the last ball of the spell he bowled – I ran straight to him to see how he was and he knew he was in a little bit of trouble then. That’s about where it is though – we don’t know any more. I think he’s going to have scans on it at some stage so we’ll know exactly what’s wrong.”Though Lee hasn’t played a Test since January 2004, his one-day performances over the last few months have been outstanding. However, in the same period, he has picked up 49 wickets in 31 ODIs and even managed to play 13 games on the trot without any injury worries. Before the tour, Lee had said that he had fulfilled the three goals that the selectors had set for him – to stay fit, to take wickets consistently and to bowl as fast as possible – and hoped to force his way into the Test side.

The Hampshire allrounder, Dimitri Mascarenhas, has been found guilty of a level II breach of conduct, after an outburst against umpire Nigel Llong during the National League match against Essex on Sunday.Mascarenhas, who bowled Hampshire to an improbable victory over Leicestershire in the last rain-ravaged round of county games, has been given three penalty points by the England & Wales Cricket Board. They will remain on his record for a year, and he will face a suspension if that tally reaches 12.

It was always known that Hampshire would have a new captain this season, but now it has been confirmed that John Crawley will be the man to do the job. Originally, Hampshire had hoped to have Shane Warne as their captain, but the Australian’s one-year ban for a drugs offence left the county without a captain until Crawley’s appointment.Crawley, a 31-year-old who joined Hampshire for last season after an acrimonious departure from Lancashire, captained Lancashire from 1999 until 2001, leading the county to the National League title in his first year. Now he takes over from Robin Smith who retired from the post after five years in charge.Looking back at his previous time as a county captain, Crawley said: “I had three great years as Lancashire captain, except the last few weeks when it all went wrong. I am sure I have learned from that.”Crawley has scored nearly 18,000 runs in first-class cricket at an average of 47.41. He has played 37 Tests for England, the most recent being the successful fifth Test against Australia at Sydney on the recent Ashes tour when he featured in a vital 92-run stand for the sixth wicket with Alec Stewart. He then marshalled the tail to finish with an important 35 not out.He will not have an official vice-captain. With former captain Smith in his side and his deputy, Will Kendall, still around, there is no shortage of experienced players to offer Crawley advice and fill in for him should the need arise.

Robin Smith rolled back the years in scoring his fourth hundred against the Australians on the day Alan Mullally was left out of England’s latest Ashes squad.Smith, 79 not out overnight, was lbw to reserve paceman Ashley Noffke for 113, his third ton of the season, as Hampshire were bowled out for 354 – a first innings lead of 257.Noffke struck Smith with a bouncer moments before trapping him lbw and a day after bowling the Hampshire captain with a no-ball. Noffke finished with three Hampshire wickets.Then the Australian top order reminded their hosts why they are the best side in the world. Former Hampshire batsman Matthew Hayden crashed Mullally for successive boundaries through mid-wicket in bringing up his fifty. And he struck Shaun Udal for two sixes before finishing on 92 not out.Justin Langer was the only Australian wicket to fall in the second day. First slip Derek Kenway caught the opener at the second attempt after Langer had snicked Neil Johnson.But Simon Katich, who finished on 49 not out, helped Hayden put on an unbeaten 104 for the second wicket as the tourists narrowed Hampshire’s lead to 81.Robin Smith said: “It was great to get another hundred against Australia at this stage in my career and some of the bowling from Brett Lee and Jason Gillsepie was as good as anything I’ve every faced.”I can see why the England batsmen have stgruggled when you consider that Glenn McGrath was rested. But I think the selectors have been silly in leaving Alan Mullally out of the squad.”Hayden said: “It was really good to spend some time in the middle here – that is never a bad thing before a Test match,” he said, looking forward to this week’s Third npower Test at Trent Bridge.”The idea of these county matches is to get some time at the crease, so itwas a really frustrating first dig. It was a missed opportunity, and we put ourselves in a nasty position.”I have been feeling like I have been batting quite well. But I have not really put together the long innings.”It has been a frustrating little period. Even in the first Test I had 30 orso on the board and was really feeling good and hitting the ball well. But thenI got out to a good catch and a poor shot.”It has not quite been my series so far, but maybe after this the next Testwill be a big one for me.”

India Pistons on Saturday joined Chemplast, Pentasoft and India Cements to setup an all Chennai semi-final line up in the Moin Ud Dowlah Gold Cup Tournament. India Pistons made it to the semifinals despite losing the last league contest against Indian Oil Corporation. They went through by virtue of a better run quotient.Electing to bat first, Pistons in their quota of 50 overs put up 213 for 9. Pistons owed its score to KS Sahabuddin (64 not out) after the top order struggled to find their footing and were tottering at 110 for 7 in the 29th over. Shabuddin added 66 valuable runs with P Muthupandian (20) for the eighth wicket in 15.2 overs. Then with WD Balaji Rao, he added a further 37 runs for the ninth wicket when Pistons ran out of overs to end up at 213. Shabuddin during his 82 minute stay at the crease faced 65 balls and sent five balls to the signboards and twice managed to clear the ropes.In reply, Indian Oil Corporation started on a bad note when RS Sodhi struck thrice in his first three overs. He had Amit Dani (1) caught by Vasudevan in the second over of the innings and then in his third over, he dismissed Mithun Beerala (7). Hemant Kinicker (29) took the score to 80. But it was captain Mandhar Phadke (43) who held the IOC innings together with three useful partnerships with Jai P Yadav, RV Pawar and IR Siddique. After his dismissal Siddhique in the company of Zaheer Khan took IOC to victory.

Two of the batsmen the SCG crowd was desperate to see put in unusual performances as they faced off for one of the last times. The left-handed gunfight between Adam Gilchrist and Sanath Jayasuriya did not explode as the conditions were not ideal for the flashy strokeplay that has been a feature of the stunning openers’ careers.Jayasuriya’s only chance of returning to Sydney as a player is if Sri Lanka make the final and he was unable to find another jewel at a ground he adores in front of people who feel the same way about him. This time he was easily out-pointed by Gilchrist, who scored a 61 which was subdued by his exceptional standards.The previous time Jayasuriya toured here, having been reinstated to the team immediately after arriving late to the tour, he lashed a brutal 114, his third hundred in a row at the stadium. His 7 tonight included one striking boundary, a flay to third man off Brett Lee after he had joined Gilchrist in struggling to start in the usual tempo.Heavy rain forced the pitch to spend days undercover in the lead-up to the game and one of the results was slow and sometimes very low bounce. Something extra special was required for free scoring, which was achieved only by Matthew Hayden and Kumar Sangakkara in Australia’s 128-run win, and the surface upset the rhythm of the two top-of-the-order belters.Facing Lee a ball after hitting his boundary, Jayasuriya was not sure whether he wanted to leave outside off stump, but the bat drifted towards the ball, found the bottom edge and cannoned on to the stumps. A younger version of Jayasuriya would not have had the interference between mind and body, but he is 38 and the ticking grows louder by the tour.Gilchrist, 36, heard the retirement noise during the India Test series and his cross-country farewell is taking on the itinerary of a rock band. He is desperate to give his fans some final memories to lock away, but the conditions were not conducive to blasting entertainment and he was cautious for most of the innings.When Hayden was 33, Gilchrist was 4, but things soon looked like changing when he pulled a fierce six in front of square off Lasith Malinga’s speed and crunched boundaries through and over cover off Ishara Amerasinghe. However, a couple of legside miscues that narrowly avoided fielders showed the difficulty in gauging the bounce and the sensible option was taken.Often Gilchrist half-centuries have come before the 15-over mark, but his 54th fifty arrived in the 27th over from 67 balls. It is a measure of the way Gilchrist has altered expectations that it felt like he was crawling. Until Jayasuriya gained confidence as a one-day opener in the 1990s that rate of scoring was considered healthy. Both men rejected such thoughts and sprinted at a speed that was breathtaking and bowler breaking.Gilchrist was trying to lift his pace when he tried to sweep Chamara Kapugedera, who is significantly faster than medium, and missed. The ball was going on to the stumps until it hit Gilchrist’s pad and Tony Hill, the umpire, almost pointed at him to signal the dismissal.He headed for the dressing room to more moving applause, having taken 81 balls to register three fours and the six. A similar reception came when Jayasuriya trod back through the members’ area, ending one of the final head-to-head battles of a couple of game-changing swashbucklers.

The allrounder James Hopes has been placed on standby for his injured Queensland team-mate Shane Watson, who is battling a left calf strain. Watson was hurt bowling against Bangladesh on Saturday and is waiting for a review from the physiotherapist Alex Kountouris.Andrew Hilditch, the chairman of selectors, confirmed Hopes as a shadow player, but he felt Watson would regain his fitness before the end of the tournament. “The intention and the expectation is that Shane will recover and play a vital part in the World Cup,” Hilditch said.Hopes said that he would relish the challenge of playing in a World Cup. “If I had to walk into a World Cup semi-final it would be daunting but it’s a challenge I’d like to face and it would be a place to make a name for yourself,” Hopes told AFP. “I’ve seen most conditions and played in them so I’ll back myself to perform in one-day cricket wherever it’s played and if it’s in a World Cup semi-final it will be a World Cup semi-final.”The announcement is a blow for Cameron White, the Victoria allrounder who played during the CB Series, although Brad Hogg’s strong form has negated the need for another slow bowler. Hopes, 28, is a similar player to Watson and has appeared in nine one-day internationals. He has scored 84 runs at an average of 28 and taken four wickets at 67.25.Watson’s aggressive middle-order batting – he has scored 77 runs at more than one-and-a-half runs a ball during the World Cup – and his containing bowling have made him a valued member of the side. Brad Hodge, who scored a century against The Netherlands in his last game, is likely to replace Watson for Sunday’s match with England.

Michael Kasprowicz has cancelled his Glamorgan contract because he believes a season of county cricket will harm his chances of keeping his place in the Australian Test side. Kasprowicz, 34, broke the news to the side this week, adding to their problems as they are already waiting to find out whether Matthew Elliott, their other overseas signing, will be fit.”The news on Michael is very disappointing but at the end of the day we can’t do that much about it,” Mike Fatkin, Glamorgan’s chief executive, said. “But we have to be philosophical about it and get on with things. We thought Michael was all set to come over for the whole season and until the last 24 hours didn’t have any inkling of this.”I can understand his ambitions, especially with the Ashes coming up again in the winter, but it leaves us looking for a replacement with just over four weeks to go until the season begins.”Elliott, who underwent surgery on a long-standing knee problem last month, has been given until the weekend to decide whether he can play. “The prognosis is that he won’t be fit to play for us until mid-May,” Fatkin said. “And if he is given the all-clear, how is his knee going to stand up to the rigours of the county season? Matthew has asked us for three weeks from the operation before we make an assessment and that’s what we will do.” If Elliott is ruled out, then Glamorgan will have less than a month to find two overseas players.

Warren Hegg, Lancashire’s 37-year-old wicketkeeper, has announced that he will retire at the end of the summer.Hegg, who made his debut for the county in 1986 and went on to win two England caps, was a key member of the Lancashire side that won nine one-day titles between 1989 and 1999. “I’ve had 20 years at Old Trafford and have played with some great players,” he said. “I feel as though I have had a wonderful career.”Hegg has played 326 matches for Lancashire and scored 10,688 runs at 28.12, including seven hundreds, as well as taking 791 catches and 93 stumpings. His two England appearances came on the 1998-99 tour of Australia.

Where were you when it happened? Younger readers of Cricinfo will not even have been born. Javed Miandad may be having a tough time with this Indian tour, but there were several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s when he should have been acclaimed as the world’s greatest batsman. No less an authority than Sir Vivian Richards did just that by nominating Miandad as the man he would choose to bat for his life.On April 18, 1986 – a hot day in Sharjah – Miandad batted out of his skin to win Pakistan the Austral-Asia Cup. It was a match that Pakistan was losing right until Miandad smashed a full toss from Chetan Sharma out of the ground from the last ball. Pakistan won by one wicket. In that instant two competing emotions took hold. Pakistan realised that they could become a team of achievers; India developed a neurosis, worrying that if they could not beat Pakistan after such domination, when could they beat them?Since that time many players, commentators, and fans have wondered about the effect of that one strike on the psyche of the two nations. Did it give Pakistan an unimaginable boost? Did India suffer a crushing, morale-sapping blow? If so, how long did this effect linger?When the British Medical Journal decided to publish a special edition on South Asia, I thought it would be wrong to ignore cricket, a subject so close to the hearts and minds of the region. But something new had to be done, beyond simply recording win:loss ratios and percentages. My mind leapt to Miandad’s six and the unanswered question: what effect did it have on the subsequent performance of the two teams? Might advanced statistical analysis answer the question?I recruited Khalid Khan, an obstetrician but also an expert in statistics and researcher methodologies. Together we analysed the results of all matches between India and Pakistan. To our surprise we found a dramatic effect of Miandad’s six — an effect that is unlikely to be explained by chance. Pakistan was much more successful after Miandad’s six and this effect was most apparent in one-day matches. Variables such as the toss, the venue, and the team batting first did not alter this finding.We analysed all matches up to the end of 2003, although the inclusion of the recent results would not affect the study, simply because Pakistan won so many matches in the years after Miandad’s six. It may take many years for India to completely cancel out its effect — though Sourav Ganguly’s team has made a good start.Has India had a magic moment of its own? I suspect it might have. Sachin Tendulkar’s six off Shoaib Akhtar in last year’s World Cup may prove to be the shot that restored the Indian psyche. But we will have to wait a few years before we can perform a similar analysis.Kamran Abbasi is deputy editor of the British Medical Journal. Click here to read the full BMJ research paper: India versus Pakistan and the power of a six