Tim Murtagh finds out giant antacids cannot be used to bounce out a batsman © PA Photos

Hello again, Confectionery Stallers. Break out your picnic baskets, don your sombreros, and ring work to tell them you’re feeling a bit ill and will be off sick for the next six months − the English domestic season has begun.

Admittedly, it began yesterday in what traditionalists would vociferously bark was (a) the wrong month, (b) the wrong country, and (c) the wrong weather. And, most unarguably, (d) with the wrong ball – as Gubby Allen would no doubt have said about the pink curiosity that has been used in the March sunshine in Abu Dhabi: “Never play cricket with something that looks like a prescription drug elephants might take for long-standing digestive problems.”

At least the season began with the traditional number of people taking the blindest bit of notice. The county cricket season, like middle age, is something that creeps up on the consciousness gradually, imperceptibly, almost furtively. Some seasons pass by almost completely unnoticed – there is still little concrete proof that the 1998 domestic summer actually happened. The schedule generally splats indecipherably onto the calendar as if it had been typed onto an orange and hurled by an unusually irate chimpanzee.

All this before the commemorative highlights DVD of England’s triumphant victory in Bangladesh has even been released, or the avalanche of ghost-written player diaries has hit the shelves. Whether The James Tredwell Story will sell as well as the Freddie Flintoff tomes that flew into Britain’s bookshops at the speed of agitated light in 2005, remains to be seen.

Tredwell’s first-Test substitute appearance – a formidable one-handed diving catch seconds after trotting onto the field of play – merits a chapter in itself. Not all subs make such an impact. I once played in a match in which the opposition loaned my team a fielder to cover for a latecomer. The substitute took a fine catch to dismiss his own captain, then hurled the ball in the air, whooped with delight, and started high-fiving us, his temporary, surrogate team-mates. Which suggested that all was not harmonious in the opposition dressing room.

England duly completed their almost unavoidable 2-0 series win. On the scale of great human achievements, this ranks some way below Beethoven’s symphonies and the plays of Shakespeare, and some way above balancing a pencil on your head for 15 seconds without it falling off, or making a sandwich. It was fine. Not great, not bad.

The pitches were difficult for bowlers and spectators alike, and Bangladesh have the strongest batting line-up in their short and unglamorous history, but England should nevertheless be a little concerned that their seam attack finished with comfortably the worst-ever collective series average (40.70) against Bangladesh.

But the Tigers’ bowling “attack” is still, by Test standards, cannon fodder, and England were startlingly cautious at times, as if nervously trying to defuse a loaf of bread. In the second Test, they scored the third slowest team innings of 350 or more against Bangladesh, featuring two of the five slowest ever innings of 50 or more against them (Tim Bresnan’s careful 91 came in a creditable fifth, and Jonathan Trott’s study in passivity was second only to Nasser Hussain’s achingly constipated six-hour 76 in Chittagong in 2003, an innings that had the physio sending out bags of dried apricots to loosen things up.)

For the home team, the dream of winning Test matches (without the aid of civil war in West Indian cricket) remains distant, but their batting, and pancake-flat pitches, suggest that the goal of at least emerging with occasional draws is now achievable. In Dhaka, they recorded their highest match aggregate, and saw four players pass 50 in an innings for only the second time.

No. 8 was a particularly fruitful position for Bangladesh, with scores of 79, 36, 59 not out and 28. It has been a vintage millennium so far for Test No. 8s, who have averaged close to 23.5, 15% above the figure for the previous millennium (which itself had smashed the preceding millennium’s record).

Much of this improvement is due to Daniel Vettori. Now promoted to No. 6, Vettori has completed his transformation from useful tailender (averaging 16 in his first 46 Tests), to fully qualified batsman (averaging 42 in his last 54). His bowling average, interestingly, was 33 in that first period of his career, and has remained 33 ever since, as he has mutated into the Wilfred Rhodes New Zealand cricket had been waiting for ever since, well, ever since Wilfred Rhodes was born in England and failed to emigrate to New Zealand.

Vettori can lay an almost legally binding claim to being the greatest No. 8 in Test history. He recently overtook Shane Warne as the highest scorer at that position of all time, with 2072 runs at an average of 42 – higher than the career Test averages of, amongst others, Mark Waugh, Dilip Vengsarkar, Herschelle Gibbs, Andy Zaltzman, Alec Stewart, Lalit Modi (sue me if it’s not true), Chris Gayle, Marilyn Monroe and Monty Panesar. He has also scored three centuries and 13 half-centuries batting at 8, both records. And, to prove that he is not a specialist No. 8, he also holds the record for most runs scored by a No. 9 (1075). The man is a true allrounder.

An all-time XI of highest scorers in each position reads as follows: 1. Gavaskar, 2. Hayden, 3. Ponting, 4. Tendulkar, 5. Steve Waugh, 6. Steve Waugh, 7. Gilchrist, 8. Vettori, 9. Vettori, 10. Waqar Younis, 11. Muralitharan.

A strong team, certainly, but whether Vettori and Vettori could combine effectively as a spin-bowling partnership is open to doubt, and there may be an awkward personality clash between the two Steve Waughs, particularly when one (the captain) asks the other (the vice-captain) to open the bowling.

It seems that the end may be nearing, however, for another Kiwi tail-end stalwart. Chris Martin has served New Zealand nobly with the ball, but he has served humanity heroically with the bat. In an age of increased professionalism and coaching, Martin has clung to his batting ineptitude with the pride and dedication of a true imperfectionist.

He has hit 12 fours in a decade-long Test career, amassing 84 runs at an average of 2.15. No Test batsman has failed with such bloody-minded persistence, an inspiration to those of us who can only dream of playing international cricket, but who can secretly (or publicly) reassure ourselves that, if we played 56 Tests, we might not take the 181 wickets Martin has notched on his bedpost, but we would have a fighting chance of scoring at least 85 runs.

Meanwhile, in the IPL, well, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what is going on. I have tried to get into it, readers, but I have failed. Yesterday, I switched my television on, and within five minutes I had seen David Warner reach a hundred and clout some sixes, David Hussey take an extraordinary boundary-defying catch, some pretty women dancing around with almost authentic enthusiasm, and at least 150 different logos. But I still cannot force myself to care genuinely who wins, or why. Possibly because of the logos.

Comments (34) | England in Bangladesh 2010

There is danger in watching Yusuf Pathan hit sixes, even from the comfort of your couch. Be warned. Also some fun Bangladesh stats, interviews with Alex Bowden and Justin Hamilton, and more lies about cricketers, including a shocking one about Alan Davidson and lettuce.

Read the transcript of the podcast here

Download the podcast here (mp3, 13.5MB, right-click to save).

Comments (4) | World Cricket Podcast

	When will Younis Khan and Mohammad Yousuf return? Tomorrow? Never? Yesterday? © AFP

Another week, another dose of the crazy virus runs through Pakistan cricket − their two best batsmen banned indefinitely for bickering like schoolgirls (not the official PCB wording), two more seasoned internationals jettisoned for a year, Afridi on probation for mistaking the ball for a toffee apple, and the Akmals told off for being naughty. All of which will, apparently, “go a long way to arrest the continuing decline of Pakistan cricket and improve the state of cricket in Pakistan” (official PCB wording).

This may appear to the layman to be akin to claiming that chopping your arms off will improve your juggling, but, Pakistani cricket being Pakistani cricket, it might just work.

The PCB, making a bid to be the first sporting body to be fully accepted as members of the surrealist art movement (at least since the days when Salvador Dali was president of The International Melting Hedgehog Tennis Association), emphasised that Younis and Yousuf can be recalled “as and when the PCB deems appropriate”.

Given the consistency of its decision-making, this could easily be tomorrow, or never, or yesterday. It might even invent a new month in which they can play. Or say that there will be certain games in which the banned players are eligible to participate, but no-one else is. Or insist on certain stipulations before they are readmitted – Younis will be eligible to play, but only if he’s wearing a 1920s silk ballgown, while Yousuf will be selected on the strict condition that he agrees to do all the cooking and laundry for the rest of the squad, and reads Salman Butt a bedtime story every night. Afridi can play as long as he’s not in the stadium where the game is taking place, Shoaib Malik has to wear a Stetson when fielding, and the Akmal brothers will face a ban if at any time in the next two years they smile while batting.

Afridi, of course, gets into trouble with the frequency that most people get into their pyjamas. There are rumours that, as a controlled experiment, the PCB once locked Afridi alone in a secret dungeon for a month. When he emerged, the ICC gave him a three-match ban. No-one knows what it was for, but no-one seemed to think it was unjustified.

One can only feel sorry for Shoaib Akhtar – who would have thought it possible that the Rawalpindi Write-Off would miss out on the most explosive disciplinary action in Pakistan cricket history? He must be seething at the injustice of it all. “Why not me?” he must be shouting to the heavens. “What did I not do wrong?”

Clearly, the PCB know Pakistani cricket as well as anyone, and have worked out that cataclysmic upheaval is the most likely means of ensuring success in the imminent World Twenty20. The rest of the cricket world would already have been wary of Pakistan, following last year’s spectacular success in England, and their disappointing recent performances which suggested that an outbreak of form was lurking around the corner. Now, with a brutal cull of some of their leading cricketing icons, a team left leaderless, shorn of experience, and fearing for its future, they will be unbeatable.

I love Pakistan cricket. I love its passion, its panache, its style, its unpredictability, its power and vulnerability, and its superhuman capacity to explode and implode, often simultaneously. It would be nice, however, if its myriad excitements were let loose more often on the field of play than off it.

All of this somewhat overshadowed the heroic efforts of Raqibul Hasan to launch Bangladesh as a rival to Pakistan in the cricketing derangement stakes. Raqibul, 22, shocked the cricketing world by retiring before most of the cricketing world had even noticed he’d started playing. He had been picked in the squad for today’s first Test, and thus must have become the first sportsman in history to resign in protest at himself being selected.

This is a slight inconvenience for the home team, but not as much of an inconvenience as their historic inability not to be soundly demolished every time they take to the field of play.

However, this is be a more competent and confident Bangladesh team than its predecessors. When England last played Bangladesh, in 2005, the tail seemed to begin shortly before the openers walked to the wicket. Now, however, England’s injury-strewn bowlers will face a useful and improving batting line-up. Bangladesh’s batsmen have already equalled their record number of international centuries in a year – six (four in Tests, two in ODIs) – scored by five different players, against England, New Zealand and India. That is as many hundreds against the major international teams as they had managed in the previous four years.

The bowling, however, remains a problem. Bangladesh’s bowlers began this year by skittling (in Bangladesh terms at least) the mighty Indians for 243 in the first Test in Chittagong. However, in their five innings since then, they have seen their opponents declare four times, and the exception being when India’s openers heroically chased down a target of 2 to win in Dhaka.

Since Bangladesh were donated Test status, top six batsmen against them have averaged 58, and scored a century every six innings – which equates almost exactly to Garfield Sobers’ overall Test record. Which either means that every single top six batsman who has faced Bangladesh is as good as Sobers was, or that Bangladesh’s bowlers have been less good than those whom Sobers faced. Probably the latter.

Why then, you may well ask, are England even contemplating starting the match with only four bowlers, two of whom are Test novices, and one of whom was recently injured, as predicted yesterday by no less a source than Cricinfo’s official preview?

It would make close to 0% sense for England to select such a team, particularly given the following considerations:

1: England's strong tail – who, if the predicted line-up of Broad, Bresnan, Swann and Tredwell is correct, all average mid-20s in first-class cricket.

2(a): England have taken 20 wickets in just six of their last 21 Tests...

2(b): And they have bowled their opponents out twice just five times in their 27 overseas Tests since 2005 (28 if you include the 10-ball abandonment in Antigua a year ago, which seems a trifle harsh, as expecting a team to take 20 wickets in 10 balls, at an even-better-than-Waqar-at-his-peak strike-rate of 0.5 balls per wicket, is something even Kim Jong Il would not demand of the North Korean 1st XI) (and in any case England’s bowlers bowled none of those 10 balls).

3: Two of those bowlers have never played an overseas Test.

4: England are much more likely to need tall young fast bowler Finn than not-very-young top-order batsman Carberry in future Tests.

4 (subconsideration 1): Particularly next winter in Australia.

5: Bangladesh have bowled their opponents out twice just four times in their 64 Tests – twice against an understrength Zimbabwe, twice against a sub-understrength ‘West Indies’.

6: For all their laudable and promising recent improvement, Bangladesh have avoided defeat just nine times in 64 Tests – including three wins against weak opposition, plus four rain-affected draws.

7: Anything other than a victory would rightly be considered a failure.

7 (appendix A): And having forgotten to take their captain with them, they simply must win, or Strauss’ sabbatical will look even ruder and sillier than it is.

England should be strong enough to prevail in any case, but playing four bowlers would maximise their chances of not winning.

(As I finished writing this blog, with the game about to start, England announced their team, which does contain only four bowlers, but with Finn instead of Tredwell from the Cricinfo Prediction XI. Therefore, considerations 4 and 4 (subconsideration 1) no longer apply. And consideration 1 is very, very slightly moderated – if England find themselves in need of crucial runs from Swann at No. 10, I expect the ECB to be phoning the PCB for some advice on how to galvanise an underperforming team.)

Comments (45) |

The reincarnation of Phil Tufnell, the age at which cricketers average the highest, a super one-question quiz, more stats than you can shake a stick at, lies about cricketers, and the first in the Annoying Things About Cricket series. Truly, we are blessed

Read the transcript of the podcast here

Download the podcast here (mp3, 6669kb, right-click to save).

Comments (12) | World Cricket Podcast

	The moustache has it: as his facial hair bloomed, so did Graham Gooch’s average © Getty Images

Hello Confectionery Stallers. I have been busily mining some Tendulkar statistics for you, only to find that I had been beaten to it by Cricinfo’s Caesar Of Statistics, S Rajesh, in this as-always illuminating piece on the Mumbai Marvel’s recent renaissance.

This reached a stunning peak with his historic one-day double-hundred in Gwalior last week – a useful innings in anyone’s book, in which he scored as many hundreds as England have managed in their last 23 one-day internationals over 15 months (and more double-hundreds than everyone on the planet had managed in the previous 51,478 one-day international innings).

So I had to excavate deeper in the seam of statistics with some special industrial stat-mining equipment, which I drilled directly through my computer screen until some numbers splurted out.

As he reached 200, Tendulkar passed the 31,054 international runs landmark. Narrowly – he’s now on 31,055, which is more than 6000 ahead of second-placed Ricky Ponting, and 31,055 more than the entire Zaltzman family combined. He also extended his lead at the top of the international centuries chart to 25 (he has 93 to Ponting’s trifling 68; next come Lara on 53 and Kallis on 50, with all Zaltzmans lagging behind morosely on 0; and no one else has even scored half as many as Tendulkar).

History suggests that the records will keep tumbling. They are now mostly his own records – Tendulkar can barely breathe without breaking some kind of world best. In fact, he literally cannot breathe without breaking a record – with 609 international appearances under his golden belt, he has, one assumes, breathed more often on an international cricket field that any other cricketer. (With the possible exception of England legend and notorious oxygen fan Herbert Sutcliffe, also known as “Hyperventilating Herbert”, who averaged around 200 breaths per minute throughout his Test career. The story goes that Sutcliffe believed that rapid breathing conveyed a sense of nervousness through the arms into the wood of the bat, making the blade tense up, and thus hit the ball further.) (The contents of the previous parenthesis are not entirely true.)

Tendulkar is now approaching his 37th birthday, meaning he will have 10 fewer candles on his cake this year than Test hundreds on his CV. As soon as Graham Gooch turned 37 in July 1990, he promptly smashed 333 against India at Lord’s, in the infant Tendulkar’s first Test in England, in which he took a catch from another universe to dismiss Allan Lamb.

Before that innings, Gooch had averaged 37 and scored just nine hundreds in 78 Tests, punctuated by periods of poor form, technical imperfections, bans, self-imposed exile, and nagging doubts over exactly how bushy his moustache should be. After reconciling himself that it should be, and remain, “very bushy”, Gooch had an extended late blooming, averaging 51 over 40 Tests, with 11 more centuries.

So, using mathematics, the deceitful she-devil, if Tendulkar achieves proportionately an identical improvement after his 37th birthday to Gooch’s, he will over the remainder of his career play 85 more Tests, and hit 57 more Test centuries whilst averaging 75. Beware, bowlers of the world, the best may be yet to come. If Graham Gooch proves to be a scientifically accurate predictor for how batsmen perform after the age of 37. And if Tendulkar is prepared to grow his whiskers.

The delight all cricket fans must feel at Tendulkar catapulting himself back to the summit of the game is enhanced by the extent and duration of his mid-career slump. I would argue that it extended way beyond even the two-year 2005-06 period Mr Rajesh details. Over half a decade − from the start of India’s disastrous two-Test humiliation in New Zealand in December 2002, to the beginning of the 2007-08 series in Australia – if you exclude two boot-filling short series against Bangladesh, Tendulkar averaged just 38.49 in 35 Tests. The cricketing immortal was rubbing statistical shoulders with the likes of Asanka Gurusinha and Craig MacMillan.

If we discount all Tests against the average-camouflagingly weak Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, Tendulkar had the 45th best Test batting average during this period (including only batsmen who played in 10 or more Tests). Here’s proof.

He scored only three centuries against the older Test nations – two of which came in successive Tests early in 2004, when he scored 241 not out and 60 not out in Sydney, then 194 not out in Multan. Either side of that short but floridly purple patch, the little master’s Bangladesh-excluding average over five whole years was an almost Ramprakashistic, sub-Azhar-Mahmoodian 29.

Tendulkar was aged between 29 and 34 during this underachieving span, an age when batsmen are generally thought to be at their peak.

(Here’s a little statistical teaser for you that my mining equipment chunked out from the cricket earth’s molten statistical core. What age is the highest-averaging age for Test batsmen? Take a guess, write it down, seal it in an envelope, hide it under your pillow, and wait for the answer to be revealed in this week’s World Cricket Podcast. If your answer is correct, you win this week’s star prize – the everlasting respect of the cricketing universe.)

Brian Lara had a similar career trough. After his stellar early years, culminating in a massive series in England in 1995, Lara averaged just 40 over six years between the ages of 26 and 32, before exploding back into greatness in Sri Lanka in 2001-02.

In this time, the Trinidad Trailblazer averaged over 50 in just two series out of 12 – a century-free rubber of steady scoring against England early in 1998, and his flabbergastingly brilliant single-handed demolition of McGrath, Gillespie, Warne and MacGill a year later. In the rest of his career he topped 50 in 15 of his 23 series.

How curious that the two greatest batsmen of their era should both have slumped significantly over a prolonged period during what should have been their best years, before resurging when they might have been expected to decline. Tendulkar’s elbow operation in May 2005 lies exactly in the middle of his five-year funk, and must be the major explanation for his temporary relapse into relative cricketing humdrummery, given the perfection of his technique and the equanimity of his temperament. Brian Lara’s slump can be attributed to the fact that he was Brian Lara.

These numerical rift valleys in otherwise Himalayan careers are perhaps bizarre anomalies, but not without precedent in the world of geniuses. Beethoven once spent five years writing nothing but advertising jingles for a horse insurance firm, French sculpture whiz Auguste Rodin locked himself away in a studio for the entire 1890s, and emerged having made a single papier-mache Mickey Mouse, and Shakespeare wrote As You Like It (my view of which may have been clouded by having it force-rammed down my throat as an A-level set text) (but only slightly clouded).

The answer to the highest-averaging age question, and related fascinations, will be revealed in this week’s World Cricket Podcast, which will also address issues ranging from England’s tour of Bangladesh, Australia’s jaunt to New Zealand, and the history of the appeal. Plus the latest in the completely unmissable Annoying Things About Cricket series. And some other stuff, if I think of it. And maybe an interview.

Comments (113) |