Bear facts: New South Wales’ finest pose with a somewhat hirsute training partner © New South Wales Cricket Association

Hello, Confectionery Stallers. As you read this, I am attempting to convert Southern Italy to cricket and/or discussing with my wife and children over a few plates of pasta the likely outcome of the forthcoming epoch-defining two-Test series between England and Bangladesh that will bring the planet to a standstill from Thursday. (That was poorly phrased – I did not mean that I will be discussing the Tests with someone whilst my family are suspended in mid-air from the ceiling of a nice trattoria. Let me be quite clear on that. That will almost certainly not happen, provided they behave and listen to my analysis of Junaid Siddique’s technical shortcomings.)

In the meantime, here is the first Official Confectionery Stall Q&A, in response to your responses to my Elvis-style Comeback Special blog last week.

Question (posted by “Circe”):
Do you think Sachin Tendulkar can beat Vishy Anand (or maybe Veselin Topalov) at chess? What do you think his fans think? What do they really think? What does David Cameron think?

Zaltzmanswer:
Tendulkar can and would beat Anand at chess. Whilst I have no idea whether Tendulkar even knows the rules of chess, I am confident that Anand’s legendary concentration would be broken by his being fully star-struck in the presence of the little maestro at his table. Especially if Tendulkar was padded up, wearing a helmet and brandishing a bat (coincidentally, the exact attire worn by Emanuel Lasker when he defeated Wilhelm Steinitz to become world chess champion in 1894). Anand would forget all about his Napoleonic openings, Bogoljubov defences and Falkbeer countergambits (thank you, Wikipedia), and try to ask Tendulkar about his greatest moments as a cricketing megastar. Tendulkar, who must be used to sledging, would ignore Anand and remain focused on the game, leading the champion chess wiz to resign in frustration and ask Tendulkar to autograph his bishops.

Tendulkar’s chances against Topalov would not be so good. Bulgaria’s Topalov is a renowned cricket-hater ever since he went to the circus in Sofia as a child. Due to a mix-up with bookings, instead of the circus Topalov saw Chris Tavare presenting a three-hour seminar on the forward-defensive, whilst Kent were deducted 16 County Championship points for sending out a performing rhinoceros and a trapeze artiste to open the batting against Middlesex at Canterbury.

David Cameron thinks that either Anand or Tendulkar could win, even though three weeks ago he was publicly adamant that Anand was useless at chess and wouldn’t stand a chance against Sachin.

Question (posted by Mick):
Here's a question for you: are you ever going to finish that "greatest moments of the decade" thing you started but only got up to 2003? Also, if they manage to succeed in human cloning, which former English cricketer would you like to see brought back from DNA? WG Grace or Douglas Jardine, perhaps? And which cricketer would make a good stand-in PM for England given your current political madness?

Zaltzmanswer:
I’ll answer those in turn.

(A) Ah, yes, er, sure I’ll finish it, I just don’t want to rush into it and accidentally pick moments which were not actually “the greatest”. By which I mean, thanks for the reminder. I may finish it. But given that England won a tournament whilst it remained unfinished, I may sit on it for a few more decades.

(B) Regarding a former England star to recreate in a laboratory, it would have to be 19th-century grinder William Scotton. His Wisden obituary stated that “he carried caution to such extremes that it was often impossible to take any pleasure in seeing him play”. In fact, his batting was so ceaselessly tedious that he committed suicide in 1893. It is not clear whether or not this was during an especially painstaking innings, but it remains a rather extreme method of making yourself a more interesting cricketer.

I would bring Scotton back to life, build a net with a bowling machine in a secret location, kidnap Gary Kirsten, and force the South African Beethoven Of Bore to watch Scotton block it for the next 10 years. I would treat Kirsten humanely and keep him well fed and watered, with internet access to communicate with his family, but I would make him sit through every single ball of Scotton’s decade-long vigil. And at the end of it, I would say to Kirsten: “Now you know how I felt after your double-century at Old Trafford in 1998.”

(C) Shahid Afridi. That would get the kids interested in politics again.

QUESTION (posted by Graham Bingham):
Which cricketer (past, current or future) do you think would have the best chance in a fight with a bear?

Zaltzmanswer:
This is a very difficult question to answer. The obvious temptation is to say England’s Alistair Cook, who tends to look awkward even when creaming the ball to all parts, and when struggling for form bats as if he is being attacked by a bear. He would therefore be better equipped to fight an actual bear than most international cricketers.

Other candidates include: Douglas Jardine, who would irritate the bear with his haughty manner and have no qualms about using dubious tactics to win (or at least asking Harold Larwood to do so); Merv Hughes, who may have actually been a bear (and recent scientific tests suggest that he shares 98% of the same DNA as a bear); and Bhagwath Chandrasekhar, who took his six pet grizzly bears with him on all his tours with India (“I can’t spin the ball if I don’t know they’ve had their lunch and a good snooze,” he once said tearfully after a careless Edgbaston groundsman let them loose onto the streets of Birmingham).

QUESTION (posted by Aidan):
Andy, with the recent success of the South Africa A-England coalition in the ICC World Twenty20, is this the birth of a "New Cricket"?

Zaltzmanswer:
Yes. The first international limited-overs tournament occurred in 1975, the year after the last UK hung parliament. England proceeded not to win a tournament until just days after the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was formalised. This cannot be coincidence. Clearly, English cricketers can only perform (in the shorter forms of the game) under a compromise administration. It makes them feel safe and wanted. So with Prime Minister Cameroniclegg’s “New Politics” changing the democratic landscape of Britain, we can also say that Collingwood’s triumphant South Africa-tinged England represent “New Cricket”.

England have long utilised foreign labour in their national cricket team – WG Grace famously once kidnapped the Australian player Billy Midwinter, and recently unearthed MCC papers suggest that WG himself was in fact originally an Italian chef called Luigi who was found chained to a lamp post in Gloucester, wearing a fake beard, after a stag night in 1865. He escaped jail and potential deportation to a colony only by agreeing to make up the numbers for the county team the next day after the opening batsman died of scurvy. And the rest is heavily bearded history.

I hope that resolves your queries. Please leave any further questions you would like me to answer in the comments section underneath this blog, and I will answer them on my return to Cricketland.

Comments (35) | Q&A

	I shall calculate the length of the shadow cast by my hand and divide it by the number croissants I had for breakfast, and voila, we have a target © Getty Images

What days we have been living through. A coalition government is in putative charge for the first time since Geoff Arnold used to open the bowling for the country – can you imagine a cricketer with Arnold’s admirably defiant lack of personal-grooming products being allowed near the England dressing room today? David Cameron has taken the keys to Number 10, a man marketed by some media acolytes as Britain’s answer to Obama. An independently wealthy Old Etonian Oxford graduate reaching the highest office in the land – they said it would never happen in our lifetimes. There is hope for us all.

But these momentous events were as nothing to the seismic jolt that blasted England’s conception of itself to smithereens, like a vintage Waqar Younis yorker splintering a nervous tailender’s big toe. In a post-imperial, globalising, technological age, the old certainties of what it meant to be English have been tossed around in the tumble dryer of progress. But one immutable national trait has remained steadfast through the baffling transformations of the modern age – an indefatigable, almost fundamentalist, ineptitude at limited-overs cricket. Now even this one beacon of reliability, this solitary undeflatable rubber dinghy on the stormy boating lake of change, has been cruelly snatched from us by a ruthless fortnight of powerful, focused and consistent cricket.

I exaggerate, of course. Slightly. But, from the beginning of the Super Eights, England barely wobbled in their progress towards their first-ever world limited-overs gong. After formulating a strategy of Machiavellian brilliance – picking lots of batsmen who can thwack the ball hard – Collingwood’s team were Australianically dominant.

There was never even the slightest hint that they would find a way to concoct a defeat. Clearly, England have been recruiting the right type of South Africans.

England thus became the third different winner of the three World Twenty20 tournaments over three years, and the last of the eight major Test nations to reach a semi-final in the shortest form of the international game. Pakistan have reached three semi-finals, Australia and Sri Lanka two, and the other five teams one each. There is no real pattern emerging yet, and no dominant force – by contrast, the World Cup has been dominated successively by West Indies (two wins and a losing final in the first three competitions) and Australia (four wins out of five finals in the last six tournaments). Long may it remain so.

The one unifying feature of the winning teams at the World Twenty20 has been that they have hit a streak of form for 10 days once the Super Eight stage begins. This contrasts with the 50-over World Cup, which is essentially a test of which team goes least mad sitting in a hotel room for six skull-crushingly tedious weeks, playing a bit of mostly meaningless cricket once every five or six days. This format evidently suits the Australian psyche extremely snugly.

Here’s a slightly curious fact for you, Confectionery Stallers. The champion World Twenty20 teams between them have won two out of six group matches – India sneaked through with a washout and a bowl-out win against Pakistan in 2007, Pakistan were clobbered by England then defeated the Netherlands last year, and England lost a titanic opening-match struggle with the Duckworth-Lewis method before being rained through to the second phase whilst defending an unimposing 120 against Ireland. So it seems that starting the tournament shakily is a prerequisite for ultimate triumph, which, once all the teams realise this, could make for some highly entertaining anti-cricket in the group stage next time round in 2012.

(Duckworth-Lewis clearly needs some tinkering in its Twenty20 incarnation. It generally functions fairly when rain interrupts in 50-over cricket, but in the 20-over game, it seems to involve the umpire dropping a calculator into a pint of ram’s blood, then jumping up and down on it, thinking about what Salvador Dali would have been like if he’d been Freddie Trueman instead, holding his breath for two minutes whilst growling, and then saying the first number that comes into his head.)

Thank you for your questions in response to last week’s blog. Having been divorced from cricket by the election for too long, I am now going away with the family for a week’s holiday in a non-cricketous country, but I have responded to some of your queries, and my factually and legally incontrovertible answers will be posted here next week.

Comments (14) | ICC World Twenty20

	England: unconscionably heroic at the World Twenty20 © Getty Images

Hello Confectionery Stallers, and apologies for my long break from the hallowed virtual turf of Cricinfo. I have been immersed in my other life as a political comedian, attempting to mine comedy and/or sense (preferably both, but often neither) from the chaos of the British general election. With this nation now retreating from the verge of civil war, and with the prospect of the Russians taking advantage of a few days’ political uncertainty to launch a blitzkreig occupation of these shores now mercifully receding, I can turn my attention back to where it belongs and naturally resides – cricket.

My various commitments over recent weeks (the only time in my career that being a political comedian has meant that I got more work, rather than less) meant that on Monday I watched my first cricket since March. What a pleasant surprise to discover that England are currently not rubbish at a form of limited-overs cricket. Not even close. A well-balanced team, well-selected, with potential boundary-smiters throughout the batting order – something must be about to go horribly wrong.

Miraculously, despite the news of a hung parliament emerging from last week’s election, England have played their best tournament cricket for years. They have been so focused and clinical that one can only conclude they had not seen the apocalyptic newspaper agitations or cold-sweat-mongering Conservative election advert warning that an indecisive election result would lead to unstoppable and absolute national meltdown, as sure as night follows day, as sure as controversy follows umpire Daryl Harper, as sure as the words “was out for nought” follow the name “Chris Martin” in a reports of a New Zealand innings.

For Collingwood and his troops to focus on cricket when the nation they represent was on the brink of literally splintering into tiny shards of island that would float aimlessly around the North Atlantic for the rest of time can only be considered truly heroic. Either that or they patriotically steeled themselves to provide Britain as a whole with a shimmering shaft of light in the unremitting gloom of Westminster uncertainty.

(There have been the usual intermittent grumblings that the England team is not as English as would be ideal, having harvested a number of their team from various other countries. Surely, however, a national sports team has a duty to reflect the country it represents. And Britain as a whole is now an importing nation, not a manufacturing one. If anything, the make-up of the England XI is a satirical comment on the country’s industrial decline, rather than a systemic failure to produce homegrown talent and an overenthusiastic use of current ICC qualification regulations.)

So, with the election and its aftermath finally over, I can mercifully resume my Confectionary Stall duties. I have not even looked anything up on Statsguru for about six weeks – my longest “dry” period since I discovered it. It may take me some time to readjust to normal life. A month of pure, concentrated, unadulterated democracy is enough to break almost any human being, and I am in need of some spiritual fumigation. I hope cricket can provide that.

I will try to post shorter, more regular blogs. And I will also do occasional question-and-answer blogs, so if you have a query about cricket to which you would like me to invent an answer, please post a message below this. It has been good to write at you again.

Comments (27) | England