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Pakistan slumped to a poor eighth spot, only above lowly Zimbabwe and Bangladesh in the latest Test championship ratings released by the game’s ruling body, International Cricket Council (ICC), Monday.Australia who inflicted on Pakistan second successive 3-0 whitewash retain top spot by the slender lead of 0.1 of a point from South Africa with New Zealand in third place.Steve Waugh’s men however will have to win the Ashes series to retain their top spot. Anything less than a win will see South Africa take over from the Aussies.Sri Lanka, England, West Indies and India follow the top three in that order.Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Wasim Raja, has been named as the ICC Match Referee for the Ashes series and Elite Panel umpires Rudi Koertzen and Steve Bucknor will stand in the first three Tests in Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. Russell Tiffin and Dave Orchard wil take over for Melbourne and Sydney Tests.(tabulated as under team, series, won, lost, drawn, points, average):Australia 13 9 2 2 20 1.54South Africa 17 12 3 2 26 1.53New Zealand 16 8 5 4 20 1.18Sri Lanka 16 8 6 2 18 1.13England 16 6 6 4 16 1.00West Indies 15 6 8 1 13 0.87India 14 4 6 4 12 0.86Pakistan 16 4 7 5 13 0.81Zimbabwe 16 3 11 2 8 0.50Bangladesh 6 0 6 0 0 –

Over recent years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether Somerset County Cricket Club should sell their town centre ground and relocate to a new out of town venue.At the AGM in December last year the question was raised and points of view from both sides were voiced, since when there has been little public airing of the matter.During the last few months however, chief executive Peter Anderson has attended several meetings with the Taunton Deane planners and given evidence with a view to the future development of Taunton town centre and the clubs future role in it.Mr Anderson has now written about the latest situation regarding the matter in tomorrow’s programme notes for the NUL game at Bath between the Sabres and Leicester Foxes.The chief executive says: "The whole future of the County Ground revolves around what is planned for the development of Taunton and the club has put forward proposals which may pave the way for the retention of the County Ground in it’s present location."He continues: "Christopher Ondaatje (the club patron ) is very keen to assist the club to stay and has also suggested ways in which the club could expand on the edges of it’s current site."The Somerset boss concludes: "The club has a bright future if everything falls into place. We need, however, the team to do well on the field, which is the principle reason why you all support in the magnificent way you do."These new developments will be very good news to the large numbers of supporters who have expressed their reservations about leaving their traditional town centre home and relocating to new out of town site, and doubtless they will be watching any further developments on this matter closely.

Somerset Under 12’s entertained Gloucestershire at Glastonbury Cricket Club and were victorious by 88 runs.The visitors won the toss and invited their hosts to bat first. Jos Butler was in excellent form for Somerset, scoring 116, as his team made 211 for 9 declared.In reply Gloucestershire were all out for 123, with Jamie Staib taking 3 wickets for 9 runs.

Either Craig White or Alex Tudor could be called into the England Ashes squad should they decide to look outside the existing party for a replacement for Andrew Flintoff.The England coach, Duncan Fletcher, announced today that Flintoff is to receive further treatment on his hernia injury at the Australian cricket academy in Adelaide.”Although Andrew’s recovery programme is running behind schedule at present, we remain confident that he will be able to take part in the Ashes series,” Fletcher said.”However, our physio Kirk Russell has a heavy workload at present due to the number of injuries in the squad and we feel that the medical team at the Academy are best placed to give Andrew the intensive one-to-one treatment he needs if he is to be fit for the first Test in Brisbane.”Other players are around in Australia, practising, and if the injuries don’t work out, we may have to make a decision to bring them in. We’ll make that decision over the next four or five days.”Tudor, who celebrates his 25th birthday today, has taken 26 wickets at 31.5 in nine Tests. The Surrey fast bowler narrowly missed selection in the original squad after an up-and-down summer against Sri Lanka and India that was interrupted by shin splints.White was another of the summer’s injury victims, suffering a side strain that prevented him from bowling after he had batted impressively against India, scoring an unbeaten 94 at Trent Bridge.If he is now fit to bowl, White’s all-round credentials are the stronger. Although Tudor made an unbeaten 99 against New Zealand three years ago, White’s Test average of nearly 25 fits him more closely to the vital number seven slot which is will be at issue if Flintoff does not recover in time for Brisbane.Three recuperating England players, Flintoff, Michael Vaughan and Darren Gough, missed the opening game of England’s tour against an Australian Cricket Board (ACB) Chairman’s XI, which the tourists lost by 58 runs in Perth.”Vaughan has a very good chance of playing in the next three-day match against Queensland, starting in Brisbane on November 2,” Fletcher told a news conference.”Gough is pretty positive. He has bowled on each of the past two days and there has been no reaction. He is feeling pretty bullish at this stage. We don’t want to push him too soon. We’ll just have to wait and see. We won’t know whether he is ready for the Test unless he is ready for the Brisbane three-day game.”Fletcher dealt succinctly with a question about whether England should have brought so many injured players on tour against the world’s top-ranked side.”Should we have left them at home then?” he said.England next match is over two days against Western Australia in Perth, starting tomorrow.

Another fast bowler from New Zealand has succumbed to a stress fracture of the back following similar injuries to Dion Nash, Geoff Allott and Daniel Vettori.Canterbury’s Wade Cornelius has been struggling with back pain for “the last couple of games,” said coach Michael Sharpe, who lost a bowler early on for the third State Championship match in a row.Cornelius, who has been Canterbury’s breakthrough player this year with 33 first-class wickets at 16, told CricInfo, “It’s a bit sad, but I suppose it could have come at a worse time.”Following he and brother Cleighten opening the bowling together for Canterbury this week against Auckland, the first time siblings have shared the new ball for the province since Richard and Dayle Hadlee 20 years ago, yesterday’s day of celebration turned sour at the doctor’s this morning.Cornelius said, “I’ve had an x-ray that shows two stress fractures,” adding that the next step was to further confirm the diagnosis with a bone scan.”It puts paid to my chances of going to England for the winter,” he continued.Just last Saturday former Lancaster Park team-mate Jimmy Hindson, who played for Nottinghamshire from 1992-97 phoned Cornelius to ask him to play in the Nottinghamshire League for Caythorpe, where the left-arm spinner is professional.”I’ll have to see if I can go as a batsman,” joked the likeable tail-ender Cornelius, who will join the likes of Chris Cairns, Shane Bond and Warren Wisneski in the sickbay of Canterbury and New Zealand cricket.

England’s hopes of having Darren Gough available for the second Test against Sri Lanka at Edgbaston starting on May 30th were dashed when it was announced that he has suffered a recurrence of an injury to his right knee and has been ruled out of the whole series.The pace bowler first incurred the injury in the one-day series in New Zealand during the winter and had surgery to rectify it. At one time it was thought that he might be back in time for the first Test at Lord’s this week, but then Edgbaston became a more realistic target.However, Gough was still uncomfortable when attempting a return to cricket last week and it has been decided that he will need further corrective keyhole surgery. This means that he will be out of action for a month and the earliest he is expected to be fit for a return to the England side is the start of the NatWest Series of one-day internationals at the end of June.Coach Duncan Fletcher acknowledged that Gough’s absence will be a serious blow to England’s chances. “This is a big loss to us as we were really looking forward to have Darren fit and raring to go for this series, but we’re hoping he will have fully recovered in time for the one-day series.”Dav Whatmore, coach to the Sri Lankans, believes the loss of Gough will be as significant to England as that of Muttiah Muralitharan from his own side at Lord’s. “I’m sure the England team will miss him just as much as we will miss Murali. They cancel each other out, that is how important he is to England. He just seems to spark them off.”Both Murali and Gough have fantastic figures, but you have to look beyond that because their value to the teams cannot be over-emphasised.”Gough will undergo what is a routine operation to clean out floating debris from inside the knee in Sheffield tomorrow. The he will have to begin a programme of rehabilitation just as he did two months ago when he had a similar operation to repair a cartilage in the same knee.

The secretary of Board of Cricket Control for Cricket in India (BCCI),Jaywant Lele has said that one of the main points in the agenda at theworking committee meeting tomorrow at Delhi would be the affiliationsof newly formed states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttaranchal.Lele told PTI here today after Baroda recorded a stunning 21-runsvictory Railways in the Ranji Trophy finals, that it was a routinemeeting and added “we will be discussing about the affiliations of thenewly formed states to BCCI.”Lele will leave for Zimbabwe on Tuesday night after attending themeeting to oversee the arrangements made for the Indian tour ofZimbabwe from May 28 to July seven, where the Indians will play twotest matches and a triangular series involving India, Zimbabwe andWest Indies.

Sunday, 24th June sees the start of the CricInfo Test series between the women of England and Australia at Shenley. The players then move to Derby, Northampton and Lord’s for the CricInfo One-Day International series, before the Second Test gets under way at Headingley on 6th July.

During a similar period last summer, the English women would have been taking on the undisputed world champions. However, since an unexpected defeat at the hands of hosts, New Zealand, in the final of the CricInfo Women’s World Cup just before Christmas, the Australians can no longer regard themselves as being invincible.The summer still presents a tough challenge for England however; for in Christchurch it was the Kiwi girls who proved themselves to be up there on a par with the Australians, rather than the Aussies going backwards.Before the World Cup began, Australia and New Zealand were thought to be out on their own with two out of England, South Africa and India likely to occupy the other semi-final places. But England failed to beat either of their rivals and so were the team to miss out.Just as the men’s team looked overseas for a coach to resurrect the national fortunes by enlisting Duncan Fletcher from Zimbabwe, so too have the English women. John Harmer is the man asked to turn around the women’s game and restore it to its position of former glory. The delightful irony here is that John Harmer has been coach of the Australian women’s team and lifted it to a supreme status in the game.How does he feel about changing camps and finding himself pitted against his former charges immediately? “Not well” is the instant response. Then, more seriously, “I’m looking forward to it with a great deal of excitement because I think we can do a lot of work and we’ve got a lot of interested people here – young people who are keen to tackle the issues and get on with it. That will be excellent – working with the other staff.”Harmer believes that he saw enough potential in the England camp to lift them to challenge the likes of Australia and New Zealand. “I don’t think there’s any question that they can do it; just a question of how we go about it. There are some good players and the advances made in athleticism and skills in the last three years have been very significant, so we just need to build on what’s already there.”There is nobody better to judge what progress England will have hopefully made in the course of this summer, and Harmer’s appointment as full-time coach on along-term contract as part of a wider national strategy for cricket must bode well for the future. Not that miracles can be expected in such a short time, but if progress can be seen to be occurring, John Harmer will at least be on the way to achieving one of the ECB’s stated aims for women’s cricket – winning back the World Cup last held in 1993.Certainly England have the base from which to build a good side. Evergreen Clare Taylor was the second top wicket taker in the CricInfo Women’s World Cup, Claire Taylor is far too fine a player not to come back strongly, and skipper Clare Connor fronts a young side full of emerging talents – such as 17-year-old spinner Laura Harper.As for the Australians, they still represent a mighty test for any newly found inspiration among the English women. They might have got it wrong one day in Christchurch, but as a cricketing unit of the highest calibre, they will have been stung by that defeat and will be going flat out to restore lost pride. It should be some contest.

A major embarrassment for the Trinidad & Tobago Cricket Board (TTCB) and the WICB was avoided after the Trinidad & Tobago players departed for South Africa to compete in the Champions League Twenty20 after initially threatening to pull out of the tournament over a monetary dispute with the TTCB.”The players from T&T have decided to travel to South Africa,” Suruj Ragoonath, the TTCB chief executive, told ESPNcricinfo. “In the meantime, the TTCB and WIPA, who have good relations, continue discussions on the matter.”The dispute began on October 3 when five T&T players – Denesh Ramdin, Darren Bravo, Ravi Rampaul, Lendl Simmons and Samuel Badree – currently in Sri Lanka representing West Indies in the World Twenty20, told the TTCB that they would participate in the CLT20 only if the board shared with them the $450,000 it received for allowing Kieron Pollard, Dwayne Bravo and Sunil Narine to represent their IPL teams instead of their country.The players’ emissary was Dinanath Ramnarine, the former WIPA president. Ramnarine, who has had numerous run-ins with the WICB on various issues, had recently helped Simmons and Ramnaresh Sarwan claim damages from the WICB for breach of their player contracts.It is understood the situation worsened on Thursday morning, when the ten other members of the T&T squad also refused to travel to South Africa on their 5pm flight from Port-of-Spain unless the demands were met. The problem had arisen six days before T&T’s first game in the qualifying stage of the Champions League and it caught the TTCB off guard.Reacting to the development, the TTCB initially explained to the players that a guaranteed sum of more than $20,000 was assured to each individual for two qualification matches. Ramnarine pointed out that in case the team advanced to the main round, the TTCB had guaranteed an additional $200,000 before taxes. It was also reported that 75% of the monies and any other prize money would be shared among the squad.That, however, did not change the players’ minds and so the TTCB reportedly asked the selectors to appoint five replacements. Former West Indies players Mervyn Dillon, Daren Ganga, and Dave Mohammed were sounded out, along with the pair of Justin Guillen and Stephen Katwaroo.The TTCB also contacted WICB officials and informed them about the development. “The WICB was told that the players had put down a condition to travel which the TTCB did not believe was fair,” a CLT20 official told ESPNcricinfo. “TTCB said that the money paid by the IPL franchises had nothing to do with the T&T squad and they were not willing to share. They have reached deadlock.”The WICB officials went scrambling to try and organize a Jamaica squad, who were runners-up in the Caribbean T20 last season, as a replacement team. “The WICB felt they had to send a team to represent the Caribbean and the board was is in talks with the Jamaica Cricket Association to send a team,” the official said.However, after last-minute negotiations, the T&T players decided to board the flight to Johannesburg.

Kanwaljeet Singh (5 for 100) and Mohammad Ghouse (5 for 97) took all theten wickets between themselves but failed to revive the hopes of Hyderabad,last year’s runners-up, in their Ranji Trophy pre quarter-final matchagainst Madhya Pradesh at the Daly College Ground in Indore on Wednesday.Madhya Pradesh entered the quarterfinals by virtue of their 107-run firstinnings lead. Madhya Pradesh will now meet Orissa in the quarterfinals.Resuming at 116 for 1, MP went on to make 291 runs, setting an improbablevictory target of 399 with only a few overs left for Hyderabad. The toporder – HS Sodhi (36), NV Ojha (40), Amay Khurasiya (35) and DevendraBundela (11) – all fell to Ghouse. Then Kanwaljeet took over and sent themiddle order packing. But Jai P Yadav (48) and Chandrakant Pandit (69 notout) forged a 76-run seventh wicket partnership. The lower order caved inwithout resistance to the guiles of the veteran off spinner. But by thetime the innings folded up, the result was well and truly decided.Hyderabad in the remaining eight overs scored 50 runs while losing bothopeners Daniel Manohar (25) and Vanka Pratap (4). Anirudh Singh (16) and DVinay Kumar (1) were unbeaten at the end.