The Confectionery Stall Perth Test Diary. Written in London, from in front of a television

Day 1
England rampaged to within a millimetre of Ashes victory today, obliterating the Australians for a paltry 268 and then blasting their magnificent, golden-tinged way to an imposing 29 for 0 at close of play. If the Australian cricket team were the Labrador they have always dreamed of being, they would have been taken to a vet and humanely destroyed.

As England progress serenely to their inevitable triumph, there is an unusual feeling amongst England fans. This Ashes has been like watching a lion toying with a zebra-print balloon. Yes, you can still admire the majesty of the great beast, but it would be more interesting to see him decimate a worthier foe than the zebralloon.

Their imminent crushing victory will be so conclusive, routine and majestic as to become rather boring, and not a little awkwardly embarrassing. And the dark, dark Ashes years of 1989-2003 and 2006-07 are receding into the murky swamp of history, as if being tugged underneath by an unusually peckish shark.

Day 2
Morning session: A characteristically brilliant start by Cook and Strauss, surely now England’s greatest-ever pair of men, has put England in total, unremitting command of this game. Australia’s bowlers seem more likely to find the Pope hiding in Ricky Ponting’s kitbag than they do to take a wicket. In fact, it is all so one-sided, predictable and uninteresting that I think I’ll pop off for a quick snooze. I’ll just think of Geoff Marsh batting, that should do the zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Afternoon session: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzz zzzzzzzzzzz. Zzzz zzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Evening session: That was a good snooze. Hilfenhaus still has not taken a wicket since the first over of the series. Would you believe that? Phil Hughes looks all over the place. Ricky Ponting couldn’t hit an egg in a chicken enclosure at the moment. Finn should pitch it up a bit more. I can’t believe India played so poorly in South Africa – are these supposedly top-class batsman completely devoid of skill against the moving ball? England must be at least No. 2 in the world rankings now.

Day 3
I wonder what happens if you try to eat a sandwich whilst having a shower?

Day 4
It’s nearly Christmas. Yippee. Sounds like Ricky Ponting will have to play on with a broken finger. Ouch. Nothing is going right for him this series.

I’m taking the family to Rome tomorrow. I wonder if we’ll be able to catch the end of day five at the airport on the way out? Let’s hope so.

Comments (35) | Ashes

It might have escaped the attention of all but the most eagle-eyed English and Australian cricket followers, but the two best teams in the world are about to face off in a potentially titanic showdown to decide which is currently the greatest cricket team in the known universe.

Here in England, South Africa hosting India has not received quite the same media frenzy as the Ashes (or, as it is being officially renamed in Parliament this afternoon by the cross-party Committee for Premature Triumphalism, ‘The Heroic and Rightful English Vanquishment of All That is Baggy, Green or Evil in the World’). Not yet, anyway. It has some catching up to do.

It is, admittedly, understandable that the unofficial World Championship play-off has slipped under most English cricketing radars, amid the wild exultation about: (a) England being ahead in an away Ashes series for the first time since David Capel was still just a hopeful, Botham-resembling twinkle in the selectors’ eyes; (b) more importantly, after two Tests of an away Ashes series, England not being bent over a desk in Cricket Australia’s head office midway through a vigourous ceremonial spanking, for the first time since that 1986-87 triumph; and (c) England having gone ahead and, more importantly, not gone behind by absolutely shoeing their oldest rivals. And it was not merely a simple, regulation shoeing, but a shoeing administered with pointy steel toe-caps, stiletto heels and, to back it up, designer poison-tipped socks.

However, for those who have detected faint traces of the impending clash in South Africa, it is an enticing prospect, not least because this series will show how good MS Dhoni’s India really are. History does not bode well for them – they have won only one of their 12 Tests in the land that has produced so many fine English cricketers, a Sreesanth-inspired skittling of the hosts in the first Test in Johannesburg four years ago. And – strap in stats fans - of the 34 Indians who have played Tests in South Africa, only six have averaged higher than their career average.

Nor is it a particularly illustrious six. Leading the way is Kapil Dev, averaging 40 in his four Tests in South Africa, compared to his career figure of 31. Other than the great allrounder, the remaining five are: Dinesh Karthik (101 runs for once out in his solitary Test, boosting his career number to the undizzy heights of 27); Vikram Rathour, who qualifies only by having been marginally less useless in his two games in South Africa (averaging 16) than he was in his four other Tests (10.83, figures which one assumes he does not have immortalised in a commemorative tapestry above his bed); and hopeless tailenders Ventapathy Raju, VRV Singh and Ashish Nehra.

The giants of modern Indian batsmanship – Tendulkar, Dravid, Sehwag, Laxman, Ganguly and Azharuddin - have collectively averaged 34 in South Africa, compared with their overall combined average of 50. This will be an enormous and fascinating challenge for Dhoni’s team.

Before the Ashes, I ran a series of blogs detailing good and bad stats for the players on both sides. Thus far, England have lived up to the former, and Australia have lived down to the latter. If time permits this week, I will do the same for South Africa and India. I began by looking into Tendulkar’s almost unfathomably gigantic numbers.

Tendulkar is the hot favourite to win the race to 50 Test centuries. He needs one more, and now leads Ricky Ponting by 10, has left early pace-setter Don Bradman spluttering in the dust, seemingly unable to respond, and still leads the fast-closing Harbhajan Singh by 47. He also needs just five more centuries to reach a hundred hundreds in international cricket – unquestionably the mark of a pretty useful player.

He has emerged resplendently from his mid-decade slump to hit 12 centuries in his last 31 Tests, averages 63 in that period, and this year alone has close to 1400 runs at 82.

However, he averages just 38 against South Africa, as opposed to 59 against everyone else combined. His average against South Africa is the 79th best of all players since South Africa’s return to Test cricket after their little ‘ethical intermission’, and puts him some 56 runs per innings behind surprise leader - any guesses? – the Sri Lankan batting leviathan Farveez Maharoof.

Admittedly, Maharoof’s statistical sample (94 runs in four innings with three not outs) might not satisfy hardcore mathematicians, but who is to say that if the Colombo Clouter plays 22 Tests against South Africa like Tendulkar has, he will not still be averaging 94? The answer to that question is: anyone outside the most loyal and deluded members of the immediate Maharoof family. But the fact remains that, of the 99 top seven players who have played five or more Tests against South Africa since readmission, Tendulkar has the 43rd best average.

(In an intriguing quirk of fate that must cause unending tension at the family breakfast table, the players with the highest and lowest averages in this admittedly niche category are Andy (70) and Grant (11) Flower. No prizes for guessing who smugly snaffles the extra boerewors bap at their family barbecues.)

Moreover, this series has been extremely cleverly scheduled by South Africa. The first two Tests are in December, a month in which, over the course of his career, Tendulkar averages 47.5, and just 42.9 if you exclude his two December Tests against Bangladesh, one of which included an unbeaten 248. In the other 11 months of the year, his career average is 58.8 (57.6 excluding Bangladesh). This means that, in December Tests not against Bangladesh, he is 25% less effective than he is in the rest of the year.

And it is getting worse. Since 2002, excluding that mauling of Bangladesh, Tendulkar averages just 30 in December Tests. And this grievous problem is exacerbated when the opponents are South Africa – he averages a pitiful 24.3 against South Africa in December, compared to 43.4 against them in other months. Overall, this suggests that, when the greatest batsman of his era plays South Africa in December, he is only 42% of the player he usually is. (Please do not concern yourself with how I unearthed these statistics, nor with the effect they have had on my family life, or the way my wife looks at me when I’m using my computer.)

The only rational conclusion to this is that Tendulkar’s main – perhaps only – weakness as a batsman is, evidently, that he gets overexcited about Christmas. Indeed, if those last eight Christmases since 2002 are anything to go by, he finds it increasingly difficult to focus on his batting when he is thinking about what Santa Claus will bring, or has just brought, to him.

I realise that Tendulkar is not a Christian, but Christmas crosses religious boundaries these days, and you simply cannot argue with statistics. Or with the rumour that the South Africans have been leaving large, bulky presents in the Indian hotel with little tags reading “To Sachin”.

The stump microphone should provide fascinating listening this series. Prepare to hear the close-in fielders trying to distract the little master by saying: “So, Mr Tendulkar, do you think you’ll get that BMX bicycle you’ve always wanted this year? That would be awesome, wouldn’t it? You’d love to have that bike, eh?” Is this bad sportsmanship, or merely professionalism? In the modern game, when an opponent has an obvious weakness, you must exploit it. And if that means playing on Sachin Tendulkar’s uncontrollable giddiness about Christmas, then we must, regretfully, accept it.

Meanwhile, during the brief intermission in the Ashes, Australia have replaced one spinner widely viewed as neither experienced enough nor good enough with one who is even more inexperienced – so inexperienced, in fact, that no one can possibly know whether he is or isn’t good enough, so at least they have replaced an "X" with a "?" on their “Can these bowlers win us the Ashes?” quiz sheet.

If the Australian cricketing public were scratching their heads when Xavier Doherty was picked for Brisbane, they have been scalping themselves with a hacksaw at the selection of Michael Beer. Of course, Beer may even be dropped even before he plays, if Steven Smith is favoured by the selectors, whose current technique for picking their squad appears to involve drinking large quantities of absinthe, riding a quad bike into a wall as fast as possible, and saying the first name that comes into their heads. They have clearly read and learnt from 1980s England supremo Peter May’s influential academic paper, How To Utilise Selectorial Whims To Minimise The Effectiveness Of A Test Match Cricket Team.

Comments (227) | Tendulkar

One of England’s greatest all-round performances has left Australia needing to win two of the next three games against an England team which has lost only three of its 24 Tests since their Kingston debacle in the Strauss-Flower regime’s inauspicious debut game. The baggy greens (so called not due to their headgear, but because their captain’s face is becoming baggier by the session, and greener with envy every time he sees Graeme Swann bowl) will have to do so with a bowling attack that has thus far been historically inept – averaging 84 runs per wicket in the series, compared with its previous worst figure of 63. On current form, Australia appear to have as much chance of regaining the Ashes as Rolf Harris would have of beating Mozart in a concerto-composing competition.

Few England teams can ever have played a more complete match. It helped that they took as many wickets in the first ten minutes than Australia were able to take in 17 hours of bowling in Brisbane and Adelaide before they finally removed Alastair Cook. I think most England fans would have accepted the offer of Katich and Ponting lasting an average of half a ball each in the first innings (the first instance in Test history of a team’s Nos. 2 and 3 failing to last as many as two balls). As they would have accepted the offer of Cook scoring 450 runs in his first three innings, more than he had in his previous 17 Ashes innings put together.

After that initial Katich-and-Anderson-inspired blast, Strauss’s men were unrelenting with the ball on a mostly placid pitch, close to flawless in the field, and sadistic with the bat against bowlers who, by the end of England’s innings, were leaving the field at the end of their spells not for a rub-down from a masseur, but for a cuddle from their mummies. England were brilliant, ruthless and purposeful; Australia uncertain, undisciplined and brittle. At some point since 2006-07, the two nations have clearly participated in an adjective swapping programme.

Australia may find a barely edible morsel of hope from England’s performances following a similarly majestic thrashing of South Africa in Durban a year ago – they struggled to narrowly avoid defeat in Cape Town before being obliterated in Johannesburg. As a matter of considerable urgency, however, Australia will have to set their top scientists to work in a secret Frankenstein-style laboratory to create at least two artificial fast bowlers capable of taking 15 wickets for not many in not much time, as Steyn and Morkel did at the Wanderers.

One assumes that the scientists responsible for creating Xavier Doherty have been fired. Of the nine spinners Australia have tried since Warne finally hung up his wrist, only Hauritz has played more than four matches. If Doherty becomes the second, the Australian cricketing public will not be scratching their heads so much as chainsawing their scalps off. The Australian seamers have scarcely provided their beleaguered tweaker with the ideal canvas on which to display his skills, but a selection that appeared odd at the time is now looking like the cricketing equivalent of asking a kebab-shop chef who had sliced your doner quite neatly to step up a couple of levels and perform open-heart surgery on you.

This has all provided rather belated vengeance for similarly scorecarded drubbings meted out by the 1993 Australians at Lord’s and, Two tests later, Headingley. England changed six of their team between those two hoofings – will the Australian selectors attempt to match that? They and their team appear to have modelled their strategy and performance on 1993 England, so perhaps it is not out of the question.

England, meanwhile, merely need to avoid one of their occasional meltdowns – three of their four losses under Strauss-Flower have been by an innings, the other, against Pakistan at The Oval, involved losing their last seven wickets for 28 – to be almost certain of their third Ashes win in the last four series, and their fourth in the last 13.

To conclude, some more stats:

• Over the last two years, England have been anything but the world-class batting line-up they have appeared so far in this series. In their three previous major series, only Trott (50) had an average of over 40. The rest of England’s current top seven all averaged between 27 and 38 (with double-centurions Cook and Pietersen both below 30).

• England have posted six century partnerships in the first two Tests. This is more than they posted in any of their eight consecutive losing Ashes series from 1989 to 2002-03. Only once since Don Bradman retired in 1948 have England scored six or more century partnerships in an Ashes series and not won the series (1975). Their record for any Ashes series is nine, in the victorious campaigns of 1970-71, 1985 and 2005.

• England’s five centuries already equals their best in an Ashes series since 1986-87. They have only once lost an Ashes series in which they have scored more than five hundreds (1924-25).

• Shane Watson has reached 30 in all nine innings he has played against England, but has a highest score of 62. Marcus North, by contrast, has reached 30 in only three of his 11 Ashes innings, but has gone on to score two centuries and a 96. If Australia could find a way of surreptitiously swapping North for Watson when the latter reaches 30 – perhaps causing a distraction by making Doug Bollinger sprint naked onto the outfield and effecting the switchover whilst the umpires and England players ran for cover – they would have the new Don Bradman.

• This is the first Ashes series since 1938 that England have scored two double-centuries. Let us all hope and pray that Cook and Pietersen have not unwittingly uncorked another world war, like last time.

• England have not topped 500 in successive Ashes Tests since 1928-29. Stand back for yet another Wall Street Crash in a year or so.

Comments (40) | Ashes

Pay attention, Confectionery Stallers. I am about to tell you what will happen in the Adelaide Test. Admittedly, by the time you read this, what I am about to say will happen may already not have happened, or, at least, have started not happening. But, as I write it a couple of hours before play begins, it has not yet not happened, so it could still happen.

This will enable you to free up some extra family time by not having to watch my forecastings unfold live on your televisions (for any Europe-based readers following our continent’s greatest cricket team take on the best Australasia has to offer, I realise this freed-up family time may be in the middle of the night; your children may not appreciate being woken up at 2 o’clock in the morning to play Scrabble/arm-wrestle with Daddy/Mummy (delete as you wish), but during an Australian Ashes series, you must take such opportunities as they arise).

Before unveiling the official Confectionery Stall 2nd Test forecast, I should admit that my Ashes-predicting form has not, thus far, been especially incisive. Indeed, my own personal Ashes began almost as disastrously as Mitchell Johnson’s. I, too, was way off target. I watched the long-awaited opening-day skirmishes of the long-awaited first Test of this long-awaited series on the Test Match Sofa. During the lunch interval, I confidently predicted that Peter Siddle – who bowled reasonably in 2009, since when he had done little of note other than fail to remove his rather unnecessary facial topiary, and be injured − would pose little threat to England at any point in the series.

Good prediction, Andy. Bang, bang. Slight gap. Bang-bang-bang, bang. Nearly another bang. Six wickets for not many. There, in two stints of high-class fast-medium probery, went my chances of picking up next year’s Nobel Prize For Cricket Punditry.

In my defence, there was not exactly a chorus of disagreement from my fellow Sofa-sitters – “Are we talking about the same Peter Siddle?”, no-one asked. “The guy who has now limbered up in the morning session and is clearly about to scythe through England like a piping-hot chainsaw through suicidal butter?” they did not continue. In further mitigation, I also said that England might have more to fear from bowlers not playing in Brisbane − Bollinger, Ryan Harris, and, at a stretch, Lillee, or, at an even greater stretch, Lindwall (there’s no substitute for experience). So I was potentially not entirely wrong on that score.

Siddle’s hat-trick (unexpected on sofas on the other side of the equator as well judging by the pre-match build-up) was probably the best in the Ashes in terms of quality of batsmen splattered since England’s Jack Hearne catapulted Clem Hill, Syd Gregory and Monty Noble back to the Headingley pavilion in 1899. Sections of the Australian press have been arguing that, if the Australian selectors insist on having a batsman in the team with the initials MN who can send down a few tidy overs of spin, they might as well pick Noble in place of Marcus North. Some have even suggesting ex-Panamanian despot Manuel Noriega for the role ahead of the beleaguered offspinner who can intermittently bat a bit.

In an effort to replicate and invert my Siddlecasting blooper of last Thursday, I should now predict that, on Day 1 of the second Test, Jimmy Anderson will take 0 for 180 off 25 overs of needlessly short-pitched garbage described by Richie Benaud as “the worst thing I’ve seen in any medium since Tony Greig’s glove-puppet rendition of Verdi’s La Traviata in the MCG toilets in 1979”.

However, I will resist that temptation, and instead issue this forecast for England’s first Test match in Adelaide since 2002-03 (neither I nor anyone in my immediate family can remember any Ashes Test there in the interim, least of all one exactly four years ago culminating in the longest all-night cricket-watching waking nightmare of my entire life): England will absolutely not declare at 550-odd for 6, have Australia in trouble, let them off the hook by dropping Ponting, still not really being in trouble despite Australia topping 500, before suffering one of the chokiest of team chokes in sport history and subsiding to an alarmingly easy defeat. That will not happen. That will not happen. That cannot happen. Please don’t let that happen.

To conclude, some statistics on England’s second-innings psychologislam in Brisbane:

• England smashed the Test record for the first two wickets of a team’s second innings as if it were a cheap and brittle plate as a particularly exuberant Greek wedding between two Olympic discus champions during an earthquake. The previous highest total for the first two wickets of a second innings was 366, by India as they almost successfully chased 429 to win at the Oval in 1979.

• Of the 12 times a team has reached 450 for 1 in all Test cricket, seven have been this millennium.

• On which point, the eight Tests played in November 2010 produced almost 9000 runs at an average of 43.6 runs per wicket, and 22 centuries, including one triple century, three doubles hundreds (equalling the record for most 200-plus scores in a month), and two more innings in the 190s. Seven of the eight games were draws, none of which even came close to producing a result. Commiserations bowlers. You should have paid more attention at school and got a proper job.

• Cook, who scored more runs in Brisbane than he did in either of his previous two complete Ashes series, became the seventh man (and first left-hander) to score 300 runs in a match against Australia, after three Englishmen from a long time ago (RE Foster, Herbert Sutcliffe and Len Hutton), and three Indians from no time ago (Laxman, Dravid and Tendulkar).

• Jonathan Trott now has the highest Ashes batting average in history – 108 in two matches − shunting the now-clearly-overrated Don Bradman (89 in 37) down into bronze medal position. In second place – Jonathan’s much, much elder Australian brother Albert Trott, averaging 102 in his three Tests in 1895.

• England scored as many 180+ partnerships in their second innings as they had against Australia (a) in the three previous Ashes series combined, (b) in the entire 1990s, 1970s or 1960s, and (c) between the birth of Julius Caesar and the death of Queen Victoria.

Comments (21) | Ashes