Members End: Graeme O'Smith, polarising proposals, Poms on the run, and Viv's verve

TELFORD VICE

“Now opening the batting for the Mighty Shamrocks ... Graeme O’Smith.” That’s right, SA sportslovers - oh test captain, our test captain officially became Irish this week; popped off to Dublin and all to pick up his bit of paper certifying him as a potato pirate. Couldn’t have been the weather that turned Smith’s blood another shade of green. Must have been the Guinness. Or the facts that, with an Irish wife and the property that the couple own in Ireland, citizenship was the logical next step. What does it all mean for SA cricket? Not a lot. Smith will retain his SA citizenship and he will not be able to play county cricket as a local while he is an active international. But let’s not give Surrey, where Smith has two years left on his contract as an overseas player, any ideas about convincing him to pack it in with the Proteas.

Funny how the proposal to turn the game inside out, upside down and back to front that the International Cricket Council will discuss next week has polarised the media. In India, the story has gone under-reported - why should they worry about a plan that will entrench their power and make their board even richer - while in England and Australia the view is that their administrators are doing everything they can to stop India from going it alone. If England and Australia become more powerful and get richer in the process, well, who are they to complain. As for the rest of us, who will make less money and have less say in what happens at cricket’s highest level, it’s an awful idea.

As if the injury of being snotklapped by Australia wasn’t bad enough, the Poms are set to be insulted by the forced removal of three of their finest tabloid hacks from the shores of their former penal colony. The Sun’s John Etheridge, Paul Newman of the Daily Mail and Mirror man Dean Wilson were given 90-day visas for a tour that will last 100 days.

Viv Richards has lost little of his swagger now that he has given up terrorising bowlers and taken to the commentary booth. “What,” he was asked while he drawled his way through the broadcast of a T20 game in Australia, “would you have thought of bowling in this format of the game?” Richards, whose bowling was humbly listed as “right-arm slow” but counts the scalps of Allan Border, Graham Gooch, Ian Botham, David Gower, Imran Khan, Mohammad Azharuddin and Martin Crowe among his 32 test wickets, had a ready answer: “I wouldn’t have wanted to bowl to myself."