A tumultuous decade of controversy

Terrorism, allegations of racism and admitted malpractice charges involving money and big names: it all reads like a file of corruptive influences involving politics. Instead it is one of charge sheets you will find when it comes to international cricket in the age they call the 'noughties'.

It makes you wonder what happened to the headlines that sparkled with the names of players and quality performances by those who entertained us during a decade that began with a spurious result of a rain-wrecked Test at Centurion in South Africa. Instead it was all about the controversies and not the spectacle of batting, bowling and fielding skills.

Just as terrorists left their malevolent calling card in Mumbai and Lahore with their evil message of intolerance and death, so did the shadow cast by Mukesh Gupta and his illegal bookmaking cronies who turned Hansie Cronje into a villain, leave its own stain on the game. And as the decade slipped towards final curtain call, it ended with the shambolic events at Kotla and the political ridicule that added to the farce and Chetan Chauhan's slur of the Sri Lankan players after the abandoned fifth game of the five-match ODI series India won 3-1.

Sri Lanka Cricket, of course, showing their sycophant state of subservience to big brother India, have made no effort to dismiss such remarks, although are typically symptomatic of someone caught trying to deny anything had been amiss. The sort of comments you would expect from someone who has the finesse of a loud-mouth political maverick in a china shop. Like the Javed Miandads of this world, all rhetoric but no vision and blaming everything but their own administrative foibles.

Amid the debris of these debacles and deliberate insouciance as perpetuated by those who have no respect for the dignity or the lives of others, and looking at the teams across the decade, it strikes you how many there have been who blazed a trail to help teams achieve honour as well as success.

Names that glowed in the headlines but have either disappeared or are about to make you realise just how fast the years of the 'noughties' in the 21st Century have passed us: all in a rush.

Sanath Jayasuriya tells you he regards it as his second best Test century, but the innings of 148 against South Africa, the first in the post Cronje era, at Galle, was a remarkable one and almost historic. Only an errant shoelace by Marvan Atapattu stopped the Matara Mauler from becoming the fifth batsmen to score a century before lunch on the first day of a Test. The two minutes of fiddling meant it would be the last over before lunch and Jayasuriya was stranded on 96 not out.

The last over before that lunch break was delivered by Makhaya Ntini who had not really become a permanent member of the South African Test side by then. On Graeme Smith's first Test tour of England as the newly installed captain after the Shaun Pollock dismissal, Ntini earned a standing ovation from a packed Lord’s for taking 10 wickets for the first time in his Test career. The British media went overboard when they wrote glowingly about how the former shepherd boy from the Transkei village of Mdingi becoming the unlikely hero of the nation banned for 21 years because of the horrendous apartheid laws.