For the last few days, I've spent a fair amount of time watching net practice and talking to the Indian press. It's an interesting experience, especially for an amateur cricket writer. The first thing which struck me was how tired and cynical most of the press guys are. For a diehard fan like me, being a cricket writer seems like a dream job. After a few days, I've realised how much drudgery it involves.

Watching the Indian team practice for the first time is an amazing experience. Seeing the way they behave with each other, listen to the coach, their body language and their intensity is eye opening. But after a few days, it seems quite boring. The poor journalists have to come about an hour before the session starts, hang around and wait for the press conference. The media session is possibly the most boring and ridiculous event there is. The same questions are asked, the same answers are given and most of the time nobody really cares. They hang around till after the team leaves, and then head back to their hotel or an Internet cafe to file their reports and send pictures.

I was having lunch today at a roti place next to the stadium, and eavesdropping on the press guys. They were all complaining about the pressure they face from their editors back home about coming up with interesting stories. There is nothing really interesting to write about during a practice session or a preview. Apart from injuries and events like Bob Woolmer's death, it's about as boring as a day at the office. They get little time for anything else and most of the time they hang around exchanging gossip and bitching about how the security guys for the Indian team treat them like dirt.

Apparently, most of the players on the Indian team have their favourite press guys. They also happen to be from the same part of the country as that player, so Sourav Ganguly has a Bengali writer as his friend, Harbhajan Singh a guy from Amritsar, and so on. The biggest scoop for these guys is to know who's in the XI, and apparently the favoured journalists get SMS messages about it. I could hear one of them badgering the Bengali guy about whether Anil Kumble was going to play against Bermuda or not, and he claimed not to know. Just after the other guy left, the Bengali writer called up his editor and told him Kumble was in. I guess most of them don't like to share their secrets.

The most interesting thing that happened was an encounter with former West Indies fast bowler Colin Croft. At 6ft 6in, he's an imposing presence, but has a great sense of humour. He obliged me with a picture on condition my camera wouldn't break. I barely reached up to his chest, and he patted me on the head, and asked if I needed a box to stand on. He then proceeded to regale me and my friends with some funny stories, and it was hilarious.

Colin has worked as a pilot, a bus driver, a school teacher and now wants to be a truck driver in the US. He also doubles up as a radio commentator, but does whatever he feels like. He wants to drive regularly from Miami to New York as a truck driver on an 18-wheel truck. Unlike a lot of the other press guys, who do their work for a living, he seems to enjoy every minute of his life, and regularly cracks jokes during a boring media session to make things lively.