Graeme Swann's maverick streak has inspired England to ludicrous heights © Getty Images

Hello Confectionery Stallers. Having had time to digest another intriguing but baffling England series, I have come to the conclusion that Andrew Strauss’s team is one of the oddest in cricket history.

Since the Middlesex Mastermind inherited the team a year ago, as a supposedly steady hand on a confused tiller after the Pietersen Project ended in predictably disarray, England have played 16 Test matches. They have lost only three of these games, but each of those proved unmitigated drubbings by an innings. They have also twice won by an innings, as well as registering three more thumping victories (by 115 and 197 runs, and by 10 wickets). Thrice they have concocted a last-wicket escape with an alchemic cocktail of incompetence and resilience, and once allowed their opponents to wriggle off their last-wicket hook. They lost a series in which they averaged six runs per wicket more than their opponents, and won and drew series in which they averaged respectively six and eight runs less per wicket than the opposition.

This must constitute one of the most ludicrous sequences of Test cricket ever compiled. And yet the team is largely made up of apparently steady, reliable, not-especially-temperamental players, operating under practical, sensible leadership. England are the cricketing equivalent of a church choir who smash up their pews at the end of their gigs before setting fire to the vicar, or an accountancy lecturer whose talks contain subliminal but explicitly lascivious reveries about Queen Victoria.

The skipper and coach Andy Flower may externally give the impression of calm, assured direction, but underneath their focused, frivolity-free exteriors, they are presiding over an England era of barking inconsistency, almost surreal fluctuations, and frankly unfathomable results. The self-styled but militarily-useless ‘army’ of England’s most vocal supporters have long and loudly proclaimed their barminess. Perhaps, over the years, their barmy contagion has worn off onto the players.

Alternatively, it could be argued that this descent into cricketing insanity coincided with the entry to the team of the maverick Graeme Swann. In fact, the more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that Swann has had an almost supernatural influence on this recent bizarrification of England’s often mundane Test team. From his very first over in Test cricket, when he winkled out Gautam Gambhir and Rahul Dravid in Chennai, it was obvious he possessed the capability to bring about the unexpected.

Within weeks, both captain and coach had been overthrown. Since then, the team’s all-round icon, Andrew Flintoff, has retired, its leading batsman, Kevin Pietersen, has been a shadow of his once dominating self, and Swann himself has seemingly ended (for a good while at least) the Test career of his spinning rival Monty Panesar, who had been regarded as England’s best spinner since Derek Underwood.

Thus, a player almost written off as a county journeyman has risen to the top echelons of the world rankings, and become his country’s leading wicket-taker, best-averaging bowler, fastest-scoring batsman and most important (and popular) player.

If all this had happened 500 years ago, Swann would have been sitting on the end of a seesaw waiting to be tried as a witch. If it had happened 40 years ago, we would simply have assumed he was a Soviet agent sent to destabilise the cricketing establishment.

As it is, we can only pay homage to the formidable, unknowable power that Swann has harnessed to take over the England team and remodel it in his own now-sacred image. Is it a Faustian pact – five years of legendary Test success (by off-spinning standards), followed by eternal yips? Time will tell. Or, if you prefer to take a less occultish approach to late-flowering cricketers, you could simply mumble to yourself about the value of bringing rounded, experienced cricketers into your Test side, and announce: “I never thought I’d say this a couple of years ago, but English cricket needs Graeme Swann like a racehorse needs its legs.”

(An alternative school of thought is that the strange patterns that have enveloped England began with the birth of my own son, whose entry into the world on the last day of that Chennai Test − described in an early Confectionery Stall entry − coincided with England subsiding from a winning position as labour began, to a spectacular defeat minutes after he slithered out into the world. Since then, as described above, English cricket has been turbulently nutty. As the boy’s father, this phenomenon keeps me awake at night. I love my son, but I cannot help but ask myself: has he been sent to this planet to turn my country’s Test team weird? He seems like a normal little lad, but then they always do, don’t they?)

As promised in last week’s World Cricket Podcast, here are some Swann statistics.

In the recent South Africa v England series, Graeme Swann took more wickets than any other person on the entire planet (albeit that most of the roughly 7 billion people eligible did not even get the chance to bowl). Swann’s 21 scalps mean that he has passed a barely-noticed milestone – he has become the first England spinner to take 19 wickets or more in two separate Test series since Derek Underwood (who hit the magical, mystical 19-wicket mark three times in his illustrious career).

Swann, the first England offspinner to winkle out 20 victims in a series since Geoff Miller in the 1978-79 Ashes against Australia’s reserves, also became only the third England off-spinner of all time to twice take 19 wickets in a rubber.

Let that sink in for a maximum of three seconds. Now, can you guess the other two?

I’ll have to hurry you.

Jim Laker and John Emburey? Wrong, and wrong. Try again.

No, one of them must have been Laker, surely? No. It wasn’t, try again.

Ray Illingworth? Nope. Not even close.

Lance Gibbs? Doesn’t count, wrong team.

Gareth Batty? It’s your own time you’re wasting.

Jim Laker? Still no.

Vic Marks? Get out of my blog.

You’re out of guesses. The two tweaksters in question are Roy Tattersall and Fred Titmus. (Meaning that Swann is one of only two people in the entire world who has twice taken 19 series wickets whilst bowling off spin for England, and still has ten toes.)

Laker’s absence from this never-before-compiled list (19 wickets not being considered an especially significant series landmark in a sport obsessed with numbers ending in 0) is something of a surprise, given that England’s greatest offspinner famously took 19 in a single Ashes Test, on his way to a ludicrous 46 in the 1956 series. But those 19 immortal Old Trafford scalps constituted more than he took in any other complete series.

There you go, stats fans. Put that one under your pillow, sleep on it, and then when you wake up in the morning, see if the stat fairy has left you a copy of the Playfair Annual. And well bowled Swann, one up on the great Laker. But 11 behind the great Muttiah Muralitharan. Who is level with the great Shane Warne, on 13 19-wickets-or-more series. Admittedly, this is not one of cricket’s keynote statistics. But it is one that you now know. Use it wisely, my friends, and tell it only to people whom you trust.

Two additional Swann In South Africa statistics in case those ones weren’t enough to slake your insatiable Swann-stat thirst:

• His 21-wicket tally was the highest series wickets tally for any spinner in a series in South Africa since Jack Alabaster, the Michelangelo of New Zealand leg spinning, took 22 in 1961-62 (coincidentally, both men’s surnames are things you should not try to eat, allowing for the spelling mistake in Swann’s name);
• And it was the third-highest by an England spinner in South Africa since Johnny Wardle in 1956-57, and the highest by any offspinner in SA since Hugh Tayfield’s 37 in the same series.

Wake up. You, the guy and/or girl who was still reading this blog a few paragraphs ago. Wake up. It is now safe to read on.

I will finish with a quick Jim Laker digression... whilst Laker’s playing career finished long before cricket and I first met, via a television set in 1981, he was a BBC commentator at that time. In that summer’s Old Trafford Test, he was responsible for one of my personal favourite lines of commentary, as Ian Botham reached his spectacular century by bludgeon-sweeping Ray Bright for six.

“What a marvellous way to bring up a six,” blooped Laker, mixing the words “six” and “century” in his understandably fevered excitement. This minor verbal slip perfectly encapsulated the pandemonium that Botham had unleashed that day, in a barrage that took him from 5 to 102 in 53 balls (the last 81 of those coming from 36 balls, of which the sweep off Bright was the fifth to clear the ropes).

Reality had departed the cricketing universe, and, bearing in mind (a) that no Englishman had ever hit four sixes in an entire Ashes innings, let alone 5 in under an hour, and (b) that Chris Tavare was making time stand still with a heroically strokeless vigil at the other end, you can forgive Laker for confusing his words. Particularly as he was probably thinking to himself at the same time: “Holy living mackerels, I took 19 wickets in a match here once. 19. In one match. That is absolutely bloody incredible. I must have been a seriously good bowler. High five, Jim? I’ll not leave myself hanging on this one. 19. For 90. Beat that, Ray Bright. Beat that.”

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In the unspeakably thrilling fourth World Cricket podcast: two actual interviews (so what if they’ve been conducted on dodgy phone lines), the Bradman of bowlers who have conceded 150 runs in an innings, the cattle fair that is the IPL auction, and more lies about cricketers. All this plus an option to subscribe via iTunes. How good can life get?

Read the transcript of the podcast here

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

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	Andrew Strauss trudges off for a golden duck. Now if only he'd opted to field instead ... © Getty Images

England will have to pull an elephant-sized rabbit out of their impressively rabbit-filled hat if they are to win the series in South Africa, especially if they want to clinch the rubber with another nerve-clanking draw, as would be appropriate.

Andrew Strauss evidently likes a challenge as captain. Bowling first would have given England a far greater chance of being able to cling on by their cricketing fingertips with one wicket remaining, the tactic which has served them so well in recent months. As it is, they are now relying on conceding a massive first-innings deficit, then launching the rearguard to end all rearguards, probably with a helping shunt in the back from the Johannesburg weather.

All at Confectionery Stall head-quarters (i.e. me, and my two small children (the wife’s away working)) were surprised not only that Strauss chose to bat, but that Graeme Smith claimed that he also would have elected to strap his massive pads onto his massive legs and clamp his massive bat in his massive forearms. (The voting on this issue was as follows: Surprised – 1; Not surprised – 0; Abstentions – 2.)

Conventional cricketing wisdom, dating back to the days when Aristotle and Plato would play single-wicket games against each other on the back streets of Athens, has always advised the toss-winning captain either to bat, or to think about bowling and then bat. Or, in exceptional circumstances, think about bowling, then think about batting, decide to bat, but be overcome by a childish desire to subvert convention and say that you’ll bowl, before returning to the pavilion to be greeted by some angry batsmen tweaking some extremely stony moustaches.

The licentious, free-spirited age in which we live has led to this supposedly sage advice being ignored with increasing frequency. In the years before 1980, only 14% of toss-winners chose to bowl and/or field. Usually both. (Although Pakistan have recently surgically separated the two apparently conjoined disciplines. Their bowling has survived and flourished, but their fielding, sadly, has passed away.) Since 1980, 36% of captains have responded to a favourable fall of the coin by saying, “We’ll have a bowl and/or field.”

The contrast is even more stark if November 2 1960 is used as a cut-off date. On that day, a “not guilty” verdict was reached in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, paving the way for DH Lawrence’s famous humpfest of a literary classic to be published freely. Until the behavioural straitjacket was thus ripped from the heaving torso of society, only 9% of captains inserted their opponents. Between them, Lawrence and the British parliament’s decision to pas the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 have truly revolutionised Test cricket.

I digress. I will now throw some more percentages down at you. If you do not fear them, they will not hurt you.

The statistics suggest that the post-1980 36% are onto something. For each of the last three decades, captains who have chosen to bat first have had a losing record – overall, they have won 31.8%, drawn (or tied) 33.8%, and lost 34.4% in the last three decades. Captains electing to bowl first, by contrast, have won 37.7% of their games, drawn 33.1%, and lost only 29.2%.

So, since 1980, choosing to bowl first gives the average Test captain a win-loss ratio of 1.29; whereas choosing to bat first clocks with a dismal 0.92 wins per loss. It would seem that conventional wisdom is an ass. In this matter at least. And an out-of-date ass (is there any other kind of ass these days?). Before 1980, the equivalent figures were as follows − choose to bowl: 0.83 win-to-loss ratio; choose to bat: 1.33 victories-per-defeat. So there was decent mathematicoscientific grounding for the wisdom.

However, just as it was eventually proved that the world is not flat (for now), that not all things are made of earth, air, fire and water (although what a perfectly balanced bowling attack that quartet would have made), that dogs don’t necessarily bark in Morse Code, and that Paul Harris is not the seventh best bowler in the world, so it has now been proved that winning the toss and batting first is, statistically, slightly silly.

Strauss, an old-fashioned operator who was clearly brought up right, has won 13 Test tosses, and batted 11 times. On the two occasions he elected to bowl (Centurion and Cape Town), England came within a wicket of defeat – you could argue that choosing to bowl first, and therefore bat last, gave England the escape route of being able to dig in for the draw, just as when he twice chose to bat first on shirtfront in the Caribbean last year, when England needed to win, he made it easier for West Indies to grind out their series win.

More pertinently, Strauss has four wins and four draws from the eight games in which he has lost the toss (admittedly including the default win at The Oval against Pakistan in 2006, and the ten-minute draw on the Antiguan sandpit last February), compared with four wins, six draws and two defeats when he has won the toss (which could easily have been three draws and five defeats without the batting expertise of Panesar, Onions and Onions).

All this suggests that the England captain, for all his undoubtedly virtues and successes as a leader, should start calling something other than ‘heads’ or ‘tails’, in an effort to leave the toss-winning ball in the opposing captain’s court. Perhaps ‘helicopters’, or ‘chainsaws’ (assuming a regulation coin is being used). After all, as all attentive schoolchildren will tell you, in 813 Tests since 1990, the toss-winning captain has guzzled the sweet champagne of victory 286 times, and glugged down the rancid rat juice of defeat on 288 occasions. And had a non-committal cup of tea after the other 239 matches.

Of course, not all of cricket’s accepted truths are as rubbish as Alan Mullally’s cover drive. “Don’t play no shot to balls that are heading for your middle stump” remains as true today as it was when I was bowled middle stump whilst confidently removing my bat from harm’s way for Penshurst against Tunbridge Wells back in 1993. And “Never try to take a catch with your forehead” applies now as much as it did when I inadvertently headed the ball towards extra cover whilst wicketkeeping in an under-10 match in 1984.

“Catches win matches” is still true more often than it is false, as Pakistan must now be prepared to testify under oath, and Hashim Amla’s first-ball-of-the-match short-leg miracle/masterpiece may prove to have been the decisive moment of the game. It was, by some distance, the best catch of the decade so far. Possibly of the millennium. Possibly of the post-Jurassic era.

South Africa should win this Test, and gain the drawn series that even the barmiest and most militaristic of England’s Barmy Army would concede that Smith and his men deserve on the evidence of the series so far. The excellent pitch has produced outstanding fast bowling, and England’s top-order fragility and carelessness, which seems to shift between their players like an unwanted and over-conversational market researcher at a funeral party, was exposed. They lost in the West Indies because of it, and won the Ashes despite it, so a draw in South Africa would be fair enough.

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In the third instalment of his World Cricket Podcast, comedian Andy Zaltzman wonders whether it is logistically possible for Graeme Smith to play an elegant shot, dives into history to find one of the dullest Test series ever, lauds Pakistan cricket for imploding like the supernova that it is, and nearly manages to get an Australian guest on his show.

Read the transcript of the podcast here

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

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	England's nerve-wracking draw in Centurion was pre-planned © Getty Images

Happy New Year, Confectionery Stallers, and welcome to a new year, a new decade (or the last year of an old decade, depending on your decade-defining proclivities). I am firmly in the New Decade camp, and so, I assume, is Jacques Kallis, if only so he can claim to be the 29th member of the highly exclusive club of players who have scored Test hundreds in three different decades.

(I have a full list of these 29 cricketing legends, but will not list them here for fear of antagonising my wife, who is anxious for me not to join the equally exclusive club of husbands who have spent excessive parts of two decades working out things on Statsguru. But a special mention for the great Indian batsman Vijay Merchant, who is the only man in the history of humanity to have scored just one Test century in three separate decades. Throw that little fact into your next conversation at work and see how people react. Hang on, I’m not quite finished with this one yet. If Kallis can somehow muster another five-wicket innings from his creaking limbs, he will become only the eighth bowler to take a five-for in three different decades, and join Kapil Dev as the only player to have both scored hundreds and taken five-fors in three decades. I’m done now.)

So impressive has Kallis been in this series that he must be starting to fancy his chances of becoming the first man to score hundreds in three different centuries – with modern science and training techniques, and Kallis’ unshakeable focus, it is entirely possible that he could still be churning the runs out in 2100.

The new year began well enough for both teams in Cape Town. England were strong throughout the first day, if a little lacking in old-ball penetration, and South Africa recovered with some style from a position where the series appeared to be heading decisively northwards.

After Durban, England fans had woken in the glorious dawn of a new year, rubbed their bleary faces, checked the second-Test scorecard they had printed out and hidden under their pillows, and murmured, “Did that really happen?” It was a performance almost devoid of flaws, and brought about England’s first innings victory over South Africa since 1964 (which itself had been so impressive that the prominent British poet Edith Sitwell felt compelled to die the following day at the age of 77).

One of the unavoidable medical side effects of modern sport-watching is feeling a faint but perceptible sensation of nausea and futility when hearing losing teams, captains and coaches desperately extracting spurious "positives" after being utterly defeated. A team will be walloped like a Victorian schoolboy, then hack away in the mineshaft of humiliation with the pickaxe of desperation in search of some flimsy nuggets of optimism to pass off as the pure gold of progress.

Therefore, in the wake of England’s spectacular Durban victory, I resolved to reverse this modern procedure, and attempt to find some equally spurious "negatives" to take from a magnificent all-round performance, as decisive and complete as any that England have concocted in recent years.

1. Kevin Pietersen’s enduring weakness against left-arm spin. It is almost reaching the stage where, as soon as the big man strides to the wicket, Graeme Smith will not merely bring Paul Harris straight on to bowl, but also tell Dale Steyn to try a few left-arm tweakers when Pietersen is on strike.

2. England’s two under-pressure batsmen, Alastair Cook and Ian Bell, were out in familiar fashion. Old repeated weaknesses resurfaced − Cook nibbled outside his off stump, Bell wafted airily. When will they rectify these flaws? Admittedly, they had both passed 100 at the time and played their best innings for a long time, but still, let’s clutch at these negative straws at this time of unadulterated positivity.

3. Catching. England only took seven catches in the match. That might have been sufficient to win by a colossal margin in Durban, but the statistics show that most Tests are won by teams taking more than seven catches. Strauss should instruct his team not to appeal for lbws, and to avoid bowling batsmen out, in order to improve their catching stats, and thus, their chances of winning future matches.

4. England let South Africa off the hook. Steyn’s last-wicket stand with Makhaya Ntini in the first innings could have turned the game and series. It didn’t, because England responded superbly and destroyed their opponents comprehensively. But it could have done. So, although it transpired not to be a negative, it might have been one if the rest of the game had transpired completely differently.

5. JP Duminy outbowled Jimmy Anderson (3 for 89 versus 3 for 99 in the match). And Steyn scored more runs in the match that Jonathan Trott and Pietersen combined. If that keeps happening, England will lose more matches than they win.

6. Graeme Swann continues to perform alarmingly well. In little over a year, he has gone from being an unfulfilled talent to one of the world’s highest-value Test cricketers. He has become indispensable. If he were to pick up an injury, or accidentally sell his spinning finger on eBay, or be struck by a divine vision, retire from cricket and devote himself to the church, England’s plans would be in disarray.

So, in summary, it wasn’t all good. Nevertheless, Andy Flower and Andrew Strauss are proving to be a canny team. On the basis of their Ashes triumph at Lord’s, they had calculated, using mathematics and science, that England play their best only after narrowly avoiding defeat with a desperate last-wicket partnership. Therefore, in the final session in Centurion, England deliberately collapsed to the precipice of defeat, in order to be able to hang on for a draw, frustrate the South Africans, and march to Durban with momentum firmly stuffed into their cricket bags.

(Anyone allergic to spurious statistics please skip the following paragraphs.)

By my calculation, aided as ever by my loyal helper, confidant and soulmate, Statsguru, England have now successfully relied on their 10th-wicket pair to bat them to safety in a Test on six occasions. Their record in the subsequent matches is impressive – four thumping wins (Lord’s and Durban this year, plus an eight-wicket triumph against South Africa in 1998, and a 217-run win over West Indies after their famous Cowdrey’s-arm-in-plaster Lord’s escape in 1963), plus one draw (in Sri Lanka in 2003-04), and one defeat, which barely counts as it occurred in the first Ashes Test of 1968, months after England had clung on for a draw in the final Test of the 1967-68 series in the Caribbean.

You cannot argue with that form-line, and bearing in mind that England had just four last-wicket-saviours in their first 886 Tests, but have since had two in their last seven, I defy any statistician to claim that these narrow escapes were not entirely deliberate. Both, after all, were spectacularly manufactured on dead pitches which appeared to have made a draw inevitable.

I fully expect Graham Onions and James Anderson to bat England to another fingertip draw in Cape Town on Thursday, before Strauss and his men romp to victory in the final Test.

(Statisticophobes may now return to the blog.)

The decade also began well for Pakistan, and in particular for Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Sami, who for differing reasons and in different ways were among the biggest underachievers of the 2000s. Asif’s class has never been in doubt, but how can the Sami who reduced Australia to 10 for 3 with devastating pace and movement be the same Sami who has the second-highest Test bowling average out of the 401 men to have taken more than 40 Test wickets, superior only to renowned strike bowler Sachin Tendulkar (whose batting stats are somewhat superior to Sami’s by way of compensation)?

Australia’s season continues in its curious vein, with just one century in four-and-a-half Tests, and that scored despite Shane Watson’s heroic efforts in Melbourne to get out in the 90s and thus continue his team’s stupendous run of failing to score hundreds.

When most players would have selfishly smashed their way through the nineties towards personal glory, Watson thought only of his team, and prodded and poked for what seemed like days, before finally spooning a dolly to cover on 99, mindful that Australia had lost the Ashes despite scoring eight hundreds to England’s two. Sadly, he had not legislated for Abdur Rauf’s buttery fingers, the triumphant run of 20 unconverted half-centuries was tragically broken, and, inevitably, Australia collapsed in a heap next time they batted.

Next time: The latest and now slightly belated year-by-year highlights of the last decade. (I haven’t forgotten about them. I’m just trying to remember them.) And look out for the next podcast later in the week.

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