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Bryce Cavanagh, an Australian hired in April 2005, has resigned as West Indies’ strength and conditioning coach following the Test series against Pakistan.Cavanagh’s two-year contract was close to expiring but his sudden, premature exit was still a surprise. He has not been replaced for the remainder of the tour, and caribbeancricket.com reported that assistant coach David Moore will fill in as strength and conditioning coach in the interim.Cavanagh was hired to control of fitness level tests and required standards for players at first-class and international level.

Mohammad Ashraful, Bangladesh’s captain, has called for the appointment of a full-time coach ahead of his side’s tour to New Zealand at the end of the year.”I feel we desperately need a permanent coach, whoever it may be, Shaun [Williams] or anyone else. There is a big difference between a permanent and temporary coach. You can’t expect teamwork with a temporary solution,” Ashraful told the .The Bangladesh Cricket Board has been looking for a national coach since Dav Whatmore refused a two-year contract extension after spending four years with the team. Interim coach Shaun Williams, who took over in June, was at the helm for a tour of Sri Lanka and the ICC World Twenty20 in South Africa. Neither of the two tours was successful for Bangladesh and the strategies of the team management have been criticised, especially after some haphazard batting in the Twenty20.National selector and former captain Akram Khan, who was part of the team management during the last two trips, also stressed on the need of a full-time coach. “I was only part of the selection process. I wasn’t involved in game planning,” he said. “Actually the captain and coach have the big role behind the planning. What I want to say is that we should have come out from the short-term solution immediately about the coach.”However, he expressed his satisfaction over the Twenty20 performance. “I think our performance was not bad because we fulfilled our target but the problem is that we were not consistent enough in any form of the game,” he said. “What I felt was that our team couldn’t play their natural game with the expectations getting higher.”Chief selector Rafiqul Alam also expressed his satisfaction over Bangladesh’s performance in South Africa. “The batting problems might remain in the Twenty20 format but what is most important is that nobody took us lightly. I believe if anybody is good in the five-day game then he will be okay in any format,” he said. “We have to shift our focus to the New Zealand trip and I think this year’s National Cricket League will be crucial for the players because we are trying many things to make it worthy including the financial encouragement.”Rafiqul also believed that the team needs a permanent coach. “A permanent coach is a very important part but as well as that, we have to find the right man for the job and in that case you have to compromise on time.”Responding to allegations that Ashraful had attitude problems during the Twenty20 and did not listen to anybody during the tour, Rabeed Imam, Bangladesh’s media manager, told Cricinfo: “Ashraful is a proactive skipper and he takes initiatives. He is confident enough to take decisions he feels are right and I don’t see any justifiable reason why some people should be critical of that. He’s also the senior-most pro in the side and has more experience at this level than any other player in the Twenty 20 team.”He has excellent working relationship with the coach, coaching staff and selectors and they can vouch for that. The players also find him easily approachable as most are his age or near about.”

Titans 176 for 2 (Rudolph 71, Hall 59) beat WPBOL 162for 4 (Kallis 50, Johnson 44) by 14 runs
ScorecardJacques Rudolph and Andrew Hall shared a 130-run opening partnership in 16 overs, to set Titans on the way to victory against Western Province Boland. No bowler was spared in the onslaught, as Rudolph top-scored with 71 from 50 balls, including 10 fours to all parts of the ground and a six over midwicket. Meanwhile Hall, back in cricket after undergoing back surgery, scored 59 off 51 deliveries, including six fours and a six. With a licence to hit out in the final overs, Justin Kemp and Gerald Dros then added 31 off 13 deliveries.Neil Johnson and Jacques Kallis kept WPBOL in the game with a 95-run partnership from 69 balls, but when Johnson fell for 44 and Kallis for 50, the game hung in the balance. Jean-Paul Duminy and Henry Davids made a valiant effort but the 23 runs required off the last over proved to be out of their reach.Eastern Cape Cricket 116 for 5 (Boucher 44) beat Eagles114 for 7 (Jacobs 47) by 5 wickets
ScorecardDavey Jacobs and Nicky Boje were the only two Eagles batsmen to offer any resistance, as Eastern Cape Cricket bundled them out for 116 en route to a five-wicket victory. The Eagles were always on the back foot and continually lost wickets as they stuttered to 114 for 7 in their 20 overs. Jacobs scored 47 and Boje 25, but playing on a slow rain-affected pitch, one that had seen a lot of rain in the past week, proved too much for the Eagles.Chasing 114 should have been an easy task, but ECC made heavy weather of it. It took some heavy hitting from Mark Boucher to relieve the pressure, although they only managed to win with three balls to spare.

Simon Katich says the prospect of regaining his place in the Test side in Michael Clarke’s absence is an “awkward situation”. Clarke appears to be out of contention for the first game, which starts in Jamaica on May 22, and Katich is the likely beneficiary of the batsman’s decision to stay home to help his fiancée Lara Bingle through the death of her father.Katich has come back into the Test squad for the first time since West Indies visited in 2005, having completed a record-breaking season of 1506 Pura Cup runs for New South Wales. He said a recall would be a reward for his work over the past three seasons, “but it is something of an awkward situation”.”It is very delicate,” he told AAP. “Obviously we don’t know when Pup is going to arrive, so it is a bit of an unfortunate situation.”The second Test in Antigua from May 30 appears to be the best option for Clarke, who was due to start his first Test tour as vice-captain until withdrawing last week. Brad Hodge, who was taking part in the Indian Premier League, has joined the party as a shadow player until Clarke arrives, but is only an outside chance of entering the first-team calculations.Australia’s only warm-up before the opening Test is the three-day affair against a Jamaica XI from Friday and Katich is likely to win a chance to impress. “It’s just a matter of hopefully playing the tour match and then hopefully getting some runs in that and putting my name up there for selectors to hopefully pick me,” Katich said. “I’ve been picked as the extra batsman and my role is to just make sure I’m ready to go if something happens, and that hasn’t changed.”Katich is determined to “grab the opportunity” and hopes to add to his 23 Tests. “I didn’t make the most of it the last time around,” Katich said. “I had plenty of opportunities to try and nail down a spot and I didn’t. If you don’t grab the opportunities when they’re there, you just don’t know when they will come back around.”

ScorecardDay 1
Bulletin – Trescothick sets the pace for England
Verdict – Bravo keeps the discipline
Roving Reporter – Age concerns
Day 2
Bulletin – Windies fight back after Flintoff blitz
Verdict – Flintoff confirms his coming-of-ageDay 3
Bulletin – England build the foundations
Verdict – A new and triumphant England
Roving Reporter – Give us a clueDay 4
Bulletin – England retain the Wisden Trophy
Verdict – Giles rips out the cream of the Caribbean batting

Scorecard and ball-by-ball details

Only in cricket can pigeon mean predator. Glenn McGrath, playing his 100th Test, spearheaded a powerful Australian attack, perhaps their best in the subcontinent, as India were restricted to 146 for 5 in reply to 398. They were choked for runs, and no-one pulled the noose tighter than McGrath, who took 2 for 18 in his 20 overs. Mohammad Kaif’s 47 not out, an innings that was both obdurate and fluent, helped India back on track, but Australia were far ahead.Start as you mean to go on, they say, but India’s start was completely at odds with what followed. Virender Sehwag smashed four boundaries off Jason Gillespie’s first over, but once he was out, the runs stopped flowing. Or even trickling. Aakash Chopra made 9 off 42 balls, Rahul Dravid made 21 off 140, and Sachin Tendulkar managed 8 off 36. The Indians collected only 60 runs in the afternoon session, as the run rate dived below two an over, and stayed there. It was not all the batsmen’s fault. The bowling was magnificent.McGrath’s bowling was an encapsulation of his essence. It was as if he strode in to bowl and said to the world, “You want to see how I’ve made it this far? Watch this.” His line was mostly in that narrow strip that is so often described as the corridor, which leads batsmen to their doom. His length, just back-of-a-length, allowed the batsmen neither to drive nor cut or pull. And he got the ball to jab both ways, teasing and tormenting. He only took two wickets all day, but what wickets they were – Sehwag, the irresistible force, and Dravid, the immovable object.His companions were lesser men only in comparison to him. Gillespie, after that first burst of looseners, bowled with hostility all day long, and Michael Kasprowicz was accurate and parsimonious, and unlucky not to take a wicket. They relished bowling on a pitch that offered them pace, even bounce and some lateral movement, and their strategy was to prise out wickets by restricting runs. Australia had decided that, while bowling, defence was the best form of attack, and they were vindicated.

It didn’t work for Dravid, though. His innings was a puzzling throwback to the early part of his career, when his immaculate defence was often not matched by the elegant strokeplay that makes him such a joy to watch. Sanjay Manjrekar once remarked that Dravid during India’s tour of Australia in 1999-2000 had made the same mistake that Manjrekar himself had made there in 1991-92: focussing on keeping his wicket intact and not caring to score runs. With that approach, you could spend two or three hours at the crease, but it would be to no avail when you got out, because the score would not have progressed much. In Dravid’s defence, though, it must be said that the bowling was outstanding, and quite a few crisp shots failed to elude the fielders, who were lively and athletic. A great foe can make a lesser man of anyone.Tendulkar played with self-restraint and obvious determination, but was set up beautifully by Gillespie, and was lbw for 8 to a lovely incutter (49 for 3). VVS Laxman came in and batted uncertainly against the fast bowlers, but it was again to Shane Warne that he perished, rocking back to a short one that spun away from him prodigiously, and trying to cut, only managing a top-edge to Michael Clarke at point (75 for 4). Dravid was out shortly after tea, lured into edging a staple McGrath delivery to slip (103 for 5).Kaif was the most impressive of the Indian batsmen on view. He played the kind of innings one has come to expect from Dravid, defending solidly but keeping the scoreboard ticking, and capitalising on loose balls. He survived an uncertain period against Gillespie just before close of play, when Gillespie kept bowling short to him. Kaif was well supported by Parthiv Patel, whose batting, at odds with his shambolic wicketkeeping, was adequate against all the challenges thrown his way. The last of them involved McGrath bowling with a close-in circle of seven fielders on the off side, like the broken seal of a bottle of mineral water. To his credit, he survived.It had been a good day for the bowlers from the start. The morning had begun with the threat of Clarke, aided by the tailenders, taking Australia much closer to 500, which would have shut India out of the match. But India struck with the second new ball, as Zaheer Khan bowled beautifully to pick up the wickets of Clarke and Gillespie. McGrath played an entertaining cameo of 11 not out, which included two hooks for four, and some immaculate head-over-the-ball elbow-high defence.But it was with the ball that McGrath would dominate. The Australian bowlers charged in, and the Indians crawled all day. Now would they die, or rise up?

Brad Williams will be out of action for a month after MRI scans revealed he had sustained only muscle damage to his right knee when dislocating it during Western Australia’s Pura Cup victory over Tasmania.Williams collapsed in agony during the ninth over of Tasmania’s second innings on Tuesday and had to be assisted from the field. The tests showed Williams, 29, had a muscle tear behind his knee and extensive bruising.Scott Meuleman has made a rapid recovery from a dislocated left shoulder, which occurred during the ING Cup loss to Tasmania on October 15, and will make his comeback for the Second XI against South Australia in a four-day match starting on Monday. Chris Rogers will also play in the game, his first since having surgery to correct a chronic hamstring complaint.

The Pakistan side returned to Karachi from their New Zealand tour yesterday, but all the questions from the media were about the forthcoming series against India.”I have never seen the Indian team playing with such strength or confidence … our strength is that we have never been so united and played with so much spirit as we are doing at the moment,” Javed Miandad, Pakistan’s coach, admitted. “We are going to face a very tough series against them. It’s going to be an emotionally charged series because of the little cricket we have had against each other in the recent years.”Inzamam-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s captain, was a little more upbeat, while acknowledging that it would be tough. “We are ready for the series. Our young team played well in New Zealand and with a superior bowling attack we think we can stop the Indian batting which has been performing very well in Australia.”We will rely on our pacers and with Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Sami we have two match winners,” he continued, while dismissing reports that he had fallen out with Shoaib in New Zealand. “We lost the one-day series and that allowed baseless rumours to float and once we start winning, all this will die down.”Some local newspapers have been calling for changes to the side following the heavy defeat in the one-day series, but Inzamam said that the same side was more than capable of beating India. “It needs no changes,” he insisted. “It has been shaping up well since we won a Test series against South Africa last year.”

Six Indian cricketers and five members of the support staff – including Greg Chappell, the coach – currently in Zimbabwe are without passports after their documents were either stolen or lost. The team manager Amitabh Chowdhary, whose own passport is missing as well, has said that the necessary procedures were under way and that fresh passports would be issued shortly.”We lost the passports on Wednesday while I was watching the match between New Zealand and Zimbabwe at the ground on Wednesday,” Chowdhary was quoted as saying by the Press Trust of India. “Follow-up action has been taken, forms have been filled and we expect the new passports to be issued by this evening.”Suresh Raina, Rudra Pratap Singh, Murali Kartik, Harbhajan Singh Ashish Nehra and Mohammad Kaif were the six players whose passports went missing, while the same fate also befell Greg King, the trainer, the physiotherapist John Gloster and Ian Frazer, the bio-mechanist. Of these, Raina, RP Singh and Kartik were selected only for the one-day squad, and will return home on Thursday, 8 September 2005.

Sir Clyde Walcott, the legendary West Indian captain and batsman, has died in a Barbados hospital. He was 80.Standing 6’2″ with a broadness to match, Walcott was one of the three Ws – Everton Weekes and Sir Frank Worrell were the others – who did so much to make West Indies a real force in world cricket in the decade after the Second World War.Despite his size he was agile enough to stand in as wicketkeeper when the occasion demanded. He was a powerful batsman with a crouching stance, a savage driver and cutter, and merciless on anything pitched short which he invariably pulled with real savagery through midwicket. But he also possessed a solid defence when the need demanded. He was also a useful fast-medium change bowler too.He first played for Barbados while a 16-year-old schoolboy, and in 1946-47 he added 574 for the fourth wicket with his schoolmate, Frank Worrell, for Barbados against Trinidad. Walcott’s share was 314. It remains the record West Indian stand for any wicket and stamped both their marks on the game.He made his international debut against England in 1947-48 where only his wicketkeeping kept him in the side, but he really came of age in India in 1948-49 where he made 452 runs in the Tests. He continued that form on the historic 1950 tour of England, hitting seven hundreds in the summer including 168 not out at Lord’s.He struggled – as many did – against the Australian attack of Lindwall and Miller, but between 1953 and 1955 he had no equals. Against Australia he scored a then-record West Indian aggregate of 827 runs in a series, including a record five centuries, and 698 runs against England.In England in 1957 he started brightly but sustained an injury in the first Test on his way to 90 and never regained his best form. He was, however, back to his imperious best for his final full Test series when Pakistan visited the Caribbean the following year.But he retired from international cricket at the top when still a comparative young man. CLR James touched on the reasons in Beyond A Boundary, hinting that the politics of the region had left him exasperated and that he was upset by the board’s insistance that a white player lead the side. Walcott himself insisted he quit for financial reasons after the board forced him to play for no fee after he took a paid coaching job in British Guiana.In 44 Tests Walcott struck 15 hundreds, and made 3798 runs at an average of 56.68.He also played first-class cricket for British Guiana between 1954 and 1964 and is widely credited with helping to expand the game to the sugar estates in Berbice. He also made a mark in the Lancashire Leagues.Walcott went on to manage several West Indian teams, and became a commentator and coach in his native Barbados. He was president of the West Indian Board before, in 1993, he succeeded Sir Colin Cowdrey as chairman of ICC. He was himself knighted in 1994.He led the ICC for six years, doing much to set in place the procedures aimed at investigating and stamping out match-fixing. He was once asked why he continued to work so hard as an administrator and replied: “Cricket has done so much for me that I can’t do enough for cricket.”The revival of Caribbean cricket had always been close to Walcott’s heart. “In recent years the game has changed considerably and I must admit we in the West Indies have done little to change our approach to this glorious game,” he said in a statement recently to promote the World Vintage Cricket Carnival to be held in Barbados in October 2006.However, Walcott hoped that soon there would be a turnaround. “I do hope that by 2007 when the World Cup is with us, our cricket will have improved so dramatically that we will be alive in the cricketing sense, once again.”