England's silver lining

A couple of days ago this diary wrote about the non-stop, multi-city trail in the wake of Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff. Yesterday Sod's Law struck with a vengeance as Flintoff flew home and Pietersen made another duck. And then, as if by magic, up popped Ravi Bopara. When Columbus went looking for India, he ended up finding America. Downgrade the analogy several notches, and, well, you'll understand the Anglo-centric excitement.

It's a measure of the exaggerated pecking order in English cricket's hierarchy that Bopara's glittering 84 off 59 balls in Durban last night will only merit a passing mention in this morning's British papers. Yet as far as England's long-term prospects are concerned, the ease with which he helped turn a target of 60 off five overs into a cakewalk completed with an over to spare is more significant than Flintoff's latest niggle or Pietersen's blip.

Cynicism comes easily when you follow the England cricket team for a living. Cock-ups of the kind seen this winter in the Stanford Super Series (on and off the pitch), the Chennai Test and the 51 all out in Jamaica work like an anaesthetic. The true shock comes when something promising, fresh and vibrant happens. That was Bopara last night and I can only apologise for becoming sidetracked by the big beasts.

For a while, it looked as if Bopara was losing the game for Kings XI Punjab simply by occupying the crease, which would have been a different sort of cock-up: forgetting which format of the game you're playing. At one stage he had moved to 39 off 40 balls when Punjab needed to score twice as quickly. But then came a poor over from Praveen Kumar - six, four and six - which was followed by a pair of sixes off Jacques Kallis. Suddenly it felt as if England had a youngster capable of reading a game.

I wrote in a different section of this website recently about the tendency of English county cricketers to leave the hard yards up to their overseas counterparts. But here we had Bopara teaching Yuvraj Singh a thing or two, and an encomium from his coach, Tom Moody, who claimed Bopara had been right at the top of Punjab's shopping list.

Forgive the excitement, but England must now install Bopara as their opener in both formats of the one-day game. Fifteen Twenty20 internationals have yielded 11 different opening partnerships, but here, surely, is one of them. "He's exceptionally talented," said Moody. "He's versatile, dynamic and he can play cautiously but effectively and be destructive at the end. We're thrilled to have him in our squad."

These are the words we expected to hear Mahendra Singh Dhoni say of Flintoff, or Ray Jennings of Pietersen. But this tournament's capacity to surprise is one of its best assets. And it may just have solved one of England's many problems.