Tasmania sweep past Queensland

Tasmania jumped to a 10-point lead on the one-day table with a convincing five-wicket win over Queensland in Hobart. The Bulls were dismissed for 75 and 96 in the Sheffield Shield last week and continued to have trouble with the bat, struggling to 9 for 167 in 45 overs.

Only having the best Nos 10 and 11 in the game helped the Bulls get to the end of the innings, with Chris Hartley (27) and Ryan Harris (13) putting on an unbeaten 40 for the final wicket. The visitors had packed their batting line-up but were undone by Brendan Drew (4 for 38) and Gerard Denton (3 for 47).

Tim Paine, who did so well for Australia in the off-season, set up Tasmania's chase with a brisk 71 and George Bailey added 51. James Hopes and Luke Feldman picked up two wickets each but the hosts reached the target in the 32nd over. The Tigers moved to 21 points after five games, 10 ahead of Victoria and New South Wales.

Pakistan v South Africa, 4th ODI, Dubai

A classic one-day series will have a deciding encounter after Pakistan produced another nerve-jangling run chase in Dubai to clinch a second one-wicket victory in the space of two matches with one ball to spare. Zulqarnain Haider struck the winning run after just about managing to keep his head as everyone else lost theirs, and South Africa will be left to wonder how they let another match slip away.

When Morne Morkel removed Abdul Razzaq in the 47th over, having also bagged Younis Khan for a measured 73, the game, and the series, was in South Africa's grasp with Pakistan needing 31 off 23 balls, but again their bowling and fielding couldn't cope under pressure. Graeme Smith, back leading the side after missing two matches with a hand injury, spilled a tough chance from Wahab Riaz and then Dale Steyn, who was playing his first international of the season, conceded 12 off the 48th over as two short balls were pulled past short fine-leg.

South Africa messed up a chance to run out Wahab when Johan Botha produced a wild throw from the outfield as he came back for a third, then in the penultimate over another chance was missed when Morkel hurled the ball past the stumps from his follow through and two overthrows ensued. Amid all the drama, it left Pakistan needing four off the last over but a final twist seemed almost inevitable, and duly arrived when Wahab was finally run out.

It meant Haider was on strike with three needed from three balls and he levelled the scores with a chip over midwicket as Parnell missed the chance to win the game for South Africa by failing to flick the ball into the stumps. The next delivery was short on leg and, after the manic scenes, it was a relatively calm nudge to square leg which sealed the result.

It was breathless cricket, the third game in a row that had shown how much the 50-over game still has to offer. There was proper, conventional batsmanship from Younis and Smith, innovative striking from Botha, quality fast bowling from Morkel and Shoaib Akhtar and impressive spin played out in front of a crowd that grew after the sun had gone down.

Chasing 275 was always going to be tough but this was a better surface than for the third game, which had been too slow to enable clean strokeplay. Younis, who only hit one boundary, was carrying his team into a winning position alongside Razzaq as the pair added 49 for the sixth wicket with the batting Powerplay still up their sleeve. It was the ideal combination to complete the chase - Younis' calmness alongside the brute force of Razzaq - but Morkel removed Younis via an inside edge and two balls later Abdur Rehman was run out in a hopeless mix-up.

Pakistan had been ahead, or within touching distance, of the asking rate throughout the chase but South Africa had kept chipping away. What made the final disintegration of their fielding so surprising was that it was shaping as the difference between the teams. Younis and Asad Shafiq added 56 for the third wicket before Shafiq was run out by a direct hit from mid-on by Wayne Parnell, then Shahid Afridi - who took three boundaries in an over off Steyn to kick-start the innings - was brilliantly caught at long-off by Parnell as he tried to launch Botha into the stands.

Imran Farhat had fallen in the first over, trapped lbw from around the wicket by Morkel, but Mohammad Hafeez set a positive tone and latched onto the extra pace of Steyn, who returned after a lengthy absence. It was fascinating viewing as Steyn worked through the gears and Hafeez was winning the early battles with a string of boundaries.

Steyn had his revenge when Hafeez tried to whip a straight delivery through the leg side and was comfortably leg before. Ultimately, though, his 10 overs cost 79 runs, the second most expensive analysis of his career, and questions will again be asked about how South Africa bowled in the closing overs, especially as Rusty Theron, who kept his nerve in the previous match, was left out.

Smith had a far more productive return to action although his lay-off had only been two games after taking a blow on his hand in the opening encounter in Abu Dhabi. He was soon back in the grove and eased to a 57-ball half-century, adding 94 for the third wicket with de Villiers, who laboured against Pakistan's spinners in a boundary-less 70-ball innings.

Smith missed out on a hundred when he tried to work Hafeez through the leg side, and for a while South Africa lost momentum as Wahab put himself on a hat trick by yorking JP Duminy and David Miller. Botha responded with a string of clever boundaries, including two reverse sweeps off Hafeez and a brace of scoops over short fine-leg against Wahab. The impetus was back in South Africa's camp, but it's been impossible to predict the outcome in this series and this was to be another thriller to the end.

Give the players a better deal

Why the world's cricket boards and the ICC are increasingly going to have to let players freelance

Andrew Flintoff's decision to reject an ECB incremental contract in favour of becoming a freelance limited-overs cricketer has generated significant debate throughout the cricketing world.

He has come under fire in some quarters for seemingly putting cash before country. But was his decision different to what any other international player would have made in his position, or for that matter any member of the general public?

Professional sportspeople are easy targets, and for some reason critics consider it morally wrong for anyone to earn a good living from a "game". Even more heinous is a sportsperson who tries to maximise his earnings from his very short career by letting the market determine a fair price for him.

Flintoff was reportedly offered a £25,000 contract with the ECB. With this contract comes various obligations on his time and restrictions on his ability to earn income from sources away from the ECB.

Much of the debate has centred on whether Flintoff¹s decision will be a one-off or the first in a wave of players taking this path. In my view it is inevitable that we will see more players following Flintoff, unless cricket addresses some fundamental issues.

The largest issue is the structure of the international game.

As Graeme Smith so rightly said last week, "... the international game is going to have to adapt to its changing environment and cut down on the current glut of meaningless contests if more of the world's leading players are to be prevented from following Flintoff¹s example."

There is too much international cricket being currently played, and too many series have little or no context. When this is coupled with the emergence of a genuine alternative option in the IPL, which in many cases provides far greater financial rewards for players than international cricket for a far smaller time commitment, it should be clear that urgent changes are needed.

The ICC and its member boards are currently in the process of thrashing out a Future Tours Program for the period 2012 to 2020. Here is their opportunity to make the necessary changes that will keep players in the international game.

The Federation of International Cricketers' Associations (FICA) and its member player associations are in the process of developing the players' vision for the future structure of the game. This vision will detail a proposed future structure of the international game that addresses the above issues. Central to this vision will be how best to fit international and club cricket together in a way that will make it attractive to players to remain in international cricket while having the ability to also play in club competitions such as the IPL.

The other significant issue is the increasing unattractiveness of the traditional contracts that players sign with their home boards. Why would Flintoff sign a £25,000 contract with the ECB and have to agree to a number of significant obligations and restrictions when he can sign a six-week IPL contract for 35 times the value of his ECB contract amount - an option that allows him to sign various other cricket contracts throughout the world?

Similar dilemmas have arisen with Sri Lankan, New Zealand and West Indies players, where the value of IPL contracts dwarfs anything these respective boards can offer. It's only a matter of time before players from all countries are faced with similar issues.

Don't get me wrong, the contract system we have had in place in Australia for the past decade has been terrific for players and pivotal to the success of Australian cricket. Our players have been easily the highest paid in the game, and they have various non-monetary benefits that are the benchmark in international cricket. It's no coincidence we have enjoyed an unprecedented period of success.

Nonetheless, with the advent of the IPL, cricket's landscape has changed forever. Boards can no longer expect players to sign contracts that prevent them from earning hundreds of thousands of dollars simply because it is their patriotic duty.

Players are potentially the greatest beneficiaries of this change in landscape with the market for their services becoming highly competitive. This is in turn driving player values up both on and off the field.

In a recent article published by Forbes magazine, the top four highest earning international cricketers were all Indians, with the captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, leading the way with annual earnings estimated at US$10m, and the other three all earning in excess of US$5m.

Interestingly the majority of total earnings for these top players are derived from off-field endorsements. With so many non-Indian players now playing for Indian teams in the IPL and therefore creating a genuine affinity with Indian fans, one would expect significant increases in the off-field value of these players within the incredibly lucrative Indian market. To counteract this, home-board contracts with international players need to adapt to the marketplace changes. While players directly benefit from and value the support of the game's many commercial partners, if players continue to be restricted from entering into endorsements with third parties to the same degree they currently are, it is very likely that players will choose not to be contracted by their home boards.

Governing bodies, players and player associations all want international cricket to not only survive but prosper. The game is however at a critical juncture and now is the time to develop workable solutions for the future.

If the game wants to avoid more players following Flintoff's path it must ensure its structure prevents competition between the scheduling of international cricket and club competitions such as the IPL and Champions League Twenty20, while ensuring that players also have adequate time away from the game for recovery and to spend with their families. Additionally, the player contracts with governing bodies must be less restrictive, such that the opportunity cost of signing them does not prevent players from doing so.

What the IPL says about India

Brash, loud and vulgar, the IPL can be seen as a symbol of the country where it took birth: an India full of a recently acquired affluence and confidence; but there's more to it than that

An alien descending on India about now would find India a state where life is centred around three-hour cricket matches that spill over into seven-hour parties after the game; where the most powerful people in the country converge for their daily fix of fame and power; where multi-million dollar sponsorship (or rights) deals are being announced with mind-boggling nonchalance; where new franchises are being sold at a 300% mark-up on the original price; where…

But for the sudden announcement of tennis heartthrob Sania Mirza's marriage to former Pakistan captain Shoaib Malik, and the ensuing controversy, it has been impossible to keep the Indian Premier League off the front pages for the past month and some. Indeed, the comebacks of Michael Schumacher and Tiger Woods, both spectacular stories in their own different ways, have been relegated to the ranks of the also-rans.

In its third season, one thought the clamour for the IPL would be on the wane; more so after the controversy following the (limited) auction of players in January, when Pakistan cricketers were sidelined, ostensibly by franchise owners, but effectively by the league. The criticism that followed was scathing and widespread, and would impact the tournament.

On the contrary, this year's tournament has generated more frenzy among the public, more eyeballs for TV viewership, and more moolah for everybody associated. So much so that the IPL is now touted as the sixth most valued sports property in the world at $4.2 billion, a figure Lalit Modi, chairman of the governing council as well as the IPL's commissioner, disdainfully dismissed as "yesterday's valuation" in an interview to business paper Mint on the eve of the tournament.

What makes the IPL such a rousing success? Does it not dilute the importance of the game, putting so much emphasis on razzmatazz and brouhaha? Isn't there a fatigue threshold for this slam-bang variety of cricket? Piyush Pandey, of the advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, and a former first-class cricketer, had an explanation as fascinating as it was simple.

"I believed that the IPL would find few takers after the first few matches in the first season itself," he said. "But when the last match was played, my mom asked me unhappily, 'What will I do every evening now?'" That's revealing in itself about the appeal of Twenty20 cricket (I wouldn't say only the IPL), which cuts across gender and age barriers and has brought in spectators and viewers in droves.

Several social historians over the past three years have argued that the IPL manifests the emerging India and its lifestyle eloquently: that this event fulfils the aspirations of achievement and self-assertion in the globalised world, of which India now finds itself a part; apart, of course, from providing full-scale entertainment. The truth of such propositions is open to scrutiny, but they offer an interesting insight into a phenomenon that has had the world abuzz.

The success of the IPL has set off a number of arguments, both in India and abroad. Its detractors find it, without putting too fine a point on it, vulgar, loud, crass, commercial, lacking in class and finesse, and finally, just not cricket. Purists are particularly enraged because they believe that too many things are being tinkered with, and that if this continues the game will lose its originality and tradition: that India, now the financial powerhouse of cricket, is playing around too much with the format without a care for the essence of the game.

My understanding is that some part of this anger is genuine concern for the game, some part actually fear of uncertainty and change, and a large part of it baseless, with no locus in fact or history. The format of cricket has been tweaked and tinkered with often, and almost never by India. Limited-overs cricket originated in England - the cradle of the game. Coloured clothing, floodlights and white balls came from Australia. Twenty20 was, again, born in England, and we first sighted cheerleaders during the World Twenty20 in South Africa in 2007.

Indeed, let alone being radical, I would say that Indian cricket - administrators and players - has been rather slow on the uptake in improvisation, innovation and in terms of being a game changer in a major way. Apart from a long history of being divided among themselves, the players have been content to follow the path laid out by other cricket-playing countries, notably England in the past and Australia more recently.

The most radical aspect of Indian cricket that I can recall is captains rolling the new ball along the ground in the 1960s and 70s to wear the shine off early so that the spinners could be brought on pronto; the most diabolical was the match-fixing scam at the turn of the last century, where India found itself at the epicentre of the scam. But it is fair to believe that the malaise was spread all over the cricket world, and perhaps involved cricketers from other countries before it did Indians. In any case, match-fixing can be traced to the very origins of the game in England, and was hardly a new phenomenon, though it certainly was the most undesirable.

I reckon the larger objection to the IPL is to the tamasha that it is seen to be. It cannot just be about the cheerleaders, for as explained earlier, they are a borrowed concept (and this year they have also been low key). Rather it is the "obscene" display of money, the apparent intrusion of the sponsor and advertiser onto cricket's hallowed ground and into the live coverage, and the massive amounts for which teams and players are bought and sold that appear to have exercised the world's finer minds.

But I venture that the IPL also reflects the upheaval in the Indian ethos, the unshackling of conservative mores in spending and consumption, the rapidly changing dynamics of how Indians now see themselves in the emerging new world order: and all of this projected through the music, colour and pageantry that has defined Indian life for centuries. Indian cinema is a standard expression of this; as indeed the affluent Indian wedding is - even the modern one, where tradition is caught up in copious consumption.

Cricket, as integral to Indian life as films and as celebratory as weddings, is now also replete with songs, dance, and tamasha, set against a backdrop of high-spirited entrepreneurship and new-found economic well-being, with its sometimes grotesque understanding of "feel good". The result, admittedly, is often a cacophony, where the original message can be mistaken, or indeed even lost.

The IPL could be seen as a metaphor for the emerging India, warts and all: freed from economic shackles, playing with recently acquired affluence and (over)confidence. Often with such new confidence comes brashness, yet that brashness also provides the energy for further growth - both economic and social. To say that what existed in the past is binding on the future is to be patronising and, seen in the larger sweep of history, quite silly. India is a billion-strong country with a robust economy; its people now feel empowered to make choices, and who is to tell them what cricket to watch and how?

Yes, this is the new India, and this is its voice currently, not always coherent or correct. At times the decibel levels are at screeching point. Often the subtleties and nuances of an ancient culture, given so much deference across the world, are hard to find in the mayhem. Indeed, ever so often, India in myriad aspects currently appears like the Wild West. I say "currently" with due deliberation, because this may just be a passing phase.

Where cricket is concerned, of course, the purists are right in some sense - the IPL is a tamasha. But it is just as likely that the IPL will evolve, as does society and the nation. It is unlikely to remain permanently brash or "vulgar". Already there are subtle differences between the first and the third editions of the game. Players themselves are reacting to the tournament differently.

And if viewers find the "crass commercialism" annoying, they will also make their displeasure felt. So will broadcasters: this IPL we have had TV ads informing people that they can watch ad-free matches in multiplexes! Pay TV may soon also allow people to buy ad-free packages. Change, goes the cliché, is a constant, and the IPL is unlikely to remain static.

Right now the IPL, as mentioned earlier, is a bit like Bollywood, a medium that, as a cinematic idiom, is peculiar in itself and distinct from Hollywood. Comparisons at this stage would be value judgements because Bollywood is also evolving with its exposure to world cinema. The IPL is also not likely to be different.

What is imperative, from an enterprise point of view, is to build in best practices and standards in the league. It cannot work forever on hype, unless, of course, it aims to become a WWE. The controversy over the new Kochi franchise is a case in point. For a major sports league, robust and transparent systems and processes will not only help build value but along with it credibility, which will then multiply manifold.

It would also be presumptuous to see the IPL as the be all and end all of Indian cricket, powerful as the temptation may be. It can't be forgotten that India is currently the No. 1-ranked Test side in the world, and No. 2 in ODIs. It would be extreme folly on the part of the administrators to ignore this aspect and surrender everything to the league.

The elevation of Sharad Pawar as the ICC president in September should provide a fascinating dimension to how international cricket shapes up. Pawar will have to take a top view, not a narrow one, in promoting and developing the sport globally. While he can perhaps justifiably gloat at having been at the helm when cricket's most lucrative league began in India, he now has to take a holistic approach that will have to serve the interests of all cricket-playing nations.

Almost 70% of the game's finances come from India, so a majority of the initiatives and ideas that can sustain not just the finances but also the essential flavour of cricket should come from here. Or at least that should be the aim.

I will risk my neck and say that the IPL, with all its flaws and blemishes, is one such initiative. The success of the IPL does not need validation, it is evident. But that also does not mean it should be seen with jaundiced eyes. It needs to be seen in perspective. And enjoyed for what it is rather than what it should be.