The duo who made Australia tearfully phone their mummies © AFP

Welcome to the official Confectionery Stall year-by-year highlights of the Test Match decade, covering the years 2000, 2001 and 2002. These are my personal selections, and should not be used as unarguable evidence of the greatest cricketing moments of the selected years in any legal cases or political dispute.

Apologies, therefore, if there is an English bias – but not only am I English, most of the cricket I have watched this millennium (especially in the first half of the decade) involved England. And England are, have always been, and will always be, the most exciting cricket side in the universe. I am sure all of you, deep down, would much rather watch Alistair Cook than Brian Lara, Ashley Giles ahead of Shane Warne, and Alan Mullally rather than Wasim Akram.

I am equally sure you all have your own favourite moments of the last 10 years. Maybe some of you are hardcore Boeta Dippenaar fans who insist that the unbeaten 177 against Bangladesh in Chittagong was not merely the highlight of 2003, but also the single greatest achievement in the history of all sport. Maybe there was a particular shot, delivery, catch, umpiring signal, appeal, use of the heavy roller, mispronunciation of player’s name by a stadium announcer, or helmet-kissing, that particularly spoke to your cricketing soul. If so, please share it with us.

2000: England beat West Indies by two wickets at Lord’s
In a decade that became notable for mammoth run-scoring on featherbed pitches, sending even the most fanatical cricketing insomniac into a catatonic snooze, this three-day thriller had “19th century” written all over it in gold-plated calligraphy.

Twenty-one wickets fell on the second day, with West Indies skittled for 54 in two hours of maniacal mayhem, with Andy Caddick returning the positively Victorian-era analysis of 13-8-16-5. There followed a nail-nibbling third-day finish as England inched to their first major victory of the Hussain-Fletcher era, against the last remnants of the great West Indian fast bowling dynasty.

Honourable mention: England winning in almost pitch-black darkness in Karachi - Hussain and Thorpe wrapping up victory batting with miner’s lamps strapped to their helmets, wearing glow-in-the-dark safety tabards, and using their innate bat-like sonar to locate the ball. Towards the end, as Moin Khan complained that his fielders could no longer see the ball, and he could no longer see his fielders, Steve Bucknor responded with an admonitory, schoolmasterly look that screamed, “Well, you should have thought of that before you started slowing the over-rate down to 4.3 per hour.”

2001: India’s follow-on victory in the Kolkata Test against Australia
This was one of my favourite matches of all time, even though I followed it only by periodically checking the scores on the internet, and had never seen VVS Laxman bat or Harbhajan Singh bowl. This had everything a cricket fan could want in a game – great bowling, great batting, great drama, a historic comeback, and an Australian defeat (for the sake of balance in the world game, of course).

Steve Waugh’s Australians had seemed invincible. Annoyingly invincible. The first Test had resulted in the kind of steamrollering now expected as routine. The second Kolkata Test began as if it would consist of little more than the steamroller reversing back over what it had squished in the first Test, to make sure it was fully flat.

When Laxman walked out to bat after India had followed on, his team were in enormous trouble. When SS Das and Sachin Tendulkar were then out in quick succession, trouble ballooned still further. It seemed a question of whether Australia would have the mercy to wait for a priest to arrive before switching off the Indian life-support machine. A day-and-a-half later, one more wicket had fallen, Laxman, aided by Dravid, had dynamited his name into cricketing immortality, and Australia were tearfully asking the umpires if they could phone their mummies to come and pick them up.

This was perhaps – maybe even probably − the greatest innings ever played. Without question, it was the greatest innings ever played by a batsman who walked to the crease boasting a career average of 27 (it is hard to imagine today’s high-mid-20s averagers such as Dinesh Karthik, Salman Butt, or Daniel Flynn, playing such an innings, even on a computer game, or in their wildest dreams).

Harbhajan spun India to an immortal victory, the baggy greens bagged even baggier, the mystique of Waugh’s men was crushed, and Australia have not won another Test series since. The last bit is not factually true, but still. What a game. If this match is not in your list of highlights of the decade, you are clinically dead inside.

Honourable mention: Brian Lara in Sri Lanka. In the 2000s, as in the 1990s, Lara swung between untouchable mastery and perplexing vulnerability, like a champion trapeze artist trying to impress two women sitting on opposite sides of a circus tent, a career pendulum that made him the most fascinating, compelling cricketer of the modern age.

In Sri Lanka late in 2001, against Murali and Vaas at their peak, he swung the right way. As his team sank to a 0-3 whitewash, Lara scored 688 runs at 114.66, in one of the greatest displays of sustained excellence in defeat that cricket has witnessed. The rest of the West Indies between them managed 852 at 15.77. Take out Sarwan, and that average drops to 11.12. Seldom can the margins of defeats have been reduced with such individual, defiant brilliance.

2002
I have already outlined my 2002 highlight in my latest podcast, involving a very silly crowd at Lord’s and the numbers on the jackets of two stewards. It was what cricket is all about.

Clearly, no actual cricket could match the splendour of that sun-smooched afternoon at Headquarters, but the on-field highlight of the year was:

Nathan Astle’s H-bomb of a double-hundred against England in Christchurch. Two hundred and twenty-two off 168 balls sounds spectacular enough. But Astle had pootled to his hundred off a relatively pedestrian 114 balls. Then, with the match all but lost, kaboom. 121 more runs off 54 more balls, including 12 fours and nine sixes. All this from a man who a year previously had scored 141 off 408 in nine hours. Against Zimbabwe. This was an innings that redefined what was possible in a Test match. England’s bowlers wore the expressions of scared teenagers in a low-budget horror film, as the prospect of the most spectacular defeat in Test history loomed.

As a curious footnote, having hit those nine sixes in 54 balls (and 11 in total in the innings), Astle faced another 3107 balls in four more years of Test cricket, of which he sent only four over the ropes, and none of the last 2736 balls spread over his last 26-and-a-half Tests. But, in mitigation, Neil Armstrong did not reach any particularly impressive altitudes post-1969, and no one complains about how his career tailed off. “Oh well done, Neil, you’ve climbed a tree. You’ve lost your edge.”

Honourable mentions to: Shoaib Akhtar’s spell in the Colombo Test when he demolished Ponting, two Waughs, Gilchrist and Warne in 15 balls, all without having to resort to fielders: three bowled, two leg before wicket. Not even Shoaib’s most ardent fans would claim he has consistently made the most of his prodigious natural gifts. But if he’d bowled those 15 balls at Bradman, he would have got him out at least three times. That is not a fact, but it must be close to being a fact.

Michael Vaughan’s batting. For six glorious months he batted as if Hobbs, Hammond and Hutton had been reincarnated in one player. For the rest of his injury-blotched batting career, there were flashes of majesty, interspersed with periods of striking mediocrity, like a Mozart reduced to writing advertising jingles. Melodious advertising jingles, admittedly.

Next time: 2003 up to however far I get up to. I’m nipping off to France with the family for a couple of days, where I would imagine the potentially gripping denouement to the South Africa v England first Test is headline news, and crowds of feverishly excitable cricket fans are gathered in bars, drinking absinthe, smoking Gitanes, and arguing in an agitatedly gesticulative manner about whether or not Paul Harris is an unheralded genius trapped in the bowling action of a village trundler.

Finally, here’s a stat for you: the highest Test innings played by Virender Sehwag in which he has scored at slower than a run every other ball is... wait for it... 13. Only 19 times in his 123 Test innings has Sehwag scored at less than 50 runs per 100 balls – 10 ducks, eight single-figure scores, and that mind-numbingly tedious 13 off 29 against South Africa in his second Test, in 2001-02. I used to be quite satisfied if I reached double figures in the first 10 overs of a village match. I am honoured to be a member of the same species.

(And as a footnote, regarding some feedback comments on when the decade ends, I am aware that, technically, the millennium began in 2001 and the decade ends at the conclusion of 2010, but no one would claim that the year 1990 was in the 1980s. Would they?)

Comments (40) | Decade review

In the second instalment of his World Cricket Podcast, comedian Andy Zaltzman tells you who will win the South Africa v England series, names his favourite South African player of all time, reflects on the outstanding series in New Zealand, refrains from speaking to his guest on the show this week because he couldn’t get his computer working, and dishes up more lies on cricket.

Read the transcript of the podcast here

Download the entire podcast here (mp3, right-click to save).

Comments (28) | World Cricket Podcast

	England have a psychological block when it comes to playing Test matches in the shadow of flat-topped mountains © PA Photos

Only two-and-a-half weeks remain of a cricketing decade that has seen some of the best cricket ever played and some of the worst, and which has witnessed greater transformation in the game than any time since Eve persuaded Adam to join her in a new game she had invented, which involved trying to hit an apple with a snake.

England began the decade as they will end it – in the middle of a Test series in South Africa. In January 2000, England’s first third-millennium Test ended in a pounding, series-losing innings defeat, before they gained a consolation win in the final Test, thanks in large part to (a) Hansie Cronje’s love of high-quality jackets, and (b) Hansie Cronje receiving a rather surprising answer from his "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelet, and acting upon it. Thus began a theme which has recurred on and off throughout the decade − the needless devaluing of Test cricket.

(A couple of trivia questions for you:
1. Who was the first man to bat at 6 for England this millennium?
2. Who was the first England player to etch his name onto a 21st-century honours board?

Anyone who answers both of these correctly without having to look them up deserves a mixture of respect, praise, pity, admonishment, scorn and a commemorative Confectionery Stall silver salver. And a urine test to check for illegal levels of Wisden. Answers at the bottom of the blog).

England begin Wednesday’s first Test in confident mood, hoping that this series will show that the 2009 Ashes win marked the beginning of a period of excellence, as the 2005 victory transpired to mark the end of one. Has beating the Australians papered over the cracks that were evident throughout the summer, or filled them in with the concrete of confidence and painted the Queen high-fiving Len Hutton on top? And was South Africa’s win in Australia a year ago their high-water mark – Ntini is retiring, Kallis creaking, Morkel stagnating, Smith chuntering to himself?

The series is a fascinating prospect, and should be closer than might have expected at the start of the year, when South Africa had just completed a spectacular win in Australia and England were in turmoil after the bizarre, truncated reign of captain Kevin Pietersen. It is England who will begin the series with the precious nectar of momentum in their pockets, although the Ashes suggested that momentum, though much beloved by pundits, players and public alike, means precisely zero, and is barely worth the newspaper/flipchart/stone tablet it is written on.

South Africa may come to regret their foolishness in not locating all four Tests at Newlands in Cape Town. England have played three Tests there since South Africa’s return to international cricket, and been humiliated on each occasion, conjuring some top-level ineptitude out of the seaside air each time. I am not a statistician or a shrink, but it does suggest England have a psychological block when it comes to playing Test matches in the shadow of flat-topped mountains.

However, the official Confectionery Stall prediction for the series (subject to unannounced revision at any point between now and mid-January), is a 2-1 win for South Africa. Unless various things happen which result in a different scoreline. Which is more than possible.

Elsewhere in the Test universe, India wrapped up a commanding series victory over Sri Lanka, for whom this was a sobering insight into a cruel post-Muralitharan universe, albeit one with the fading genius still in it. MS Dhoni’s potent team should go from strength to strength, and confirm itself as India’s best ever Test team. But it won’t, because it will barely play any Tests in the next year.* Why? No reason. That’s just the way Fate decreed that it should be. And by "Fate", I mean "the BCCI". The two are essentially interchangeable these days.

West Indies put on an excellent performance in the drawn second Test against Australia, and Chris Gayle proved again how great a cricketer he could have been – of players who have played 10 Tests or more in this decade, Gayle has the 57th best batting average. Too often he has been the man who has put the “ach” into “underachievement” (to this contrived wordplay even to slightly work, you must say “ach” with extreme frustration, as if you have just put on a slipper only to find that there was a sharpened javelin inside it, or fed your keys to the dog and tried to open your front door with a slice of biltong).

Tomorrow, I will begin my year-by-year personal cricketing highlights of the decade. Thank you for all your comments on the blog and episode one of the podcast (even if, like "jonty", you think I “suck big time”, or like the appositely named "CruelExecutioner", you wish to hurl a rotten orange at me; I fear not the rotten orange, and back myself to tuck it into the leg side for a cheeky single). Episode two should, technology willing, be available on Wednesday.

Answers to the two trivia questions:

1. The first man to bat at 6 for England this millennium was Andy Caddick.

2. The first Englishman on a 21st-century honours board (assuming there was one at Newlands at the time) was Chris Silverwood.

If you don’t believe me, here is proof.

* There is talk of India slotting in two Tests when they host South Africa in February

Comments (15) |

	Charged as guilty: Virender Sehwag© Associated Press

Virender Sehwag, not for the first time in his extravagant career, stands on the cusp of history. To break Brian Lara’s Test innings record, the Delhi Devastator needs another 117 runs – equating to approximately 23 minutes’ batting at his standard scoring rate.

I speculated in my first World Cricket Podcast exactly what bowlers must feel when attempting to combat Sehwag on a good batting pitch. Suffice it to say that if this innings continues long into day three, the International Court of Human Rights may become involved, and the phenomenal Indian opener may find himself charged with crimes against bowling humanity.

For all the splendour Sehwag has once again given to the cricket-watching world, all record of this innings must be surreptitiously destroyed. What if impressionable young bowlers were to stumble upon evidence of the kind of abuse they may endure? What right-thinking parent would want their precious little baby bowler to grow up in such a heartless universe? Even bowling machines might refuse to bowl.

How cricket has changed. As a schoolboy, I was an opening batsman. Not a good opening batsman but an opening batsman nonetheless. And, more importantly, an excruciatingly tedious one. I viewed it as my specific responsibility not to score runs, and to not score them over as long a period as possible.

Steve Waugh used to talk of the “mental disintegration” of opponents. My approach to this task was to block full-tosses, leave wide half-volleys and pad up to long-hops until the opposition bowlers and fielders were on the verge of either tears or retirement. Sehwag embodies everything I could not even have imagined being possible as an opener.

In fact, cricketing orthodoxy at the time was such that a boy was expelled from my school for scoring a run-a-ball 50, bringing disgrace to the school’s proud cricketing tradition with his morally wanton strokeplay. That story is not true, but it might as well have been, so it’s staying in the blog. No arguments.

Sehwag may well break Lara’s record, but Angelo Mathews has already claimed his place in the record books, with the narrowest failure to score a century in Test history. Mathews was run out by approximately half a millimetre, after an agonising delay as the third umpire subjected the video footage to more intensive scrutiny than any piece of film since the JFK assassination.

Being out for 99 is a strange form of personal sporting failure − you have basically succeeded, but the moment of disappointment is all the greater than if you had in fact properly failed. And being run out for 99 adds a piquant element of avoidable silliness to the failure.

Mike Atherton suffered this partially abominable fate at Lord’s in 1993, when, turning for a seemingly simple third run, he was sent back by Mike Gatting, who had been temporarily transfixed by a supernatural vision of the world’s largest banoffee pie. Atherton slipped, Ian Healy Australianly whipped the bails off, and Gatting licked his lips, mumbling, “I have seen the future. And it’s covered in toffee and bananas.”

Steve Waugh became an associate member of the Missing Out On A Test Century Due To Between-The-Wickets Incompetence in spectacular fashion, in the Perth Ashes Test of 1994-95. Twin brother Mark was acting as runner for Craig McDermott, went for an imbecilic single, ran himself/McDermott out, and left Steve one run short of another scrawling on another honours board. What were the brothers thinking to each other as they trudged off? The official Confectionery Stall guess is as follows:

Mark: “That’ll teach you to make your Test debut four years before me.”

Steve: “Looks like I’ll be forgetting your birthday this year. I don’t care how easy it should be for me to remember it.”

Mark: “You’ve got to admit, it was objectively the funniest run-out in cricket history.”

Steve: “I’m going to tell Mum. You’re in trouble. I want my teddy.”

Mathews’ dismissal was the 67th time a batsman has been out for 99 in Test cricket, and the 14th time one has missed out on three-figure glory by virtue of being run out. Fourteen out of 67 – this is an extraordinary ratio, which illustrated the madness that can envelop the human soul when the tastily steaming baguette of personal triumph is within nibbling distance. Also, 20.9% of batsmen out for 99 have been run out – yet of the 59,237 Test dismissals that had occurred as of 5pm GMT on December 3, 2009, only 3.5% have been run-outs.

Batsmen on 99 are thus six times more likely to run themselves out (or, perhaps, have a sadistic team-mate run them out), than batsmen who aren’t already mentally picturing charging around with their arms in the air, kissing their helmets, waving their bats at any available camera, and cuddling the non-striking batsman.

There are statistics and there are statistics. And this statistic reveals the inherent nature of the human condition, and the potentially fatal pitfalls of personal ambition, as much as any play by Shakespeare. Arguably. Expect it to be on all school curriculums around the cricket-speaking world within months.

Comments (84) | Sri Lanka in India 2009

The groundbreaking first instalment in Andy Zaltzman's series of world cricket podcasts is here. In this special guest-free edition, Zaltzman turns an eye to the cavalcade of cricket that has been shovelled into our faces of late. Among the highlights: a look at the Dunedin Test, of which, despite not having watched a ball, he loved every ball; the first and last "paltry/poultry" pun ever; ways Mohammad Asif can get banned in future; the Zaltz Stat of the moment; the team that (sometimes) executes their plans as smoothly as Henry VIII did his wives; and in a world-first, a joke that features both Ali Naqvi and Dirk Wellham.

Read the transcript of the podcast here

Download the audio here (mp3, right-click to save)

Comments (66) | World Cricket Podcast