PONTING – shattered thumb shattered soul. He won’t even arrive in India until before the third test. As Mcgrath fills the boots of Shane Watson, little Clarkey gets to step up for his test debut and fill the boots of el rick. We’ll miss Ponting’s savage front foot, it contains some of the most deadly venom in the world. He’ll be very hungry when he returns to lead the side in the second two tests of the series. Absent Impact rating – low.

TENDULKAR – this is a strange one. I don’t even know if its been confirmed that he will be missing the test, but everyone seems to know that he will. 10dulkar has 10nis elbow. Strange. He’s been bowling in the nets but not batting. He is in the squad and Ganguly has been saying he will have a big role to play whether he plays or not. A charismatic role I guess. He will sit in there in the sheds with the boys and emit wisdom and confidence. It’s all a little mysterious, and it will be messing with the minds of the opposition for sure. Absence Impact rating – high – his absence could be very affective. It is almost as though it has been engineered in an attempt to match the awesome power of Steve Waugh’s absence.

WAUGH – will definitely not be playing, though my hopes rose when Ponting shattered. There was a place for a captain again. But this series is Waugh’s destiny. To win this series was what his entire career was building up to, everything he did was done with a view to victory here, in this series. It was going to be his glorious swan song. His moment of supremacy. And it still will be. Steve Waugh will be haunting those Australian sheds and the players will feel a breeze brush past them now and then in the field that is unmistakable. In the end, even Steve’s retirement was a necessary act in achieving this victory and Steve would have had no trouble sacrificing himself for his fate. Steve Waugh will know, when Australia clinch series victory late on the fifth day of the final test, that he has once again led the team beyond old thresholds. It is no coincidence that Australia are going into this series without an embodied leader. Absence Impact rating – astronomical. His absence will be the decisive factor (in quite the opposite way that the absence of Alec Stewart and Nasser Hussein from the English team has led to the great renaissance in English cricket).