Kumar Sangakkara finds out that his swivel chair has been stolen and replaced with a stuffed porcupine © PA

The empty seats of the Swalec Stadium gazed on in astonishment yesterday afternoon as a hitherto grey Test match careered to an explosive ‒ or, depending on your allegiance, implosive ‒ end. England, having shown little real desire to win the game on day 4, blasted their way to a staggering victory with such ultimate comfort that, in the end, not only did they not regret wasting an extra 20 minutes whilst Bell completed one of the less significant hundreds of his increasingly impressive career, but they might now think they could have waited for Morgan to notch up the 86 more runs he needed to post three figures as well. Sri Lanka, who had played with skill and resilience in the first innings, left both of those useful attributes firmly locked in a safe deposit box in their hotel, and subsided like a badly timed soufflé in the face of the fire of Tremlett and the wiles of Swann.

New captain Dilshan and his men registered the seventh shortest completed Test innings since the Second World War, lasting 148 balls between them on a pitch on which their bowlers had taken English wickets at a rate of one every 186 deliveries. It is fair to say, in modern sporting parlance, that Sri Lanka had "a bad day at the office". As office days go, it was roughly equivalent to turning up to work to find that your swivel chair has been stolen and replaced with a stuffed porcupine, before your boss calls you in to give you a 90% pay cut, feeds your packed lunch to his pet iguana, and puts your trousers through his shredder, after which you return to your desk to find that your colleague has run off with your car keys, half-finished crossword and spouse, and your computer is frozen irretrievably on a YouTube video of Gary Kirsten’s unedited double-century at Old Trafford in 1998.

(I should point out that I have not spent much time working in offices. In the brief period of my life in which I did have an office job, every day was "a bad day at the office". In fact, even my days not at the office were bad – I took a week’s leave to go to that Old Trafford Test, spent two days watching Kirsten, and the remaining three regretting ever discovering cricket.)

The Strauss-Flower England thus added another superb Test triumph to their collection ‒ their fifth innings victory in their last seven matches, and their third in succession. England clocked up three innings victories in an entire decade in both the 1980s (all against Australia) and the 1990s (all against New Zealand), so these are boom times indeed for people who like seeing England win by an innings – the boomiest since the late 1950s, when one of England’s greatest teams obliterated West Indies and New Zealand in successive summers.

Yesterday’s win was facilitated by Tremlett, who surgically dismantled the high-class Sri Lankan top order in such a way that it would not have been entirely surprising if, at the post-match presentation, Mike Atherton had marched up to the Surrey paceman, said, “Come on Scooby, let’s see who he really is”, and ripped a latex face-mask off to reveal Curtly Ambrose underneath, before concluding: “I thought I recognised the way you were bowling.”

England’s selectors have had several major successes in recent years, Swann and Trott being the most prominent, and Tremlett is proving to be another. Like Swann before him, he has made a seamless transition in his late 20s from long-time county workhorse to international devastator. In his four Tests since his call-up to the Ashes squad, after a good if not Wisden-combusting 2010 season with Surrey, he has taken 22 wickets at an average of 23, and 16 of those dismissals have been top-six batsmen.

Tremlett should have been Man of the Match in this game – his three early wickets turned victory from an unlikely afterthought into a strong possibility, blitzing a strong upper order on a good batting pitch, and his fourth removed Prasanna Jayawardene, first-innings centurion and the final major barrier to success. In terms of impact on the game, his was the decisive performance. If England’s batsmen chopped the vegetables and minced the beef, it was Tremlett who cooked the Bolognese. Swann absolutely nailed some perfectly al dente spaghetti, some of the Sri Lankan batsmen suggested adding a tweak of nutmeg for depth of flavour, and Broad grated the cheese on top at the end. Yum.

As with Swann, Tremlett’s success prompts the question: did England err by not picking him more often earlier in his career; or is he only doing so well now because he arrived in the Test side as a rounded, experienced bowler? The answer is probably a bit of both, but, I think, more of the latter. It is impossible to say definitively, at least without recourse to a time machine, and, since the fall of Allen Stanford, that argument-settling device seems as far away as ever for cricket. The ICC should rightly concentrate on perfecting the DRS before investing its spare trillions in time travel. We will therefore have to wait for science to get its test-tube waggling act into gear before we finally know how Bradman would have fared against the 1980s West Indian attack, how much WG Grace would have made in advertising endorsements and IPL contracts if he had been around today, whether Ajit Agarkar would have been as lethal as SF Barnes on matting pitches, and how great a bowler Mohammad Amir might have become, if only Eve hadn’t been tempted by that juicy looking apple all those years ago.

All in all, another imposing performance by England, whose bowling is one of the joys of world cricket at the moment, and whose batting has taken on an aura of granite impregnability against the disastrously off-colour Australians and this understrength Sri Lankan line-up. What prompted this transformation late in 2010 remains unclear – whether is was the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton, the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, the rescue of the Chilean miners, or the death of Norman Wisdom, something has inspired them.

STAT WHACK

1. Since the start of the Ashes, six England batsmen have been averaging over 40 – Cook 128, Trott 108, Bell 86, Pietersen 51, Prior 50, and Strauss 40. Over the course of their previous three major series, against Australia in 2009, in South Africa in 2009-10, and versus Pakistan last summer, only Trott (50) averaged over 40.

2. Since the start of last summer’s Pakistan series, England’s bowlers are collectively averaging 23.9. In the time between the start of the 2008 home series against South Africa and the end of the 2009-10 away series in South Africa, they averaged 37.4.

3. Yesterday was the third fastest England have bowled a side out since the Second World War, and the fifth fastest since Archduke Franz Ferdinand had his clogs forcibly popped, bringing an end to (a) world peace and (b) SF Barnes’ Test bowling career.

4. Sri Lanka can take some microscopic and stale crumbs of comfort from the fact that they lasted almost twice as long as South Africa did in their first innings in the first Test of 1924, when the tourists had the Edgbaston pavilion gate swinging like the toilet door at an incontinents’ drinking contest in being bowled out for 30 in 12.3 overs.

Comments (26) |

Barack Obama and colleagues look on rapt as Thilan Samaraweera makes his way to a hundred © Getty Images

The first day of the Test summer. The unquestioned highlight of the British and European year. For English cricket fans, at least. A day when cricket lovers in this country bedeck their souls with psychological bunting and wave metaphorical flags with bats, stumps and balls on at themselves in joyous celebration that humanity’s greatest single creation, the crowning glory of all civilisation, the thing described by Abraham Lincoln as “the last best hope of earth” ‒ Test cricket ‒ is back. (Not all scholars agree with my interpretation of Lincoln’s words from his address to Congress in 1862, a decade and a half before the birth of Test cricket. But if you try reading that speech out loud with the old BBC cricket theme blaring out of your ghetto blaster, I think and hope that you will reach the same conclusion I did.)

Over the years, the beginning of the summer’s Test cricket has lost some of the excitement it had when I was a child in the 1980s, when innumerable questions would swirl around the crickosphere as the first Test loomed. Who would be left in the team from the previous summer? Who would be captaining the side? Who would be captaining the side in a month’s time? Who would be the first player dropped, how quickly, and how needlessly? How gruesomely would England lose? And which county stalwart would be speculatively picked in a moment of crisis, then summarily discarded, whilst the selectors consulted tea leaves, ouija boards, the entrails of freshly slaughtered animals and (on rare occasions) the first-class averges?

Few of these questions still arise in the more stable, well-organised 21st century world of England cricket. Most of the media discussion to date seems to involve wild speculation on what may or may not be going on inside Kevin Pietersen’s head.

However, this summer is particularly appetising, with Sri Lanka and India promising strong opposition and exciting cricket. Last summer and in the winter, England’s bowlers did not merely have Pakistan’s and Australia’s batting line-ups on toast, they sliced them into soldiers and dipped them in an egg. They are unlikely to find this summer’s tourists quite as pliant, but with home advantage and strength in depth they will be confident of further success.

The questions arising in advance of today’s first Test might not be quite as quirky as their 1980s predecessors, but they are intriguing nonetheless. Will England’s near-flawless Ashes performance prove to be the pinnacle of their achievements, an unrepeatable concoction of collective and individual form on one side and collective and individual uselessness on the other? (Last time England won in Australia, in 1986-87, they proceeded to win just one Test over the next three years. There would be a full mutiny in the Barmy Army if they do so again.)

How will Sri Lanka win without Murali? Removing a bowler with 800 Test wickets under his belt would adversely affect most teams, and in the two Tests Sri Lanka have won in England, Murali has taken 27 wickets at an average of 13, whilst the rest of the bowlers have mustered 11 scalps at 58. This is their first away series since Murali joined Eddie Hemmings in the ranks of retired Test offspinners, and in their five home Tests in that time they have struggled to take wickets and have failed to win.

Will Alastair Cook maintain his recent elevation to leviathan of modern-day batsmanship, or return to his previous state of toddling along adequately? Will Eoin Morgan prove to be a genuine Test batsman, or were his struggles against Pakistan last summer, when his one successful innings was scored primarily off low-to-medium grade spin, indicative a technically flawed one-day wizard?

And, perhaps most pertinently of all, will the Royal Wedding have inspired England’s players or distracted them? Will it have fired them with an even deeper sense of national pride and duty, or made them spend all their spare time thinking about dresses, crowns and Pippa Middleton’s Rumpelstiltskin rather than practising cricket?

(As a side issue, as an Englishman I think it is a national tragedy that Prince William married for love. For what is the point of having a royal family and the princes who come with it if you cannot marry them off to people from other countries to make strategic political alliances? Surely that is the historical raison d’être of royalty. If William had a shred of patriotism in his body, there are only two women in the world he would even consider marrying. 1: the daughter of Chinese President Hu Jintao; and 2: Angela Merkel.)

The official Confectionery Stall prediction: England to win, Pietersen to do quite well, and no Sri Lankan bowler to take 16 wickets in the match this time.

Sadly, Barack Obama, the 49-year-old professional president from Washington DC, concludes his state visit to the UK this morning, and is, one assumes, distraught that the buffoon responsible for the scheduling did not factor in a couple of days at the Cardiff Test. (A White House spokesman yesterday confirmed that the President is “gutted” to be missing the chance to see Thilan Samaraweera bat, and whilst “grateful that he could at least sample some of the build-up”, made “desperate last-minute pleas to postpone the Deauville G8 meeting, or do it via a conference call in the Swalec Stadium car park during the tea interval”.) (If anyone remains in any doubt about Obama’s obsession with English Test cricket, he married a woman whose forenames are Michelle LaVaughn. Case closed.) (Admittedly, they were married in 1992, before the English, male Michelle LaVaughn had even made his debut for Yorkshire, but Obama is a man of vision, so let us assume he knew what was what in early 1990s youth cricket.) (Besides, the first lady’s maiden name was Robinson – meaning that the president has never married a woman whose passport was not bedecked with the name of a former England opening batsman.) (I digress.)

Extras

The ICC has announced that, following its successful use in horse racing, a handicapping system will be introduced to international cricket on a trial basis. An ICC spokesman explained: “In recent years, several teams have fallen behind the stronger nations of world cricket due to a combination of financial inequality, crass organisational incompetence, and not being very good at hitting and/or bowling cricket balls. In order to re-levelise this increasingly non-level playing field, from September, the lower-ranked teams will be able to use wider bats, and the higher-ranked sides will have to defend wickets that are up to 60% taller and feature a fourth stump, to be located at the discretion of the fielding captain.”

If the trial is successful, consideration will be given to allowing the weaker teams to claim one-hand-one-bounce catches, and capping the innings of the world’s top 10 batsmen at 50 runs.

The ICC spokesman, speaking exclusively to The Confectionery Stall concluded: “The changes promise a dynamic and competitive new era in Test cricket, at far less cost and much more quickly than, for example, trying to make the West Indies good again, or teaching Pakistan to catch.”

Comments (51) |

Mr Chamberlain: a believer in moustachioed men being all-round good eggs © Getty Images

After a prolonged sabbatical spent worrying about its future whilst watching its younger siblings charge around like banshees, Test cricket roared back into life with a low-scoring thriller between West Indies and Pakistan. Admittedly, that roar raised the age-old philosophical question: if something roars in an empty cricket stadium, and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a noise?

It was a gripping match of 19th-century-style scoring, played out in front of a 17th-century-style crowd, in a 21st-century-style stadium – nicely made but pointlessly remote. One day, a high-ranking scientist or Nobel Prize-winning genius will work out on a high-powered computer that if you build soulless modern stadiums, without history or character, far from civilisation, you may on occasion struggle to attract crowds to watch cricket in them. It will take a brain of formidable power to reach this conclusion, a thinker of rare perspicacity, who is prepared not only to think outside the box, but to set fire to the box whilst his head is still inside it to accelerate the thought process.

Low-scoring games have provided some of cricket’s all-time classics, from the umbrella-chewing mayhem of The Oval in 1882, when the 19th-century proto-Lillee, Fred Spofforth, demonised the Ashes into existence with brilliant bowling and an intimidating moustache, to England’s back-from-the-dead-but-with-hindsight-still-feeling-quite-ill World Cup group win over South Africa in Chennai in March.

Misbah’s 52 was the highest score in the Providence Test (which itself sounds like something the cricket community should insist wealthy tycoons pass before being allowed to land at Lord’s in a helicopter with a Perspex box full of cash). This is the sixth-lowest highest score, if that makes sense, in a completed Test match since the First World War, and enabled the game to narrowly avoid becoming only the third Test since the Second World War to produce a positive result without featuring any half-centuries.

The previous fifty-free Test was in Hamilton in December 2002, when New Zealand dismissed an Indian batting line-up containing Sehwag, Dravid, Tendulkar, Ganguly and Laxman for 99 and 154, with Daryl Tuffey taking 8 for 53 in the match. It seems scarcely conceivable now, and that sentence might read as if it has been generated by a seriously malfunctioning internet automatic translation programme trying to convert a Swedish recipe for salmon fishcakes into English, but it is in fact 100% true.

Before that, there had only been one other such match since before Neville Chamberlain was waving his piece of paper around, declaring “peace in our time” – a declaration that now looks dodgier than Hansie Cronje’s at the Centurion Test in January 2000, and proves that there was a precedent for high-ranking English officials being duped by confident men with moustaches long before the Stanford debacle. The game in question was Edgbaston 1981, when Botham swung England to victory by marmalising Australia’s tail, spreading them on toast, and eating them in one mouthful, with 5 for 1 in five overs of legend-solidifying brilliance.

There is something deeply engrossing about a match in which an innings of 25 is a potentially game-winning contribution rather than a frustratingly wasted start. I find there is also something nostalgic about such games, as they recall early school matches when runs were scarce and boundaries seemed like hypothetical barriers halfway to the horizon. In the second game I played, my school Under-9 team bowled out the opposition for 63. I remember thinking: “That is an imposing total. Not many teams in world cricket could hope to chase that down.” Despite the loss of totemic opening batsman Zaltzman, harshly adjudged bowled first ball, my school battled bravely, but fell short. Thirty-nine all out. A match-winning total in some games, but a 24-run thrashing on the day.

It ended with a good win for West Indies, and a personal triumph for Darren Sammy. West Indian cricket has had more false dawns than an insomniac schoolkid waiting nervously for his exam results to arrive in the morning post. The standard of Pakistan batting – historically, almost heroically, inept in their six Tests in England last summer, and little improved since then - means that we cannot be sure whether this is a genuine dawn, another bogus one, or just a car passing in the street outside with its headlights shining through the bedroom window. After all, the previous apparent new dawn for West Indies cricket, when Jerome Taylor skittled England like a tray of wobbly milk bottles in Jamaica in 2009, turned out barely even to be that. However, after a World Cup marked by brief periods of promise inevitably scythed down by an onslaught of incompetence, at least this was a welcome and hard-won victory, the highlights being Devendra Bishoo confirming his promise and captain Sammy sealing victory with his fourth five-wicket haul in Tests.

Sammy is not yet on many people’s Great Bowlers Of The 21st Century shortlist, but he now has more five-wicket innings notched into his bedpost than Andrew Flintoff, Colin Croft, Lasith Malinga or Stuart Broad, and the same number as Harold Larwood and Frank Tyson. He has played just 12 Test matches, in which he has taken more wickets than the legendary Picasso Of Pace, Malcolm Marshall, did in the equivalent period of his career. In fact, Sammy has taken as many five-wicket hauls in his first 12 Tests as Holding, Garner, Marshall, Ambrose and Walsh managed between them in their first 12 Tests. The logical conclusion to all this is that Darren Sammy is (a) the greatest and (b) the fastest bowler of all time. Ignore the speed gun. It lives only to deceive.

Extras

The ECB have announced that they are working on a new fourth format for international cricket to enable England to appoint a fourth captain. A spokesman explained: “Having three skippers is proving to be a nightmare – whenever we have an England Captains Table Tennis tournament, Strauss always insists on getting a bye directly into the final. This understandably causes resentment amongst the other captains. With four, we can either use a straight semi-final-to-final knockout structure, or a four-prong round robin followed by a first-versus-second final. It has to be resolved, and fast, before Cook and Broad start throwing their toys out of the pram.”

Comments (78) | West Indies

The Black Eyed Peas: John Arlott's most well-known groupies © Getty Images

Hello Confectionery Stallers, and welcome to my first post-World Cup blog. I have completed a month-long social reassimilation course following my trip of a lifetime around the subcontinent, and am now, on occasion, almost capable of conducting a competent conversation about something other than cricket. I have stopped asking my wife and/or children to hold pretend press conferences in the kitchen explaining their curious batting Powerplay tactics. I no longer wake up in a cold sweat dreaming that I’m bowling to Kevin O’Brien in my own greenhouse. I therefore feel ready to allow cricket back into my life.

A few thoughts on what has happened during my sabbatical:

1. The unstoppable churn of international cricket has continued. Australia and Bangladesh launched the 2011-2015 cycle with an ODI series that began seemingly seconds after MS Dhoni concluded his victory speech in Mumbai. Even by the stretchiest stretch of even the most gymnastic of imaginations, this was too soon.

It is entirely feasible that, when the next World Cup starts, Mitchell Johnson will come charging in with a ball in each hand, and bowl them at two batsmen simultaneously on adjacent pitches, one to Gautam Gambhir in the World Cup opener, and another to Brendon McCullum in the fourth game of a seven-match ODI series that is a crucial early step in the Australians’ preparation for World Cup 2019.

2. The IPL juggernaut is plowing on, its golden engine chugging on relentlessly, churning out cricket after cricket after cricket. Fifty-four games played, 20 remaining. I cannot claim to have followed the tournament closely, or even distantly. I am still getting over the disappointment of being ignored at this year’s auction. Was I not even worth my $19.99 base price? Even for spare parts?

My family and friends also advised that I take a prolonged break from watching cricket featuring incessant blasts of pop music throughout the game. It has taken me over a month to eradicate the World Cup theme song “De Ghuma Ke” from my brain. I estimate that I heard the song, or snippets thereof, on approximately 8470 separate occasions during the tournament. That is a lie, but the point stands. Merely writing the name of the song has brought the memories flooding back. I may need further treatment. I am still not entirely sure what it means – I assume it was something about slowly building an innings and working the ball into the gaps until your eye is in.

As I wrote at the time, I felt that the ear-assaulting unavoidability of the irrelevant musical interludes on the stadium PA systems neutered genuine atmosphere. However, it should be said in mitigation that, during American hip-hoppers the Black Eyed Peas’ recent “The E.N.D. World Tour”, at the end of every song they played a 20-second snippet of John Arlott’s radio commentary at face-melting volume.

I digress. The IPL team owners and grandees must be casting envious glances at Major League Baseball in America, whose season began at around the same time. The MLB has just ripped through the 450-game barrier, with just under 2000 more matches to go. Plus the up-to-41-game post-season. Each franchise hurls and thwacks its way through 162 games in the regular season, at a rate of six matches per week. Can a window in the international calendar be found for a similar IPL format? If there were 33 times as many games, would it be 33 times as exciting?

3. It was a source of considerable relief that the ICC will reassess its patently bonkers format for the 2015 World Cup. Its proposed 10-team closed-shop retro-style tournament took the concept of cricketing development and clattered it hard in the groin with a 3lb 8oz bat, whilst proudly purring, “Shot, sir. Shot.”

On the evidence of this year’s World Cup, few could argue that there are 14 teams deserving of a World Cup place. Even fewer, however, could argue that there are only 10, and even fewer than that could claim that the qualification process for selecting those 10 should have been conducted without public notification, and been concluded in 2000 before being kept under wraps until the least opportune moment. It should be 12 teams, and not take too long. Although either one of those two would be nice.

A fascinating English summer looms. Sri Lanka, then India. England should be perkier than they were at the World Cup, with their three captains – rumour has it that Strauss will ride Cook and Broad in a pantomime horse outfit onto the field in Cardiff in two weeks’ time. By the time India arrive, after the IPL and a Caribbean tour, they might need some industrial-strength coffee. I’ve been working on my carrom ball, but cannot yet get it down my hallway without it hitting the wall. So it looks like I am facing another summer on the touchlines. But I’ve had my blogging licence renewed, Statsguru is waiting, and my computer will hurl itself off a cliff if it reads much more stuff about British politics. It’s good to be back.

EXTRAS

● In an effort to make the pre-Twenty20 era of cricket retrospectively more exciting, the IPL is being officially backdated. The 1976 IPL has been won by the now defunct Visakhapatnam Visigoths, led by Indian Test legend Gundappa Viswanath and part-owned by legendary film director Satyajit Ray and Scottish pop stars the Bay City Rollers. In a tense final in Madras, they defeated the Delhi Daredevils, for whom Geoff Boycott scored an undefeated 23 off 65 balls as his team narrowly failed to chase down the Visigoths' total of 93 for 4, an imposing total for the time. The losing semi-finalists were the Punjab Pranksters and the Chennai Benevolent Dictators, later rebranded as the Super Kings.

● After the batting Powerplay provided considerable tactical intrigue throughout the World Cup, the ICC has announced the introduction of a further Powerplay to spice up the 50-over game. In the new captaincy Powerplay, the skipper of the batting team will captain the fielding side for five overs. He will choose the bowlers, and place the field. An ICC spokesperson commented: “We’ve tested it out in club cricket, and it’s a hoot. To compensate the considerable advantage this gives the batting side, during the captaincy Powerplay the fielding team will be able to jump around and pull faces in an effort to distract the batsmen. These innovations should help cricket become the world’s most-watched spectator sport.”

Comments (45) | World Cup 2011