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Ben Edmondson and Steve Magoffin upended their former state as Queensland fell to an innings loss inside seven sessions at the Gabba. The fast bowlers moved to Western Australia in search of opportunities and they reminded the Bulls of what they had missed, picking up four wickets each and knocking the home side over for 133.The Bulls began the day at 3 for 88 but were soon in trouble after losing Craig Philipson for 15 when he was bowled by Brett Dorey. Giving the hosts no chance of a recovery, Edmondson broke through James Hopes, Chris Hartley and Andy Bichel in four overs to stop Queensland’s thoughts of making Western Australia bat again.Steve Magoffin removed Ashley Noffke and Daniel Doran in three balls and ended the game before lunch when he dismissed Nathan Rimmington in his next over. Magoffin claimed 4 for 21 off 12.2 overs while Edmondson picked up 4 for 46.Shane Watson, the No. 3, was trying to impress as he aimed for a World Cup spot, but he ran out of partners and was stranded on 46 not out. The outright loss was Queensland’s third in a row at the Gabba.

Past West Indies cricketers drank and were subjected to curfews but they respected their profession and would never go overboard. This admission was made by former captain Clive Lloyd at the launch of his new biography in England.Lloyd, who is now a director of the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), said he never condoned indiscipline and the players he led to global dominance in the 1970s and 1980s knew where to draw the line.”If you have rules and people break them, they know they’ll get punished. I think you need curfews if you have young people in the squad,” Lloyd said. “Discipline has always been something that I’ve believed in and the guys in the West Indies team knew that from day one. They said that once they saw me annoyed, they knew they’d overstepped the line.””We always had curfews and we had respect – respect for one another, respect for your profession and respect for the people you represent,” he added. However, Lloyd said that curfews weren’t imposed for the tour matches as the players had their free time then.Lloyd, who is also a committee member at Lancashire, Andrew Flintoff’s county, explained how drinking was not the only way to build team spirit but it had been a part of professional sport for many years.”Respect has got to be earned. You have to do the right things and lead by example. If you do things like Andrew has done, then you let yourself down,” Lloyd said.But Lloyd said former England coach Duncan Fletcher was wrong to speak out about Flintoff’s behaviour during the Ashes tour and could have handled the situation better.Fletcher said, in a serialisation of his autobiography, he had to cancel a training session in Australia as Flintoff, who was captain in the absence of Michael Vaughan, was under the influence of alcohol. Although Lloyd admitted drinking had always been a part of professional sport, he accepts Flintoff overstepped the mark.”Sportsmen have been drinking for years, it is not something new, but you don’t want to overdo it. I think there’s a limit because you need to be fresh and you’ve got to be thinking straight. We went out drinking but the point is we never overdid it. We went out as a group and knew it was important to do the right thing.”

Tom Moody, the coach of Sri Lanka, believes his side’s recent success in England was a stepping stone towards achieving greater goals in the future. After a difficult, inconsistent six months Sri Lanka, under the inspirational Mahela Jayawardene, exceeded expectations and played with the natural flair that was traditionally their strength and Moody was quick to single out the team’s journey.”The success of the team on the tour just didn’t happen, but because of a lot of hard work that was put in 12 months prior to it. Everyone’s got to take credit for that,” Moody told reporters. “There’s been a lot of work done by the individual players, support staff, management and senior players. As a team we gained enormous confidence and we look to improve even further in all aspects of our game.”If we don’t rest on our laurels on one good tour but continue to make that progress we had made in the past 12 months, we are in good shape. Everyone wants success but at times we all need to be patient for that success particularly when we are looking to groom the next generation of youngsters,” Moody said. “Players don’t instantly turn into super stars overnight; sometimes it takes 6 months, 12 or 24 months for a player to adapt to the speed of the game at international level in Test and one-day cricket. There’s no question the talent is here in Sri Lanka.”Moody added that the most significant aspect on the tour of England was the performance and consistency of the side. “It started to take place after a few weeks when the team adjusted to the conditions and accepted a number of things we had to face over there,” he said. “On Saturday evening of the first Test at Lord’s the reality of the situation really hit home. The group of players dug very deep and showed not only themselves but the England team and the Sri Lankan public that they had some genuine characters.””They fought back from a hideous position to save the Test match. From that point the penny may have dropped that we can compete in the series, that we can win over here,” he said. “The hard work that we are doing is working. Let’s persevere with that hard work and believe in ourselves. The results beyond that point speak for themselves.”Sri Lanka, who had a week off following their nine-week tour, will start fitness training from Thursday in preparation for the two-Test home series against South Africa starting on July 27.

Don’t feel so bad. Save your anguish for much worse that is yet to come.Given what West Indies cricket has been through in the past decade, defeats to South Africa and Bangladesh in two three-hour vupping sessions are no real cause for any additional weeping and wailing, unless you’re one of those who believes that success or failure in the ICC World Twenty20 is an indicator of anything meaningful in the longer versions of the game.If cricket’s latest and most popular hybrid is your bowl of , and lifting the new trophy after the final on September 24 would have soothed all the aches and pains of previous disappointments, go right ahead and bawl for murder.Test cricket too boring? One-day internationals too long? Cool. Should this abbreviated variety carry all your hopes and aspirations for a return to those increasingly distant years of Caribbean glory, then the mournful demeanour following elimination in the first round of the tournament in South Africa is fully justified. However, if you dare to entertain the radical notion that an obsession with the Twenty20 game will actually bury us even further down the pit of cricketing irrelevance, then there should be the realisation, in appreciating all of this in a wider context, that the two losses in three days at the Wanderers are merely symptoms of an incurable malaise.This bigger picture is only relevant if Test cricket is still accepted as the highest form of the game, a standard at which greatness is truly measured and a level to which all young players should aspire. If not, there’s no point reading any further, because what follows is an attempt to put the damaging consequences of the sport’s version of instant gratification within the sobering realities of a West Indian context.In the first place, we must appreciate that the vast majority of our current crop of cricketers lack the maturity to be able to adapt to the significantly different demands of the increasing varieties of the game. We lack the mental strength to concentrate for long periods, and as such, seem far more competitive the shorter the contest is.Yet even in the narrow confines of 50 overs-per-side, or now the 20-over version, we remain blighted by inconsistency: incomparably brilliant one day, woefully inadequate the next. Whereas every catch was held and every fielder fired in his returns over the top of the stumps in Nottingham in the finale to the England tour two months ago, the same players struggled often to fulfil the very basics of cricket in Johannesburg yesterday and last Tuesday.Chris Gayle was at his most spectacular in the tournament opener, but only the hopelessly naive would have been thrown into despair at the sight of the opening batsman walking back to the pavilion within the first over less than 48 hours later. All of the ingredients that contribute to consistency are critically deficient. There is brilliance, no question. But like the fireworks around the ground on that first night, they glow spectacularly for only a brief moment.With one or two exceptions, there aren’t too many boring old light bulbs around, the kind that glow continuously. Not always eye-catching, but almost always switched on to the context of the moment. Apologists may wish to tolerate this period as just a phase or a cycle, or use some other description which ties in the implication that it is only a matter of time before the good times start rolling again.

Yet more and more, the grim realisation takes hold that we are living in West Indies cricket’s Dark Age, not because of what happened yesterday or two days earlier, but because the social circumstances in the Caribbean that produce players and administrators of the current variety will not be reformed for at least another generation.But wouldn’t the fun and excitement of Twenty20 give us cause to smile? Only if we can see no further than the next towering six or the next bunch of dancing girls and boys that accompanies the white ball’s disappearance beyond the boundary. Batsmen who already suffer from a flawed temperament will only become more heavily addicted to measuring the worth of an innings by sixes, fours and strike-rates. Bowlers incapable of following one good spell with another will now see the sum total of their contribution to the game as 24 balls, barring wides and no-balls. Conversely, fielding should be much sharper, but only if players are able to cope with the concentrated pressure that the shorter forms of the game impose. Recent evidence is not encouraging.All of this analysis becomes irrelevant, however, if the men in the middle, and their assortment of minders and ego-protectors, fail to acknowledge that radical treatment is necessary to, at the very least, slow the spread of the cancer.Ricky Ponting accused his players and himself of playing diabolical cricket and not respecting the game in the aftermath of Australia’s shock defeat to Zimbabwe on Wednesday. Such strong words, though, are too insulting and demeaning for our proud, sensitive West Indian ears. “Learning experience” is as offensive as we are prepared to go.If we are so fundamentally insecure and lack the honesty and integrity to acknowledge the shameful reality of what lies before us, then we should accept that the last 12 years were just a prelude of what is to come.Thank goodness it’s only a game.

Zorol Barthley, chief cricket operations officer of the WICB, has announced he will quit his role at the end of February next year.Barthley’s resignation is one of many to have hit the board in the past year and Dr Roland Toppin, who was named its new chief executive in November, will now have a clean slate with which to begin his tenure. So far this year, the resignations have included Roger Brathwaite, the chief executive; Darren Millien, the chief marketing executive; Dr. Michael Seepersaud, the chief cricket development officer and Bryce Cavanagh, the Australia-born strength and conditioning coach.Toppin takes up his new role in time for the World Cup which is being held in the Caribbean in March and April next year.

Matthew Hoggard, the swing bowler, has questioned the longevity of Australia’s mostly 30-something attack and doubted their ability to knock England over twice. Hoggard was largely ineffective in the 2002-03 Ashes series, where his six wickets cost 62.5 runs each, but he expected his team-mates to target the greybeards when the series starts tomorrow.”They’re getting on a little bit – we’ve got back-to-back Test matches so it’ll be interesting to see if they can put in the consistent performances for 25 days,” Hoggard told the . “It’ll be interesting to see if they have the firepower to bowl us out twice.”Glenn McGrath and Shane Ware are 35, Michael Kasprowicz is 32, Jason Gillespie 30 and Brett Lee 28. Hoggard, 28, challenged McGrath to make it to the end of the five-Test series in September. “It’s going to be tough on the body, it’ll be interesting to see if he is the world-class bowler he was and to see if Jason Gillespie can find some form,” he said. Hoggard also said Warne was “not the force he was” and was taking a defensive option by bowling more around the wicket.While Hoggard was busy talking down Australia, his pace partner Steve Harmison was trying to convince everybody he had a nasty streak. A key component if England are to be successful, Harmison said bowling fast was his job.”I feel I’ve got a nasty streak in me but it’s when I’m in my cricket gear and have got the ball in my hand,” he told . “I don’t believe you frighten batsmen. You work them to your advantage. I don’t go out intentionally to hurt anyone or frighten anyone.”Harmison was another young bowler to struggle against Australia in 2002-03 when he claimed nine victims at 50.55. Since then he has played 25 Tests, topped the world rankings and stirred up Australia’s one-day batsmen with his steepling bounce.

Ricky Ponting wants to forget Australia’s 10-run loss to West Indies and escape any further “slip-ups” when his team faces a must-win scenario against England on Saturday. Australia’s batting failed to overcome the tight West Indian attack at Mumbai on Wednesday night and the bowling lacked regular pentetration.The pitch has also been criticised but Ponting refused to blame the conditions. “There was a game there to be won and we weren’t good enough,” Ponting said in The Australian. “Chasing 230-odd, we knew it was going to be hard work, but thought that total was pretty gettable if we applied ourselves. But there were only a couple of guys with our batting that actually did that, and we still got pretty close. So it was a disappointing day for us.”Ponting did not think Australia’s situation – they need to win to stay in contention for the finals – would be difficult to turn around. “You have to look at every game in this series as a knockout game anyway,” Ponting told the paper. “As we’ve found out in the last couple of Champions Trophy tournaments, one little slip-up and you’re gone. We’ve got to forget about it [Wednesday night] as quickly as we can, talk about the areas we didn’t play well in and improve them come Saturday.”England lost their opening match against India and both sides will use the game at Jaipur to score early points ahead of the Ashes. Australia’s loss in the semi-finals of the previous Champions Trophy gave England an early edge for their 2005 success and Ponting has already spoken of his plans to go hard at his opponents. “England’s one-day form hasn’t been great, but they will probably lift a bit against us,” he said. “I’d like to think we can improve.”Ponting is also struggling with the bat and has posted only one half-century in his past seven innings. He made a single on Wednesday and was dismissed playing on to Jerome Taylor. “I haven’t made a lot of runs in the last few one-day games that I’ve played,” Ponting said in The Courier-Mail. “I’ll be okay, I’ll bounce back on Saturday.”

Virender Sehwag’s remarkable double-century against Pakistan at Lahore this week was not sufficient to lift him up from seventh position in the latest LG ICC Player Rankings. Ordinarily, an innings of 254 from 247 balls would have sent Sehwag surging up the list, but such was the torpid nature of the Gadaffi Stadium pitch that his efforts barely registered.In five days just eight wickets fell while 1089 runs were scored, even with men of the stature of Shoaib Akhtar and Danish Kaneria in the Pakistan attack. Five other batsmen scored centuries, including Sehwag’s opening partner and captain, Rahul Dravid, who climbed two places to joint-fourth with Australia’s Matthew Hayden.Inzamam-ul-Haq was a rare failure, making just 1, and has slipped down to sixth. But his middle-order colleagues Younis Khan and Mohammad Yousuf have both made gains after their scores of 199 and 173 respectively. Yousuf is ninth and Younis tenth, with career-best ratings for each of them.Further down the list, Shahid Afridi’s blitzkrieg batting on the second day has moved him up five places to joint 39th, while Kamran Akmal, whose 81-ball century was the fastest by a wicketkeeper in Test history, is up to 52nd spot. Both players have career-best hauls of rating points.There were five bowlers from among the world’s top 20 on show in Lahore and unsurprisingly, all of them lost rating points. Irfan Pathan has dropped out of the top ten, slipping two places to 12th position, but India are still represented in that top ten by Anil Kumble, down one spot to ninth place. Pakistan’s representatives are Shoaib Akhtar, unchanged in fourth, and Danish Kaneria, down one position to 14th.For the complete rankings click here

Ryan Sidebottom was probably being a bit hard on himself when he announced that he was “bitterly disappointed” with his wicketless performance on the first day of the Lord’s Test against New Zealand, but when you’re the reigning England Cricketer of the Year, with a tally of 24 Kiwi scalps under your belt already, it’s only fair that you should set your standards high. Either way, he made swift amends after a good night’s sleep and a minor technical tweak, and duly swept through New Zealand’s tail with 4 for 5 in 9.2 overs.One of those victims was Jacob Oram, who applied himself gamely for a two-and-a-half hour 28, before Sidebottom undid him with a full-length outswinger that he nicked to slip. “He’s the best bowler I’ve faced at the moment, and I’m pretty keen not to face him again,” said Oram. “He’s bowling at a good pace, and swings it enough to cause guys trouble. If you’re able to swing it with accuracy, you’re going to be tough to play, and that’s the thing that strikes me the most about him. He’s right at the top of his game, and right back where he was in New Zealand, unfortunately for us.”Sidebottom was his usual modest self when discussing his performance, but admitted that – as the first anniversary of his Test recall draws closer – he now sees himself as the leader of the England pack. “Any bowler should think like that,” he said. “You’re playing Test cricket and you should put pressure on yourself. I see it as a responsibility, and I guess I’ve been around a bit more than Broady and Jimmy [Anderson]. It’s an added responsibility and one I’d like to take on.”It was Broad and Anderson who were England’s main men on the first day, sharing five wickets between them, and Sidebottom admitted that there had been some friendly jibes in the dressing-room after he had swept into the action today. “The lads were taking the mickey, saying I’d burgled a few wickets after all their hard work yesterday, which I agree with,” said Sidebottom. “I was bitterly disappointed with my performance yesterday, you’d like to back up Broady and Jimmy who bowled fantastically. New Zealand are strong in the middle order, but we think they got 50 runs too many in hindsight.”To Sidebottom’s credit, he was quick to identify why his performance had been slightly off the boil on the first day, and with England’s bowling coach, Ottis Gibson, on hand, he made amends immediately. “I didn’t run in with my arms enough yesterday, because when you do that they go into position rather than just being lazy,” he said. “But that sometimes happens, you can’t bowl well all the time. Maybe I was trying too hard as well in the first Test [of the season] at Lord’s. But I have no excuses, it was pretty poor from myself, and I wanted to come back today and bowl a bit better.”A feature of Sidebottom’s performance today was the number of short balls he bowled, particularly to Oram, who was pushed onto the back foot before being drawn forward again for his dismissal. “Today was a plan to be more aggressive and bowl a few more bouncers,” said Sidebottom, who suggested that Brendon McCullum in particular might receive a slightly more hostile reception when he comes out to bat in the second innings. “He’s a good player and he took the momentum away from us, but we weren’t as aggressive as we could be and we let him play a few front-foot shots. Although he’s quite good at hooking and pulling, no batsmen like it. It puts them off their play and the way they move their feet.”England’s day ended with Alastair Cook and Andrew Strauss well placed in an unbeaten 68-run partnership, and Oram conceded that New Zealand were up against it in this match already. “We’ve got to make improvements or we’re going to be wiped off the park,” he said. “We didn’t enter the game hoping for a draw and we’re not playing for the draw at the moment, but they were probably as demanding as they were in New Zealand in the final two Tests there. They bowled with a lot more intent and the rewards came, but if the weather is overcast and drizzly, it’ll be an opportunity to chip away.”

IPL season to begin on April 9

• IPL 9 will start on April 9, six days after the World Twenty20 final in Kolkata, and end on May 26

• Mumbai will host the IPL season-opener and final

• According to BCCI president Shashank Manohar, the player auction will be held in Bangalore on February 6

• He also said the franchises will take part in a two-day workshop in Srinagar, on January 13 and 14

The Sanjeev Goenka-owned New Rising consortium and mobile phone manufacturer Intex have won ownership rights of the two new franchises in the IPL. New Rising have picked Pune as their home base, while Intex have opted for Rajkot.New Rising bid Rs minus 16 crore while Intex quoted minus 10 crore in the reverse bidding process through which the new franchises were chosen.In a short media briefing, IPL chairman Rajiv Shukla said a total of five bidders had entered the fray to bid for the ownership rights of the two new franchises that would replace Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals, who were both suspended for two years by the RM Lodha panel investigation the 2013 IPL corruption scandal. Harsh Goenka’s RPG group, Chennai-based cement major Chettinad Group and Axis Chemicals were the other three bidders.Under reverse bidding investors were encouraged to bid for lower than the base price of Rs 40 crore set by the IPL. This meant the BCCI would pay a maximum of Rs 40 crore from its central revenue pool to the new owner. The investor who bid the lowest price would eventually bag the ownership rights. Having bid in the negative, New Rising will now pay Rs 16 crore while Intex will pay Rs 10 crore to the BCCI per year of their contracts.Goenka has business interests spread across different domains such as power, information technology and media and entertainment. Goenka is also a part of the Kolkata Games and Sports Pvt.Ltd consortium that owns the football franchise Atletico de Kolkata in the Indian Super LeagueThe Delhi-based Intex Technologies specialises in manufacturing smartphones and consumer electronics durables, “I am personally a great sports enthusiast and a cricket lover. We have a great synergy with cricket,” Keshav Bansal, the director of Intex, said. “Nothing bigger than the IPL to connect with the youth, which is our target audience. Gujarat is a great cricket-loving state.”According to BCCI president Shashank Manohar the BCCI stood to earn profits of more than Rs 300 crore with the two new franchises declining to accept money from the central revenue pool.”What we had calculated was that BCCI pays them [franchises] approximate 70 crores first year out of the central revenue and next year it would be 75 crores. So that makes it 145 crore for one team. Now that 145 crore is going to be safe because they are not accepting that central revenue. Plus they are paying us 25 crore so 50 crores [across two years] more. That is the simple calculation,” Manohar said at the media conference.But purely financially this doesn’t seem very beneficial for the new franchisees. They look set to suffer losses and will likely relinquish any goodwill generated through two years of their existence as a team. After the two suspended franchises serve their time, they will come back into the IPL fold. Even if the BCCI raises the number of teams to 10 after two years, the new franchises will have to be won through a fresh auction.Bansal estimated Intex group will have to spend around or more than Rs. 100 crore per year on the players, stadiums, security, logistics, travel, the bid amount etc.Intex bid in minus for Rajkot while their other two bids for Visakhapatnam and Kanpur were in positive. “We knew the competition was going to be intense,” Bansal explained. “So we had a negative bid. We chose Rajkot for a negative bid because Gujarat is a cricket-loving state with a higher spending power. And more importantly Intex is the No. 1 selling Indian handset brand over there.”We just wanted to be associated with cricket. The window happens to be for just two years. After this if the BCCI wants to continue or raise new teams, why not? The first step was to get into this.”Manohar though, made it clear that the new teams can come in only through a fresh bid at the end of the two years, which will mark the end of the original 10-year franchisee agreements.Intex said that even if they got just two years they considered this a good investment and Bansal said he looked at entering the IPL as just an extension of his company’s association with cricket and the BCCI. “You have to see the synergy from the product and the brand,” Bansal said. “We are the official on-air sponsors for 2015. In India cricket is the biggest thing. The idea is to get the best out of that.”Asked whether New Rising was willing to suffer losses and look at entering the IPL as an investment, Subhashish Mitra, the executive director and group company secretary at New Rising, said the owners were looking at serving the sport.”We love the game of cricket. This is our humble way of getting associated under the great banner of BCCI. We will do our humble bit to support the game of the cricket in India. And this is the endeavour which has driven us to this humble initiative. We love the game of cricket as we love the game of football. This is a small gesture from our side to get involved with the great game of cricket.”The next step for both new franchises will be taking part in a player draft on December 15, where both teams will pick five players each from a pool of Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals players. Having finished as the lowest bidder, New Rising will get to pick the first player from the 10-player pool. Intex will pick the second player and both teams will alternate thereafter.For the ten Super Kings and Royals players chosen, the BCCI has applied the same money brackets it put in place two years ago when the other six franchises were allowed to retain five players. The first player gets Rs 12.5 crore, the second Rs 9.5 crore, the third Rs 7.5 crore, the fourth Rs 5.5 crore and the fifth Rs 4 crore. An uncapped player stands to earn Rs 4 crore if he is picked. Irrespective of the IPL fee agreed between the franchise and the retained player, a fixed amount will be deducted from the franchise’s salary cap per player retained.Incidentally, at the franchise auction, all five bidders opted for more than one city from the nine available. The four bidders other than Intex all had Pune on their roster. New Rising bid Rs minus 11 crore for Nagpur. Intex also bid for Nagpur and Visakhapatnam, but quoted Rs 10 crore for each of the two cities. Chettinad, meanwhile, quoted Rs 27 crore for both Pune and Chennai. RPG bid Rs 17.88 crore for Pune and Rs 20.88 crore for Rajkot. Intex bid Rs 10 crore for both Kanpur and Visakhapatnam. Axis, meanwhile, quoted Rs 15 crore for both Nagpur and Kanpur and Rs 10 crore for Pune,The bidding process lasted for about an hour and was a two-part exercise: the first half involved determining the mandatory technical eligibility of the five bidders followed by a check on the the financial eligibility of the five bidders.