On my first Sunday afternoon back, I took

Mohammad Amir has had awful luck since he returned from suspension, having at least 11 catches go down off his bowling in Tests; but he had a sense of humour about his misfortune, and suggested the team suffers more from dropped catches than he does.Amir had four chances missed off his bowling in the ongoing Hamilton Test: two in the slips, one at midwicket, plus a difficult low catch that he himself dropped in his follow through. Catches off his bowling had also gone down through the mid-year Tests in England, and more recently against West Indies as well.Yes, it affects the bowler when you run from 22 yards and your catch is dropped - youre disappointed and frustrated, Amir said. But it affects the team more than the individual. Ive been very unlucky, but I try to be a team man.Its difficult to keep count, but I think at least 12-13 catches have gone down off my bowling in Tests and about six-seven catches have been dropped in the shorter formats as well.Chances were also missed off the bowling of Wahab Riaz on Monday, and the reprieves allowed New Zealand to shore up their dominant position in the match, hitting 313 for 5 declared in the second innings to set Pakistan 369 for victory. If Pakistan fail to win this Test, they will lose their No. 2 ranking - a fact Amir said will motivate them to attempt the target on day five.The ranking is very important and weve achieved it after a lot of hard work, he said. In the last seven series, weve won about five. Its very important for us. We like to be among the top teams in the world. Tomorrow there will be 98 overs to bowl, and the first session will be very important. If we can lay a platform, well try to achieve the target. Well try to break the target up into smaller scores, and go about it that way.New Zealand had taken a 55-run lead into the second innings, but Pakistan may still have put pressure on the hosts if they had taken quick wickets on day four. Many of Mondays overs might have been bowled by legspinner Yasir Shah, had he been in the XI, but despite New Zealands eventual scoreline, Amir was confident the best side had been selected.The decision to play four seamers was the correct one, he said. So far theres been a very limited role for the spinners, so the decision to play four quicks was right. The track has improved for batting. The ball is coming onto the bat and its become easier to play shots. Theres a good possibility that we will bat well.Having won the toss on a green-top, however, Amir said Pakistan should have been more clinical on the first and second days.The score of 271 in the first innings when we bowled was on the higher side. We should have got them out for a lower score. 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The players spoke Jan. 13 during a Major League Baseball Players Association conference call after Rodriguez sued the union and Major League Baseball to overturn an arbitrators decision suspending him for the 2014 season and post-season. Dear Cricket Monthly, Cricket has so often risen above the rigid hierarchies of its birth that sometimes it is easy to forget that it belongs fundamentally to the private realm. If youve grown up seeing a game in every lane around your house - as many across the Indian subcontinent do - you can forget that not every game is a public spectacle. But of late Ive begun to wonder what the world will look like when we dont play gully cricket any more.For the last year, the balding lawn in front of the ticketing offices at Humayuns Tomb in central Delhi has been closed off by high blue boards. Trapped inside are the gully cricketers who once played there every free hour they got. Im joking: in fact, an ambitious renovation plan has evicted them in order to turn the lawn into a parking lot. Presumably nothing else will induce tourists to enter the presence of one of the worlds most beautiful buildings.That lawn is one of the few places in the capital where I saw noodling amateur cricketers noodling about in public at all hours of the day. For 18 months I lived behind the tomb, just outside the crop circle of peace and plenty better known as Lutyens Delhi. Its a trap devised by aliens, but one in which a prisoner from anywhere else in the country would be happy to turn the lock and throw away the key.The ticking clock of the Indian city can be heard even here, as though from a distance: the sound of trains, the call of hawkers, the clacking up and down of shop shutters. The sounds of bat hitting ball are rarer. Children run around with footballs tucked under their arms. (In upper-class India, the cleats go on before, not after, you have learned to play: an unmistakable sign of prosperity but an oddly weaponised one.)In Lodi Gardens, a vast stretch of kindly British landscaping superimposed on a Pashtun mausoleum complex, the eye collides constantly with sportspersons sweating through neon Adidas shirts as they compete with their own respiratory systems, running or skipping rope or cowering before their merciless boot-camp trainers. Three lanes away, golfers commandeer the 220-acre fertile swells of the Delhi Golf Club, another intersection of late Mughal tombs and PG Wodehouse.Most places in India compare unfavourably with this abundance of civilisation, if you like this sort of thing. The film-maker Shyam Benegal enviously wrote of this zone as Gods little acre. It is an admirable state, but it does not bode well for the gully cricketer preparing himself or herself for heaven.I returned recently from this long daydream to Mumbai. Time always passes faster here than elsewhhere.dddddddddddd I expected, like Rip Van Winkle, to have fallen rather badly behind. If theres anywhere in the world where they should start to play cricket in space, its above this town, where the lanes grow thinner and the buildings taller every day. (But no - science fiction too must be manufactured in controlled surroundings. The first antigravity pitch will no doubt be invented in a rooftop lab in Gurgaon, or perhaps in a plastic cell holding N Srinivasan, the Magneto of world cricket.)Space, in any case, is Mumbais weightless, more expedient word for land. Here too cricket is ceding ground. When I left the city in 2013, the pitches in Shivaji Park were already in mixed use. More schools and parents in the citys preeminent cricketing district were accommodating football programmes than ever before. City non-profits promoting leisure and play for lower-income people were steadily choosing football - easier to teach across constraints of gender and purchasing power - over cricket. The hope that Mumbai would soon be a smart city, full of privately owned infrastructure that would open doors and operate vehicles without human intervention, and complete the transformation of labour into capital, was still a pipe dream. But its rhetoric was embedding itself in visions of a future different from the present. It is the task of blueprints to design cities without citizens: under the circumstances, sport can only be imagined if it is decorously incarcerated in facilities and complexes.The streets are not, at present, quite freed up for the march of progress. On my first Sunday afternoon back, I took a slanting, slippery run through my new neighbourhood. It was raining, and the buildings were growing shorter, giving way from the railway and the main streets to quiet roads that sloped down to a fishing village. Even the passing cars sounded squelched and beaten. I ran head down, trying to find the dissolving pavement with my toes.I heard the match well before I saw it: the bitten-off thump of a shot, the heels scuffing between the wickets, the cheers of a ring of men watching a game in a muddy circle between a ring of small houses. I watched as the ball flew off someones bat, shaking the slush off itself, arcing out in the direction of the grey, limitless expanse across the road - the sea. This sport is at least as adaptable as we are: and if we dont become creatures of the air, we will probably learn to play on the water.Yours, Supriya Nair ' ' '