Usman Khawaja, who announced that the last Test match in Sydney is going to be his final appearance in Australian colours, also spoke from his heart about the greater battle that players, especially those who are from the sub-continent, have to face in countries which call themselves developed but have plenty to develop in their minds. What sort of reception he gets when he walks onto the ground will be known by the time you read this and give a better idea if his comments have hit the right or the wrong nerve. Here’s hoping he gets a ton in each innings like he did in the last Ashes Test there and goes out on such a high that those who hounded him will be looking for binoculars to see how high he is above them.

Ben Stokes also gets full marks for saying at the end of the farcical game called a Test match in Melbourne that if there was a pitch like that anywhere else in the world (read India), then all hell would have broken loose. Not surprisingly, many have come to the defence of the curator, sorry, Director of Turf, and suggested it was an honest mistake in leaving so much grass on the pitch. It’s exactly like in the old times that whenever an English and Australian umpire made wrong decisions then it was a ‘human error’, while mistakes made by the sub-continent umpires was ‘cheating.’ Even today, despite the ICC panel of umpires officiating in games, a mistake made by them is often mentioned with their name and country suggesting that it was incompetence or more, while similar mistakes by umpires from the so-called developed countries gets overlooked as if it was insignificant to the result of the match.