In this week’s podcast James Buttler talks to Geoffrey about Feng Shui and ball tampering. After a succession of exciting Test Matches he starts by suggesting that Test cricket has never been healthier…

India were able to do that with the variety and quality of their attack with the seamers taking six wickets, five of them for Sreesanth, in the first innings and the four spinners sharing seven wickets in the second. It was a high scoring match in the first Test and it just goes to show that however good your batsmen, if your bowlers can’t finish them off you won’t win.

In the second Test the first three in the Indian batting order, Gautan Ghambir, Virendar Sehwag and Rahul Dravid, made big hundreds and put them in a position to dictate terms but it was the bowlers who made those runs count.

A small consolation for Sri Lanka was the emergence of Rangana Herath, the first left arm spinner to bowl the ‘doosra’. There have been plenty of off spinners who can do it, Harbhajan, Murali and Johan Botha among others but we’ve waited quite a long time to see a left armer. Nobody’s quite sure how he’s doing it which is good for cricket and he became more effective when the pitch, which was very flat at the start, began to take turn. But India are a hard side to beat on their home ground and they won this one much more easily than they might have expected.

It was a much closer affair in Dunedin where New Zealand won a wonderful cricket match by 32 runs against Pakistan. The thing that strikes me about Pakistan is that the opportunity to win was there and they must be kicking themselves at falling short. They’ve got to get a lot more steel into their cricket. They’ve always got talented players but they’ve got to learn how to get over the winning line. Umar Akmal, brother of Kamran and Adnan, is a wonderful young batsmen, just turned 19, and he made 129 and 75 in the match but their old failings came back to haunt them. They just don’t have good opening batsmen. The top three in the order made a combined total of 67 for their six wickets, that’s not good enough and it’s been like that since Sohail and Saeed Anwar retired. There’s no quality at the top and it haunts them every time because they’re in trouble from the word go. They seem to just shove youngsters in first and keep chopping and changing and until they solve this problem they’re always going to struggle. If they think they’ve got problems with New Zealand wait until they play Australia in England next year.

Pakistan must get Younis Khan back in the side as soon as possible. I don’t know the ins and outs of what’s been going on behind the scenes but I do know he’s far too good a player not to be in the side. I also think that someone at the top should talk Shahid Afridi into playing Test cricket again. Not so much for his batting which is hit or miss but for his bowling and his infectious enthusiasm which appeals to colleagues and spectators.

Attention needs to be paid to Mohammad Aamer the very talented left arm seamer. He needs to get closer to the stumps in his delivery and maybe someone should tell him to have a look at Wayne Parnell, the South African, to see how close in he gets at delivery. At the moment Aamer is so wide on the crease that to hit the stumps he has to pitch outside leg stump and that makes it impossible to get a leg before. He must be able to pitch the ball between wicket to wicket so that if the batsmen misses, he hits and if he gets closer to the stumps he’ll find he’ll be able to swing it in to the right handers more.

Pakistan are good but it’s nearly impossible to win consistently without good openers because in Test cricket the new ball can do so much damage and that’s where their weakness lies. Talent is not their problem, mental strength is.