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Chad Keegan, the 28-year-old fast bowler, has not been offered a contract by Middlesex for 2008.Plagued by injuries through his seven seasons at the club, Keegan was more accustomed to one-day cricket (133 wickets at 23.86) than the Championship (140 at 34.90). He never properly recovered from the surgery he underwent in 2005, followed by a complete remodelling of his action, and with injuries and fitness concerns shadowing every season, his opportunities at the club became increasingly limited.”Chad has been a wonderful player for Middlesex and a great bloke to have in and around the dressing room,” John Emburey, Middlesex’s director of cricket said. “Chad’s injury problems have curtailed his playing career and we are terribly sorry to see him leave us after seven years, in which he has had a huge influence on the club, both on and off the field.”We wish him every success in his future career.”

“Bowl dot balls, because that gets to Matthew Hayden’s ego.” It’s a nice plan in theory, but on the second day at the MCG, it didn’t quite work. England did manage 184 of the blighters, but unfortunately they also served up 46 singles, 17 twos, three threes, 11 fours and two sixes, as Hayden rattled along to a thumping great innings of 153.Not only that, but England’s cunning plan was imparted to all of Australia’s listeners on ABC Radio, after a copy of their laminated, colour-co-ordinated bowling chart was lifted from the dressing-room and leaked to the Australian media. Other nuggets included the revelation that Andrew Symonds doesn’t move his feet much early in an innings and is susceptible to the bouncer, and that Ricky Ponting has a tendency to pull in the air in front of square. One out of three ain’t bad, I suppose.In official parlance, the episode was a severe embarrassment to both the England team, who have lavished vast sums of money on security for this tour, as well as Cricket Australia, the MCG management and the ICC. But at the end of a long, hard day in the field, Matthew Hoggard quite rightly repainted the whole episode as one big joke.”We’re continuing our investigations, and when we find who did it we are stringing them up by his ding-dang-doos and we’re chopping them off,” announced Hoggard in the middle of his end-of-day press conference, as he dispensed with the usual platitudes and put-the-ball-in-the-right-areaisms that are usually England’s stock utterances on days as bad as this.”It’s very disappointing when you’ve got a document that’s personal and private. You’d think that the security in international cricket was tighter than that,” Hoggard continued, in a short-lived attempt to keep a straight face. But with England’s lugubrious press officer, Andrew Walpole, sitting to one side of the table and inaudible to the assembled microphones, it was over to Hoggard to display (or otherwise) the indignation of Team England.”We’ve got our best people on the case,” he continued. “Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Morse, Miss Marple …” And another was added soon afterwards when the Independent‘s irascible correspondent, Stephen Brenkley, got stuck into the conspiracy theory, demanding to know just what use England’s three full-time security guards are anyway.

“Shall we add him to the investigation team?” asked an impressed Hoggard. “He’d go well with Miss Marple.” Eventually, though, Walpole got enough words in edgeways to deliver the official England line. “We don’t know whether the document was taken from the England dressing-room or another part of the ground,” he declared, “so we are talking to the ICC security manager, and to Cricket Australia, who are very disappointed, as we are.”But Hoggard who, incidentally, bowled Michael Hussey (“Vulnerable to swinging ball”) through the gate with a swinging ball, scotched any lingering notion of seriousness by admitting: “I just close my eyes and whang it down anyway, so there’s not much planning there.” As for the suggestion of whether England should sneak into the Australian dressing-room and nick their plans for the England batsmen, he retorted: “It wouldn’t help us!”The levity in the England press conference was not shared by Symonds, who blanked an enquiry about his bouncer problem, nor Hayden, who snorted at the suggestion he’s an egomaniac, before announcing, very deadpan: “It’s not rocket-science, gentlemen. You have to bowl the ball at the top of off stump.” But for all of Hoggard’s good humour in adversity, it was the Aussie pair who were enjoying the last laugh this evening. England, quite literally, had lost the plot.

Michael Vaughan has said that he won’t rush Ashley Giles back into action during England’s tour of India, despite the importance the left-arm spinner to the attack on the subcontinent. Giles is confident of recovering for the trip, following surgery on his hip, but Vaughan is adamant that he can’t play half-fit.”It’s so important we get him back but we are not going to take him if he is like he was in Pakistan,” Vaughan said in an interview with newspaper. “He has to be fit and mentally right. He is going to bowl this week and it’s still six weeks until the first Test.”The selectors have left one space in the tour squad open for a third spinner, to accompany Giles and Shaun Udal, but Vaughan knows how important it is to have his No. 1 option available for the tough conditions.”Ashley is a big, big man for our team. He has played 52 Tests and is at the heart of the set-up,” Vaughan added. “If you lose Ashley you are going to have to throw someone else in who probably hasn’t played into what is the hardest tour of them all.”Vaughan is also willing for Giles to forego the two warm-up matches before the opening Test if he needs extra time. “If it means the first 10 days of the trip are part of his rehab I’d take that, as long as he is fit for the first Test.”Ian Blackwell, Monty Panesar and Alex Loudon are the three spinners competing for the spare spot in the tour squad, but they will struggle to give Vaughan the same control as Giles.An even more vital cog in the England team, Andrew Flintoff, has yet to decide whether he will be available for the third Test, in Mumbai, which coincides with the time that his wife, Rachael, is due to give birth to their second child.”I’d like to be at the birth but I’ll have to talk to Rachael about it before we decide anything,” he explained. “I will have a chat with the captain and coach about it, but it’s very hard to plan these things – my daughter Holly was born a week early and if that happens again it will throw all the plans up in the air.”However, Flintoff is certain about one thing – he wants to make his mark on the tour. It was on the 2001-02 visit to India that Flintoff’s stuttering international career began to take off. It was his bowling that kept him in the team, with his bounce causing discomfort for the Indians. He struggled with the bat, making just 26 runs in five innings, and is aiming to perform with both aspects of his game this time.”I’ve played in India before and I know how difficult it can be. I know after the last trip there I came back a better bowler by the end of it but I struggled throughout that trip with my batting and hopefully that will improve this time.”We know it’s going to be a tough tour and there is a big year ahead with the Ashes tour and the World Cup, but we are a good team and we all want to keep improving.”

ScorecardJerome Taylor and Nikita Miller triggered an astonishing Leeward Island collapse in which 8 wickets fell for only 51 runs. At 99 for 2, Leeward Island were in a strong position, and all set to take the first-innings lead over Jamaica, but were bundled out for 150, still 38 short of Jamaica’s total. However, Wilden Cornwall struck back for Leeward with two wickets, and had Jamaica in some bother at 39 for 3 as the second day ended.Taylor claimed 5 for 23 and Miller took 4 for 47 on the uneven track, which assisted the bowlers, but not as much as on the first day. Leeward were 2 for 2, but a 97-run counter-attack between Runako Morton (50) and Sylvester Joseph (35) ensued before Jamaica ran through. Soon Leeward were 116 for 8, but were helped along by two stubborn innings by Carl Simon (15) and Kerry Jeremy (19).Jamaica then lost both openers and Lorenzo Ingram for 32 to restrict Jamaica’s lead to 77, with two days to achieve a result.The two other matches – between Barbados and Windward Island, and Guyana and Trinidad & Tobago – were both rained off.

Ray Bright, the former Australian left-arm spinner, will conduct a three-day training programme with some of Tasmania’s young slow bowlers. The sessions will commence from Friday, August 1, in the Indoor Centre at Bellerive Oval, Hobart. Among the items on the agenda for Bright is a two-hour session – from 10am to 12 noon on August 1 – spent exclusively with Xavier Doherty, a promising left-arm spinner.Bright’s international career lasted 10 years, during which time he played 25 Tests and 11 one-day internationals. He was also in the Australian team that took part in the first World Series against West Indies and the Rest of the World. Bright played 184 first-class matches for Victoria, taking 471 wickets at 32.08.

Dravid is not having a very happy timeSourav Ganguly is suffering the fate of all those captains who arecaught up in a spate of ill fortune. Everything he does seems toinvite criticism. Be it the handling of his own men or his position inthe batting order, it looks like the Prince of Kolkata must bear thecross all the time.On the opening day of the second Test, it was his introduction ofspinners within the first 70 minutes of the morning that found him atthe receiving end. Ravi Shastri, who is in South Africa as acommentator, described it as `Christmas time’ for the South Africanbatsmen. Former South African swing bowler Fanie de Villiers was alsobemused and struggled to find a logical explanation before settlingfor “you are ****ed up if you win the toss and ask the opposition totake first strike and don’t get them all out on the first day!”Shastri, meanwhile went on to add that, he thought 50 overs byspinners on the first day on a green pitch, with the overhead cloudcover, was disastrous from the Indian point of view.

But Ganguly’s move was indirectly backed by South African opener andcenturion Herschelle Gibbs who explained that at the end of the firstday’s play that the ball wasn’t really coming on to the bat because ofthe dampness in the pitch. He also added that there was also not muchpace and lateral movement in the wicket. Ganguly probably decided tobowl his spinners with this in mind as he felt the batsmen would bemade to grope for the ball.With Ganguly letting everybody know that he was keen to open theinnings, Rahul Dravid and Venkat Sai Laxman suddenly became the fallguys. Laxman could be excused as he has made it known to theselectors, in no uncertain terms, that he was not interested inopening the innings ever again.Meanwhile, Dravid, contrary to his public image of a guy willing to doat anything that his captain and coach want him to, hates being askedto open. If you remember, in the Harare Test in Zimbabwe in June, itwas Hemang Badani who finally had to open in his first Test after afew big names couldn’t bring themselves to embrace the idea of facingthe likes of Andy Blignaut operating with the new ball!

Dravid’s position becomes trickier if you remember he is also thevice-captain of the side. Shastri thought this was the area whereDravid should have been seen shouldering more responsibility. “He isvery quiet on the field and sometimes you need the vice-captain tocome up with useful advice to the captain. A captain, under stress,could have his thinking cap off.”Dravid continued to be haunted by fresh woes on the field too as hedropped a dolly, offered by Mark Boucher off Harbhajan’s bowling, inthe slips on the second day. That was before Shaun Pollock bowled himfor two when he came out in his preferred position of India No.3 inthe Indian first innings…