HARBHAJAN SINGH, the India off spinner, will play for Surrey next season after being given the go-ahead by the Board of Control for Cricket in India. He replaces Saqlain Mushtaq, his Pakistan counterpart, who helped Surrey to win three county championships in his eight years at the Oval before breaking down with knee trouble.

Harbhajan, 24, was contracted to play for Lancashire in 2003 but did not manage a single match because of a finger injury. He has proved that he is back to his best by bowling India to victory in the final Test against Australia with five for 29 and finishing the series with 21 wickets at 24 runs apiece.

“This is great news for the club,” Steve Rixon, the Surrey coach, said. “With Saqlain struggling to recover from two serious knee injuries, I felt we needed to strengthen our spin attack. Harbhajan is one of the world’s best spin bowlers and he will relish the sort of pitches produced here at the Oval.”

Saqlain will still be a hard act to follow. He took 368 first-class wickets for Surrey at an average of only 20.08, claiming five or more wickets in an innings 30 times and ten in a match on ten occasions.

There is a more pressing engagement for Harbhajan today in Kanpur, where India play the first of two Test matches against South Africa, who after half a decade doggedly hanging on to Australia’s coat-tails have plunged to sixth place in the ICC Test table.

Only Shaun Pollock and Jacques Kallis remain from a South Africa team who on their previous visit to India won by four wickets in Bombay and then thrashed the home side by an innings in Bangalore.

The man entrusted to restore South African cricket to a position of prominence is Ray Jennings, the former Easterns coach, who has tempered his disciplinarian tenets with a “love-and-care” slogan.

Graeme Smith, the captain, was quietly confident, despite the fact that Kallis will almost certainly not be able to bowl with a side strain suffered in the warm-up match in Jaipur. “We are a young side, highly motivated and touring India is always a tough proposition, but we are looking forward to the occasion and proving a few people wrong and coming out with a smile,” he said.

Sourav Ganguly will captain India after a teleconference with Tim Castle, the New Zealand lawyer appointed by the ICC to look into the two-Test suspension handed down for slow over-rate in a one-day match against Pakistan last Saturday, was postponed to November 25.

The pitch, devoid of grass and with plenty of cracks after not being watered for five days, is likely to aid spin bowling, though it is not expected that all three India spinners — Anil Kumble, Harbhajan and Murali Kartik — employed in the victory over Australia in Bombay will play.

South Africa will go in with one specialist spinner, Robin Pietersen, who averages 44 per wicket in his five Tests. They will also hand Test caps to Thami Tsolikele, the replacement for Mark Boucher, the wicketkeeping stalwart, and Hashim Amla, the first player of Asian extraction to represent South Africa.