I'm John Batchel in Southern New England. Jeremy Zackis is in New South Wales. My fall, his spring.

That means cricket and the Australian team, champions, are waiting for the Ashes series that begins in December.

In the meantime, the India team is in town for a test. India plays wonderful cricket. That is why it is confounding that there's

suddenly a spitball incident. Now, spitball is a term from the old days of baseball. It doesn't mean

necessarily that you spit on the ball. It means that you're doing something to the ball that makes it

irregular when you throw it hard.

You can cut it with a razor. You can put Vaseline on it. You can scratch it in some fashion so that the spin of the ball is

difficult to read at the plate, as far as I understand.

I could never hit a curveball, so I'm just repeating what I've learned.

Now, Jeremy, you tell me that a cricket ball is very hard.

So what is this accusation?

What happened?

Well, John, it's nothing like a bit of cricket scandal to get the week going.

What happened was it was during the Australia versus India test in Melbourne, so at our Melbourne

Cricket Ground, which is one of our hallowed cricket grounds in Australia.

The test was going very well.

It had gone into day two.

Australia was quite well defeating India.

They weren't doing very well at the crease and really

weren't bowling too well. But at the end of day two, the umpire actually picked up the ball

and noticed that there's something a little bit odd about it. Having a close look at the cricket

ball that they'd been using for the past couple of days, he noticed that it actually had quite a large

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