Troubles in India, unimaginable horrors in India, and yes, I too have stayed in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, I too have walked those bloody, corpse-strewn corridors in better times, sometimes hurrying back from the cricket to write copy, at other times walking with a suggestion of a reel after a convivial evening. Knowing the place makes it all so much more vivid, so much more personal.

And at once, the England cricket team are locking shoulders in the door of the departure lounge and offering fervent business-class prayers that they won't have to come back for the Test series, praying the great funk-artist's prayer: oh God, please let me off.

If they seek precedent, they can always look to the Australia cricket team, the weasels of international sport: one hint of a murmur of a rumour of a firework going off in any city on the sub-continent and the Australian plane is making a mad U-turn and heading back to God's Own.

We are all torn in half about what to think about this retreat, this rout, this seeking to wriggle out of commitments. Already we are told that Andrew Flintoff and Stephen Harmison are likely to lead the drop-outs and the captain, Kevin Pietersen, is saying, perhaps rightly, that he puts pressure on no one, he wants a squad of volunteers.

I can find plenty of good reasons to skive off an India trip right now and I have every sympathy with any person with a young family who is asked to go there in the next week or two. I'd be horribly uneasy if it were me. I'd be hoping I'd not only be let off going, but let off making a decision about going.

But that's just my sympathy, as one private person to another. The question that remains is the extent to which a professional athlete representing his country is a private person.

There are plenty of rewards available for an international athlete, in terms of finance, in terms of fulfilment, in terms of fame. Millions of people think you're great. It's a difficult life, but never forget that an awful lot of it is pretty enviable.

Great athletes get these rewards because they represent us. You and me. In triumph and disaster, in embarrassment and in joy, they're part of us, and that's what we pay them for. The contract states that if you wish to become a professional athlete, particularly one representing his country, then you forfeit a good deal of your right to be considered a private person. Not all of it, but an important amount of it. What you do has repercussions beyond yourself.

When you take a big wicket or score a big century, you are not alone because the country celebrates with you. When you fail, when you mess it all up and, say, get drunk on tour and need to be rescued from a pedalo, the country jumps on you. That's the deal: those who are up to it are paid handsomely, and quite right, too.

It follows, then, that an England cricketer is not morally entitled to think like a private person. Like me, for example, or you. An England cricketer can't duck out of a tour like a tourist. He has to think bigger than that. That's the job he signed on for.

We pay an athlete to inspire us. Flintoff batting in the Ashes series of 2005, Flintoff taking Australia wickets and inflating his chest like a Lilo, Flintoff consoling Brett Lee in England's victory; these things matter to us. They are the sort of things a great athlete does, and at such times we know they are worth every penny of the money they receive.

But they can't have it both ways. They can't say: “I represent you lot when it pleases me, not when I don't happen to fancy it.” When a player loses touch with his audience, becomes too precious, too cocooned in money, too cut off from reality as you and I know it, then he loses our respect. In short, he reneges on the deal, the unwritten contract between an athlete and his public.

We love sport in a good time; we need sport all the more in a bad time. India needs sport as the recovery process begins, needs the cheerfulness, the triviality and the nonsense of the battles in which no one dies - and it is England's job to make this possible.

I am not advocating stupidity or recklessness or carelessness with cricketers' lives. But England have an opportunity to say something important, loudly, triumphantly and publicly. It is something that I believe is best said in the most robust language possible, and it is this. F*** all terrorists. You're not going to f***ing win.

I hope the England cricket team can inspire us all with these sentiments.

A modern tale of administrative nonsense

Here's some more on the fools from the UIPM, modern pentathlon's international governing body. Its brilliant innovation, in which the run and the shoot are combined, actually makes the sport illegal in this country.

It is illegal to take your gun from its box in a public place in this country. In other words, training for the mod-pen is against the law. You can't go to a running track, leave your gun on a table, do a couple of laps, then pick up your gun and blaze away. You can't practise the most telling part of the new event, so that's the end of the sport in this country, certainly at amateur level.

But that's not the end of the stupidity. A trial event was held at Millfield School in Somerset and, in typically vile British weather, it was called off. This was because high winds created a very real danger that the competitors might accidentally shoot each other. An event in Cairo was cancelled for the same reason. And you know how many of the athletes are in favour of the move? Scarcely one.

The administrators are destroying a fine sport because - well, simply because they can, I suppose.

William Gallas an author of his own downfall

What is it that drives rich footballers on to the rocks and rapids of literature? It can't be the money. It can only be the allure and the beauty of literature itself, the chance to say all the fine things about yourself that the world needs to know, and to do so with all the seriousness that a hard cover can give.

William Gallas is the latest in a long line of athletes who have flung themselves into print and given away more than they meant to. He sought to show himself as a good man who has suffered much. Like so many before him, he comes out as a greedy fool who lost touch with reality.

The Arsenal defender writes of his failure to show up at work, his pay negotiations, his apparent veiled threats to score an own goal, and he expects us to accept him as a martyr. But alas poor William, they never told him that literature has a terrible knack of showing the world a great deal more than the authors intended. True for James Joyce, true for Gallas.