Mind games fill three day gap between Tests

Since the Cardiff Test ended on Sunday there has been a lot of huffing and puffing from both players and commentators (armchair through to professional) about England's alleged timewasting/cheating, Australia's ditto and Ricky Ponting's captaincy.

A (far from exhaustive) sample:

• A range of opinion in the Australian's letters to the editor

• A chauvinistic piece (with an unnecessary racist quote) by David Penberthy in The Punch

• Duncan Fletcher in The Guardian pointing his finger at Ponting.

On top of all this comes news of Andrew Flintoff's retirement - at the end of this series - from Test (but not other forms of) cricket. At Cardiff he faced 122 balls in two innings (37 and 26) and bowled 35-3-128-1 in Australia's only innings: a heavier workload than in his (admittedly injury affected ) 2009 IPL season.

Enough of that I'm looking forward to watching the teams get back on the playing field.