Brian Viner: Will Gayle honour the house that England built?

My 6ft 6in colleague Angus Fraser and his 6ft 5in counterpart on The Daily Telegraph, Derek Pringle, dropped in – in more ways than one, since, to the wonderment of our children, they both had to duck to get into our kitchen – for an early supper on Thursday.

They were on their way to the Rankin Club in the north Herefordshire town of Leominster, five miles from us, to do a turn as the "Grumpy Old Bowlers", a troupe that sometimes also includes 6ft 4in short-arse Ashley Giles. It was an excellent evening, during which Fraser recalled that following the fifth Test between the West Indies and England in Antigua in 1994, Brian Lara was given a plot of land in his native Trinidad, in recognition of what was then the highest individual Test score of 375. Some years later, Lara invited Angus and a few others to the handsome home that he'd had built there. "This," he said, giving them a guided tour, "is the Fraser suite, these are the Tufnell kitchens, that's the Caddick lounge..."

One wonders whether Chris Gayle and his Stanford All-Stars teammates will similarly inaugurate the Harmison mezzanine, the Collingwood gym and the Flintoff swimming pool if and when they get round to building new homes with the not-so-hard-earned rewards from last Saturday's Twenty20 for 20 fiasco, also in Antigua? Still, as Pringle told his audience in Leominster, the Stanford match at least had one positive repercussion for England: it made them look forward to the start of the Indian tour, "and it's not often you can say that".

It's not often, either, that "The Last Word" records a pang of sympathy for Kevin Pietersen. I have interviewed Pietersen twice, once before he had played Test cricket and again a year or so ago. He was loquaciously charming on the first occasion; sullen, virtually monosyllabic and swollen with self-regard the second time. So I wasn't sorry to see his obvious discomfort in Antigua, and yet I do feel a twinge of pity for a sportsman placed so uncompromisingly in a no-win situation.

England were flayed by the media after their pop-gun effort against the Stanford All-Stars, but what if they had fired howitzers and won? Then, at the first suggestion of a lacklustre performance in India or anywhere else, they would have been labelled as players who only offer 100 per cent when there are huge individual riches on offer. By playing like Budleigh Salterton thirds, they probably did the right thing.

Bergelin added snap to Borg's sublime game

Lennart Bergelin died this week. He was the redoubtable Swede who coached Bjorn Borg, and bore a startling resemblance, it seemed to some of us back in 1976, to the 38th President of the United States, Gerald Ford. I can even remember speculating with my school friends that they might be one and the same, especially as President Ford vacated the White House, and therefore our TV screens, at about the time that Bergelin (pictured below) entered our consciousness. Yet it was famously, if rather cruelly said of Ford, that he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. Nobody would have denigrated Bergelin in that way. He looked like he could chew granite.

He could act as tough as he looked. It was always hard to believe of the ice-man Borg that he had once thrown tantrums and rackets in equal measure, but apparently it was so, until Bergelin got hold of him. The coach was devoted to his young charge however, and cheerfully used to share a hotel room with Borg's rackets, which were strung so tightly that, while Borg slept peacefully in an adjacent room, Bergelin would often be woken by the high-pitched twang of a string snapping.

He would then examine every racket until he found the snapped string, whereupon he would cut out all the other strings, so the frame didn't warp, before going back to bed. This strange ritual was explained years ago in an ITV documentary unambiguously called "Borg", which was reviewed with characteristic irreverence by Clive James.

"As we saw in 'Borg'," James wrote, "the young champion strings his rackets so tightly that they go 'ping' in the night, thereby waking up his manager. Borg runs a taut ship. He likes his headband tight too, to bring his eyes closer together. He likes them touching."

Borg and Bergelin fell out a few times, but I imagine those same eyes shed a tear or two this week.

Bad time to make fun of F1 procession

On Channel 4 the other night, a comedian whose name I didn't catch suggested that Formula One is so boring that he would rather watch two washing machines going through their cycles, to see which finished first. It's not a bad gag, but he didn't half choose the wrong week to crack it.