Salt: chefs are still laying it on thick

Government advice is that you should use just half a pinch of salt a day. But the only people who appear to pay any attention to this are those with cooking shows on TV

Salt has been used throughout history to preserve food, but it is also linked to many health problems. Photograph: Alamy

Cooking telly is full of frauds. Sit and watch with anyone who's worn chef's whites and they will spot a host of lazy fictions guaranteed to make them snort and pshaw. A popular one is that on TV no one puts their fingers in the food: in a working kitchen, the digits are the most used tool of all. Another is the salt thing.

On television you will hardly see a shake of the white powder. But in real kitchens, they lay it on thick: "Correct seasoning to a chef is as much salt as you can put in without it tasting too salty," Bocca di Lupo's Jacob Kennedy says. "That's why we all die young."

In his last book, Cooked, the American eco-food guru Michael Pollan gets busy preparing a piece of meat for grilling. A chef tells him to lay on the salt. "Use at least three times as much as you think you should." Shocked, Pollan consulted another pro. He agreed, but "upped the factor to five". Science explains why: long-chain carbohydrates in cooked food neutralise natural salt by binding in the sodium ions. For taste, it needs replacing.

So it's no great shock when survey after survey finds higher levels of salt from high-street restaurants – Domino's, Wetherspoon's, Carluccio's and Jamie's Italian were all putting more salt in single dishes than adults are supposed to eat in a whole day.

But what we're supposed to eat is ridiculously, you may even think unfeasibly, little. The NHS recommends just 4g of salt a day for a child (a small teaspoonful) and 6g for an adult (a large teaspoonful). But the NHS also says that up to 90% of the salt we eat comes already present in our food, so we should only be using adding 0.6g or half a pinch. My mother uses half a teaspoon of salt or more every time she sits down to eat, usually before she has tasted the food. (At nearly 80, she admits to being well preserved.)

As with so many ingredients, there's good and bad when it comes to salt.

The bad

It hardens your arteries and drives up blood pressure, leading to heart attacks and strokes. The latest medical charge against it is that it may be acting as a secret agent, "driving our immune systems to rebel against us". It may also play a leading role in multiple sclerosis. Nonetheless, wicked salt dealers are working to persuade you to eat even more. The Department of Health has said that reducing salt intake by just 1g a day – just a pinch – would save 4,147 preventable deaths and £288m.

The good

For 6,000 years it has been preserving fish and meat to keep humans alive in hard times and produce such glories as jamon serrano and brandade of salt cod. Salt is instantly vivid; it puts a shoulder to a shy taste and shoves it on to the stage. Try salting a boiled egg, or a slice of avocado, to watch something bland come alive - try it on everything, actually.

Also, get it while you can. With transfats gone and sugar under attack, salt may be the next ingredient to come under the pitiless eye of the law. Legislators in New York have already made one attempt to get salt banned in restaurants. According to Time magazine, federal legislation on salt content in packaged and restaurant food is under consideration.

What to do?

Manufactured food tends to use a lot of salt, especially if it claims to be "healthy", because salt fills in for taste when fat or sugar is removed to lower calories. But lots of basic foods we use are high in salt: bread, cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, pickles and so on. And – hold on to your seats – crisps and bacon. Not to mention those damnable salty caramel-flavoured sweets.

Clearly, avoiding ready meals and processed food is one way to allow yourself more salt in your cooking. Or you could just ignore the advice, and carry on salting. Anthony Bourdain – the chef who first lifted a lid off the seamy truths of the professional kitchen, has no time for the salt police. "It's what makes food taste good," he told Time magazine. "Traditional, intelligent and skilled used of salt has become confused in the minds of nanny-state nitwits with the sneaking of salt into processed convenience foods. Nothing else encapsulates the mission of the food ideologues better than this latest intrusion: they desire a world without flavor."

So, could you cook with half a pinch a day?

A Possible solution to the DRS Imbroglio

by Girish Menon

The DRS debate, definitely on the netosphere and to some extent on TV and print media, appears to be a conversation of the deaf. These warriors appear to have wrapped themselves in national colours with scorn and ridicule being the weapons used. Does this win over their opponents? I doubt it, because both groups are dominated by users of terms like 'Luddites' and '100 % foolproof' which instead of persuading the dissenter actually antagonises them. In this piece I will attempt to try to mediate this debate and attempt a possible solution to the imbroglio.

It is a principle of rhetoric that the side demanding a change from the status quo must provide the burden of proof. To that extent I will agree that the pro DRS lobby have already proven that DRS does reduce the number of umpiring errors in a cricket match. I'm sure that BCCI will admit this point. However the ICC's claim that DRS improves decisions by 93 % is in the realm of statistics and it is possible to find methodological grey areas that will challenge this number. So for purposes of this argument I'm willing to discount ICC's claim and willing to start on the premise that DRS does reduce errors by at least 70 %. The debate should actually be more concerned with the next question i.e. 'at what price does one obtain this 70% increase in decision accuracy and is it worthwhile?' This question is ignored by net warriors and media pundits alike and I wonder why?

Before I proceed further I wish to remind readers of the MMR scare scandal, not many years ago, that prompted a mass scare in the UK about a triple jab vaccine and its links with autism. Some may recall Andrew Wakefield, an expert, on TV exhorting viewers to avoid the vaccine. The saga ended with Wakefield being discredited and found to have multiple undeclared conflicts of interest in propagating the scare.

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Cricket, Physics and the Laws of Probability

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To avoid a similar hijacking of the DRS debate I suggest that all protagonists declare their interests in the matter. I for one have no truck with any cricketing body or media organisation or a technology provider or a provider of a competing technology. Also, I'd like a reduction in umpiring errors at a price that will sustain and grow cricket all over the world.

Similarly it is incumbent on the likes of Michael Vaughan to declare their links with the purveyors of such technologies so that the cricket loving public know that their views are without any profit or personal motive.

While the reliability and validity of DRS technologies has been well debated, the monopoly profits that derive to these suppliers has been largely ignored. I suspect this is the real issue where the BCCI is at loggerheads with the others. As an outsider, I think national cricket boards have their own technology suppliers which they wish to back. They may even have an investment in them which may expose their reluctance to adopt alternative and cheaper solutions to a problem. Jagmohan Dalmiya's argument against the esoteric Duckworth-Lewis method is a case in point.

It is a truism that in the market for technologies, unfortunately, the best technology does not always win.  Economics students will be aware that Dvorak keyboards have never made much headway against their QWERTY rivals and  Betamax became a cropper to VHS. So just like the well ensconced Duckworth Lewis method, Hot Spot  and Hawk Eye hope to become monopoly providers of technology services to the ICC. This will enable them protection from cheaper alternative service providers and will guarantee their promoters life long rents.

There is another dimension to this issue viz. 'Cost'. In 1976 the FIH (International Federation for Hockey) replaced natural turf with astroturf to improve the game. Today, while the game looks good on TV and is fast etc it provides no competition to cricket in countries playing both sports. One possible cause is the decline of the sport in India and Pakistan, the two nations who did not have the financial resources to create adequate 'astroturf based' infrastructure among the lovers of the sport. Along similar lines, the prohibitively expensive DRS technology may bankrupt the smaller cricket boards of the world. I'm sure no warrior on either side of this debate wants a reduction in the numerical diversity of cricket lovers.

I suppose as a way out of this imbroglio would be for the ICC to take ownership of the current technologies and make the technology 'open source'. Allow competitive bidding for DRS services instead of paying monopoly rents to the patent owning suppliers. I'm sure this will reduce the costs for DRS and even the BCCI will be keen to support such a venture.  

Towards a radical new theory of Anglo-American slavery, and vindication of free markets

New evidence coming to light in the National Archives and the Bodleian Library may soon change our entire view of the British slave trade, and the roots of institutional plantation slavery in the Americas.

The Caribbean states, CARICOM, are filing a lawsuit against Britain, Spain, France, Holland and Portugal for slavery reparations Photo: Film Stills

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

With luck it will help to vindicate the fathers of liberal government and the free market in the 17th and 18th Centuries, falsely accused until now of abetting - or promoting - the great crime of race-based African slavery.

For academic orthodoxy holds that John Locke and the great Whig thinkers of the Glorious Revolution (1688) helped to design and foster the economic system of hereditary slavery that shaped Atlantic capitalism for a century and a half.

From that it is but a step to dismiss the moral claims of liberalism as so much humbug, to write off all the talk of justice, natural rights, inviolable contracts and government by consent as the self-interested catechism of oppressors. As Samuel Johnson said acidly: "How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

Except that this established version of events is not true. It is a near complete inversion of what happened, and this matters in all kinds of ways since the debate over slavery refuses to subside, even though the trade was abolished in 1808 and Empire slaves were freed in 1833.

Indeed, it is coming to the boil again. The Caribbean states, CARICOM, are filing a lawsuit against Britain, Spain, France, Holland and Portugal for slavery reparations. Apologies are not enough, says Ralph Gonsalves, premier of Saint Vincent. "We have to have appropriate recompense." 

It matters too because liberal democracy has been on the back foot in large parts of the world for a decade. China is bidding for global leadership with radically different claims - with allies in Moscow, and followers from Bangkok to Caracas. It seizes eagerly on anything that punctures the moral claims of the West.

Joshua Kurlantzick says in Democracy in Retreat that the "Washington Consensus" we have known for so long is losing ground to an ascendant "Beijing Consensus", the greatest challenge to Western Liberal values since fascism and communism in the 1920s and 1930s.

The banking crash of 2008-2009 has tempted some in China's Politburo to conclude that Leninist planning is superior to Anglo-Saxon markets, and prompted many in Europe to ask whether Capitalisme Sauvage is worth saving at all. They misread events of course. It was governments that caused the crisis: the West by fixing the price of credit too low, the East by amassing reserves and flooding the world with excess capital. But that is not the narrative of the web, or political discourse.

So let us start to set the record straight on one point at least. The archives demonstrate that the Stuart monarchs Charles II and James II systematically drew up laws to enforce and spread hereditary slavery, mimicking the Spanish practice of the day and the "divine right" absolutism of the Habsburg empire.

They did so with relentless focus, stacking the courts to ensure favourable rulings, and carrying out police state sedition trials against opponents, not least because revenues from tobacco and sugar plantations became the chief source of wealth for the crown.

Professor Holly Brewer from the University of Maryland says Charles II was so enamoured with the Royal African Company that he engraved its symbols of elephant and castle on one side of his golden Guinea. "The Stuarts envisaged monarchy and slavery as, literally, two sides of the same coin," she said.

Slavery had not been hereditary in British possessions before. There were African slaves, just as there were indentured white workers, but it was fluid, in a legal grey zone, and judges could not be counted on to enforce the recapture of runaways.

Prof Brewer said the findings she has uncovered in the archives show that Locke fought tooth and nail to reverse this new hereditary structure while on the Board of Trade in the 1690s under William of Orange.

Locke sought the stop linking land grants to the number of imported slaves - 50 acres per head - a "strangely perverted "practice, in his words, intended to ensure a plantation aristocracy built on slaves. He urged that the children of blacks should be "baptized, catechized and bred Christians" so that they could not be denied their civil liberties so lightly.

Locke had been compromised earlier in the 1660s as a young man working for the Stuarts but later became an exile and rebel in Holland. "When he had a position of real power, he tried to undercut the development of slavery in comprehensive ways," she said.

His was the outlook of most liberal thinkers who shaped the American Revolution. It was the view too of Adam Smith, the free market theorist writing later in the 18th Century, also accused of promoting slavery. Smith, in fact, argued that slaverly stifled economic growth and innovation. “It appears from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves," he wrote in Wealth of Nations. William Wilberforce cited Smith approvingly to buttress the abolition case.

Locke's efforts to undo Stuart damage came too late. Vested interests were too powerful. Hereditary slavery had become embedded in the economic system of the American and Caribbean colonies. Britain would acquire the notorious "Asiento" at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, giving the South Sea Company the contract to supply the Spanish Empire with slaves. The cancer then metastasized.

In my view, the British are a little too cavalier about this saga, thinking the nation absolved because the practice was far away and not on island soil.

We tend not to be aware that King George III actively perpetuated the slave trade in the late 18th Century, vetoing laws by Virginia and other states trying to deter the inflow by raising import taxes on slaves. It is why Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the US Declaration of Independence contained a clause saying the king "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us."

And no, Jefferson was not a hyprocrite because he owned slaves. They were mortgaged, due to his family's crushing debts left from monetary deflation after the Seven Years War. They could not legally be freed.

America puts its own gloss on events. Simon Scharma argues in Rough Crossing that "theirs was a revolution, first and foremost, mobilized to protect slavery". His point is that the "Somerset" ruling of 1772 in England - "the state of slavery is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it: the black must be discharged" - set off ferment in the colonies, and the Dunsmore Proclamation in 1775 offering freedom to slaves who fought on the British side rallied planters to the revolution. Yet this can be pushed too far. The intellectual leaders of the American Revolution were Lockeans through and through, almost all tormented by slavery.

As Britain prepares to defend itself against the Caricom suit - so soon after settling torture claims from Mao Mao victims in Kenya - it is scarcely helps perhaps to argue that the slave system was built by monarchical tyranny, rather than by private citizens beyond control, as we like to think. It is worse, in some ways, if it was a state endeavour.

Yet it should be some comfort that Parliament and liberal government may be absolved, at least in part. Slavery was excresence of absolutism, not free commerce. We cannot hold our own in the world's bare-knuckled battle of ideas if we concede this cardinal point of history.

The US frequently refuses extradition requests - On Obama's cancellation of summit with Putin and extradition

The US frequently refuses extradition requests where, unlike with Snowden, it involves serious crimes and there is an extradition treaty

BETA

• 
• • Glenn Greenwald
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 7 August 2013 16.38 BST

President Barack Obama today canceled a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

President Obama today canceled a long-scheduled summit with Russian PresidentVladimir Putin in part because the US president is upset that Russia defied his personal directive to hand over Edward Snowden despite the lack of an extradition treaty between the two nations. That means that US media outlets will spend the next 24 hours or so channeling the government's views (excuse the redundancy) by denouncing the Russian evil of refusing extradition. When doing so, very few, if any, establishment media accounts will mention any of these cases:

New York Times, February 28, 2007:

Washington Post, July 19, 2013:

The Guardian, September 9, 2012:

[US refuses Bolivia's request to extradite its former CIA-supported president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, to stand trial on charges of genocide and other war crimes after de Lozada hires Democratic lobbyists to represent him]

El Paso Times, December 30, 2010:

The US constantly refuses requests to extradite - even where (unlike Russia) they have an extradition treaty with the requesting country and even where (unlike Snowden) the request involves actual, serious crimes, such as genocide, kidnapping, and terrorism. Maybe those facts should be part of whatever media commentary there is on Putin's refusal to extradite Snowden and Obama's rather extreme reaction to it.

Other matters

Former Bush-era CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden appeared on CNN this week and confirmed that our reporting on the NSA's X-Keyscore program was accurate, telling the nation that we should all be grateful for those capabilities.

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has a superb essay on the behavior of the US media in NSA stories.

Foreign Policy CEO and Editor David Rothkopf becomes the latest establishment figure to recognize, as he puts it in a quite good column: "I have myself been too slow to recognize that the benefits we have derived from Snowden's revelations substantially outweigh the costs associated with the breach."

Ashes 2013: England's spin king Graeme Swann makes all the difference

Transpose the seamers and the story would probably be the same. Do so with the spinners and Australia might well be in the ascendant – Graeme Swann is that influential

• 
• • Mike Selvey
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 6 August 2013 16.50 BST

Graeme Swann is on track to be not just England’s, but one of the game’s, greatest ever spin bowlers. Photograph: Stu Forster/Getty Images

Spin them how you like, twist them until they look like a DNA double helix but in the end statistics can tell a story. In this series, after three Tests, they are revealing both similarities and differences between the sides.

Ian Bell, for instance, stands head and shoulders above any other batsman, with the possible exception of Michael Clarke, and is unmatched for consistency. Closest for England is Joe Root and 180 of his 242 runs have come in a single knock, while Stuart Broad has more runs than Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott, and averages more than any other England batsman beyond Bell and Root.

Of the seam bowlers, Ryan Harris and Peter Siddle have outbowled their England counterparts significantly. Harris, brilliant, has 11 wickets from two Tests at 18 runs apiece and Siddle, an industry all on his own, has 16 at 21.68. Only Jimmy Anderson comes close for England, with 15 wickets at 26, but he had one of his least productive games for England at Old Trafford, where both Australian seamers excelled.

England's three other seamers in this series – Steve Finn, Tim Bresnan, and Broad – have only as many wickets as Anderson between them, and at a cost that might put them on the shelves in Harrods rather than Lidl. There has been a great deal of mediocrity from both sides in this series.

If England have the upper hand in any area, though, it is with their use of and success with spin. Here the differential is huge.

Australia's spinners have taken seven wickets for 442 runs, four of those going to the occasional legspinner Steve Smith who got lucky once. It means that the two front-line spinners, Ashton Agar and Nathan Lyon, have three wickets between them, costing 111 runs each.

On the same pitches Graeme Swann and, briefly, Root have managed 22 at 23.4 each, 19 of them to Swann.

Only in the maiden-overs column, where the Australia spinners have sent down 30 to England's 29, and from 43 fewer overs, do they have the upper hand – and that most likely is a function of the fields that have been set. Swann is the single player who is making a difference. Transpose the seamers and the story would be the same, probably more so. Do so with the spinners and Australia might well be in the ascendent – he is that influential.

Perhaps it is unfair to compare his figures with those of a teenager elevated to the heights with the rapidity of an ejector seat (although Dan Vettori, for example, managed well enough) or someone whose perceived weakness, despite a perfectly credible career, meant that no Australian had played as many Tests as Lyon had before Old Trafford without one against England. But Swann has moved beyond the stage of being merely a phenomenon and is on track to be not only England's greatest spin bowler, but one of the game's greatest.

At the moment he has 241 wickets from 55 matches, which places him 11th in a list of wicket-taking spinners, headed of course by Muttiah Muralitharan, with 800, then Shane Warne, 708, and Anil Kumble (619).

These are players surely out of reach for all time and perhaps, for Swann, Harbhajan Singh, 413, too. But the rest – from Vettori (360) down to Bhagwat Chandrasekhar (242), are within range. More pertinently, he is closing in on Derek Underwood's England record of 297 wickets as a spinner.

What is surprising is that of those 10 spinners with more wickets than he, his career average of 28.41 is bettered only by Murali (22.72), Warne (25.41) and Underwood (25.83), and this playing half his cricket on generally seam-orientated English pitches.

Indeed sometimes it is hard to understand quite what it is that elevates Swann above other bowlers. There is no mystery to him, no doosra or carrom ball. He is an orthodox finger spinner, not back of the hand like Warne, Kumble, Danish Kaneria or Chandra; or a double-jointed physical freak of nature as Murali has been.

He spins the ball hugely for a finger spinner – about 2,500 revs, according to the TV spinometer – but then Lyon gets close to that, too.

With the spin comes drift away from the direction of turn (physicists can explain that one) and thus he can beat the outside of the bat as well as inside. This, despite his late entry into the Test arena (which given what has happened is as baffling as anything else about him) is a thoroughly modern DRS savvy bowler, whose enviable record against left-handers owes as much to him hitting the pads as beating or taking the outside edge.

Yet even this aspect seems to have tailed off, with batsmen now making sure they keep their pads out of the way.

In the end, it must simply come down to nous. He has supreme confidence in his ability, is unflappable under fire (an interesting contrast to how Lyon reacted when first Pietersen and then Bell got stuck into him in a calculated manner in England's first innings at Old Trafford), can pick holes in a batsman's technique, and varies his pace and trajectory according to conditions and circumstance. There is a tantalising line that he bowls to right-handers too. England offspinners of yore, helped by a lack of fielding restrictions on the leg-side, tended to bowl a straighter line than their overseas counterparts but Swann operates outside the off-stump, inviting the drive through that side. No off-spinner likes being hit through extra cover off the front foot but none mind seeing a batsman try.

Perhaps Swann does have a little magic to him. When, from round the wicket, he proceeded to bowl the left-hander Usman Khawaja behind his legs with an off-break that turned significantly, he celebrated with the sort of joy that only comes when something is pre-planned, or at least signalled beforehand as an act of bravado.

It looked for all the world as if he meant it: he probably did.

How Much Land Does a Man Need?

"How Much Land Does a Man Require?" (Russian: Много ли человеку земли нужно?, Mnogo li cheloveku zemli nuzhno) is an 1886 short story by Leo Tolstoy about a man who, in his lust for land, forfeits everything.

Synopsis

The protagonist of the story is a peasant named Pakhom, whose wife at the beginning can be heard complaining that they do not own enough land to satisfy them. He states that "if I had plenty of land, I shouldn't fear the Devil himself!". Unbeknownst to him, Satan is present sitting behind the stove and listening. Satan abruptly accepts his challenge and also tells that he would give Pakhom more land and then snatch everything from him. A short amount of time later, a landlady in the village decides to sell her estate, and the peasants of the village buy as much of that land as they can. Pakhom himself purchases some land, and by working off the extra land is able to repay his debts and live a more comfortable life. 

However, Pakhóm then becomes very possessive of his land, and this causes arguments with his neighbours. "Threats to burn his building began to be uttered." Later, he moves to a larger area of land at another Commune. Here, he can grow even more crops and amass a small fortune, but he has to grow the crops on rented land, which irritates him. Finally, after buying and selling a lot of fertile and good land, he is introduced to the Bashkirs, and is told that they are simple-minded people who own a huge amount of land. Pakhóm goes to them to take as much of their land for as low a price as he can negotiate. Their offer is very unusual: for a sum of one thousand rubles, Pakhóm can walk around as large an area as he wants, starting at daybreak, marking his route with a spade along the way. If he reaches his starting point by sunset that day, the entire area of land his route encloses will be his, but if he does not reach his starting point he will lose his money and receive no land. He is delighted as he believes that he can cover a great distance and has chanced upon the bargain of a lifetime. That night, Pakhóm experiences a surreal dream in which he sees himself lying dead by the feet of the Devil, who is laughing.

He stays out as late as possible, marking out land until just before the sun sets. Toward the end, he realizes he is far from the starting point and runs back as fast as he can to the waiting Bashkirs. He finally arrives at the starting point just as the sun sets. The Bashkirs cheer his good fortune, but exhausted from the run, Pakhóm drops dead. His servant buries him in an ordinary grave only six feet long, thus ironically answering the question posed in the title of the story.

Seeing is unbelieving: DRS in a pickle

Vedam Jaishankar in Times News Network 6/8/13



For some time now the BCCI has been cast as a demon by ICC's former veto-power countries' media. Snide remarks and leaks to the English and Australian media by influential voices in those countries and even within ICC made it seem that the BCCI was responsible for all the ills dogging cricket. 

The malicious plethora of blame ranged from BCCI's position on the Decision Review System to IPL to television money to cricket schedule to pitches to every other issue related to the game. 

How ironic then that with the BCCI far removed from the scene, it is the two Ashes combatants who are smarting under a string of goof-ups, almost all of their making. Tragically for them there is no big, bad wolf to blame for what must already go down as one of the touchiest of series. 

DRS, which was hailed as the greatest invention since sliced bread, is in a veritable pickle. The joke though was when the inventor of the so-called Hot Spot admitted that batsmen were confusing the gizmo by using metallic stickers on their bats. He insisted that the Hot Spot be used with an enhanced snick-o-meter as a back-up. As seen in the Ashes series that is no cure either, as third umpires are also confused by the snicks; not sure whether these are triggered by the sound of bat hitting ground or ball brushing the pad. 

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On Walking - Advice for a Fifteen Year Old

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The benefit of doubt, which traditionally went to the batsman, now tended to go in favour of the Snick-o-meter and Hot Spot! When the mistakes became too glaring to ignore, vested interests, much in the fashion of the American Gun Lobby who claimed "guns don't kill people; people do" stated that it was the umpires who goofed up on interpretation and not their 'hallowed' gizmos. 

But DRS was not the only sore point. Bad light became an issue in the Ashes Tests much like Tests in the past. These two Ashes nations which attempted to make other countries play Tests under lights did not want to use similar floodlights to dispel darkness. Yes, the lights were switched on, but were not good enough to support Test cricket! 

This was the last straw for Australia who believed they have borne the brunt of the many errors. Their skipper Michael Clarke was seen vehemently arguing with the umpires on live television. At the end of the day's play David Warner revealed that Clarke thought the light was good enough but the umpires thought otherwise. 

Did Clarke bring the game into dispute by arguing publicly on the field of play? Most cricket-loving viewers would have thought so. But did the ICC's match referee too see it that way? Time will tell. That brings us to the cricket pitches. Were they ideal for batting? 

Not really. Not when the ball turns square in the midst of the match, or the odd delivery leaps off a length. Had this been an Indian pitch we would not have heard the last of it. But Australia and England, they have their own rules and they'd be happy if everybody (read as BCCI) too plays to those rules.