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With talks failing to resolve to their dispute over the sponsorship rights for the November 1 Stanford 20/20 All-Star match, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and chief sponsors Digicel will head to arbitration.Three weeks of negotiations between the WICB and Digicel have not brought about a mutually favourable solution. Now, legal teams from both parties are working towards a neutral intervention, WICB CEO Donald Peters confirmed yesterday.”Digicel have asked to go to arbitration, so we are prepared to do that,” Peters told the Express. “Our attorneys are working on that, but (we’re) not sure what time it is yet. There are guidelines to the arbitration process, so we will stick with that.”The issue Digicel raised with the Stanford five-year, US$100 million series – which consists of one All-Star match per year against an England Select team – is that the deal with the WICB and Stanford encroaches on the Irish telecommunication giants’ exclusive sponsorship rights. Allen Stanford, however, disagrees.”Digicel has to deal with the WICB, the WICB has the West Indies team,” Stanford said on Monday during the ring presentation ceremony to the Trinidad and Tobago team, the 2008 Stanford 20/20 regional winners. “We have the Stanford Superstar team which was selected by the Legends here, not by the WICB selectors, totally different, totally apart.”A 32-man training squad, including eight T&T players, has been selected for the lucrative, winner-take-all match. Stanford has exclusive television and other rights to the game according to their deal with the WICB, but Digicel has threatened legal proceedings if the issue is not settled soon.

Scorecard

Although the season has almost a month to run, there was a distinctly autumnal feel to proceedings at a chilly Lord’s in a game with little at stake in terms of promotion. Middlesex, beset by rumours of internal disharmony and possible player exits, nevertheless did enough to take charge against a Gloucestershire side rooted to the bottom and without a Championship win all year.Shaun Udal lost his first toss as Middlesex captain but it wasn’t too costly. Gloucestershire struggled against a moving ball and Middlesex’s seam attack had them five down by lunch. David Brown (68) and Steve Snell (31) showed some fight after the interval, but Alan Richardson returned to nip out the tail and record his first five-wicket haul of an injury-hit summer.Richardson and Tim Murtagh caused no end of problems on a greenish pitch. William Porterfield fell leg-before half forward and then Kabir Ali played on to leave the visitors 6 for 2. The rest of the session was punctuated by frequent lbw shouts and a few edges, only one of which, to Murali Kartik at second slip, was spilled. Steve Finn removed Hamish Marshall with his first ball when he replaced Murtagh at the Nursery End, and Billy Godelman took a smart short-leg catch to account for Chris Taylor.At that stage Gloucestershire were 39 for 4 and looking likely to roll over, but at last Alex Gidman found in Brown someone prepared to dig. The pair steadied the innings only for Gidman to play on when Murtagh returned shortly before lunch.Oddly, the batting appeared easier in the first hour of the afternoon when the cloud cover was low. But once Finn nipped one back to trap Brown leg-before, there was little resistance. Richardson, in his third spell from the Pavilion End, benefited from some loose strokeplay to finish with 5 for 34 as the last three wickets went down in three overs.By the time Middlesex started their reply the sun was out but appearances were misleading. It was bitterly cold with a cutting breeze coming from behind the pavilion.Gloucestershire’s seamers posed few problems once the shine was off the ball, and the left-handed opening pair of Andrew Strauss and Godelman were rarely troubled. Both played well off their legs, and there was no shortage of opportunity to do so. Brown and Steve Kirby occasionally looked threatening, but there was little else to rouse the sparse crowd.Strauss eventually brought about his own downfall with a mistimed pull, and while that slowed the scoring rate, Middlesex continued to make steady progress. Ed Joyce, relived of the burden of captaincy in a bid to find form, and reportedly still in negotiations over his county future, started cautiously before unleashing two superb drives, one straight off the front foot immediately followed by an even better shot going back.Unsurprisingly in a wretched summer, the forecast for the next three days is poor. On today’s showing, the weather is about the only hope Gloucestershire have of avoiding yet another defeat.

It has been twelve years since Ricky Ponting first landed in India to play a Test. Four visits, eight Tests and an average of 12.28. Ponting failed in the one-off in 1996, in 1998 against Anil Kumble and Venkatapathy Raju but the ambush by Harbhajan Singh in 2001 is what really haunts him.”That first dismissal in the first Test was where it all started for me,” Ponting said in Hyderabad. Tellingly, it was Harbhajan’s first delivery to Ponting in Test cricket. The ball looped, gripped, and turned in viciously. Ponting, on 0, lunged to defend but the ball lobbed off the bat and pad to short leg.It was the beginning of the end for him. “I was always trying to find a different way to play, fearing that one delivery I guess,” he said. In the second Test, he fell playing off the back foot in the first innings and attempting to sweep in the second. In the final Test he returned to those signature fatal lunges. Ponting’s humiliation was total; Harbhajan had taken him out five times in five innings in the series.It was time for introspection. “The reason for my poor performance was that I didn’t trust myself; I didn’t trust my technique,” Ponting said. “I ended up getting stumped, caught at bat-pad sweeping. I tried almost everything and nothing worked. Every time I tried something, I got out pretty soon after. They are the lessons to be learnt I guess from coming here.” In 2004 his failure in the only game he played can be discounted as it came on a devilish spin track in Mumbai.Having burnt his fingers trying various options, Ponting said he was going to stick to one game plan this time. “I have spoken to a lot of guys this week about working out a style of playing you think is going to work for you … and when you have worked it out, making sure you stick to it. Even if you do get out a couple of times early, you know that if you stick to those things that have worked for you in the past, some will go your way and you will end up scoring some runs. I have to be strong and stick to what I know is going to work.”The Hyderabad tour game, in specific Ponting’s practice routine in the nets, offered some clues to his thought process. He was seen getting outside the line of the turning ball by taking an off-stump guard against the offspinners as a possible preparation for Harbhajan.His record against Harbhajan is awful: eight dismissals from nine games at 9.50. The worst bit about that stat is it includes games in Australia. Harbhajan knows he owns Ponting. When asked about the secret of his stranglehold, Harbhajan recently said, “He hasn’t batted for long enough against me, so I don’t know.”

Ponting searches for his own repartee. “Sri Lanka is probably the hardest spinning condition to play in. I have got a record there, as good as anybody, and against a set of bowlers a whole lot more skilled than Harbhajan might be.”He maintains his travails against Harbhajan were not “much of a mental thing”. The problem, according to him, is the first 10-15 minutes against spin. “That’s the challenging period. When you look at it, whenever I have got out to spin, it has been very early on. He has obviously had a very good run against me. He did that in the 2001 series and even back in Australia in the last series, he got me out three times in the Test series.”What gives him confidence that he can succeed this time? Ponting is drawing self-belief from his improved technique after his duels with Muttiah Muralitharan and sessions with India’s former coach Greg Chappell. “It’s about getting through that initial period. I feel like I have got the technique now to get through that,” he said. “My record everywhere else is great. I have enjoyed having Greg Chappell around. He’s obviously a great player in his own right and a very good coach.”I discussed a few different things with him, as most of our batters probably have. They are the little things that you need here. Sometimes, it’s just the real fine-tuning sort of thing that you might need with your technique to do well. One of our strengths is that a lot of our batsmen, in particular, talk amongst themselves about little things they might do, techniques they might use in different conditions. I am in good shape.”Ponting is desperate to remove the Indian spin asterisk from his career record. “It means a lot to me to do well here. I haven’t done well here in the past. So I guess it’s my turn now, my time now to stand up and make sure I am scoring some runs. I have had pretty much six weeks without any batting at all, trying to get over this wrist injury and it has come along pretty well. I just have to keep working hard and push myself and everything will then look after itself.” Ponting’s greatest test of character begins this Thursday and will run through this month. It is the battle of the series.

Mitchell Johnson is hoping reverse-swing can be his key weapon in India as he aims to hold his place in Australia’s Test team and fight off a challenge from Doug Bollinger. Johnson’s position is the least secure of Australia’s three starting fast men and he is not expecting any real help from the new ball during the four Tests.”I’ve sort of, not given up on the swing thing, but I think in these conditions I’m probably not going to get too many opportunities to swing the new ball anyway, so that’s when the reverse will come into it for me,” Johnson told AAP. “I had been working on basically trying to get it through to the keeper and bowl the way I have in the past.”Johnson had an excellent one-day tour of India this time last year but his Test appearances have been no more than solid. He struggled in the West Indies this year, where he sprayed deliveries both sides of the wicket, and he was stripped of the new-ball duties.”Looking at the West Indies tour I probably didn’t have the best tour there,” Johnson said. “But towards the end of it I started to get a bit more rhythm and where I was bowling there was coming in behind Brett [Lee] or Stuart [Clark] and just trying to bowl straight and hit the deck.”The persistent wicket-taking of Johnson’s fellow left-armer Bollinger will place Johnson under pressure during the upcoming series. Bollinger, an unused backup on the Caribbean trip, has impressed in his few games in India, both with Australia A and in the weekend’s practice match in Jaipur.”I like to bowl as straight as I can and I like to swing the ball as much as I can, whether it be natural or Irish,” Bollinger said. “That can be a very beneficial thing over here because the wickets don’t change as much and they’re a lot flatter than Australia.”

Six thousand Ashes tickets will be on sale this Monday, November 3, for the first Test between England and Australia starting on July 8 in Cardiff.Edgbaston, which will host the third Test, was the first ground to offer Ashes tickets for next summer’s hotly anticipated series, with the second and third days selling out in just a few hours.”As expected, the biggest box-office event in cricket, the first Ashes Test match is a big hit,” Glamorgan’s chairman Paul Russell said. “We want to give all our supporters the best possible chance of getting their hands on tickets. As a result, we are releasing over 6000 tickets for general sale in November and a further 6000 tickets in January.”This will give as many fans as possible the chance to watch the biggest cricket match ever to be played here in Wales.”The ECB’s decision to hand Cardiff an Ashes Test – the first at the newly-developed ground – courted controversy because of the ground’s low capacity (16,000). The club are extending it with additional seating, though only by a few thousand.

Match facts

Nov 9, 2008
Start time 7.30pm (1400 GMT)

The Big Picture

The 36th and final game of the league stage is no dead-rubber; it should be a keen contest between two of the ICL’s top-performing teams. Chennai Superstars need a win to finish at the top of the table. For Lahore Badshahs, a win will guarantee them a spot in the semi-finals, but a big loss could mean an early exit for one of the pre-tournament favourites.Lahore are currently tied on eight points with Dhaka Warriors, and Chandigarh Lions could join them if they win their encounter against Ahmedabad Rockets – which is the first of the two games on Sunday. But Lahore have the net run-rate in their favour at the moment, and could choose for damage control in case the match goes out of grasp, to ensure their net run-rate doesn’t slip below any of the other two contenders. In their last game, a must-win contest, they stepped it up against Dhaka, but Chennai should be a much tougher opposition: they have won five games out of seven so far, and they don’t rely heavily on just a few players; it’s teamwork that’s got them to the semi-finals.

Where they rank

Chennai are virtually assured of the second spot, and a win will move them up to No. 1. It’s Lahore, in fourth place, who must do the running in order to avoid slipping out of the semi-final positions.

Form guide (last five matches, most recent first)

Chennai – LWWWL
Lahore – WWLWW

Stats

• Mohammad Yousuf started off his ICL stint with a bang, hitting three fours off the first three balls he faced. Continuing in the same vein for a bigger score would have silenced the critics on his Twenty20 abilities, but his four-ball 12 puts on right on top on the batsmen with the highest strike-rate in this tournament.
• Ian Harvey’s strike-rate of 184.21 isn’t far behind Yousuf, but with 105 runs in five innings, it’s been a less-than-average tournament with the bat for the leading run-getter in the ICL – Harvey has 665 at an average of 31.66.
• Imran Nazir has 13 sixes in the tournament. Can he get six more on Sunday to overtake Alok Kapali as the leading six-hitter?

Players to watch

After missing their first three games, Hemang Badani has performed splendidly for Chennai. He scored two fifties in four games, and will want to score one more to put his team on top of the table.Saqlain Mushtaq made the doosra popular the world over. He has now come up with another variation, the : at the point of release, his palm faces towards midwicket instead of cover, which would be the normal position when bowling the conventional offbreak and doosra to a right-hand batsman. He then rolls his fingers over the seam, and the delivery works more like a topspinner. Batsmen will surely be checking out videos to figure this one out.

Quotes

“I have done well with the bat but I am not fully satisfied with my overall performance. I feel I am way below my own benchmark and working hard to get there.”
“The team sets targets in every area of the game and then each player identifies his role in it. All of us work hard and we are lucky to have experienced players in our side. We do not concentrating on just winning matches but executing the job assigned to us. Most importantly, what I feel is that we have done well in executing our plans.”

West Indies have appointed Steve Folkes, a former Australian rugby league player and coach, as their strength and conditioning coach ahead of the series in New Zealand.Folkes joined the team in Christchurch and coordinated the fitness and net session on Friday. The players will have a similar session on Saturday before they head to Auckland for a three-day warm-up.Folkes said he wanted to push West Indies up the rankings and bring in a winning attitude along with positive drive. “I can remember going to the cricket ground in Australia and watching Sir Garry Sobers, Wes Hall, Rohan Kanhai, Roy Fredericks and other great West Indies players,” Folkes said. “Naturally I got autographs from them all, so I understand that West Indies have a very proud and successful heritage. I will do my part to have a positive environment, good team atmosphere and good team culture.”Folkes said though there was a significant difference between training for rugby league and cricket, the players had welcomed his ideas. “My background is in strength and conditioning and then I went to coaching. The sports are different and the needs are different so I just need to adjust. I will learn by watching and I have spoken to [head coach] John Dyson and sought his advice.”West Indies are scheduled play two Tests, two Twenty20s and five ODIs against New Zealand between December and January.

Garnett Kruger, the former South Africa bowler, has joined Glamorgan for 2009.Kruger last played for South Africa in 2006 but has remained a consistent performer for Lions and Leicestershire. His decision to come back to county cricket comes as a surprise; at the end of his season with Leicestershire last year, he left to cut down his workload.Now, however, he is delighted to be joining a new county and linking up with his countryman Herschelle Gibbs. “I can’t wait to join Glamorgan, I just want to play cricket and be as successful as possible,” he told the club’s website. “I am really looking forward to catching up with the boys in Cape Town pre-season.”Matthew Maynard, Glamorgan’s cricket manager, added: “I am absolutely delighted that Kruger is joining the side. He is a player of great experience and he will lead our bowling attack next season. With the additions of Kruger and Gibbs to the side, we look forward to a very exciting season in 2009.”

Ijaz Butt, the PCB chairman, has suggested that Shoaib Malik will stay on as captain of Pakistan in 2009 despite calls for him to be replaced. Malik’s performance was due to be reviewed on December 31, 2008 – when his tenure was originally supposed to end – but it’s highly likely he will be retained, especially after gaining Butt’s vote of confidence.”Shoaib Malik will remain as the Pakistan captain till the time he continues to deliver,” Butt was quoted as saying in the . “I believe that he has done a good job in recent times.”Malik was appointed after Pakistan were eliminated from the group stages of the 2007 World Cup in the West Indies. His achievements include reaching the finals of the ICC World Twenty20 the same year, beating India in the Kitply Cup final in Bangladesh the following year and a 3-0 sweep in the ODI series against West Indies in Abu Dhabi in November. He led Pakistan to a country record 12 successive ODI wins though the bulk of them came against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh earlier this year.However, he’s had limited opportunities to lead Pakistan in Tests as they’ve been deprived of Test action in 2008 due to security concerns. His skills as a leader were questioned when his former team-mate Mohammad Yousuf and, other senior players, criticised him for being a poor communicator.But Malik found support from his coach Intikhab Alam who believed he should be retained for another year. A final decision on his tenure is expected soon.

Both Mahela Jayawardene and Mahendra Singh Dhoni are expecting the five-ODI contest, which starts on January 28 in Dambulla, to be a closely-fought affair. India edged out Sri Lanka 3-2 in the ODIs during their visit in July-August last year, but the hosts are confident about their prospects after their recent 2-1 success in Pakistan.”It’s going to be a tough, challenging series but we are looking forward to that challenge,” Jayawardene said. “Things happened for us in Pakistan which is good. We should try and continue that trend.”I put the success that we had in Pakistan [down] to the way we successfully adapted to the tough conditions in Zimbabwe and in Bangladesh,” he added. “A lot of younger guys put their hands up and a lot of character was shown in our team. In different situations certain players played really well. That gave a lot of guys the confidence going forward.”The way we lost the first game in Pakistan was really tough for us. We had a chat and we knew exactly what went wrong and the next two games was history. The way our boys played was brilliant. The last three months have taught us quite a few lessons and hopefully we’ll learn from that and continue to improve as a unit.”While Sri Lanka have been on the road for the past three months, India have enjoyed successes at home, against Australia and England, and the luxury of a break in a cramped schedule thanks to the cancellation of the Pakistan tour – the absence of which has led to Sri Lanka playing both teams.In the 3-2 win last time around, Dhoni won four tosses, which he felt would play a vital role. “It’s not the weather but the wickets behave in a strange way in Sri Lanka,” he said. “The ball grips on and it is slightly slower. In the last one-and-a-half years you have venues like Dambulla and Premadasa Stadium where it seams around in the evening especially under the lights. If it is a day game in Dambulla the ball does a lot. That’s why the toss is very important.”India will be without an experienced campaigner in Harbhajan Singh, and Dhoni said it was a chance for left-arm spinners Pragyan Ojha and the uncapped Ravindra Jadeja to prove their mettle. “Harbhajan has been the pick of the bowlers when it comes to spinners,” Dhoni said. “He is one person who wants to perform in a game. We will miss him. We have two spinners in the side Pragyan Ojha and Ravindra Jadeja who will try to fill in the space. We also have part-timers who have done well.”With the pitches favouring spin, Dhoni does not foresee a tough time for them. “One plus point is that over here the spinners get the assistance from the wicket,” he said. “It won’t be really tough for them if they find a good length. It will be comparatively easy compared to a wicket that doesn’t assist them and favours the batsmen. It’s a fair opportunity for both the spinners to prove themselves when your leading spinner is not there.”