The seconds, you say?

Cricinfo have selected their all-time world XI. A jury of 12 good men and true have put Barry Richards in the seconds. Hobbs and Hutton made the cut above Bad Bas and Sunil Gavaskar for some reason or other.

The jury must be forgetting though that Bas don't play in no seconds...

NB: A certain gentleman whose picture appears at the top of this column didn't even make the twos... Do you want to tell him or should I?

There will be blood

Vic Marks and Peter Roebuck are former Somerset team-mates now operating as journos on opposite sides of the world. Both can claim to know a player when they see one - they only had to glance around their dressing room to encounter Viv Richards, Ian Botham and Joel Garner.

This weekend, each decided to to select their Test XIs of 2008 for their respective newspapers, the Observer and the Sydney Morning Herald. Total number of places available: 22. Total number of Australians included: 1.

When empires go, they go quickly and with blood. Marks's selection, which contained no Australians at all, was further constrained by his decision to consider only players from Australia, England, South Africa and India (in Vic's world, if no-one else's, England still rank above Sri Lanka).

All good, knockabout fun. But there is a wider point, and that is that the Australian air of invincibility has slipped away now that their bowlers can no longer control a game. No-one feels the need to defer to them any more.

Marks's XI

Graeme Smith

Virender Sehwag

KP

Sachin

AB de Villiers

Andrew Flintoff

MS Dhoni

Harbhajan

Zaheer Khan

Ishant Sharma

Dale Steyn

Roebuck's XI

Graeme Smith

Gautam Gambhir

Hashim Amla

KP

Shiv C

AB de Villiers

MS Dhoni

Ryan Sidebottom

Dale Steyn

Mitch Johnson

Ajantha Mendis

NB: I went into the bookies on Christmas Eve to put a bet on KP's brave boys to win the Ashes back as a speculative present for my dad. England were favourites.