Confectionery Stallers, the waiting is at an end. Here is the remainder of the post-1981 World’s Dullest XI. (Part 1 | Part 1 appendix)

The selection process has become no easier. Finding bowlers of the requisite level of tedium is not simple – to be a truly dull bowler, you first have to be a good bowler, in order to have the capacity to drive the game into a near-vegetative state. First, however, the wicketkeeper...

7. Jack Russell (England)

	Jack Russell: the slow man's slow © Cricinfo Ltd

I include Russell with a heavy heart (and only after foolishly including Tillakaratne as a special batsman), as he was a favourite player of mine, and his batty quirkiness as a cricketer and hat-wearer transcend the boundaries of statistical dullness. Russell’s minimalist scoring rate was, objectively, unimpeachably tedious, so I have tried to view this from the perspective of non-English cricket-watchers, for whom enduring the Gloucestershire Gremlin as he poked, prodded and persevered must have been inexorably irritating.

Other glovemen made strong applications – including every single pre-Dhoni Indian since Kirmani – but few have bored over a sufficiently elongated career, and none has played an innings remotely in the negativity class of Russell’s great masterpiece – 29 not out off 235 balls in almost 5 hours as he saved the Johannesburg Test with a comparatively explosive Atherton in 1995-96. This was the slowest recorded Test innings of over 20, and, had it been played 500 years earlier, videos of it would have been used by the Spanish Inquisition to extract confessions from even the most blameless cricket watchers.

Career Highlight: Johannesburg 1995-96.

Some South African cricket watchers still curl up into a ball and start crying whenever they see a small man with a moustache. Of the traumatised bowlers, Meyrick Pringle could never bring himself to play Test cricket again, and Clive Eksteen took almost five years off, played one more wicketless Test, and promptly disappeared.

8. John Emburey (England)

Choosing a partner for the great Shastri in the spin-bowling defence was one of the toughest tasks facing the selection panel (namely, me and my 6-week-old son). Many will press the case of Ashley Giles in the most vocal and febrile terms available, particularly those who saw him ‘bowl’ in India in 2001-02, whilst Kumar Dharmasena (who has already created more excitement in his one-match international umpiring career than he did as a player merely by signalling a leg-bye) bowled as if he thought that displaying a semblance of either flight or turn would give him an incurable lifelong ear infection, and also plinked a few useful runs at a pitifully morose rate.

In the end, however, I have been swayed by statistics. Tauseef Ahmed’s numbers are impressive, but his moustache was quite exciting, and Emburey just has the edge, or lack of it, to nail down the spinner’s spot. He had a pleasing, classical off-spinner’s action, but the highest strike rate of any specialist bowler with more than 50 Test wickets in the 1981-to-now period (a wicket every 108 balls), and the third best economy rate, at 2.24. If he had ever bowled unchanged at both ends through a full day of Test cricket, the close of play score would have been a stadium-clearing 200 for 5.

The Middlesex Miser also adds valuable depth and immovability to the lower middle order – he used the least flamboyant batting technique ever developed in the history of the British Isles to jab his often critical runs away at just 35 per 100 balls.

Career Highlight: The entire Test summer of 1987. Bowled through 4 entire Tests without taking a wicket. whilst constricting the Pakistan batsmen to just 2 runs per over. His 0 for 222 off 107 overs series figures showed the control of a tantric Casanova, but the penetration of an inebriated eunuch.

9. Craig Matthews (South Africa)

Of all the South African seamers who have sent down over after over 18 inches outside the batsman’s off stump waiting for their adversary to chase one out of sheer boredom or smack their own stumps to pieces just to make something happen, Matthews was the dullest. Tediously effective from the tip of librarian’s haircut to the hooves of his workhorse feet, the Cape Constrictor ran to the wicket as if he was about to photocopy directions to a municipal rubbish dump for a public safety inspection officer, eyes set firmly on the maintenance of his career 2.26 economy rate.

Career Highlight: Debut v India, Johannesburg, 1992-93. Match figures of 4 for 64 off 49 overs of unmitigated nagging. Admittedly aided by an Indian batting line-up featuring Shastri, Jadeja, Amre, Manjrekar, Prabhakar and More – all of whom spanked it around at fewer than 40 runs per 100 balls over their Test careers.

10. Ewen Chatfield (New Zealand)

Again, it has been hard to narrow it down to one New Zealander from a veritable Pacific Ocean of possibles. How can one ignore the claims of Martin Snedden, for example, who not only bowled the least exciting medium pacers of all time but also once scored a three-day duck with the bat? But the perennially tidy Chatfield was the most economical seamer of the relevant period (2.23 per over). A tearaway fast bowler in the sense that spectators wanted to tear their eyeballs away from their sockets whilst he was in the middle of a long spell, the Manawatu Mogadon took a wicket roughly every two hours of bowling, yet still averaged only 32. Rumour has it that, when facing Chatfield, batsmen would smash themselves on the toes with their bats so that the pain would keep them awake at the crease.

Career Highlight: 1988-89 Wellington Test v Pakistan. A 53-over marathon of probe which yielded 82 runs and 1 wicket. A 1950s spinner trapped in the body of a fast bowler.

11. Alan Mullally (England)

Comically inept batting cannot outweigh his tireless pounding of the corridor of unreachability. The Leicestershire Lolloper gave his captain some control by refusing to aim anywhere near the batsman, let alone the stumps (which he hit approximately once every 70 overs of bowling), and enabled spectators to take regular toilet, refreshment or snooze breaks without fear of missing anything resembling action. Also made groundsmen feel that it had after all been worthwhile mowing the edges of the pitch. They gave Mullally the facilities. He used them. To a fault.

Career Highlight: Any time he heard a commentator utter the words ‘Alan Mullally’ without immediately adding the words ‘wasted the new ball by giving the batsmen too many balls they could comfortably leave alone’.

12th man: Asif Mujtaba (Pakistan)

	Asif Mujtaba: a fine 12th man © John Dawson

Statistically, the dullest middle-order batsman of the modern era, with a strike rate of 28 runs per 100 balls over a barely-believable 25 Tests in which he averaged 24. After his promotion from the surprisingly intensive job of being Pakistan’s specialist substitute fielder, Mujtaba found the boundary boards with the regularity of a derailed Antarctican train ploughing into a queue of polar bears. Whilst it would be harsh to lay all the blame for the paltry attendances at Tests in Pakistan at his unspringy bat, it is scientifically provable that he did absolutely nothing to reverse the trend.

Career Highlight: 1992 series in England. The only time the Sind Sedative (a) did anything remotely useful against a major Test team in his 11-year career, or (b) scored at more than 2 per over in a series. His 33.55 strike rate constituted a positively Gilchistian onslaught by Mujtabatic standards.

So, the final post-1981 Dull XI is:

B.A.Edgar
G.R.Marsh
G.Kirsten
C.J.Tavare (honorary captain)
R.J.Shastri
H.P.Tillakaratne
R.C.Russell (wicket-keeper)
J.E.Emburey
C.R.Matthews
E.J.Chatfield
A.D.Mullally

12th Man: Asif Mujtaba

I look forward to your personal world and national Dull XIs. Congratulations to all those selected, and commiserations to the many grinders and trundlers who can feel rightly aggrieved to have missed out (of whom Sanjay Manjrekar, as many of you have forcefully pointed out, is probably the most unfortunate).

This is a team of players who have proven themselves dull over long and often distinguished Test careers. Anyone can achieve momentary dullness – Aravinda da Silva, a certified magician described by this very site as “one of the games’ best entertainers” and “an unrepentant attacker”, once clobbered 27 off 191 balls against a mighty Zimbabwe attack consisting of Streak, Rennie, Guy Whittall, Jarvis and Peall. It takes a steely force of personality to accumulate an entire career of almost unbroken inertia, and I defy any person to concoct any team that could force either a win or a defeat on a flat track against this agglomeration of the adhesive, this procession of the prudent, prosaic and parsimonious.

Comments (85) | XIs

Tomorrow (here it is, Ed.) will bring the long-awaited announcement of numbers 7 to 11 in the Confectionery Stall Post-1981 All-Time Dullest World XI, putting tedious cricketers and lovers of tedious cricket out of their misery at last.

In the meantime, this is clearly an issue that has stoked the fires of Confectionery Stallers throughout the universe. Many thanks for your responses to this most emotive of topics, and I fully understand the uproar generated by the omission of some of the most negative players of the modern era: men who have driven you to hair-rending, eye-poking frustration with their refusal to countenance the idea of a full follow-through.

Here, therefore, are explanations for the exclusion from the Dull XI batting line-up of some of those you have nominated.

Geoffrey Boycott: excluded purely because this is a 1981-Ashes-and-after team. Boycott therefore only had the final few months of his Test career in which to press his claims. And press them he did, grinding along merrily at 34 runs per hundred balls. Were this a 1964-1981 team, he would be the first, second and third names on the teamsheet.

	'A soporific scoring rate is not sufficient in itself to qualify for selection'. Even for Dravid... © Getty Images

Rahul Dravid, Sir Michael Atherton, Jacques Kallis: too classically orthodox and stylish for this team of the awkward, inelegant and pokey. Although each has had innumerable moments of spectacular unspectacularity – Dravid’s 61-ball 3 against England in Bangalore in 2001-02; Atherton’s 11 off 90 against New Zealand in 1999; Kallis’s six-hour unbeaten 85 as South Africa powered towards a declaration against England in 1999-2000, to pick just three especially turgid cherries from a smorgasbord of strokelessness – a soporific scoring rate is not sufficient in itself to qualify for selection. You must be fundamentally unwatchable on every level, even when making your rare sorties into attack. If Kirsten had ever scored a 130-ball double century, it would still have felt like you had taken cricketing Mogadon.

Shivnarine Chanderpaul: too quirky and too good. Disqualified for scoring a 69-ball century against Australia. Reinstated for 11-hour 136 against India. But redisqualified for ethereal timing and heroic defiance of the orthodox.

Jimmy Adams: too influenced by injury. A man who had the patience, nerve and sheer unadulterated rudeness to score a 370-ball century against Zimbabwe (let me confirm that: against Zimbabwe) would appear to be a shoo-in, but it should be remembered that, before having his cheekbone squished by an Andre van Troost bouncer in 1995, Adams rattled along at a relatively jaunty 45 per 100 balls in Tests. After his appalling injury, he squirreled out his runs at a joyless 31 per 100 (and his average sunk from 62 to 29).

Wasim Jaffer: Test strike rate of 48 per 100 balls. Cut the guy some slack.

	Kepler Wessels: exciting when he was semi-Australian, less so as a Protea. Quite a lot less so, in fact © Getty Images

Kepler Wessels: unarguable contender on grounds of his sub-zero-frills style, but tonked it around at 50 per 100 in his Australian incarnation, before returning home to South Africa, and winding himself back down to an acceptably Protean 40. What does this reveal about the cricketing cultures of the two nations? Everything.

Mudassar Nazar, Shoaib Mohammad, Mark Richardson: selectorial whim. Formidable candidates, but there is no shame missing out to grinders of the dullness of Edgar, Marsh, Kirsten, Tavare, Shastri and Tillakaratne.

Grant Flower: up against Shastri. Could have done little more to convince the selectors with his unthreatening but tidy left-arm spin and unthreatening but tidy right-handed batting, but up against Shastri.

Brendon Kuruppu: possible flash-in-the-pan. One innings of unimpeachable dull greatness – a 777-minute double-hundred on debut – cannot compete with the years and years and years and years and years of creasebound inactivity which the members of this very special XI have demonstrated. Kuruppu also spanked England around Lords for an hour in 1988, raising doubts about his true grinding status.

I hope this has quelled the seething resentment that your own particular least favourite blockers and nudgers have not received the recognition they deserve. Being a selector is a difficult job at the best of times. When honing down a team of world-class snooze-inducers, with so many outstanding candidates to choose from, it becomes impossible to please everyone.

The wicketkeeper, bowlers and twelfth man will be unveiled tomorrow.

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The ICC’s much-maligned Best-Ever Test Match ratings, which have provoked typhoons of outrage and howls of misunderstanding across the cricketing universe, have fired the millennia-old debate about how best to assess a cricketer’s quality. Even the mathematically ingenious Babylonians and the wise old Ancient Greeks were unable to concoct a definitive equation for this deeply important matter, hindered as they were by an unfamiliarity with cricket. It is therefore unsurprising that the ICC (who often seem to suffer the same hindrance) have also failed.

In many ways, such rankings are, theoretically at least, a more reliable indicator of a player’s current standing than career averages, being more reactive to form, opposition, era, conditions and the other variables that can skew a players average so beguilingly. Perhaps an average of a player’s ranking after each Test he played would give a clearer measure of the overall magnificence, adequacy or rubbishness of his career, and return Matthew Hayden to his rightful place in the all-time batting pantheon – in other words, in that pantheon, but not eating at top table whilst Tendulkar, Lara, Headley, Compton and Boeta Dippenaar look on enviously, picking at their food and muttering, “I was better than him,” before four of them add, “Boeta, what are you doing here? Have you stolen Graeme Pollock’s membership card again? Leave, Boeta. Just leave.”

However, cricketing achievement is only one measure of a player’s contribution to the game. Another is dullness. Dull cricketers have played just an important part in the development of our beloved sport as exciting ones – whose genius and flamboyance is only noticed by comparison with the porridge-like drudgery of their less gifted colleagues.

To many in this Twenty-20 era, dullness is not a quality to be prized. The Confectionery Stall’s first exposure to cricket, however, was in the summer of 1981, famous principally for Ian Botham’s ludicrous feats of swashbuckling heroism, but equally noteworthy for some grindingly turgid batting by both sides (no bowler who played more than two matches in the series conceded more than 3 runs per over).

Botham’s 118 off 102 balls at Old Trafford may have shocked and intimidated the Australians (particularly after he had scored 3 from the first 30 balls he faced), but it was Chris Tavare’s 78 off 289 in 7 hours that broke their spirits, obliterated their love of cricket, and crushed their will to live, rendering defeat inevitable. It also inspired the young Zaltzman to strive for great feats of elongated scorelessness in his cricket career – my greatest achievements including playing the dominant role in an opening partnership of 1 in 10 overs in an under-11 match, and being out for 17 in the 31st over a 40-over West Kent Village League game for the mighty Penshurst Park CC.

Tragically, there are no official dullness rankings for fully appreciating the game’s less exuberant performers, so the Confectionery Stall would hereby like to honour the unsung heroes such as Tavare – the Behemoths of Boredom, the Titans of Tedium, the Grand-Masters of Grind – by announcing its post-1981 Dullest World XI.

This hypothetical team of dullards to take on the proverbial Alien XI would be required not merely to play for a draw from ball one, but also to put the invading extraterrestrials off cricket for good, leaving the sport unsullied in its rightful home – Planet Earth.

Dullness as a cricketer is of course somewhat subjective, and is not measurable purely by statistics. Batsmen must not only score slowly, but do so with a lack of style that renders them unwatchable to all but their closest family and most dedicated team-mates. They must also be aggravatingly good enough to stay at the crease sufficiently long to send spectators into a deep coma. Bowlers must be skilled and patient enough to contain and restrict, without threatening the excitement of a wicket by any other means than a mental capitulation by the batsman, brought on by overwhelming frustration and an uncontrollable consideration for the paying spectator. Thus, we are looking for the crabby, awkward stubbornness with the bat, and trundling negativity with the ball.

The obvious temptation is simply to pick 11 New Zealanders at random – a team of Edgar, Franklin, Wright (capt), Richardson, J. Crowe, Coney, Blain (w-k), Bracewell, Snedden, Chatfield and Watson would challenge the enthusiasm of even the most ardent cricket lover (and if Jacob Oram could bat like Chris Martin, he would walk into the team as a specialist bowler). But that temptation must be resisted, if only because other nations must be rightly recognised for their contributions to tedious cricket.

Here, then, is The Confectionery Stall's Post-1981 Dullest World XI.

Part 1: Batsmen

1. Bruce Edgar (New Zealand)

Just one of a seemingly endless production line of sleep-inducing Kiwi openers (Wright-Franklin-Hartland-Pocock-Young-Twose-Horne-Bell-Richardson-Papps-Cumming-Redmond-McIntosh, the list goes on, and will continue to go on as long as cricket is played in the land of the long white cloud). With a strike rate and average of 31, Edgar batted like the professional accountant he is.

Career Highlight: Wellington Test v Australia, 1981-82. After his team were put into bat, Edgar batted until well into the fifth and final day of the match. For 55 runs. Admittedly, rain had intervened, and intervened a lot, so Edgar faced a mere 259 balls and had clubbed an average of one boundary per day, but a five-day half-century is not to be sniffed at.

2. Geoff Marsh (Australia)

	Geoff Marsh dulls himself to sleep © Getty Images

Perhaps the closest Australia have come to replacing Alec Bannerman since his retirement in 1893, Marsh scored at more than a run every other ball in only 7 of his 93 Test innings (and only once in his first 35 Test Matches). Dogged it out with the flamboyance of a road cone, making partner Mark Taylor look like Adam Gilchrist.

Career Highlight: Bicentennial Test v England, 1987-88. Contributed to the joyous celebrations and party atmosphere of his nation’s 200th anniversary by blasting his way to 5 off 49 balls in the first innings, then thrashing a 215-ball 56 in the second.

3. Gary Kirsten (South Africa)

An intensely personal selection. Kirsten has haunted my every cricketing nightmare since I took a week’s holiday to go to the England v South Africa Old Trafford Test in 1998. Kirsten spent the first 11 accursed hours of this match grinding out 210 grindingly ground-out runs in a manner that rendered previously sane cricket watchers insensible with boredom. Even his team-mates and blood relatives must have been drinking fearsomely aggressive espresso coffees every half hour to endure the vigil. Not wishing to waste a moment of my precious holiday time, I dedicatedly sat through every single ball of that innings. I have suffered flashbacks ever since, the deep psychological scars have seriously affected my family relationships, and I have never quite been able to see the sunny side of life as I had before. I survived the ordeal, but have never truly been the same cricket fan again. There have been statistically duller batsmen, but figures alone cannot express the anti-joy of watching Kirsten bat.

Career Highlight: Entire career. But especially Old Trafford 1998.

4. Chris Tavare (England)

See above. Outshone Boycott in 1981, averaged a boundary every 51 minutes of Ashes batting over his career, a strokelessness record that probably will and certainly should surely never be broken by a front-line batsman. The Bradman of Block.

Career Highlight: Perth Test, 1982-83. Backed up an 8-hour first innings 89 with his stonewalling masterwork – an incurably constipated 9 in 127 minutes.

5. Ravi Shastri (India)

A genuine dullness all-rounder. Scored and conceded runs at little more than 2 per over. If he could have bowled at himself, cricket would have died.

Batting Career Highlight: South Africa v India series, 1992-93. On the momentous occasion of South Africa’s first home Test since readmission, and the first ever Test between the nations, Shastri showed South Africa what they had been missing by clobbering 14 off 81 in his first innings of the series – and then slowing down in his subsequent efforts. In all, faced 412 balls in the 3-match series. For others, this might have been sufficient for a healthy 250-plus runs. Shastri bludgeoned just 59, at an average of 11.8 and a scoring rate of less than one run per over. Heroically dull.

Bowling Career Highlight: India v England, 1984-85. Sent down more than 1100 balls in the series, 7 of which took wickets, whilst England flayed him for 2.1 per over.

6. Hashan Tillakaratne (Sri Lanka)

Featureless accumulator, the very antithesis of Sri Lankan batsmanship, it was often impossible to believe he was from the same planet as Jayasuriya and de Silva, let alone the same country. Rumour has it that even Tillakaratne himself cannot remember any of his innings.

Career Highlight: Asian Test Championship Final v Pakistan, 2001-2002. Bounding to the crease in Sri Lanka’s first innings with his team strongly poised at 447 for 5, more than 200 ahead with 5 wickets in hand, having scored at almost 4.5 per over to that point, Tillakaratne rammed home the advantage by plundering 19 not out in almost 3 hours. Still, red ink is red ink.

It appears I have got a little carried away with this blog, so, in the interests of domestic harmony in the Zaltzman household, as well as of my other professional commitments, the announcement of the uninteresting wicketkeeper, stultifying bowlers and yawnsome 12th man will be delayed until the next blog. Who will join the Wellington Wall, the Perth Plug, the Cape Town Clogger, the Orpington Obstacle, the Bombay Blockage and the Colombo Crawl in this union of the unspectacular?

Time permitting, I will also suggest Dull XIs for all the Test teams, for which your nominations are welcome. Until then, let us remember the words of Sir Geoffrey Boycott, the Sultan Of Stodge himself: “You can’t score runs in the pavilion.”

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Matthew Hayden, the Brisbane Bludgeoner himself, has become the latest of the Australian old guard to succumb to the inescapable tentacles of time. And when each of the modern Baggy Green legends stands in his bathroom in the morning, and asks, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most irreplaceable of us all?”, the mirror will, without a moment’s hesitation reply: “Warne. Statistically, Warne by the longest chalk you’ve ever seen. I don’t care where your blackboard is, this chalk could reach it. I mean you’re all good players, don’t get me wrong, and I know these things can’t be measured by numbers alone, but it’s Warne. Definitely Warne. You’ve got toothpaste on your chin.”

It’s stats time. The Confectionery Stall, as regular readers will know, fears not the infernal breath of statistics. Indeed, it positively revels in what others find mathematically halitotic. So strap in. If you are allergic to averages, please take an anti-histamine tablet before reading on.
The loss of Hayden, like that of Langer and Martyn before him, should be overcome with little fuss by a nation still enviably strong in batting depth. Arguably, Australia should be stronger without him. Any team would miss a 50-average batsman, but it is really the post-recall Hayden of 2001-03 who was irreplaceable – averaging 71, scoring at 4 per over, with the power and grace of a rampaging rhinoceros. Since then, he has averaged a healthy but hardly indispensable 44, and since the 2006-07 Ashes only a Kim-Hughesian 37.

Since Langer took his career average of 45 off into the sunset, Katich and Jaques between them have averaged well over 50, as has Symonds from the moment he replaced the fading Martyn. Haddin is now stepping increasingly confidently into Gilchrist’s shoes – shoes which had averaged a provably human and increasingly indecisive 30 in the Perth Pummeler’s last 28 Tests over 2½ years, compared with Haddin’s 38 average since his predecessor retired to spend more time irritating people with books.

The bowling has been the greater problem by far. Australia miss McGrath like a dog would miss its snout, but even so, Mitchell Johnson, who made his debut the Test after McGrath’s retirement, has since averaged only fractionally more than the Narromine Nagger in his final 14 matches after his ankle injury at Edgbaston in 2005.

When Warne consigned himself to the history books in a blaze of England-whitewashing glory, he had taken over 700 wickets at an average of 25, and an economy rate of 2.65. Australia have played 18 Tests and selected six different front-line spinners – Hogg, MacGill, Casson, White, Krejza and Hauritz, who between them in 17 appearances have taken 48 wickets at an average of 52, whilst donating 3.66 runs per over to the opposition cause. Only Hauritz has exerted even a pretence of control, and when Krezja’s debut is removed on grounds of being barkingly bizarre, Australia’s post-Warne tweakers and twirlers have mustered 36 wickets at an average of almost 60.

As the old saying goes, ‘the mirror never lies’ – even when, in the case of this blog, that mirror is fictitious, and probably excessively influenced by statistics it has spent far too much time calculating. How Australia must be wishing that Mr and Mrs MacGill had decided to wait another ten years before starting a family. Ricky Ponting might even be wishing that Ian Salisbury had been born under the Southern Cross. Or that Warne has a bad run on the poker tables and needs a bit of extra paid work in July and August.

In the meantime, the Melbourne Mesmeriser can add to his bulging collection of accolades an official Confectionery Stall nomination for ‘Most Irreplaceable Cricketer Of All Time’, alongside Bradman, Richard Hadlee and Great West Indies Fast Bowlers 1976-2000 Collectively. Your further nominations are welcome. A winner will be adjudicated and sent a complimentary print-out of a Confectionery Stall blog of his or their choice.

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Greetings Confectionery Stallers, and welcome to the first instalment of the Confectionery Stall’s Ashes result prediction blogs, which will pepper the year from now until the final over of the series.

By the time the action begins in, of all places, Cardiff, I confidently predict that I will have confidently predicted all 21 possible series outcomes. I will therefore be able to march onto The Oval outfield in August as the teams shake hands for the final time, brandishing a print-out of one of these blogs, shouting “I told you so” through a loud-hailer, before being manhandled by over-zealous stewards for attempting to express my historical right to walk on the outfield at the end of a Test series (see sub-blog below).

The last couple of months have given many pointers to what will happen in the Ashes. The difficulty is working out which of these are pointing in the right direction, and which are, like Italian road signs, completely and deliberately misleading. Are England plunging into turmoil, or plunging out of it, with Pietersen stung and invigorated and Strauss bringing wisdom and control? Are Australia really weaker than they have been for two decades, or already rebounding from their entertaining-for-the-neutral slump? Or both?

ENGLAND

	Some good innings, but not too many great series © Getty Images

My suspicion is that England’s messy but rapid bout of blood-letting will benefit the team in the short-to-medium term, which in an Ashes year is all that matters. All the evidence suggests that Strauss is a good captain, but he will need several of his players to break out of their current cycles of not-quite-bad-enough-to-be-dropped tolerability.

He will also require greater consistency from his one world-class batsman – the deposed captain and victim of one of the oddest coups in cricket or any other walk of life. Pietersen has been hit or miss for some time. He has scored an outstanding 7 centuries in his last 18 Tests (since July 2007), but still averages only 47 in that period. He has been out for less than 20 in 13 of these 32 innings, and has no scores between 45 and 94. He has played great innings, but not great series. England will need one from him in the summer, and they may well get it. If he seriously wants to captain England again, he knows the only way he will do so is by (a) behaving himself, and (b) scoring brontosaurus-loads of runs. Perhaps Pietersen’s entire captaincy reign was an elaborate ruse by the ECB to ensure his continued dedication and a crushingly dominant resentment-fuelled Ashes.

(As a possibly interesting statistical appendix to this, Pietersen has on occasion been compared to Viv Richards, and the Master Blaster himself was also not one for destroying his opposition with consistent, merciless unstoppability. After his annus mirabilis in 1976 – six centuries in 8 Tests – over the rest of his career he only once scored more than 400 in a series (446 v Australia in 1988-89), and only once hit more than one century in a series (two, against England in 1980-81). Brian Lara, by contrast, topped 400 in 11 series, and scored two or more hundreds on nine occasions.)

On the bowling front, England’s attack may not be the most consistently threatening, but the Ashes is a home series and since 2005, every single England bowler has a better average at home than overseas (apart from Broad, marginally and unimpressively). Panesar and Anderson both have significantly better records in England, and Harmison, since his breakthrough tour of West Indies four years ago, has averaged 29 at home and 46 away.

Furthermore, if Brett Lee fails to recover from his injury in time, it is probable that they will face a bowling attack with a grand total of zero Test wickets in England. If England can keep it that way for the duration of the series, they will probably win (barring some some overly cautious declarations, some overly jaunty declarations, an encyclopaedia of run outs, or a two-month monsoon) (although with Cook and Strauss opening, regular scores of 450-0 off 210 overs may not be enough to give the bowlers time to force a victory).

AUSTRALIA

	Ricky Ponting: the last surviving member of the gang © Getty Images

Australia’s victory in the Sydney Test has enabled the baggy greens to perch a little less baggily atop the heads of Ponting and his men, and, less importantly, allowed them to retain their position as number-one-ranked cricket team in the world, despite having lost consecutive series to the two best cricket teams in the world.

Cricket’s undisputed number-one-ranked sage, Sir Richie Benaud (his knighthood has been bestowed upon him unilaterally by The Confectionery Stall, in recognition of Sir Richie’s services to brightening my summers from 1981 to 2005), famously stated that “captaincy is 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent skill – but don’t try it without the 10 per cent”. Thus, in my book, cricket captaincy is statistically identical to scientific research, veterinary surgery, piloting an aircraft, and seduction. And it should be noted that Benaud had one of the biggest 10 per cents known to mathematics.

From 1995 to 2007, Australian skippers were blessed with a healthy wodge of the 90 per cent luck portion of the captaincy cake, simply by being able to say to themselves: “I think I should probably put Warne and/or McGrath on now. Yes, Warne and/or McGrath it is. Yup. Lovely piece of captaincy there Mark/Mr Waugh/Ricky [delete as appropriate], even if I do say so myself.”

Ponting, by contrast, now has Hauritz and MacDonald at his disposal. However much of the 10 per cent you believe Ponting possesses, and it is certainly not all 10, it should be remembered that even Michelangelo would have struggled in the Sistine Chapel if someone had snapped his paintbrush in half, and told him to work with a pair of chopsticks instead.

However, with the retirement of Hayden and the injury to Lee, only Ponting remains of the golden era regulars. Perhaps this will help the new generation to play without constant comparisons to the players they are not. Batsmen are queuing up in state cricket, and Johnson and Siddle should be dangerous in English conditions. England may be playing Australia six months too late. After all, Michelangelo would eventually have adjusted to his chopsticks and come up with a half-decent ceiling if the Vatican Painting and Decorating Committee had been threatening to sack him if he didn’t.

PREDICTION

The Confectionery Stall’s first Ashes series prediction, then, is England 2 Australia 2. These are currently two reasonable sides, neither as good as they were in 2005. They should be evenly matched, with England perhaps slight favourites due to home advantage.

As an England supporter raised in the 1980s, however, I am pessimistic by inclination, and see the cricketing glass as not merely half empty but also leaking all over my trousers. And thus I am aware that the last time an Ashes series began the sides apparently evenly matched and with England slight favourites, in 1989, England were on completely the wrong end of a seismic, era-defining 4-0 clattering from which it took the team and me 16 years to fully recover. But still, it’s going to be 2-2 this time. As long as the selectors don’t pick 29 different players. And as long as Terry Alderman stays in retirement. And Tim Curtis too.

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I know that this might seem a relatively insignificant bout of nostalgic grumpery in an age when the whole of cricketing tradition is under threat, but cricket has lost something special with the outlawing of the end-of-match pitch invasion, as well as its more restful but nevertheless enjoyable counterpart: the end-of-match stroll across the outfield to stand in front of the pavilion whilst some commemorative medallions are handed out with all the glitz, glamour and razzmatazz of an egg sandwich in a disused quarry.

No doubt some these celebratory or commiseratory crowd incursions were putting players at increased risk of suffering a public handshake or mild back-patting incident. More importantly, it is unquestionably more difficult for the organisers to cram the requisite 150 sponsors’ logos onto a pavilion balcony than onto a temporary cardboard rostrum that looks like a struggling school pupil’s failed CDT project.

However, some of the most memorable moments in cricket history have been when players have had to sprint with their commemorative stump through a swarming mass of celebrating fans, sidestepping like particularly exuberant Fijian rugby players to avoid excessive hair-ruffling. And some of the most iconic images of the game feature victorious captains waving from a lofty pavilion perch to their adoring throng like a chuffed pope after a particularly good St Peter’s Square sermon (albeit that few popes have saluted their fans after being drenched in champagne and beer by jubilant cardinals) (only Pius IV).

I acknowledge unreservedly that the world has more important political and economic issues piling up in its in-tray at the moment, but if cricket’s authorities can demonstrate that they trust their spectators to pitch invade with due care and decorum, perhaps the Middle East will realise that any problem can be resolved if only those involved are prepared to try.

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As another Ashes year begins and English cricket has suddenly found itself pitched into a medieval-style power struggle. Metaphorical knives have been drawn, and either captain or coach (or possibly both) seems destined to be metaphorically stabbed, in either the back or the front (or possibly both).

It is a curious and unseemly situation – can the ECB afford, financially, to dispose of Peter Moores, or, cricketingly, to oust Kevin Pietersen? Can they afford not to? If Pietersen is sacked or disciplined, what effect would it have on him, the team’s best batsman and the key to victory against Australia? If he is allowed to get away with his attack on the authority of the coach, what effect would it have on the rest of the team and their relationship with their captain, also the key to victory against Australia? The ECB is essentially holding two frying pans, wondering with which one to smack itself in the head (or, alternatively, whether to clonk itself less hard with both pans simultaneously). Either way, it will make a noise and hurt.

The situation should not surprise even the most easily-startled cricket fan. When England appointed Pietersen, they knew it would be a bumpy ride. The question was merely whether it would be short and bumpy, or long and bumpy. It is, however, a little curious that the biggest bump to date should have ostensibly been caused by a dispute over the recall of Michael Vaughan (averaging 36 in 54 Tests since his eight-month explosion of batting greatness in 2002-03, and with barely a run in any cricket since last June).

The affair is complicated by the fact that a strong argument could be made for sacking Moores in any case. The English cricket boat has been drifting aimlessly in a sea of adequacy since its two-year golden age of 2004 and 2005. Moores has been paddling enthusiastically, but appears to have done little more than send the vessel round and round in circles, and claiming that the circles are definitely getting rounder.

He inherited a side that had just completed perhaps the most disastrous cricketing winter in England’s history, since when they have comfortably avoided both notable humiliations and meaningful triumphs. Most of the players have made little discernible progress individually. Under Moores, only Ryan Sidebottom averages under 29 with the ball, and only Pietersen over 42 with bat. The captain is also the only top-six batsman to have scored his runs quicker than 50 per 100 balls, and even his once formidable scoring rate and six-thwacking prowess have dipped significantly. The upshot of these statistics is that England as a team has lost its capacity to seize key moments of matches and series against strong opposition.

Of England’s best young players, Alastair Cook, Ian Bell, James Anderson or Monty Panesar have all performed reasonably, but none has improved markedly in the manner of, for example, Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers and Dale Steyn. Moores’ reign has been characterised not by the disasters of the 80s and 90s, but by collective, individual and selectorial stagnation.

What, then, are the possible outcomes? The Confectionery Stall offers the following plausible scenarios for how this sorry mess may play out:

1. Pietersen wins: Moores to be sacked and/or exiled to an island in the mid Atlantic, Pietersen to become sole dictator of the English Republic Of Cricket, running the team like an old Soviet despot, overseeing parades of bowlers from the pavilion balcony in front of a 50-foot high portrait of himself.

2. Moores wins: Pietersen sacked, repatriated and sold to the IPL or Real Madrid for $50 million. Moores appoints Chris Adams captain, forges a passport for Mushtaq Ahmed, and calls up Richard Montgomerie to open the batting as he attempts to apply his successful county-championship-winning formula from Sussex to the international arena.

3. Compromise A: Pietersen to be given the Graham Ford he wants, but to promise not to be naughty in future and to do what he’s told like a good boy. Moores to stay involved in a backroom role, responsible for making tea, cakes and excuses for the team. If the ECB are going to have to pay him, they might as well get some of their money’s worth.

4. Compromise B: Pietersen to be sacked, and join Andrew Strauss, Andrew Flintoff, Paul Collingwood, a recalled Vaughan and an unretired Trescothick as ex-captains back in the ranks. It is frequently said that a great team needs many leaders, not just a captain. England should therefore fill the team with as many ex-captains as possible – ideally ten, eventually, plus a novice captain they can advise, bully and confuse. Moores to stay on as coach, but not say or do anything during practice, and observe a restriction order preventing him from being within 20 miles of the team during matches, other than for post-play press conferences.

5. Compromise C: Both to stay in their posts, but be forced to spend a week’s holiday together in Rome, to try to rekindle the magic.

Appropriately enough, this unseemly squabble has marked the beginning of the year in which multiple-royal-wedding fans and schism enthusiasts alike will be celebrating
the 500th anniversary of ace squabbler Henry VIII ascending to the English throne. And what a fine cricketer he surely would have been – how intimidating for an umpire, about to raise the finger of doom after big Henry had been trapped with his big fat legs plumb in front of all three stumps, to see the latterly massive king at the far end of the pitch miming, chopping something’s head off with his royal bat. The umpires’ reluctance to trigger the mightily-appetited monarch would surely have led to him adding ‘the English Javed Miandad’ to his long catalogue of titles and nicknames (including: Defender Of The Faith, Bluff King Hal, Old Coppernose, and the Medieval Mike Gatting).

WG Grace may have had the chutzpah to replace his bails and announce that the crowd wanted to see him bat rather the bowler bowl, but even he did not wield Henry’s lethal two-pronged attack of (a) the power of life and death over opponents and match officials, and (b) a short fuse.

Later in life, when his youthful athleticism had transmuted into a colossal gut, the Bearded Beheader could even have taken up umpiring himself, and counted the balls bowled in an over with six special marbles, each decorated with a picture of one of his wives. “That was Anne of Cleves, so... two to come, batsman.”

I digress.

My money is on a pyrrhic KP victory. Moores as coach and Pietersen as captain are both dispensable. Pietersen as a player is not. But he has done himself and his team few favours in the last week.

New Zaltzman update

Thank you very much, dear Confectionery Stallers, for your kind comments about the birth and catch of my son. The boy and his mother are both in outstanding fettle, and recovering slowly from the trauma of having to rely on my historically-abominable catching skills at such a key moment of both of their lives.

The first few weeks of life are crucial to later development, and I thank a mixture of luck and the ICC that my son was born into the midst of three-Test series, with no one-day or twenty-over games to sully his earliest cricketing experiences.

Aside from his primary hobbies of squawking, guzzling and snoozing (the age-old triathlon of babyhood), he spends much of his spare time waving his arms around, perhaps suggesting that he is destined to become a spin bowler with a tendency to appeal over excitably for obviously-not-out lbw shouts.

He was patently delighted when, aged just 10 days, he was presented with his first plastic cricket set. Let me rephrase that sentence – I was patently delighted when, aged just 34 years, I presented him with his first plastic cricket set (which, with the help of some friends, I knocked in with a Test-match-intensity game of corridor cricket at 3am on New Year’s Day).

Inspired by the story of Tiger Woods’ father performing golf swings over his infant son’s cot, I have also now instigated a rigorous programme of pretend forward defences and mimed leave-alones whenever the boy is awake. One day, like his daddy, he will be a grinder. I can now only wait for the long-awaited cartoon biopic of Gary Kirsten to be released.

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