Happy New Year, Confectionery Stallers, and welcome to the first ever edition of this crickoblog to have been composed when the words “England retained the Ashes by obliterating Australia with a phenomenal display of total cricket” could be written without being a rabidly deluded fantasy or a wilfully obscure cryptic crossword clue.

As I write, England, with Cook and Bell grinding the remaining slivers of spirit from the Australian bowling attack, are well placed to ensure their series victory, probably by 3-1 unless Australia’s top order decide to stop batting as if they are trying to raise questions about their nation’s right to Test status.

It has been one of England’s greatest all-round performances, and almost certainly Australia’s worst. Many predicted an England success. No-one predicted a drubbing. Albeit a drubbing that could still, theoretically, end 2-2, and one in which England’s remorselessly determined and scientifically executed demolition of their opponents was punctuated by an oddly feeble capitulation in Perth. Strauss’s men are on course to record England’s biggest ever runs-per-wicket superiority in an Ashes series – so much for the too-close-to-call series almost everyone seemed to expect. This series has been the cricketing equivalent of turning up to see the Oxford-Cambridge boat race, only for one of the crews to be in a jet-propelled speedboat and the other to be in a leaking bath-tub.

Even fewer people than no-one predicted that Alastair Cook would score 750 runs in the series (and even that total may be horribly out of date by the time you read this). Of all the adjectives you could have used to describe Cook before this series, “undismissable” was some way down the list. Particularly if that list was being written by Mohammad Amir and Mohammad Asif. He has been phenomenally, bafflingly impressive – this is a player who had not averaged over 50 in a series against anyone other than Bangladesh or West Indies for over four years.

In six of those ten series, he averaged below 33. Cook turned up in Australia fresh from a domestic summer in which he breached the 30 barrier just once in ten innings, and then only with some major good fortune, and in which often looked unsure not just of where his off stump was, but unsure of what his off stump was, and even of what sport his off stump might be involved in. He then transformed into a slightly better version of Don Bradman. This constitutes one of the more remarkable individual triumphs in cricket history. Not quite as remarkable as Inzamam-ul-Haq winning the Olympic 100 metres would be, but remarkable nonetheless.

It remains to be seen whether Cook’s mega-series is a spectacular blip in his otherwise largely prosaic career, or the watershed in a potentially great batsman’s development. Either way, he has blasted himself into Ashes immortality.

He has been joined there by Australia’s top four. Who will be rather less chuffed to be there. England fans have of course become accustomed to baggy-green batsmen breaking scoring records in Ashes series. Usually in recent decades, they have been records for high scoring. The 2010-11 baggy-green vintage – a cheap Bulgarian Merlot laced with methylated spirits compared to the Chateau Latours England’s bowlers have faced on previous Ashes tours – have been chiselling themselves into the annals of all-time ineptitude with ruthless determination.

The course of a Test is established in the first innings, and Australia’s upper order have not merely flunked their first-innings exams, they have eaten their exam papers, sworn at the invigilator, and set their pencil cases on fire. Australia’s captain and vice-captain have totalled a reprehensible 71 runs in their nine first-innings efforts. Simon Katich and Phillip Hughes between them totalled 99 in the five Tests, and Shane Watson 150. Usman Khawaja’s determined 37 in Sydney not only saved his two skippers from the ignominy of being Australia’s worst 3-4 first-innings combination in any series since 1890, but also bumped the Aussie top-four first-hit series average up to a still-gob-smackingly dreadful 17.85 – their worst such figure in the Ashes since Lyons, Bannerman, Giffen and Harry Trott struggled to come to terms with English conditions in 1893, and their worst ever in a five-match Ashes series.

Even when Hussey’s sterling resistance at 5 is taken into account, Australia’s first five wickets have averaged just 23 per wicket in their first innings, their second lowest in the Ashes since Queen Victoria popped her massive queenly clogs.

And just to rub it in, England’s top 4 are on course to record the highest-ever series average against Australia. Ouch.

Much of the credit for Australia’s failure obviously goes to England’s bowlers, who, as in 2005, have been persistently threatening. James Anderson, who had little history of overseas success, needs three second-innings wickets to claim the best haul by an England bowler in Australia since John Snow in 1970-71 (and he only needs to take all ten to equal Snow), and the England pace attack have between them take 62 wickets at 28, putting them one more good innings away from the best series by a visiting pace attack in Australia since the West Indians of 1992-93. More on them in a future blog. They have been individually and collectively excellent. But not unplayable.

With the ball, especially with the bat, and in the selection committee, the Australians have been truly, historically dreadful. The Ashes boot is now well and truly on the other foot. The Australians must feel like a carnivore being eaten by a steak.

The unexpected disparity between the teams has made the series less compelling as a sporting spectacle than it could have been. In South Africa, however, after a similarly lop-sided beginning, a blistering series now approaches its endgame. VVS Laxman put in a late bid for innings of the year with his towering 96 in Durban – an innings which instantly rocketed towards the top of the Innings Which Deserved A Century But Did Not Get One chart, perhaps just ahead of Monty Panesar’s 7 not out in Cardiff in 2009.

Jacques Kallis (with his ninth century in his last 15 Tests) and Tendulkar (with his 12th in his last 24) laid down early markers for 2011, two of the greatest players the game has seen tussling for supremacy as others around them struggled.

Ben Hilfenhaus and Harbhajan Singh are the unlikely pace-setters in the Test Match Six Of The Year stakes, the former dispatching Tim Bresnan over midwicket like the 21st century Viv Richards that he isn’t, the latter plonking the world’s greatest current bowler over long on as if he was playing Stick Cricket.

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.

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.

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.

The Brisbane Test was, in football terminology, A Game Of Two Halves – the first an intriguing old-fashioned Test match of wrenching tension, shifts of momentum, and hard-fought battle between bat and ball; the second a trademark 21st-century run glut on a featureless pudding pitch that appeared to have been rolled with Mogadon and told that if it did anything naughty it would have its Christmas presents taken away.

The first 130 overs brought 403 runs for 15 wickets (figures courtesy of ProperTestCricketTM Inc.). The next 284 overs gave the world 962 runs for seven wickets − two of which were tail-end hoicks, and two of well-set centurions trying to hit a six. There was some outstanding batting by the five hundred-makers, spectacularly, record-shatteringly dogged resistance by an England team ideally suited to digging in to save a game, some schoolboy fielding by Australia, and some pedestrian bowling and passive captaincy by both teams.

England claimed one of their greatest Ashes moral victories. Given that these have been as rare as actual victories in recent jaunts Down Under, this is not to be sniffed at. Reports are that those Australians who have tried sniffing at it sneezed violently and took themselves off to bed with a headache.

The real winners were the pitch and the slightly baffling Kookaburra ball, which rendered decent, if not world-class, bowlers utterly toothless, gumming away at Cook, Strauss and Trott like a somnolent baby on a week-old rusk. So much so that they must have ended the match feeling that having a medieval dentist yank their incisors out with a pair of rusty pliers, having used a crowbar to the face as an anaesthetic, would have been a preferable means of achieving toothlessness than bowling for two days on that Brisbane track. Indeed Mitchell Johnson ended the match seeming to be bowling like Shakespeare’s seventh age of man – not merely sans teeth but sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Not one of the seven billion people or so on earth today would claim that this Australian bowling attack (for want of a better word) is the greatest in baggy green history, but even some of the greatest bowlers from Australia’s cricket’s pantheon would have been left tweaking their moustaches in frustration on this surface, which provided further evidence that the currency of the heroic rearguard has been seriously and artificially devalued in recent years. Indeed, a spokesman for the estate of 19th-century bowling whizz Fred “The Demon” Spofforth issued a statement saying that his client is “delighted to be dead, rather than bowling at Brisbane”.

Thus the game drifted from cricketing fascination to statistical curiosity and psychological point-scoring, the pointiest of which were scored by England.

It all added up to a curate’s omelette of a Test, which was ultimately glorious for England, agonisingly ominous for Australia, and, presumably, skull-crushingly tedious for the neutrals; and which, whilst confirming that there is little on paper between two teams who justified their current mid-table world rankings, will have left Australia far more concerned than England.

This is partly because Strauss’s men are now 20% of the way to a triumphant 0-0 series final scoreline, and the evidence of this Test suggests that both bowling attacks may struggle to upgrade their 0 into a 1. Fortunately for Australia, the evidence of the 2009 series also suggests that the evidence of any Test between these two sides is of absolutely no relevance to the next match. The evidence from which should equally be shredded and buried before the following game. Eighteen months ago, “having the momentum”, the much-prized, much-claimed momentum, proved to be almost entirely counter-productive, and ultimately for Australia, going to The Oval after obliterating England at Leeds, lethal.

Nevertheless England will be buoyant, having once again brilliantly underperformed in their first innings in order to make their ultimate avoidance of defeat all the more psychologically boosty. Only Collingwood of the England top six did not show form, and, given that Hussey (almost caught at slip) and Strauss (fractionally not lbw) demonstrated how fine the line is between first-ball nought and match-changing century, golden-duck victims Prior and Broad can both claim to have essentially scored brilliant centuries in the first innings.

England’s bowlers all performed creditably if not penetratingly in their one innings of relevance, and with more luck, or a differently regulated umpiring review system, could have snipped off the Hussey-Haddin megapartnership much more quickly.

They may struggle to dismiss Australia – other than double successes in Bangladesh early this year and in swinging conditions in New Zealand three winters ago, England have now taken all 20 opposition wickets in just one of their last 19 overseas Tests (a spectacular horsing of South Africa in Durban a year ago), dating back to the start of the last Ashes in Australia. However, the official Confectionery Stall hunch is now that if they do so once to secure a victory, it should be enough to ensure at least a drawn series, as it was against South Africa.

For Australia, only Siddle really threatened in England’s first innings, and the second was a slow, surgical dismemberment, albeit in those meaninglessly lopsided conditions. Australia should bring it at least two, and arguably three, physically and mentally unscarred bowlers for Adelaide.

And how refreshing it was for English cricket followers to see an Australian team ready, willing and able to drop simple catches at critical times. This traditional staple of cricket at all levels has been largely eschewed by the baggy greens for two decades. With one notable exception, when Warne shelled Pietersen at the Oval in 2005, rocketing to the top of the Player Who Least Deserved To Cost His Team A Series chart.

How refreshing also for England to see their own unspectacular left-hander grind out a massive double-hundred, rather than suffering the southpaw ploddings of others – take that, Gary Kirsten. And Justin Langer. And Allan Border. And Mark Taylor. Cook, freed from the summer torment of Amir and Asif, scored more runs in one match than he had in either of his two previous Ashes series. He might have played more awkward-looking strokes than you would see at the average Overcome Your Lifelong Fear Of Dogs group on an outing to an Alsatian petting zoo, but as statements of intent go, it was majestic.

It was all set up, of course, by Strauss. In the first innings. His third-ball duck may have been greeted with horror by many Northern Hemisphere fans, but it was exactly the start England needed, as it constituted a blaze of relative glory – his team had lasted a 21st-century record three balls before encountering disaster in Australia. After Harmison’s first-ball horror four years ago (a delivery that put the “miss” very firmly into “missile”), and Hussain’s noughth-ball flat-track insertion in 2002-03, Strauss’s third-ball duck represented a discernible, arguably exponential, stride of progress. Boosted by the surge of confidence those first two wicketless balls sent coursing through their non-baggy blue veins, England comfortably romped to their first non-rain-assisted Brisbane non-defeat for 24 years.

Roll on Adelaide. And hopefully some cricket where wickets fall more often than once every 48 hours.

With the world’s top eight-ranked Test nations all in, or soon to be in, action,
I sat down in front of a mirror and interviewed myself about the current spate of Test cricket.

Confectionery Stall Hello Andy, thanks for talking to The Confectionery Stall.

Andy Zaltzman It’s a pleasure. A lifelong dream fulfilled.

CS It’s all happening on Planet Test Cricket. The unofficial quarter-finals of an as-yet-still-non-existent World Championships – top-ranked India against eighth-placed New Zealand, world Nos. 2 and 3, South Africa and Sri Lanka, against sixth-ranked Pakistan and seventh-ranked West Indies. All whetting the appetite for one of the all-time classic mid-table confrontations – fifth-ranked Australia against their statistical nano-superiors, fourth-placed England.

AZ What? Are you telling me, and the rest of the English media, that this is not the ultimate clash of the two greatest teams in the history of cricket, with the eyes of the universe fixed immovably on it?

CS It’s fourth against fifth. Out of, basically, 8.

AZ Well, can you perhaps explain why, given that Australia (340) and England (312) have both won more than twice as many Tests as any other nation, they are not ranked 1 and 2?

CS I think it’s because the rankings don’t take into account how good teams were in the 1890s.

AZ I prefer to look at the big picture. It’s One versus Two.

CS Let’s start with batting. If it has been a good month for fans of engagements in the British royal family, it has been an even better one for the world’s batsmen.

AZ Sure has. What is going on with all these triple-hundreds in Test cricket? Correct me if I’m wrong, but Chris Gayle’s against Sri Lanka was the ninth in just 380 Tests since May 2002. There had only been eight in the previous 44 years and 1148 Tests.

CS You are wrong. You meant there had only been only eight triple-centuries in the previous 44 years and two months and 1149 Tests. But your point basically stands. Three hundreds are being scored at a breakneck rate of one every 42 Tests. Instead of once every 143 Tests in that 1958-2002 period you keep prattling on about.

AZ Crumbs. If that rate of increase in triple-hundreds continues, by the year 2643, roughly, every single Test innings will be a triple-hundred.

CS It’s what the advertisers want. This millennium has been like the 1930s all over again, but less so – there were five triple-hundreds in just 89 Tests, all of which lead inexorably in 1939 to the start of the most devastating conflict in the history of the world. The ICC needs to clamp down on big scoring, or the world at large could suffer.

AZ Are you claiming that, if South Africa had not declared with AB de Villiers on 278, the world would have been shunted closer to Armageddon?

CS Yes, I am. Can you prove otherwise?

AZ No.

b>CS Point proved then. De Villiers and Morkel posted the 21st tenth-wicket century partnership in the history of history. Harbhajan and Sreesanth put up the 20th just a week before.

AZ
So you’re telling me that almost 10% of all 100-plus last-wicket partnerships have been scored in mid-November 2010, whilst, as all schoolchildren know, there were only two such stands between 1903 and 1952 – the same number as there were World Wars in the same period.

CS Precisely. So a lack of century last-wicket stands is clearly linked to global war. De Villiers apparently asked his captain to declare even earlier than he did. So by deliberately avoiding scoring a triple-hundred, and by coaxing Morne Morkel to play his part in a 100-partnership, de Villiers has made himself hot favourite for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

AZ Wow. What a man. The Henry Kissinger of South African batsmanship. Have you got any more statistics on rates of high scoring in modern cricket?

CS
Yes. But I’m not telling them to you now. You’ll have to wait for another blog.

AZ
Oh shucks. That’s ruined my week.

CS
Good stats come to those who wait.

AZ Hey, here’s a question for you. What do the three Test double-centurions of November 2010 – Gayle, McCullum and de Villiers − have in common?

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CS Do they all…

CS Are they all pre-op transsexuals?

AZ Not that I know of. One more guess. I’ll give you £50,000 in non-sequential banknotes if you get it right. Don’t tell the ICC.

CS Did they all endure prolonged century-less spells earlier in their careers, all beginning in 2005 and lasting for more than 20 Tests? At a guess, I’d say Gayle did hit a ton for 24 Tests from April 2005 to December 2008, McCullum didn’t trouble the honours board for 26 games between August 2005 and March 2009, and de Villiers specialised in single- and double-digit scores for 23 Tests in the two-and-a-half years to January 2008.

AZ Bingo. Good guess. Did you look that up on Statsguru?

CS No.

AZ Promise?

CS Yup.

AZ Okay. I’ll trust you. Here’s your money.

CS Thanks. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty-seven, seventy-seven...

AZ Can you count it out later? We’re mid-interview.

CS Sorry. No problem. Was that a 17-pound note?

AZ Let’s move on.

CS Did you draw that yourself?

AZ Let’s move on.

CS It had Graham Gooch’s face instead of the Queen’s.

AZ He’s the rightful King of England. The point is, just because a player doesn’t score a hundred for over 20 Tests, it doesn’t mean he won’t spank a double-hundred a few years later.

CS So England should pick Monty Panesar for Brisbane. He’s clearly got a massive innings stored up inside, just waiting to burst out.

AZ And the other point is, three simultaneous high-scoring drawn Test matches in a week makes Jack a dull boy. And by “Jack”, I mean “Test cricket”. Especially when “Jack” is conducted by unadventurous captains on stodgy pitches.

CS So, Andy, who do you think will win the Ashes?

AZ None of your business.

CS Actually, I think it is my business.

AZ Is it? Fair enough. I think England will win the Ashes. Or at least not lose the Ashes, which is more important.

CS Really? What makes you think that?

AZ Don’t know. Bit of a hunch. Plus they are mostly in form. Even Alastair Cook, who so often bats like a visit to the doctor about a gastric disorder − awkward and only occasionally effective − has found some form, whilst the batsman formerly known as Ian Bell has been playing with a dominance befitting the official new name the ECB has given him to make him sound more intimidating for this series: “The Sledgehammer Of Eternal Justice”.

CS Yes, Eternal Justice could be an absolutely crucial player in this series. Surely as a long-standing England follower, all this must make you extremely uneasy.

AZ I admit it does feel slightly like the opening scene of a horror film, when everything is obviously too idyllic, and you know that inevitably something absolutely terrible will happen. In this instance, instead of a chainsaw-wielding maniac leaping out of a cupboard and starting to chop American college students to pieces, I’m worried that Mitchell Johnson will suddenly leap out of a cupboard and find a tidy line and length on day one in Brisbane.

CS Or that Xavier Doherty will emerge from the pavilion wincing in pain, with bloodstains all over his shirt, having just had Shane Warne’s arm surgically grafted onto his shoulder.

AZ That’s a possibility, certainly, but the way things have been going for Australia recently, they would probably balls it up and graft Warne’s left arm onto Doherty, not his right. Mind you, looking at Doherty’s first-class figures, that may still be worth a punt. With a bowling average of 48, he could prove to be to spin bowling what 93-year-old wartime singing sensation Dame Vera Lynn is to heavyweight boxing.

CS Sounds like a bit of complacency might be creeping in to your Ashes preparations, Andy.

AZ Far from it, Confectionery Stall. I’m fully focused on what I have to do on Wednesday night – sit down in front of the television and watch cricket. I’m not thinking beyond that. Besides, after the disasters I’ve experienced watching the last five Ashes tours, I’m taking nothing for granted. And I think the Australians would be mad to play a debutant spinner with no track record in the first Test of an Ashes series on a potentially seam-friendly wicket in Brisbane. That would be the tactical equivalent of eating your goldfish for dinner because you once had a fantastic fillet of sea bass in a Michelin-starred restaurant.

CS I’ll take your word for that, Andy.

AZ I’ve researched it extensively. The comparison stands.

CS Unless Doherty is much better than everyone in England seems to assume.

AZ Good point, Confectionery Stall.

CS Anyway, I think you’re wrong. I think Australia will win the Ashes.

AZ What makes you think that?

CS Don’t know. Bit of a hunch. Plus they have much greater experience in Australian conditions, particularly the bowlers. England’s have struggled overseas for years. And the Aussies have points to prove. And unwanted places in the history books to avoid.

AZ What do you think the key areas will be?

CS England’s batting, Australia’s bowling, both sides’ fielding, Strauss’s captaincy, Australia’s batting, Ponting’s leadership, and England’s bowling. In no particular order of preference. Plus luck.

Mrs Zaltzman Andy. Come and help me make dinner for the kids.

AZ Can’t Confectionery Stall do it?

Mrs Z No. You’re their father. Besides, Confectionery Stall frightens them.

CS They can’t handle the truth.

AZ But we haven’t finished previewing the Ashes yet, dear. Or analysing the strengths and weaknesses of India and South Africa as they prepare for their table-topping showdown.

Mrs Z I’ve heard what you have to say about India’s bowling options and South Africa’s lack of killer instinct, and, frankly, it can wait. If you’re not in that kitchen in 60 seconds, I’m confiscating your Denis Compton autographed snuggle blanket.

AZ I’ll be there in 59 seconds. Better go, Confectionery Stall. Lovely talking to you.

CS What are you doing? No, no, don’t shut me in the attic again. I promise I won’t wake you up with queries about how much tail-end batting averages have improved in recent years, or players who have emerged from prolonged career slumps to re-find their best form, or whether teams are statistically better off with an inferior spinner and better balance or a superior fourth paceman and reduced variety, or whether Harbhajan Singh is the greatest batsman of all time, no, not the attic, please, not the att...

AZ Good boy. I’ll bring you a sandwich on Wednesday.

As the cricket match-fixing scandal pinballs around between annoying, disappointing depressing and alarmingly sinister, this blog will ignore for now the murky morass that threatens to swamp the international game, forget about the potential implications of Zulqarnain’s unscheduled London jaunt, and distract itself from the grim realities of reality with an altogether chirpier topic (from a pre-Ashes England supporter’s point of view) – Australia being not very good anymore. Not bad – just not very good.

I have outlined in previous blogs the reasons why England are unbeatable and heading for a thrashing, and why Australia are in prime position to administer that thrashing, like a grumpy 19th-century headmaster who has been doing strength and conditioning work on his caning arm in readiness for the arrival of a particularly objectionable and naughty boy. Here, to conclude this decisive proof that England or Australia will win or lose the Ashes, is unarguable, laboratory-tested, player-by-player evidence that Australia are definitely going to lose.

Simon Katich
Bums-off-seats left-hander has scored just 134 runs at an average of 22 in his last three Tests, and red-facedly owns up to a 1980s-Australia-throwback Ashes average of just 33 in 11 Tests. Furthermore, he has scored fewer Ashes runs in Australia than Monty Panesar.

Katich is also reported to be suffering from an existential crisis of confidence after accidentally seeing video footage of himself batting (Cricket Australia had successfully protected him from seeing himself for years, using a series of increasingly convoluted distractions, including puppet shows. Katich loves puppet shows. Can’t get enough of them. He owns DVD box sets of all TV puppet shows. And if that is not true, let him sue me.) “Oh my god, no,” he said, dumbfounded, after watching himself ungainlily nudge a leg-side boundary. “I thought I played like David Gower.”

Shane Watson
Like most of his team-mates, Watson is on the slide. Admittedly he has not slid as far, fast or slidily down that slide as some, but after averaging 65 in 2009, he has posted a figure of only 38 so far in 2010. This clearly does not bode well for the New Year Test in Sydney, and the less said about Watson’s 2012, when he looks set to average 16, the better.

He averages only 30 when Australia lose the toss (compared with 47 when they win it), suggesting that Ponting’s coinflipwork and Strauss’s head-or-tail preferences could be crucial to Watson’s success or failure. He also has the >third worst conversion rate of any Australian top-six batsman with 10 or more Test fifties – he has turned just two of his 14 scores of 50-plus into centuries.

Rumours that he is an allrounder may prove unfounded. As a bowler, he has never taken more than two wickets in a Test innings in Australia, and has no Ashes wickets under his belt. He bowled just eight overs of purest garbage in 2009, so will have some persuading to do to convince England that he is not rubbish. Mind you, Glenn McGrath was in a similarly unconvincing position after his wicketless Ashes debut in 1994-95. If only Australia had done the decent thing and permanently jettisoned McGrath after that match, as England sportingly disposed of the obviously superior Martin McCague (two wickets in the at Brisbane Test)... if only England had stuck with Gloucestershire left-armer Mike Smith after his wicketless Ashes bow in 1997... if only, if only...

Ricky Ponting
Anyone telling you that Ricky Ponting has not declined over the last few years is either talking about a different Ricky Ponting, or has been poisoned with a mind-altering potion, or has seriously misheard the question, or is Ricky Ponting, or is trying to wilfully engage you in an unwinnable argument whilst their accomplice steals your electrical goods and/or priceless collection of David Boon memorabilia.

Australia’s “Best Since Bradman” has, for the last four years, been approximately Australia’s 27th-best since Bradman – he has averaged 43 in his 41 Tests since the pivotal Adelaide Test of 2006-07, with six centuries (stats eerily similar to Ian Bell’s over the same period, a time in which Ponting proudly boasts the 43rd best Test batting average in world cricket, behind, amongst others, willow-wielders extraordinaire Darryl Tuffey and Brad Hogg, and current table-topper Kane Williamson).

The self-styled “Tasmanian Ian Bell” has averaged over 50 in just three of his last 12 series, having done so in nine of the previous 10, and has scored only one Test century in 16 Tests since the Ashes opener of 2009 − a double against Pakistan after Mohammad Amir dropped a possibly-with-hindsight-although-equally-plausibly-perfectly-above-board-but-still-suspiciously-easy sitter when the Australian captain was on 0.

And if the series gets tight, Australia might as well drop their captain for the final two Tests – over the last four Ashes series, he has averaged under 30 in Tests 4 and 5.

No Australian captain has ever lost three Ashes series. Ten years ago the prospect of Australia losing three Ashes series in the rest of eternity seemed remote. But then again, they said man would never walk on the moon. Ponting is all set to become Australia’s Neil Armstrong.

Michael Clarke
Beset by media and public grumblings, largely due to insufficient runs and insufficient Aussieness, Clarke has averaged just 21 in his last four Tests, including only one score above 15 in his last seven Test innings. After a golden period from 2006-07 up to Headingley 2009, in which he averaged 62, he has averaged only a middling 42 since the Oval Test.

Michael Hussey
Hussey’s almost unprecedented career rocket has altered its course from heading to a place amongst the all-time great, towards crash landing amongst international cricket’s plodding journeymen in three anti-climactic years. Has averaged 25 in his last seven Tests, and just 34 in his last 34, with a pitiful three centuries and a strike rate of 43 (compare this with his first 20 Tests – an average of 84, eight hundreds, and a strike rate of 53). He was once within touching distance of Bradman. Now he rubs statistical shoulders with Wavell Hinds, Manoj Prabhakar, and Chris Tavaré. Could still bump his average back up into the 80s this Ashes, but only if he scores 2500 undefeated runs in the series. This seems unlikely. Hussey has averaged 35 or less in seven of his last nine series, and 25 or less in five of his last 11.

Marcus North
After smiting three centuries in his first six Tests, North has averaged 29 in his last 13 matches. Traditionally in Australia, this leads to impeachment by Parliament and disappearance to the Dirk Wellham Memorial Gulag, 150 miles outside Darwin. North has been out for 10 or less in more than half of his 32 Test innings, and his five ducks make him the most regular duck scorer in the Australian top six since the 19th century. To where some Australian supporters seem to want him to emigrate.

Brad Haddin
The new Adam Gilchrist – in that his most recent performances have not been particularly impressive. Haddin averages 20 in his last five Tests, and 31 in his last 10 since being injured during the 2009 Ashes. In stark contrast to Watson, Haddin averages 33 when Australia win the toss, and 48 when they lose it. The selectors must be bold, and speculatively drop one or the other. Or both, to be on the safe side.

Mitchell Johnson
Eleven wickets at 43 in his last four Tests, has failed to take more than one wicket in 10 of his last 14 innings - Johnson is becoming the Australian Steve Harmison. If Harmison bowled one of the great series-losing balls in Ashes history in Brisbane four years ago, Johnson bravely attempted to steal his thunder with one of the immortal series-losing spells in Ashes history with his geometry-expanding effort at Lord’s. Having come to England with a reputation as a bowler who could bowl unplayable balls, he proved that reputation well deserved - albeit that the balls were only unplayable due to their being unreachable.

Increasingly expensive, Johnson conceded more than 3.5 runs per over in none of his first seven series, but has done so in four of his last six.

Since apparently breaking through as a top-class allrounder against South Africa in 2008-09 (400 runs and 33 wickets in six Tests), not only has Johnson explored all regions of inconsistency with the ball, he has averaged just 13 with the bat – further evidence of him stepping snugly into the Harmison mantle.

Nathan Hauritz
Since filling his boots against the staggeringly, persistently inept West Indies and Pakistan last Australian summer, Hauritz has taken 10 wickets at 65 in his last four Tests. Statistics can, and often do, lie, but if Hauritz is a genuine match-winning Test-class spinner, then his first-class bowling average of 43 must be in line for Porkie Of The Year. Successor to Shane Warne. In the same way that Graeme Smith is the successor to Rudolf Nureyev. He is OK.

Peter Siddle
Since helping skittle England in their tactically masterful fourth Test complacency-inducing megacapitulation in Leeds, Siddle, who skipped away from Headingley thinking he had cracked Test cricket, has taken just 15 wickets at 41 in six Tests. He averages almost 35 in Australia. He has been injured for a while. He is not as frightening as McGrath, McDermott, Merv Hughes, Lillee or Thomson. Or as good. He is OK.

Doug Bollinger
Has never dismissed an Englishman in a Test. Largely through lack of opportunity, admittedly. Has also been injured, and might not play in the first Test, extending his lifelong habit of not dismissing Englishmen in Tests. Startlingly inept batsman. Possibly hair-replacement-themed teasing victim.

Ben Hilfenhaus
Has never taken five wickets in a Test innings, nor six wickets in a match. Has only played one Test in Australia, and is an English-style bowler who averages 38.7 outside England. He is OK. If Australia pick him and Bollinger, they will lose. The last time they picked two seam bowlers with tri-syllabic surnames – Gillespie and Kasprowicz in 2005 – they lost.

So there it is. It is or isn’t looking good for Australia.

On previous Ashes tours, England’s positive statements in advance of their inevitable first-Test mincing sounded not so much like men clutching at straws as men pointing their fingers nervously at what they thought might be a straw, and mumbling something about being confident that it was probably a straw, and that they were definitely planning to try to think about clutching it. This time their public confidence is well founded. England are quite a good team. As are Australia. It will be a draw. A glorious draw.

The major cricketing news in England of late has been the fact that Jimmy Anderson may or may not be struggling to be fit for the first Ashes Test, after he may or may not have cracked a rib whilst being possibly punched or hypothetically not punched by someone who either was or was not a team-mate, in what may or may not have been a boxing match, on what may have been an extremely important team bonding camp in Germany or may alternatively have been grown men mucking around in a wood because they don’t really have proper jobs. The camp may or may not prove to have been either “great fun, and the main reason we won the Ashes”, or “a miserable, pointless, and knackering exercise and the principal cause of our humiliating 5-0 defeat”. Or neither. The details remain sketchy. The England team seems to have been firmly bonded anyway, even without yomping through some fields or toasting Ricky-Ponting-shaped marshmallows round a campfire whilst singing rude songs about Peter Siddle.

Whatever proves to be the case, it is safe to say that Anderson’s injury only happened because of the invention of air travel. If England had had to take a six-week boat trip to Australia, we can assume that the bonding camp would have been rendered redundant, and Anderson would not have been injured trying to recreate the Rumble In The Jungle. He might have been eaten by a whale instead, but the long voyage would have given him ample time to recover.

I heard Matt Prior interviewed on the radio about the team jaunt, and when asked what happened, he claimed that he is not allowed to give details of exactly what the squad were doing. It is hard to imagine why the ECB felt compelled to commit the players to silence on the issue. Perhaps it is a straightforward administrative issue – perhaps no one in government has ever found the time to downgrade the level of secrecy required for any British operation in Germany since the early-to-mid 1940s.

Perhaps the activities might reveal points of weakness the Australians could exploit in the Ashes – “Right, boys, we know Alistair Cook turned out to be very good at abseiling, so let’s keep a tight off-stump line for the first 10 overs and hope he gets bored and tries to abseil down something.” Perhaps the skills learnt could prove crucial at important stages of the series – “... and, Richie, it looks like Strauss is asking Finn for one final effort to break this partnership, and the young Middlesex paceman looks confident”; “Of course he does, Bill, let’s not forget Finn now knows how to light a fire by rubbing sticks together and how to kill a reindeer with his bare hands. Marcus North can hold no fears for him now.”

Many in the press have criticised the ECB for sending the players on the camp, and for making them punch each other’s lights out whilst on it (could they not have hired a couple of Doug Bollinger impersonators instead?), but, in mitigation, who knows what injury Anderson could have suffered had he been tucked up safely at home. He could have been run over by an escaped steamroller in Lancashire, or fallen into a vat of custard whilst visiting a local food factory, or tumbled out of a window whilst playing all-in caged Scrabble. It is best that England players’ injuries are administered centrally these days. There are rumoured to be plans to take the squad on a DIY course next week, in the hope that someone will hit Kevin Pietersen round the head with a plank of wood and concuss him back into form.

Of course, there are other things happening in the world of cricket than minor injuries to England players several weeks before the Ashes begin. Bangladesh’s impressive ODI series clattering of New Zealand was welcome and auspicious. As Oscar Wilde once famously wrote, “To win one ODI against a major cricket nation may be regarded as fortune, to win two looks like signs of genuine improvement, and to spank a decent New Zealand side 4-0, without your best batsman, whilst three times defending chaseable totals, suggests that, come World Cup time, with home advantage potentially all way to the semi-final, Bangladesh could be a real threat to anyone.”

Good luck to Darren Sammy as the new West Indies captain, a role that seems in recent years to have mostly involved administering contractual squabbles and occasional outbreaks of cricket. Sammy wrote on his Twitter feed that he will face the challenge “with God at his side”, although even the Almighty would struggle to turn the current team into world beaters (whilst, even at his Biblical best, God would have been lucky even to get a place in the starting XI in the 1980s).

Here, as promised, following on from last week’s blog about Tendulkar’s impossible struggle to overtake John Traicos and Dave Nourse in the Fewest Tests Missed In A Career Lasting Longer Than 20 Years Challenge, here is a table of the 20-year-career Test players and the percentage of possible matches that they played in.

Dave Nourse: 45 out of 45 Tests between 1902-1924 (100%)
John Traicos: 7 out of 7 Tests between 1970-1993 (100%)
Garry Sobers: 93 out of 100 Tests between 1954-1974 (93.0%)
Sachin Tendulkar: 171 out of 185 Tests between 1989-2010 (92.4%)
Syd Gregory: 58 out of 75 Tests between 1890-1912 (77.3%)
Mushtaq Mohammad 57 out of 76 Tests between 1959-1979 (75.0%)
Jack Hobbs: 61 out of 91 Tests between 1908-1930 (67.0%)
Imran Khan: 88 out of 139 Tests between 1971-1992 (63.3%)
Colin Cowdrey: 114 out of 195 Tests between 1954-1975 (58.5%)
Frank Woolley: 64 out of 110 Tests between 1909-1934 (58.2%)
George Headley: 22 out of 45 Tests between 1930-1954 (48.9%)
Wilfred Rhodes: 58 out of 120 Tests between 1899-1930 (48.3%)
Bob Simpson: 62 out of 149 Tests between 1957-1978 (41.6%)
Freddie Brown: 22 out of 113 Tests between 1931-1953 (19.5%)
George Gunn: 15 out of 87 Tests between 1907-1930 (17.2%)
Brian Close: 22 out of 245 Tests 1949-1976 (9.0%)

Some notes on this for those of you with a not-particularly-busy day/week/life in the offing: Dave Nourse’s son Dudley played 34 of 35 possible Tests in his 16-year career, from 1935 to 1951; between them, therefore, they recorded a 98.75% attendance rate over a combined 38-year career, making them, statistically and unarguably, the father-son combination least likely not to play in a Test Match if there was one available in which to play. Even allowing for the fact that the Incredible Test-Playing Nourse Family were lucky enough to predate the age of squad rotation, this suggests that there may be an as-yet undiscovered gene that determines propensity to play in all possible Test matches.

Further support for this theory comes from the Zaltzman family. I have never played in an available Test match, nor has my father (yet; making him one of the few remaining South-African-born Englishmen not to have played Test cricket), nor did his father, nor his father before him (Lithuania having not yet, at that late-19th-century stage, been awarded Test status [and even if they had been, the chances of them selecting a Jew would have been remote]).

George Headley played all 19 of West Indies’ Tests from 1930 to 1939, then captained them in their first post-war game in 1948, played in Delhi later that year, then kicked back for a while, perhaps dreaming of one day playing for the Stanford Superstars like his heroes Sylvester Joseph and Daren Powell, before a late and unsuccessful 1954 recall in his mid-40s against England brought his batting average sliding still further downwards from its pre-war 66 to its final resting place of 60, but more importantly gave him eternal membership of the exclusive 20-Year Test Career Club.

Later in the same series that Headley belatedly bowed out of Test cricket, Garry Sobers bowed into it. He played 85 consecutive Tests, from his second match in 1955 until 1972. He was a good cricketer. Anyone who attempts to persuade you otherwise is probably trying to steal money from you. Ignore them and report them to the relevant authorities.

Bobby Simpson took a 10-year break after his first retirement in 1968, before clambering out of his cosy baggy green bed and claiming to be serving his nation in its hour of Baggy Green need by leading a Remnants Of Australian Manhood XI during the Packer Shebang. In reality, he just wanted to become just the second Australian in the 20-Year Test Career Club.

(There are rumours circulating in cricket circles that mid-80s three-Test spinner Murray Bennett is looking to launch another comeback and join Simpson and Syd Gregory in The Club, 25 years after his last Test appearance. Bennett’s manager, the Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel, who lists Matt Damon, Conan O’Brien, Tim Zoehrer and Martin Scorsese amongst his other clients, claimed: “Murray has unfinished business at Test level, and the current weakness of Australian tweaking means that this should be a no-brainer for the selectors. If they pick Bennett, I can pull a few strings and get them Robert de Niro to open the batting in the Perth Test. I have total faith in Murray Bennett’s ability to single-handedly win the 2010-11 Ashes – that is why he is the only left-arm spinner I represent. I’m going to make Murray Bennett a worldwide megastar.”)

And to finish this week’s ramblings, here is an illustrious chain of cricketing debuts for you: on Tendulkar’s debut, the opposition captain was Imran Khan, who on his debut had bowled to Colin Cowdrey, who had played his first Test alongside Bill Edrich, who debuted against Don Bradman’s 1938 Australians; the Don’s first Test was against an England team containing Jack Hobbs, whose opposing opener in his first Test was Victor Trumper, who made his debut in WG Grace’s last international. On WG’s first-class debut, he dismissed Julius Caesar. He did. Don’t look at me like that. He got Julius Caesar out. Twice. Here’s proof. He would probably have got Genghis Khan and Charlemagne out too, if they’d been playing. Julius Caesar’s first major appointment in public life was as the High Priest of Jupiter in Rome in 84BC. Jupiter was King of The Gods. And a very useful swing bowler and hard-hitting middle-order batsman. And a real success with the ladies. The Imran Khan of his day. And even Jupiter would have struggled to dismiss Tendulkar in Bangalore.

That is all.

Having sought the assistance of Big Mama Stats to prove why England will definitely, decisively and unarguably win the Ashes, I will now ask her to prove that Andrew Strauss and his men are heading for a definite, decisive and unarguable pulping.

(Please do not read this piece in isolation – I realise that, without the context of Part One, this might look like gratuitous numerical hatchet job on a highly successful team. But still, numbers are numbers, and they deserve their say as much as the other great tools of sports punditry, such as experience, perception, gut feeling, rampant jingoism, selective memory, blind optimism and/or pessimism, and, above all, guesswork.)

THE ASHES-LOSING ENGLAND XI, 2010-11

Strauss
Deceptively inconsistent throughout his Test career, for one who is outwardly as unflappable as a granite pterodactyl’s wing. Strauss seems to have a bizarre and inexplicable fixation with averaging between 24 and 26 in series of longer than three Tests – he has done so in five of England’s last seven such rubbers.

These include the last two major series, in South Africa and at home against Pakistan (in which his highest score in eight matches was 54), and his previous tour of Australia, on the supposed 2006-07 Ashes, when he allegedly averaged 24 if Australia claims are to be believed. He has not scored a century for 13 Tests, and only one in his last 17.

As a captain, he masterminded England’s 2009 Ashes triumph by sitting in the pavilion in Cardiff quietly wetting himself whilst Anderson and Panesar held on for a draw, then skilfully led his team to a drawn series in South Africa by doing the same thing twice more.

Cook
Too often bats as if he is trying to befriend the slip cordon, his legs, arms and bat moving like frantic passengers at a busy station all heading for different trains. Averages just 26 in 10 Ashes Tests, and, since the start of the last Ashes tour, in 36 Tests against the top-seven ranked Test nations (i.e. excluding Bangladesh and West Indies), he averages just 33.

Trott
The Cape Town Compulsive Twitcher averaged just 29 in his only previous winter of overseas Test cricket, as his game melted down like a dead zebra’s ice cream on his return to the country of his birth.

Pietersen
Here’s a question for you: What do Andrew Strauss and Kevin Pietersen have in common? Is it: (a) they were both born in South Africa; (b) when they eat a fishfinger, they both nibble the top corners off first to make it look like a fish cricket bat; (c) neither of them has read War And Peace, start to finish, in the original Russian; (d) they were both shortlisted for the role of Tim Curtis in the forthcoming Hollywood blockbuster The Savage Blade, the $150-million biopic of the former Worcestershire and England opening batsman (in the end, the part of three-Test wonder Curtis was given to Vin Diesel, with Kiefer Sutherland as county team-mate Stuart Lampitt, and Scarlett Johannson as England chairman of selectors Petra May); or (e) they have both averaged under 26 in England’s last two major series?

It was a trick question. The answer is of course: all of the above. In his last six series, over 16 Tests, Pietersen has averaged 35, with no centuries, and has plinked only five sixes from his once explosive bat. He is far from the dominator he once was. He hit 32 sixes in his first 18 Tests, but has crossed the ropes just 21 times in 48 matches since then, whilst his scoring rate has dropped by 20%. Pietersen needs to regrow his successful, almost unstoppable 2005 badger hair. It was a source of strength and inspiration for him, and fear and confusion for the Australians.

Collingwood
The glue holding England’s batting together has been decidedly unsticky of late – he has posted six single-figure scores in his last eight Test innings. In his last 17 Tests, he has scored just one century and averaged a sedate 37. In the eight Ashes Tests since his Adelaide masterwork (“The Sistine Chapel ceiling of Durhamite batsmanship” – The Durham Weekly Sprout), Collingwood averages a Brearley-esque 23.

Bell
The Flamethrower Of Eternal Justice averages a piddling 25 against Australia in 13 Tests, dreamy cover drive or no dreamy cover drive. The latter, in most of his Ashes innings – Eternal Justice has trousered a scarcely believable 14 single-figure scores in just 25 Ashes innings.

Could be vulnerable to verbal attack. On his last tour of Baggygreenland, the Australians, masters of psychological intimidation that they are, sledged him using techniques they had clearly learnt from CIA terrorist interrogators – they teased him about looking a bit like someone from a film. “What works in Guantanamo, works at the MCG,” explained captain Ricky Ponting, as he scuttled off to try and put an orange jumpsuit on Alastair Cook.

Prior
As a wicketkeeper, his handling skills were once compared to those of a baby-hating midwife. This is not true, but the point stands. As a batsman, in his 14 Tests against the three highest-ranked teams of recent years (Australia, India, and South Africa), Prior averages 26, with no centuries.

More pressingly, Prior, about to make his first trip to Australia, will be fretting bucketloads about his future career prospects. England have changed their wicketkeeper in four of their last five Ashes tours. The last five keepers to don the gloves for England in Australia for the first time have never played Test cricket again after the end of that series – Rhodes in 1994-95, Hegg in 1998-99, Foster in 2002-03, and Jones and Read in 2006-07.

Alec Stewart in 1990-91 is the last England gloveman whose career was not ended by his first Ashes tour, and that series was also the last England jaunt to Australia that did not signal the total annihilation of a wicketkeeper’s Test existence. Even then, established first-choice Jack Russell was jettisoned after three Tests, and was in and out of the team for the rest of his battered-hat-festooned career. Furthermore, in 1986-87, Jack Richards kept wicket in all five Tests as England triumphed. He was promptly dropped for the first Test of the following summer, played only three more times, and never passed double figures again.

Since Alan Knott, England’s wicketkeepers in Australia have averaged 20.66 in 45 Tests, with one century and five fifties, all whilst crawling along at a fraction over two runs per over. In summary, Australia is a bad place for English wicketkeepers.

Swann
Is Graeme Swann: (a) the world’s most valuable all-round cricketer who holds the key to England’s Ashes hopes; or (b) a fortuitous chancer who has buffed up his bowling average against some of Test history’s most inept batting line-ups? It’s another trick question. The answer is (a), with a bit of (b) thrown in. Swann averaged 40 with the ball in his previous Ashes series, and, against the higher-ranked Test nations, averages close to 36. He averages just 15 with the bat in his last 11 Tests, with a highest score of 32.

Broad
The man who puts the “petulant” into “often needlessly petulant” has seldom produced for England overseas – he averages 37 with the ball and just 14 with the bat in away Tests (compared to 32 and 39 at home). He has not taken five wickets in an innings since that Ashes-winning apparent breakthrough at The Oval in 2009, and has never averaged more than four wickets per game in a series.

Anderson
Could win the Ashes single-handedly. If they were being played in cloudy conditions in England, with Pakistan’s batsmen playing for Australia. Sadly, that is a big “if”. Perhaps the biggest “if” since Rudyard Kipling started projecting the titles of his poems onto the skies above Gotham City. The Ashes will not be held in England with Pakistani batsman. Not this year. Anderson has taken just 17 wickets in eight Tests against Australia, at an average of 56. Over his whole career, in overseas Tests, he has taken 52 wickets at an average of almost 44.

Finn
Struggled to take wickets in his two previous overseas Tests, against Bangladesh, and tends to leak runs – his economy rate is 3.77 in Tests, 3.61 in first-class cricket. Finn is tall. Martin McCague was tall. He once bowled one of the worst opening spells in Ashes history. Logically, therefore, Finn will definitely do the same.

Finn has taken fewer Ashes wickets than, amongst others, Len Hutton, Uzman Afzaal, Ranjitsinhji, and Alan Igglesden (and I guarantee that is the first time in human history that those four names have appeared in the same sentence). Finn can play the “lack-of-opportunity” card as hard as he likes, but the fact remains that he has taken the same number of Australian Test wickets as actress Julie Christie, controversial former professional pope Pope Pius XII, my wife, Diego Maradona and 1997 England one-cap left-armer Mike Smith.

BACK-UP

Morgan
His brilliant array of strokes will not be of much use if his technical flaws against seam bowling continue to rear their indecisively-fiddling-outside-off-stump heads. He has scored just 103 of his 257 Test runs against pace, and been dismissed six times by quicks (compared to 154 runs for once out against spin and dobblers).

Davies
He could become the first English-born wicketkeeper to make his debut for England since James Foster in 2001 – the previous five England-born glovemen to debut for England since Alec Stewart (Foster, Read, Hegg, Rhodes and Blakey) have, between them, averaged 19 with the bat in careers lasting an average of seven Tests.

Also, see Prior’s entry above for the fortunes of England’s wicketkeepers in Australia. In addition to that list of woe, of England’s reserve wicketkeepers on Ashes tours, Gould (1982-83) never played in a Test match at all, Tolchard (78-79) never added to his four caps, Taylor (70-71 and 74-75) played one Test in New Zealand at the end of the 70-71 tour then waited seven years and a Packer revolution for his next. Going further back, surprise first-choice AC Smith never played another Test after the 1962-63 tour, back-up keepers Keith Andrew and Arthur McIntyre played only one Test each after their tours 1954-55 in 1950-51 respectively, Paul Gibb never played again after the 1946-47 tour. Nor George Duckworth after 1936-37. Dodger Whysall played just once after 1924-25. Arthur Dolphin never played after 1920-21. I’m boring myself now. The point is: Davies should fake a serious illness if he wants to have a future as an international cricketer.

Bresnan
He struggled to hit the ball off the square or take wickets in his Tests against Bangladesh; expensive and unpenetrative in ODIs this summer; has had a poor first-class season for Yorkshire. No current reports of anyone in the Australian squad waking up in the middle of the night sweating and screaming, before clambering into their parents’ bed, and asking, “Mummy and Daddy, is it OK if I sleep in your bed again? I’ve had another nightmare about Tim Bresnan.”

Panesar
He has spent much of his recent international career on a learning curve. Unfortunately, that curve has been heading downwards. He averages over 40 in his most recent 22 Tests − the reincarnation of Ashley Giles himself, but with the useful batting and fielding having gone AWOL during the changeover. Monty averages 44 in 17 overseas Tests. His batting has never kicked on from the promise shown in that one straight drive he hit in Perth four years ago that had critics excitedly hailing the new Garry Sobers. And he fields as if he has read the wrong instruction manual, but refuses to back down.

Tremlett
He has taken little over three wickets per match in county cricket over the course of his career. The last time England took a temperamentally suspect giant fast bowler to Australia, the first ball of the series almost killed second slip.

It all looks very, very bleak for England. If you ignore the last blog. And it all looks fantastic if you ignore this one. Statistics are a fickle mistress. I think it will be a close series. Two-all. Or 5-0 either way.

England announced their squad to ruthlessly demolish the quivering Australians amidst some razzmatazz last week, whilst the all-but-already-defeated Ricky Ponting and his about-to-be-thrashed bundle of inferior cricketing specimens were warming up for their warm-up series in India, desperately trying to enjoy a few days of nice, friendly cricket before their ritual humiliation inevitably begins in Brisbane late in November.

Sorry, let me rephrase that. England announced their squad to be ruthlessly exposed yet again in Australian conditions, as Ricky Ponting and his vengeance-hungry troops prepare to pull their baggy-green caps especially determinedly down over their wrinkly green foreheads and reassert their traditional superiority over their old enemy and greatest adversary, India, in what promises to be an intense if stupidly brief series. They will then head home to exert home advantage over an England side, none of whose players have ever not lost a Test in Australia.

Or it might be a closely matched series between two decent but flawed teams. At least it will be the first time since I was still a boy that England have sailed off to an Ashes series without expecting to be beaten like a naughty egg white, and without the summit of their hopes being the partial retention of their cricketing dignity. (Do they still sail to the Ashes? I’m a little bit out of the loop on that one.)

On paper – by which I mean, on the bit of paper on which I’ve written down some statistics − these are two very closely matched teams. In the ICC Test rankings, for what they are worth, Australia are officially the fourth best Test team in the solar system, and England the fifth best, with respective ranking points of 113 and 112. If you add up the individual rankings of the likely starting XIs, there is almost no difference between the two teams’ batting (England 5517, Australia 5466) or pace bowling (England 1878, Australia 1906). Only in Swann’s superiority over Hauritz (858-498) does one side have a clear advantage.

Nevertheless, the English press have been bullish about the team’s prospects – in some cases, as bullish as the streets of Pamplona during idiot season. (And that, readers, I believe to be perhaps the first running-of-the-bulls joke in a cricket blog).

Since the end of the last Ashes in Australia in 2006-07 (I forget what happened in that series, the last thing I can remember of it is Collingwood and Pietersen smashing the Aussies all over the Adelaide Oval, so I assume it all worked out fine), the new, post-Warne-and-McGrath-and-the-rest-of-that-annoyingly-brilliant-side Australia have won 20 Tests and lost nine (with seven draws). The gradually-and-belatedly-emerging-into-the-post-2005-era England have won 20 and lost 10 (with 16 draws).

There now follows a two-part statistical run-down of the England team. Firstly, a look at the England team that will definitely, without any question, and barely even having to break sweat, spank Australia into the cricketing stratosphere. On Thursday or Friday, I will post a statistical run-down of the England team that obviously will be swept aside by the rampant Aussies in a fug of all-too-familiar English ineptitude. And when the Australians have finished their two-Test series in India, I will have a similar crack at their statistics. And then we can all kick back, relax, and get on with the rest of our lives.

THE ASHES-WINNING ENGLAND XI, 2010-11

Strauss
Already joint seventh on the all-time England run-scoring chart after little over six years in Test cricket, the Middlesex magus is the fifth highest run-scorer in world cricket since January 2008. With a square cut like a Victorian headmaster punishing a boy who sniggered at hymn practice, Strauss has three Ashes centuries already under his much-decorated belt, and skippered the team to victory in 2009 with a Man-of-The-Series-winning performance that many consider the greatest deed by an Englishman since Shakespeare wrote those rather overlong skits of his.

Cook
The youngest Englishman − and second-youngest person in the history of the universe, male, female or otherwise − to reach 4000 Test runs. Cook, despite sometimes batting as if he’s trying to sell advertising space on the outside edge of his bat, has scored four centuries in his last 11 Tests, including his two best England innings since his stellar debut, in Durban and at The Oval. Housewives’ favourite – if those housewives like players who accumulate steadily with plenty of nudges into the leg side.

Trott
Scored a supernaturally calm Ashes-confirming century on debut at The Oval in 2009, produced another masterpiece to help clinch this summer’s Pakistan series, and has a Test average of 55. Bats like a cross between Jacques Kallis and an anxiously fidgeting death row inmate waiting for news from his lawyer.

Pietersen
Match-changing dominator with the capacity to dismantle a bowling attack as if it were a £2 carriage clock. More shots in his locker than Allen Stanford has skeletons in his. KP averages 50 against Australia, the fourth-best such figure in world cricket this millennium, and the best by a non-Indian (qualification: at least five Tests).

Collingwood
Scored a superb double-hundred in Adelaide four years ago, and averages almost 48 in away Tests (and over 40 in eight of his last nine away series). The kind of defiant, unflappable cricketer who would have swum to Dunkirk in his pads and evacuated some troops on his bat.

Bell
Stylist who can make batting look as simple as staring at an egg. Averages 61 in Tests since making a crucial if oft-forgotten 71 in the decisive Oval Test of 2009, and has scored six half-centuries in his last eight Ashes Tests, including four in five in Australia four years ago. Now officially renamed by the ECB as “The Flamethrower Of Eternal Justice” to make him sound more intimidating.

Prior
With a Test average of 42, he is England’s second-highest averaging wicketkeeper ever (after Les Ames, who was unavailable for selection after a fitness test confirmed his failure to recover from his death at age 84 in 1990). Prior also has the fourth-highest batting average in human history of any wicketkeeper who has played more than 10 Test innings (behind Andy Flower, Gilchrist and Ames). His glovework, once regarded with such suspicion that it was arrested and interrogated by MI5, is now excellent.

Swann
Transforming from a county also-ran into a modern England great like a forgetful larva suddenly remembering it was supposed to be a prize-winning butterfly, Swann has taken a phenomenal 113 wickets at 26 in his 24 Tests since his debut two years ago, including nine five-wicket hauls. This makes him, by a vast margin, England’s best spinner since Derek Underwood. Ranked as the second-best bowler in the world, he is the world’s leading wicket-taker over the past two years, and the world’s top spinner by an almost embarrassing margin. Excellent natural smiter of a cricket ball, who scored 250 critical and quick lower-order runs in 2009 Ashes.

Broad
In between repeated tellings-off by match referees for being a little bit naughty, Broad has taken 45 wickets at 27 in his last 12 Tests, and has produced series-winning performances in the final Tests of both 2009 and 2010 – his career-defining spell at The Oval to decide the Ashes in 2009, and his 169 at Lord’s against Pakistan, the second-highest Test innings ever by a No. 9, and ending once and for all the debate over whether he is a better No. 9 batsman than previous England incumbents Matthew Hoggard, Alan Mullally, and Neil Mallender.

Anderson
The planet’s No. 4 bowler according to current rankings, Anderson has taken 118 wickets at 27 in his last 30 Tests. He always has the ability to make the ball talk. On occasions, it has said: “What in God’s name are you doing, Jimmy? That bat hurts when it smashes me for four.” This summer, it said: “I’m going to get you out.” And it meant it.

Finn
A strong start to his Test career, with 32 wickets at 23 in eight tests. Twenty-six of his victims have been top seven batsmen. Finn is tall. Curtly Ambrose was tall. He once bowled a spell of 7 for 1 in Perth. Logically, therefore, Finn will definitely do the same.

BACK-UP PLAYERS

Morgan A brilliant strokemaker with four international centuries this year already, including one against Australia in an ODI, and a maiden Test 100 under pressure against Pakistan. Ireland must be regretting fighting for independence from the UK. If they had stuck it out, they could be enjoying his England successes as their own.

Davies has a first-class average over 40, and a couple of promisingly potent ODI innings against Pakistan. Left-handed, aggressive, a wicketkeeper – he clearly must be the new Adam Gilchrist, but more so, and better.

Bresnan is whole-hearted and improving with the ball, reminiscent of a young Flintoff as he increases his repertoire of deliveries; averages 46 in 12 ODI innings against Australia. Has displayed excellent swearing skills on Twitter, could prove useful as a 12th man/specialist sledger.

Panesar is a proven Test wicket-taker, still young for a spinner but with 126 Test victims and eight five-wicket hauls already in his cellar. Possesses an elegant, stylish off drive. Seldom hits the ball with it, but it looks great.

Tremlett had a creditable Test debut series in 2007 against a strong Indian batting line-up, and has a solid first-class record. Tremlett is tall. Joel Garner was tall. Garner took 89 Australia Test wickets at an average of 20. Logically, therefore, Tremlett will definitely do the same.

Part two, the Ashes-losing England XI, 2010-11, will follow in Friday

Basil Butcher: cleverly ensured there aren’t any pictures of him bowling © The Cricketer International

Over the last few days, the roads of England have been inundated with joyous cars sporting flags of St George, the red cross fluttering proudly in the English air in honour of its sporting heroes, as the nation, coming together as one, celebrates its cricketers’ 2-0 series victory over Bangladesh.

The football-obsessed media would have us believe these flags symbolise support for the impending World Cup. They would, of course, be wrong. Football World Cups come around every four years – but there will not be another home Test series against Bangladesh for a decade. The public, understandably, wishes to mark this once-in-a-relatively-short-lived-dog’s-lifetime event. And there is no more potent display of patriotism available to the 21st-century consumer than attaching a small flag to your car window.

In the three previous Tests against England, Bangladesh had, in accordance with their team moniker, fought like Tigers, albeit inexperienced tigers, and when bowling, tigers who had yet to grow teeth. But tigers nonetheless. They had lasted at least 90 overs in each of their six innings, averaged a wicket lost every 11 overs, and when 126 for 0 at Old Trafford, with Tamim Iqbal again tearing into England’s bowlers like a lovestruck teenager into a promising-looking Valentine’s Day envelope, they were well on course to extend their team record of nine consecutive innings of 280 or more.

Bearing in mind (a) that their previous best sequence of 280-plus innings scores was a less-than-world-beating one in a row, and (b) that as recently as 18 months ago they completed a run of 18 successive sub-280 efforts, progress was undoubtedly being made.

It was, therefore, a serious disappointment for all fans of vaguely competitive Test cricket that they then seemingly transported themselves five years back in time and hurled away all 20 wickets in 64 overs (including at one point 11 in 123 balls), fighting like cornered tigerskin rugs as they subsided to a first-innings defeat in a year and a half.

There is an old saying in showbiz, “Always leave them wanting more.” Bangladesh certainly did that, in a frenetic cascade of understandable technical shortcomings and avoidable lapses of attention that was eerily reminiscent of too many of their earlier Tests. It was also spookily similar to England’s rancid capitulations in Leeds, Johannesburg and Kingston within the past 18 months. One of the supposed purposes of Bangladesh’s Test status is for them to learn from better, more established teams. At Old Trafford they demonstrated that they had perhaps been watching videos of the wrong England matches.

Looking ahead to the rest of England’s Test year, they will need more consistent penetration from their bowling attack. They again prospered in favourable conditions, continuing a trend of intermittent threat dating back some years. Since the demise of the 2005 Ashes-winning four-prong-pace-plus-one-prong-containing-left-arm-spin attack, England have struggled to dismiss opponents twice when unaided by conditions or limited opponents (whether they have picked four or five bowlers).

Excluding Tests against Bangladesh and the early-season series in England, they have done so just 10 times in 43 attempts, including just five in 27 overseas Tests (two of which were in New Zealand). This suggests that if they are going to retain the Ashes, they will have to win 1-0, or draw 1-1, and cling on for three or four draws. Bearing in mind that in the past six Australian seasons there have been only three drawn Tests out of 34, this may require Jonathan Trott to extend his pre-delivery routine to heroic levels of time-frittering complexity. Perhaps he could indulge in a full glove-twiddling interpretation of Swan Lake before settling down to face each Nathan Hauritz bombshell, reducing each day to four or five overs. (I am sure that during his Lord’s double-hundred I saw Trott make the bowler wait whilst he checked his emails on his laptop and phoned his gas supplier to see if someone could take a look at his faulty boiler.)

With the Ashes looming, Pakistan’s two forthcoming series against Australia, then England, will be fascinating. All Pakistan series are fascinating. Even if all 30 scheduled days of play were to be washed out, I am sure that some intriguing behind-the-scenes subplots would emerge from nowhere to keep us entertained. And Shahid Afridi is captain. It is not often that one watches cricket primarily to see what the captain does. But this will be one of those rare occasions.

The bans on some key players have already been lifted, and the concern for Pakistan supporters must be that, with the first Test against Australia still almost five weeks away, there is ample time for a new set of bans to be randomly imposed before the Test matches begin (plus at least two changes of captaincy, three major feuds, five retirements and six retirement reversals).

Time for one question and answer from your submissions (more to follow in a few days’ time).

Question (submitted by Themistocles): Inspired by your last piece about Mudassar Nazar, what do you consider to be the most underwhelming feat of greatness?

Zaltzmanswer: Interesting question, Themistocles (and how good to discover that you are alive, well and on the internet, despite having died in 459 BC).

Figures of 6 for 32 suggest a devastating pace blitz or a wily spell of mystery spin on a crumbling fifth-day pitch, not some slow-medium wobblers wreaking havoc amidst the cream of English batsmanship. That Mudassar should have carved those numbers into cricketing history, rather than Imran Khan or Abdul Qadir, who between them took 4 for 178 in 79.5 overs in that innings, is one of those strange quirks that illuminate the annals of the sport.

Mudassar followed up his Lord’s triumph with 4 for 55 a fortnight later at Leeds, his second-best Test analysis – he did not take more than five wickets in any other series in his 13-year Test career. I prefer to think of such unexpected and isolated outbreaks of quality in otherwise mundane careers as flabbergastative rather than underwhelming.

Perhaps the finest example is Basil Butcher’s 5 for 34 against England in Port-of-Spain in 1968. Butcher had been a stalwart of the West Indies batting line-up for most of the previous decade when Garry Sobers tossed him the ball with England coasting along serenely at 370-odd for 5. In that time Butcher had bowled once, nine years previously, a tidy six-over spell of 0 for 17 in Delhi. He was not so much an occasional legspinner as an entirely hypothetical one.

As he stood at the end of his run-up, Butcher must have thought to himself: “I’ve got a round red thing in my hand. What on earth do I do with it now?”

The answer he gave himself was, evidently: “I suppose I’d better take four wickets in three overs.” After dismissing Colin Cowdrey for 148, he skittled the English tail, before bowling Jeff Jones to take his fifth wicket.

One can only imagine the stunned silence in the West Indies dressing room after Butcher completed his spell, as his 10 team-mates stared at him, as if to say: “You should have mentioned you could bowl at some point in the previous 10 years, Basil. You really should have mentioned it.”

Butcher preferred to retain his cloak of bowling anonymity, however. He never took another Test wicket. As individual, unexpected peaks of performance go, this was the cricketing equivalent of Inzamam-ul-Haq hauling himself out of his special chair, slightly stretching what is left of his hamstrings, lolloping towards a sandpit, and breaking the world triple-jump record. Or of George W Bush standing up in front of the UN, clearing his throat, and giving a faultless rendition of the Queen of the Night’s aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute.

The fact that Butcher waited so long before revealing his hand makes his feat particularly special. Michael Clarke famously took six Indian wickets for nine runs in 38 balls in his fourth Test, in Mumbai in 2004-05. This, however, merely raised expectations that have never been met (other than when he took out three more Indians in 11 balls in Sydney three years later – excluding these combined schoolboy analyses of 9 for 14 in 8.1 overs, Clarke has tweaked out just 11 batsmen at 70 runs per wicket in 58 Tests).

Butcher, by contrast, skilfully created his extravagant element of surprise by not bowling at all for the previous nine years. And retrospectively heightened it by barely bowling ever again. A work of pure genius.

Hello again Confectionery Stallers, and welcome back to the blog after a slightly-earlier-and-longer-than-expected holiday. I signed off the last blog in a flurry of post-Ashes statistical frenzy confidently predicting that I would post the Official Confectionery Stall Ashes Review. I can only apologise for not having done so. A number of things cropped up that prevented me doing so.

1. My wife discovered me having a candlelit dinner in a French restaurant with Statsguru. I tried to convince her that it was perfectly innocent, that I just wanted to thank Statsguru for all the help it has selflessly given me through the summer, but only time will tell whether she swallowed it. If she had heard me giggling coyly at all of Statsguru’s jokes, I would have been in big trouble.

Anyway, on our family holiday, I was not permitted to take even so much as a copy of Wisden with me. I tried to argue that if she was allowed to take two children with her, I was entitled to take two boxes of Wisdens with me. My wife, being a lawyer, won the argument convincingly. Even my offer to read her the match reports of England’s series in India in 1981-82 to help her get to sleep was rejected.

2. An unscheduled cricketing comeback. Having not played for three years, I strapped on what was left of my cricket kit for the first time since I became a father and took the field for the mighty Penshurst Park in a colossal local derby against Chiddingstone in the Kent Village League. Cricket simply does not come any more intense than that.

And what a return for Zaltzman, 34, striding to the wicket with eight overs remaining and Penshurst in need of quick runs, like Odysseus returning from his 20-year war-then-gap-decade extravaganza, surviving the easiest documented missed stumping opportunity on 3, spanking a six over long on that flabbergasted me, my wife, my bat, the ball and those of my team-mates who had seen me bat before, then creaming a cut straight to backward point, deciding the purity of the shot merited at least a single, and being run out by between 12 and 14 yards as the non-striking batsman stared in stationary amazement from comfortably and immovably within his crease.

Thus I was out for 17 mesmeric runs following a dazzling display of strokeplay all round the wicket that brought to mind a young Frank Woolley in his pomp, that proved what Mark Ramprakash might have achieved if given the chance at The Oval, that demonstrated once and for all that, while form is temporary, class (or, in this case, an absence of class) is permanent. Chiddingstone luckily fluked the match by seven wickets with about six overs to spare.

3. I have been unable to sit still for long enough to type more than three words at a time due to the febrile, adrenaline-surging excitement that rampaged through my body whenever I thought about the forthcoming seven-match one-day series.

The Ashes were a tasty if uneven appetite-whetting hors d’oeuvre, but now for the real main-course cricket – a Titanic three-week contest to define once and for all which of the two ancient rivals is the greater cricketing nation. There’s probably a trophy for it as well, although no-one is quite sure. And it might affect the ICC rankings too, although no-one knows how they work or what they mean. And there are crucial psychological points to be scored in the build-up to the 2010-11 and 2013 Ashes. And personal cricketing immortality awaits for any player who can send down ten tidy overs or smack a crucial 30 off 20 balls. England against Australia – cricket at its unquenchable greatest.

As I write, three matches in, the series has yet to fully explode into the shimmering majesty the world had expected.

Some may argue that waiting for this series to erupt is like sitting on top of a small hill in Gloucestershire wearing a heat-proof bodysuit while muttering: “Now for a spot of volcano surfing.” Others may suggest that these seven games represent that crassest example of scheduling in cricketing memory, further proof that those who run the game have no discernible soul. A few might even go so far as to argue that these games, along with the 13 (thirteen) (yes, thirteen) (I’m not joking, thirteen) one-day internationals England will play next summer are a cheeky, underhand scheme to discredit further the already-maligned 50-over format by boring the English cricket watching public into going to watch some crown-green bowling.

But for now, let us cast such cynics aside, and luxuriate in the mellifluous rhythms
and majestic drama of England struggling to hit the ball off the square and Australia playing adequately enough to win easily.

4. The Ashes defied analysis. On reflection, there was nothing much to it. There was no great masterplan cunningly executed, no merciless exploitation of opposition weakness. Both sides played two good matches, and two bad ones. Australia failed to capitalise on one of their two good ones, but probably would have done but for rain.

England showed considerable mental resilience to rebound from their staggering ineptitude at Leeds and play an excellent match at The Oval, but only after showing considerable mental frailty to plumb those depths in the first place and necessitate a subsequent display of mental resilience. Having previously displayed similar frailty at Cardiff and similar resilience at Lord’s.

The pattern of the series suggested that if there had been a sixth Test, Australia would have waltzed it. And if there had then been a seventh, England would have trounced their old enemy and regained the Ashes in a blaze of unexpected glory.

If both sides had played well simultaneously, we could have seen a great Test. If both sides had played badly simultaneously, we could have seen one of the all-time classics.

5. I lost my pen.

6. I’ve been working out some stats about how regularly teams score centuries and half-centuries in one-day internationals. And how regularly they concede them. Don’t tell the missus. Please. More on this later, when she’s out of the house. Okay, since you insist, here’s a little taster: since the 2007 series with India, England have amassed three hundreds in 37 games, comfortably the fewest of any major Test nations (and one per 105 innings played by their batsmen − excluding Pietersen, the rest have scored one century, by Strauss, in 288 innings).

However, England’s bowlers have only conceded five in that time – only South Africa (a measly one) have conceded fewer. So while England might not know how to play entertaining 50-over cricket themselves, but they also know how to stop their opponents doing so. Which possibly explains why that Gloucestershire volcano remains resolutely dormant.

Now that we’ve all calmed down a bit, I have another statistic for you. And it’s a good one.

A series that has seen England plumb some extremely murky depths ended with a second joyous and outstanding triumph. Broad’s meteoric spell on Friday was supported by superb batting on Saturday, leaving Australia with an unrealistically Himalayan mountain to climb.

Ponting and his men had been bafflingly, unAustralianly passive and negative in the field as England piled potentially crucial extra rocks on top of what turned out to be a 546-run Everest. They set off confidently enough, but Hussey and Flintoff then combined to steal Ponting’s crampons and send him tumbling off the mountain, and then Clarke was unluckily bullocked off it by a passing African rhino in a hang glider (if I may attempt to convey quite how unfortunate he was when run out). It remains a mystery why North and Haddin then chose to hurl themselves down a ravine when there were still technically enough rations to at least attempt to reach the summit. It was a strange way of proving that Australians never give up.

Yesterday was a great day for English cricket, and in particular for Strauss, whose batting and coin-tossing were of the highest calibre, sparking celebrations that, rightly, did not touch the wild exultation of four years ago. For my part, I celebrated with a romantic evening in with Statsguru, and, well, without wishing to go into too much indelicate detail, things got a bit frisky between us, and a statistic emerged. A beautiful, bouncing new-born statistic. And its first words were these:

England averaged 6.49 runs per wicket less than Australia in this series, but still won. This is the biggest runs-per-wicket deficit ever overcome to win a Test series. In the entire history of cricket, the human race and the universe put together. Here endeth the stat.

Let’s all take a couple of minutes to think about that.

 

 

 

 

Come on, concentrate.

 

 

 

 

Good. This was the 35th time in 539 Test series that a team has won with an inferior average (and only the second Ashes contest in which the statistically weaker side has triumphed since 1902). Never has that inferiority been greater than 6.49 runs per wicket. The previous record margin was 6.03, when England hoodwinked South Africa in 1998 after narrowly escaping with a last-wicket-remaining draw at Old Trafford. Coincidentally, that was Flintoff’s first series – his career has been bookended by two of cricket’s greatest statistical heists.

So, did England deserve to win the series? Taking the five matches as a whole, perhaps they didn’t. Taking the two sides’ performances in the final, winner-takes-all shootout at The Oval, they probably did. Taking Australia’s first innings failures at Lord’s, Edgbaston and The Oval, they certainly deserved to lose it.

This statistic certainly confirms that this has been one of the oddest Ashes series of all time – two teams equally capable of both very good and genuinely atrocious cricket produced a series that was close overall without containing a single close game. Four of the Tests were massively one-sided (first innings leads of 239 at Cardiff, 210 at Lord’s, 343 at Leeds and 172 at The Oval). Only very briefly at Lord’s was there a match in which both sides had a realistic chance of winning, and this was rapidly snuffed out on the final morning.

All in all, it was a bit like watching a boxing match in which the fighters were punching their own faces as often as their opponent’s, or a two-horse steeplechase in which the horses alternately sail majestically over one fence before ploughing face-first straight into the next without even attempting to get off the ground. Australia ended snout-down in the last, leaving England to prance past them and trot down the final furlong punching the air in delight that there were no more fences left to crash into.

The destination of the urn was ultimately decided by England’s belated competence and resistance in Cardiff, and by Broad’s magnificence at the Oval on a pitch where no other fast bowler made a significant impression.

From the crucial day-four rain in Cardiff to the toss and Michael Clarke’s supernaturally unfortunate run out at The Oval, England had better and more influential luck than Australia, and were certainly holding the right end of the umpires’ collective white stick. But, when the summer was reduced to a single winner-takes-all shoot-out, England produced the series’ best bowling (by Broad) and batting (by Strauss and Trott). And I stand by my previous assertion that the real man of the series, in terms of the player whose contribution proved most influential, was Monty Panesar.

I should also apologise for my assertion in the last blog that The Oval pitch was “an embarrassment”. It was not ideal – could a so-called ‘result’ pitch not be fast and bouncy, rather than crumbly and random? However, on Saturday, almost 400 runs were scored for six wickets (including three slogs and a run out), and four of the first seven Australian second-innings wickets were due to silly, silly batting, and one to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune picking mercilessly on Michael Clarke.

I will post The Official Confectionery Stall Review Of The Series later in the week.

For those who enjoy tables, here is a list of the Top Ten Biggest Runs Per Wicket (RPW) Deficits Overcome To Win A Test Series. Commit it to memory, then destroy it.

A more accurate measure of the extent of cricketing superiority overcoming may be The Heist Percentage – the difference between the sides’ averages as a percentage of the losing team’s average. By this measure, England’s 2009 Ashes win is the 7th greatest heist in Test history – a 15.9% heist, some way off Australia’s burglary of the 1891-92 Ashes, when they filched the urn despite averaging 21.6% less than England. The injustice still rankles today, and clearly motivated Strauss and his men at the Oval. In fact, as Graeme Swann celebrated the final wicket, lip-readers would have seen him screaming the words, “This one’s for WG Grace and his boys.”

There you go. Now I must spend some quality time with the wife. If she sees me looking anything else up on Statsguru in the next month, she’ll start telling me she can’t go on with three of us in the relationship.

This has been a curate’s omelette of a series, and it seems that the decisive egg was thrown into the pan by Stuart Broad yesterday. Broad chose what can conservatively be described as a useful time to graduate from being a perennially promising bowler who had previously chipped away with occasional wickets, to being one capable of devastating an opposition top order – from a sporadically flaring barbecue to a full-blown Krakatoa in one magnificent spell.

He had taken more than three wickets only twice in 35 Test innings, so Australia’s backroom cricketing seismologists could be forgiven for not having detected the pre-rumblings of Broad’s extraordinary eruption of intelligently hostile swing and cut. He was ably aided by Graeme Swann, on a stupidly helpful surface, and Swann was unably aided Umpire Rauf, with two stupidly helpful lbw decisions.

England will have to pull off something spectacular to lose from here, which, on the patternlessly inconsistent form both sides have shown this series, is not out of the question. They seem set, however, to complete one of their oddest Ashes victories. They began this Test having been poor-to-hapless for large swathes of the first four games. No single player had compiled a properly good series – no batsman was averaging over 50, no bowler under 30, and even Strauss, comfortably England’s best player, had failed in two games out of four.

Australia statistically had most of the top batsmen and bowlers, but it now looks as if their irresponsible collapse at Lord’s, and less culpable but still carelessness-assisted one at the Oval yesterday will have decided the series.

The pitch for such an important match has been an embarrassment (although, as a general rule, one like this is preferable to a featureless featherbed), making the toss disproportionately important. Both sides appear to have selected their teams wrongly, Australia more wrongly than England. Jim Laker would have fancied beating his own 19-wicket record on this pitch. Even Nathan Hauritz might have come close to it.

However, a feature of the series has been how both sets of batsmen, products of an era of predominantly pancake-flat wickets, have proved totally unable to adjust to even mildly unhelpful conditions and moderate movement of the ball. I suppose it is inevitable that, if you live on a diet of pancakes, suddenly being served an unshelled crab will be a major test of your knife-and-fork technique.

In this decisive game, England’s batsmen and bowlers have so far been more disciplined. Ponting and Clarke, Australia’s two best batsmen, were out playing attacking, good-wicket shots early in their innings. Strauss by contrast has simplified his already simple technique, and scored some of his most important runs. And Ian Bell received almost no praise from a media that has become so obsessed with his supposed mental frailties that they failed to notice him chiselling out his toughest and arguably best Test innings after an unpromising start.

And, if England fail to pull off something spectacular and do complete the series win, Monty Panesar can clear his throat and prepare to deliver his Man of the Series acceptance speech.

	It increasingly seems that when England pick Steve Harmison, they essentially pick a myth © Getty Images

Sit down. I have some stats that may or may not be relevant to the Oval Test.

• Australia are averaging 13 runs per wicket more than England – 46 to 33 – meaning that, statistically, they have dominated this series more than they did the series of 1990-91, 1994-95 1997 or 1998-99 which they won comfortably without having to sully their baggy green hands with an important final Test, and more even than in the famous 4-1 Lillee-and-Thomson-ignited drubbing of 1974-75. Nevertheless, thanks to Monty Panesar’s unbreachable bat, they have failed to translate this obvious superiority into champagne-spraying exultation.

As an incidental substatistic, at the equivalent stage of the 2005 series, Australia and England both averaged 30.87 runs per wicket – though, when an extra decimal place is thrown into the equation, England had a clear advantage of 3 thousandths of a run per wicket over. Good, close series, that one, with hindsight.

• If England do win (and assuming they do not hand Australia a 1938-style innings-and-500 drubbing), they will become only the 2nd team since 1902 to win an Ashes series despite averaging less than their opponents − in 1981, England won 3-1 despite averaging fractionally lower than Australia (26.38 to 26.52). Botham’s aura evidently made a 0.15 runs-per-wicket difference then – can Flintoff’s overcome a 13-runs-per-wicket deficit this time?

• If England drop Graham Onions for Flintoff, they will attempt to take 20 wickets with five bowlers who, in the last two Ashes series, have taken 65 wickets at an average of 50.12, with a strike rate of a scalp every 83 balls. If they continue on this form, they will need 277 overs to bowl Australia out twice for a combined total of 1002 runs (excluding leg-byes and byes).

England will therefore have to score 1003 in around 170 overs to win. The best tactic on winning the toss would be to insert Australia, bowl them out for 501 by mid-afternoon on day two, then smash a quick run-a-ball 1003 for 9 declared by just after lunch on day four, and bowl Australia out for 501 again to win with the last ball of the match. The only potential flaw in this plan is that the 11 batsmen who would have to do this have, over the same time span, averaged 30, and scored at three per over. Still, stranger things have happened. Albeit, not in cricket. Or reality.

• It increasingly seems that when England pick Steve Harmison, they essentially pick a myth. Either side of his annus mirabilis – from October 2003 to September 2004, when he took 70 wickets in 12 tests at an average of 19.8, against Bangladesh, West Indies and New Zealand – he has harvested just three wickets per Test at a Malcolmian, Prabhakaretic, sub-Pringlesque average of 37.5.

If you then remove four further ‘Tests’ against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, that average creeps above 40, into the realms where Madal Lals, Ashley Gileses and Guy Whittals roam. If you then get a bit cheeky and whip out his 11 for 76 on a bouncily helpful wicket at Old Trafford against Pakistan, England are now relying on a bowler who for the vast majority of his career against top-class opposition on non-trampolining pitches averages 43 – slightly worse than the career averages of fast-bowling legends such as Champaka Ramanayake, Nixon McLean, Pramodya Wickramasinghe and Nathan Astle. Most players’ careers can be statistically picked apart in some way, but these are ugly numbers in anyone’s notebook, particularly if that person is using their notebook to plot a series-clinching Test win against Australia.

There you go. You can’t argue with facts. Particularly when the facts are arguing with themselves.

I have finally emerged from my special shed at the end of my garden that I keep for emergency situations, such as nuclear war, Armageddon, a large meteor homing in on South London, and mentally recovering from watching England being humiliatingly obliterated in a crucial Test match. I spent six months in there after Adelaide 2006. I remain unconvinced that I did not re-emerge too soon.

The £20 I forked out on a fifth-day ticket for Leeds proved to be one of my less sound financial investments, alongside the purchase of a surfboard made of salt, my bet that a zebra would win the Grand National by 2007, and a contribution to the research and development budget of a company making a sausage howitzer for rapid feeding of crowded school dining rooms.

Was Headingley operating a Nigerian-banking-style internet scam, preying on vulnerable and easily-misled cricket fans such as myself by promising an unforgettable day’s cricket, with England potentially winning the Ashes and adding a new entry to its Top 10 List of Greatest Ever Moments, for just £20 – the price of four £5 notes − when they knew full well that England were planning to collapse like a Victorian lady at the unexpected sight of a gentleman’s danglers? I knew it seemed too good to be true, but I was sucked in and the media were so persuasive I felt I couldn’t turn them down.

In the event, my Tuesday holiday at Headingley transpired to be a fairly dull experience, sitting alone in an ugly, empty stadium with a copy of Wisden, a pair of binoculars and an imagination. However, even trying to pretend England were knocking off 300 to win on the last afternoon proved impossible, and I ended up envisaging a mid-afternoon collapse and Ricky Ponting sprinting around the outfield with the Ashes screaming, “Yes, yes, yes, we’ve done it – we have vanquished the mightiest of the mighty.” To make matters worse, play in my imaginary final day ended late due to bad light and I missed my train back to London.

Even the most ardent positivist in the England camp would concede that the fourth Test was a bit of a disappointment. The prize was within touching distance, but, instead of reaching out and grasping it, England tripped over their own shoelaces, landed headfirst in a bucket, staggered around blindly with the bucket lodged on their head, walked into a plate-glass mirror, staggered backwards, fell over a dog and tumbled out of a 15th floor window.

Nevertheless, as the players of both teams have been chanting with monk-like repetition, it is Only One-All And Still All To Play For, despite Australia’s pronounced statistical superiority (they are averaging 13 runs per wicket more than England, more on which in tomorrow’s statfest of a blog).

Furthermore, looking at History, that most seductive but useless of guides, the best Australia can hope for from this match is a draw. They have never won a decisive Ashes Test without the following two criteria being fulfilled: (1) Don Bradman is in the team; (2) it is the 1930s. Neither of those looks likely to happen at The Oval. Ponting and his men will therefore have to hope that England cannot force a victory.

So, this is it. After all the build-up, the years of waiting, the endless speculation, and the nationwide frenzy of anticipation, finally, on Thursday, Jonathan Trott will make his Test debut. And the 2009 will reach its denouement.

I confess to knowing little about the former South African, but he has a solid overall first-class record and, as a horse for this particular final Test course, has been picked when bang in form, and a loud bang at that. In previous times, the England selectors seemed to shy away from picking new players if they were in form, preferring to wait until they were struggling, and preferably, having to face top-notch opposition, before throwing them in, in an effort to undermine their confidence and self-belief for the long-term. It was a curious tactic, with hindsight.

Bell is lucky to be playing – if Rudi Koertzen had used his eyeballs at Edgbaston he would have had three failures out of three and be contemplating a prolonged period on the sidelines learning not to put his leg in the way of inswingers. But the stage is set for one of the great career-transforming double-centuries of all time.

England need major contributions from players who have failed to deliver them so far, and if they (and especially Flintoff) make a good or even non-cataclysmic start, the crowd, occasion and prospect of another drunken bus-tour around London and a chat with the Queen could inspire them to close the gap in quality between the sides that seemed apparent before the series and in Cardiff, then went AWOL for a couple of Tests, before re-emerging as a chasm in Leeds.

I still think England have a chance of ensuring that their Ashes blimp soars victoriously to the skies on the helium of adrenaline and history, rather than merely Hindenburging into an inferno of defeat at the first opportunity.

The good news for England is that, so far in this series, the performances in one match have generally not given many hints as to how the teams would play in the next. And they will know that, if it is a close game (and let’s hope that it is – there hasn’t yet been a match in this series in which both sides have played well), Australia may start thinking about how they really should have had these Ashes wrapped up and under the Christmas tree by now. And Ricky Ponting may start thinking how the last Australian captain to lose two Ashes series in England, Billy Murdoch in the late 19th century, ended up playing for England less than two years later. No-one could cope with that Bazooka Of Damocles pointing right into his face.

THE CONFECTIONERY STALL OVAL TEST PREDICTION

What the heck. England to win. I don’t really think that, but I’m trying to give optimism a go, just for a change. Flintoff to be knighted at tea on the final day before ripping through the Australian tail to clinch victory. Ponting to burn an effigy of himself on the outfield before going into hiding and being sighted in Argentina some years later.

Brace yourselves for some hard-core Confectionery Stall stats tomorrow morning.

	How low can England go? Answer: very low © Getty Images

As I write, Broad and Prior are launching a spectacular Headingley-81-style fightback – a blazing partnership that has so far brought 22 defiant runs in just 20-odd minutes. Whether this develops into the 350-plus stand that might give Graham Onions a chance to do a Bob Willis remains to be seen, so, with the game still poised so delicately in the balance, here is a statistic for you.

England’s number 3, 4 and 5 have in this game posted the worst ever Test performance by and England 3-4-5. The worst. In 890 Tests. Even counting matches when nightwatchmen have broken up the 3-4-5. Even in 19th-century games when the wickets sometimes literally had snakes in them. Ouch. (Counting only games in which numbers 3, 4 and 5 have been dismissed twice, which seems fair in the circumstances.)

Bopara, Bell and Collingwood mustered 16 runs between them in their six innings. Even by the most positive-taking of modern standards, this was ‘a bit disappointing’ and ‘something that needs building on’.

In fact it was the equal third worst performance by numbers 3 to 5 in the batting order in all Test history (excluding South Africa at Melbourne in 1931-2, when they used a completely different 3-5 in the second innings, to spectacular effect – Bell, Mitchell and Cameron managed to double the 5 runs accumulated by Christy, Taylor an Viljoen in the first).

South Africa can proudly claim both first and second place in this list of shame. They managed 12 in a Test in 1888-89, at a time when they still pretty much pitched up at the ground and asked passers-by if they fancied a game of cricket for a couple of days. And, least triumphantly of all, Keith, Endean and McLean – not the worst 3-5 in Test history by any measure – amassed 6 runs in the 1955 Oval Test. Scores of 5, 0 and 1 in the first innings paved the way for three second-knock ducks as Laker and Lock filled their spinny boots on a turning wicket.

So at least Bopara, Bell and Collingwood can claim to have done 166% better than the 1955 South African 3-to-5. A small consolation as they take their place in English cricket’s slightly embarrassed history books.

[A quick update – Prior is out. I daresay the odds are now even longer the 500-1 England defied 28 years ago. But Broad has just been dropped by Siddle. Could that be the crucial turning point? No. No. No. It could not.]

For English masochists, those who dislike England for whatever reason, and those who simply love the statistics of failure, here is a list of the worst ever performances by an England 3, 4 and 5. Please ignore if you are of a sensitive disposition, or closely related to the three batsmen involved. Thanks be to Statsguru.

	Freddie, make way please. Behold the new Botham. © Getty Images

The Ashes scoots rapidly towards its denouement, with the fourth Test beginning today just under a month after the first. Both sides may be wondering whether they will ever again bowl the other out twice without serious meteorological assistance. And both may think that it is in their interests to club together and purchase a cloud machine.

England may be pondering whether or not they will still be allowed a bus parade and some New Year’s honours if the crowd keeps booing Ricky Ponting. Or if they grind out a 1-0 series win.

Ponting himself may be contemplating the inevitable consequences of becoming the second Australian captain after Billy Murdoch to lose two Ashes series in England – i.e. playing for England, which is what Murdoch found himself doing 18 months after his 1890 Ashes failure. An intriguing prospect, particularly with the next Ashes in Australia 18 months away, should Ponting prove able to displace Ravi Bopara from the England line-up.

The prospects for Headingley have been extensively discussed by far worthier keyboards than mine, so instead of wrongly guessing what might happen over the next five days, I present the first batch of nominations for the Confectionery Stall 2009 Ashes Mid-Series Awards.

CONFECTIONERY STALL MAN-OF-THE-FIRST-60%-OF-THE-SERIES

Jimmy Anderson

The new Botham. Anderson has the priceless ability to take wickets with good balls and, more importantly, bad ones. He plucks stunning catches out of the air like an unusually athletic seal snaffling a particularly rapid herring. And he is a flamboyant batsman willing and able to clatter good-length balls to the cover boundary. All he needs is the occasional cigar, a slightly less honed tummy, and some ducks, and the similarity will be complete. Please, England, just don’t spoil him by making him captain.

Monty Panesar

Panesar is, or at least should be, a live candidate for the Man-of-the-Series gong. His 7 not out was the most influential single performance of the rubber to date, just sneaking ahead of Mitchell Johnson’s opening spell at Lord’s.

Paul Collingwood, Anderson and Graeme Swann all contributed to the rearguard, but they could have been expected to perform as they did on a friendly wicket. For Panesar to play out 40 minutes in any circumstances, with barely a droplet of alarm, could not have been predicted. If cricket is now more about momentum than cricket, Panesar has been the key player thus far.

Rudi Koertzen

Harshly criticised for his some of his less certifiably correct decisions, Koertzen has valid excuses for most if not all of his so-called mistakes. When he apparently gave Michael Clarke out in the first innings at Edgbaston, he was in reality merely joining in with a Mexican wave.

When allegedly giving Ian Bell not out LBW to Johnson when it appeared that the batsman’s L was about as B his W as is physically possible, it was because Koertzen had spotted that the scalding Birmingham sun had melted the varnish on the bails, welding them together in an unbreakable union. Had Johnson’s surprise perfect inswinger managed to avoid Ian Bell’s shuffling limb, it would have knocked middle stump out, but left the bails in place. As Hawkeye failed to show.

(It should also be noted that, when England desperately needed Koertzen to keep giving people out on the grounds that they were nearly out, he started getting some close decisions right. He received minimal credit for this – such is the lot of the Umpire.)

(And what a set-up by Johnson – an entire two Tests of near unbroken garbage just to maximise the surprise of that one ball to Bell.)

DISAPPOINTMENT OF THE SERIES

Simon Katich

Fans of the New South Wales nurdler would have been hoping and expecting to see a series of Gary Kirsten-like crabby accumulation, and would have been delighted with his century in Cardiff. Since then, however, he has concocted an array of recklessly macho and carelessly loose shots for which he would have been roundly slammed if he had been a player with a reputation for recklessness or carelessness.

Phil Hughes

One of the most intriguing questions to emerge from the series so far is: how many Test runs will Phillip Hughes score in his career? He currently has 472. The answer could be anywhere between 15,000 at the higher end, and 471 at the lower. Many factors will decide this, including whether or not Test cricket dies on the vine, whether Hughes volunteers for a manned mission to Mars, whether he stops hitting short balls into the hands of fielders, and which performance was more indicative of his future achievements – this Ashes, or the series in South Africa, when Hughes scored more runs against a better attack in tougher conditions.

Mitchell Johnson

But he’s brewing something. I can feel it. (But then I could also feel Geraint Jones developing into a top-6 specialist Test batsman. We are both still waiting.)

The Pitches

This has been an interesting and often exciting series despite the surfaces, which, to the untrained eye (e.g., either of my two eyes), have been almost indistinguishable from each other, and provided a stupidly tough examination for the bowlers, but a relatively facile quiz for the batsmen.

There have been two circumstances in which the bowlers have dominated – (1) when the ball has swung; and (2) when the batsmen have taken collective leave of their senses. The tension and rarity of a close Ashes series has camouflaged the drab nature of the pitches. If this is the future of Test cricket, however, it will need more than pink balls to keep people interested.

More nominations to follow tomorrow. Please make your own nominations too. Each of the winners will receive a commemorative Confectionery Stall bag of dried apricots, personally signed (on receipt of a stamped, addressed envelope).

HEADINGLEY PREDICTION

Australia are still vulnerable to swing. They have dealt with it with the practiced expertise of a crocodile delivering a baby. England have been little better. Whoever gets the better of the clouds could win. The weather forecast is quite good. It could be a draw. England may miss Flintoff – medical science has kept him going in the series. Forty years ago, he would have been humanely put down by now.

I think Australia’s bowlers might click in this match, especially if they pick four front-line quickies. The Confectionery Stall insulates itself from disappointment with pessimistic predictions – Australia to win in four days. (I have a ticket for the fifth day.)

England, however, would be happy with a draw to leave Australia having to win at the Oval − Australia have never won a decisive final Ashes Test without Don Bradman in the team.

FACT OF THE DAY

If England can pull off a shock first-day win (which no team has managed to do in first-class cricket since 1960), they will become the first England team to win the Ashes inside a month since 1890. Australia have pulled of this remarkable feat of Speed Urn Acquisition three times this decade.

To achieve this, England’s best tactic would be to insert Australia, bowl them out for 70-odd, cut loose for 25 overs, declare on 180-3, then skittle the Aussies again for 80 to win by an innings. This is, admittedly, a high-risk gambit. But history beckons with a brightly glowing finger.

Welcome to Part 2 of the Official Confectionery Stall Multiple Choice 2009 Ashes Quiz. Following last week’s four questions about the Lord’s Test, this week’s exam focuses more on the Edgbaston Test, which, if predictions about the weather and pitch prove true, is already shaping up to be one of the most exciting matches ever played in the Birmingham area which straddles July and August 2009.

Pencils at the ready...

5. Who is going to win at Edgbaston?

(a) England

They’ve already broken one hoodoo – not having beaten Australia at Lord’s since Greta Garbo was still a proactive conversationalist.

In the oldest of all cricketing proverbs: One Brings Two. They will surely now break another hoodoo – not having beaten Australia in the next Test match after beating Australia at Lord’s since 1890. It will help if the team can follow the example of the majority of the English media, and forget how they only managed to escape from the jaws of defeat in Cardiff by first coating themselves in mayonnaise and climbing into those jaws.

(b) Australia

Mitchell Johnson has set himself up perfectly for a startling return to form, catapulting England out on a docile pitch before slugging a match-winning century. Australia’s batsmen are averaging almost 10 runs an innings more than England’s in the series so far, and, as Michael Clarke himself said, his team is never more dangerous than when the chips are down. Recent history suggests this is almost as big a lie as his claim that this Australian team is as good as any he has played in, but you have to admire the lad for saying it anyway.

(c) No-one – it will be a draw

Rain is forecast, the pitch is reportedly flat as a demotivated pancake, and, more pertinently, both sides should have learned from their mistakes of the first two Tests, each of which were played on friendly batting surfaces, and each of which required batting of catastrophic ineptitude to lead make a positive result possible.

Even so, the runs-per-wicket for both sides put together (43) is so far the highest ever in an Ashes series. It will take something special for either side to force a defeat out of themselves.

Furthermore, in the West Indies, England proved masters at accidentally playing for the draw when they need to play for the win. They should therefore have no trouble playing for the draw when they actually need to play for the draw. Three stalemates would be enough to match the glorious 1926 and 1953 one-nil-out-of-five triumphs.

(d) No-one – it will be a tie

There has never been an Ashes tie. The last Edgbaston Test was the closest the two teams have ever come. There have been 321 Tests between these nations. Statistically, with only four results possible, around 80 of those should have been ties. It is long overdue.

6. All cricket fans will be hoping that Edgbaston is not scarred by further umpiring controversies of the sort seen and giggled/whinged about (delete according to hemisphere of origin) at Lord’s. What is the long-term solution to disputes such as the Hughes-Strauss-Koertzen-Ponting-Ball-Grass-Referral Incident?

(a) End all arguments by removing caught from the list of dismissals.

This will also encourage more exciting, aggressive bowling. Fast bowlers would be forced to bowl yorkers in an attempt to dismiss batsmen bowled or lbw, and bouncers in an effort to make batsmen retire hurt. In this age of breakneck modernisation, it could also herald a return to underarm daisy-cutters − cricket re-embracing its roots.

(b) Take the fielder’s word for it – we’re all adults, and it’s only a game.

The batting team must, however, be entitled to demand an instant on-field polygraph test to ensure the catcher is telling the truth. If it transpires that he has fibbed, he should be paraded around the boundary, booed and pelted with biscuits shaped like Colin Cowdrey.

(c) Alternating decisions – one out, the next one not out.

This new system was trialled at Lord’s – refer one, don’t refer the next. Statistics say that such a system will even out over the course of a series, or, at least, over the course of the rest of cricket history.

(d) Dye the entire outfield with a bright purple pigment.

This is a simple, error-proof solution to demonstrate conclusively whether or not a ball has bounced before thudding into a fielder’s hands. Only the 22-yards between the stumps would be left unpurpled. The ball would be thoroughly cleaned by the umpire before each delivery. After a disputed catch, the umpire would inspect the ball. If the purple pigment is visible on the ball, the ball would have been shown to have bounced, the catch would be duly disallowed, and the umpire would tut at the fielder concerned and start muttering about how the entire planet has lost the plot.

The pigment would have to be re-applied to the outfield between each over, to ensure a fair and even covering at all times. Batsmen would not be allowed to coat their bats in the purple pigment.

Traditionalists will of course bleat about how cricket has always been played on a green surface, players will complain about getting purple all over their clothes and faces, and groundsmen will whinge about the added workload and potential toxicity of a substance that may have to be radioactive in order both to be sufficiently purple and not to cause interference on TV pictures.

Surely, however, reaching a fair decision is more important than any of these minor quibbles, in this day and age?

7. Last week, I promised to ask the question: How much will England miss Kevin Pietersen? On reflection, this can now be more productively phrased: Which of the following true statistics about Ian Bell is the most misleading?

(a) Ian Bell averages 25 against Australia

The widely-accepted idea that Ian Bell has ‘never really done it against Australia’ is true in the sense that he has never really done it against Australia, but false in the sense that the statistics point unerringly to him doing it in no uncertain terms this time.

Whilst only a mathematical Luddite could dispute that Bell averages 25 in his 10 Ashes Tests, and has been out in single figures 11 times in his 20 innings, it should also be remembered that he averaged 17.1 in 2005, but a much more respectable if scarcely abacus-shattering 33.1 in 2006-7.

This represents a 93% series-to-series improvement. If the Warwickshire Whirlwind continues to ski the right way up this graph, he will average 64 this year, 124 in 2010-11, and 240 in 2013, by when he will be universally recognised as the greatest player of all time.

It should also be remembered that Bradman scored six ducks against England, so he wasn’t all good either. And, in the 2006-07 series, Bell scored more runs than Strauss, Cook, Flintoff, Panesar, Prior, Bopara, Botham, Barrington, Compton, Hutton, Hammond or Hobbs. Or Gilchrist or Langer.

(b) Ian Bell averages over 40 in Test cricket

This puts him above, among others, England stalwarts such as Stewart, Atherton, Hussain, Lamb, Gatting, Greig (both Tony and Ian), Fletcher, Woolley and even Hutton (Richard, admittedly, not Len). He averages 48 in the first innings when games are shaped, averages 47 batting at No. 4, 74 with Strauss as captain, 45 in England, and 43 in third Tests (although he’d better perform at Edgbaston – he averages 18.5 in the fourth and fifth Tests of series). And he averages 297 when Kevin Pietersen is not in the team.

Against this, he has mostly played on nice and friendly pitches, it’s a batsman’s game these days, averages mean less and less in modern Test cricket, he filled his boots against Bangladesh at the start of his career (see Pietersen-absent stat above), filled them again against a fairly weak Pakistan attack in 2006, since when he has scored three centuries in three years. And you can dress a statistic us as smartly as you like, but it doesn’t guarantee that it will be dancing cheek-to-cheek with truth at the end of the evening.

In summary, Ian Bell could have done better, Ian Bell could have done worse. Bearing in mind the class of his best innings and finest strokes, however, the overall feeling is that Ian Bell’s career has so far been like a fillet of prime sirloin made into an adequate stroganoff. Neither inedible, nor incredible.

(c) Ian Bell averages 1.3 catches per match in Ashes Tests

This compares domineeringly against Kevin Pietersen’s figure of 0.3. So he is effectively worth one extra innings per Test. Which means that Bell’s batting average of 33 is in effect almost identical to Pietersen’s 50.

8. Which part of their game will Australia have to improve most to avoid repeating their disappointing performance at Lord’s?

a) Bowling.

b) Batting.

c) Rudi Koertzen.

And, finally, as a tie-breaker in case the scores are level:

9. Will there ever be another Test pitch with genuine pace and bounce in it?

a) No.

b) Probably not.

The deadline for completion of the quiz in order to win the chance to captain your country in a Test match is 1st January 2019. Answers to follow at some point before then.

	Bryce McGain struggles with question 2 © Getty Images

As promised, here is Paper 1 of the Official Confectionery Stall Multiple Choice 2009 Ashes Quiz/Exam. Answer the following four questions to the very best of your ability. No cheating. Read your answers aloud to your computer or a trusted household pet, then wait and see what happens.

All those scoring above the Test batting average of their favourite player are entitled to draw themselves a certificate, and scribble their names onto a Test scorecard from an appropriate edition of Wisden.

QUESTION 1:
Where does the Lord’s victory rank amongst the great achievements in British history?

(a) Not very high. It’s only a game. And Australia were, for the most part, garbage. When a solid but habitually unspectacular opening partnership such as Cook and Strauss put on 196 in 40-odd overs without having to think about taking even half a risk, you know you’ve bowled like a skip full of rotting potatoes.

(b) Quite high. Below Shakespeare’s plays, but above Buck’s Fizz winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 1981. One of the great monkeys has been removed from the national sporting back, but that will be forgotten if England allow the monkey to then climb up a tree and urinate on their picnic by failing to win the Ashes.

(c) Top of the list. Bar none. The Cardiff-Lord’s double was the finest escape-followed-by-victory combination since the Dunkerque-Battle-of-Britain one-two in 1940. However, bearing in mind that Britain had prevailed in a world war just over 20 years previously, the Lord’s win has even greater rarity value.

QUESTION 2: Why did Australia play so astonishingly badly for large and decisive parts of the game?

(a) Because they are a largely inexperienced team, and therefore prone to inconsistency, with some key players out of form. We don’t yet know how good they are. Their impressive series win in South Africa looked like a resurgence after back-to-back defeat in India and against the Proteas. But was the away victory over Graeme Smith’s team what economists would call a ‘dead cat bounce’ – the short-lived but misleading rise of a plummeting stock before it plonks back down onto the ground, lifeless and worthless, like a cat lobbed out of an office window? If so, can Ponting and Nielsen resuscitate the cat? Are the Australians willing and able to kneel down and give mouth-to-mouth to a cat? Or is the cat actually fine? Did the cat deliberately throw itself out of the window to pass the time on a dull afternoon, play dead for a while to attract some attention, whilst planning to leap back to its feet and miaow, “I’m fine, never felt better, what are you all fussing about? I suppose a bowl of milk’s out of the question?”

(b) Because the entire Australian nation has completely lost its manhood. Where Merv Hughes sported a moustache that simply bellowed, “I mean business, and I’ve got half my lunch stuck on my upper lip to prove it,” now Peter Siddle has a small and unforgivable tuft of hair languishing apologetically below his mouth. And what about Haddin’s comments about Hauritz’s finger dislocation? “I don't know if I can talk about it,” wept the wicketkeeper, wiping a tear from his eye with a trembling glove. “I don’t like seeing those things,” he continued, whilst calling for a little teddy bear to cuddle to help him through the ordeal. “My stomach can’t handle it,” he concluded, before running away and hiding under a desk until he was sure it was safe to emerge. Allan Border must be spinning in his still-empty grave.

(c) They didn’t. No less an authority on the matter than Ricky Ponting said so, and he should know.

(d) Because of Rudi Koertzen.

	Michael Clarke took his test after reaching his hundred. Be inspired © AFP

QUESTION 3:
So did Michael Clarke really, honestly, mean it when he claimed before the first Test that “we’re as good as any team I have been part of for Australia”?

a) Yes. Absolutely. He believes it to the very bottom of his baggy green soul. But he is also suffering from major amnaesia after headbutting a large, moving truck. He cannot remember anything from before June 2009.

b) No. He’s not a total idiot. But, in the circumstances, he was unlikely to say: “Hauritz is a decent tweaker, but let’s be honest, he’s barely fit to play the same sport as Warney. Siddle gives it a go but if he’s Glenn McGrath then I’m Cyndi Lauper. And Mike Hussey is nowhere near as good as that guy Michael Hussey who played for us a couple of years ago.”

c) Yes. But he didn’t finish the sentence. He was distracted by a low-flying buzzard before he could continue: “... that has contained five players whose name begins with H. No doubt about it.” Or, possibly: “... at motorcycle pyramids. Yeah, we’re great at the old team stunt riding. Managed to get all eleven of us balanced on a Kawasaki last week whilst Punter pulled a wheelie. Bradman’s so-called ‘Invincibles’ could barely even ride a bicycle by comparison.”

QUESTION 4: Did Strauss really catch Hughes?

a) Yes, sure did, went in clean as a nun’s whistle. Look in the scorebook if you’re still not sure. Or, more practically, look at a scorecard in a newspaper or on the internet, they’ll probably be easier to access than the actual Lord’s scorebook. But the point stands. He’s the England Cricket Captain. Not any old Cricket Captain. The England Cricket Captain. By definition, he is the most honourable man in the known world.

b) Possibly. He probably caught it on the end of his fingers, but it might have brushed the grass on its way in, which he would not necessarily have felt. This explains why he celebrated spontaneously, and without the evil glint in his eye or demonic cackle that surely would have been present had he been pulling a fast one.

c) No. Clearly not. The ball almost bounced over his head before he caught it. The fact that he even thought about claiming the catch proves that the entire English nation has not only gone to the dogs, but it has dressed up in a cat outfit and is waiting for those dogs to eat it. This ‘catch’, if such a word is applicable to such an act of nefarious naughtiness, proves that the public school system is nothing more than a factory of cheats, liars and hoodwinkers.

---

The remaining questions will be unleashed on Monday, including (in case any of you wish to do some revision before sitting Part 2): How much will England miss Kevin Pietersen? What is the solution to disputed catches? Who will win at Edgbaston? And, in retrospect, could the 12th-man glove-trundling incident in Cardiff have been the most important single moment in English cricket history?

The correct answers will be given after the Edgbaston Test, or possibly after Headingley, or even after the Oval, depending on when the truth makes itself known to the relevant authorities

Hello again Confectionery Stallers. I wrote last week about how the Cardiff Test made me feel like a teenager again, with its Australian dominance and voracious run-scoring painfully echoing 1989 and 1993. At Lord’s my regression continued – I felt like the 10-year-old that I was in 1985, watching England casually demolish substandard Australian bowling, then blast through a tentative top order. Is Freddie Flintoff really the new Richard Ellison?

To complete that distinctly mid-80s Ashes feeling, five Australians were good enough to get themselves out pulling or hooking in the first innings – as if an entire team of cloned Andrew Hilditches had taken the field.

At the age of 34, having never seen England even come close to defeating Australia at Lord’s (the last time England even took a first-innings lead over the Aussies at Lord’s was 1975), I had long since assumed this would simply be something that I would never see in my lifetime, alongside such distant but hopeless scenarios as England fielding a four-prong wrist-spin attack, the monarch leading Britain into battle again, Neil Armstrong landing on the moon for a second time, a dog being elected prime minister of a G8 nation, the Vatican becoming a Test-playing nation (although St Peter’s Square remains one of the flattest batting tracks in the Catholic world), the development of the self-cooking chicken, the extinction of the wasp, and lasting peace in the Middle East.

I am still finding it hard, therefore, to adjust psychologically to the fact that Hedley Verity is no longer the last man to have bowled England to victory in an Ashes Test at Cricket HQ.

Aside from being a jubilant occasion for English cricket, the first for a considerable time, this was a fascinating match. There was much good cricket, mostly by England, alongside a considerable amount of quite bad cricket, mostly by Australia. Everyone wants to make history at Lord’s, but few have done so quite as spectacularly as Mitchell Johnson, who recorded the most expensive 20-over analysis in Ashes history, as he cleverly removed the docile pitch from the delicate equation of cricket by aiming to pitch the ball wide of or beyond it.

Overall, it has been an evenly matched series so far, in that both sides have played one good match and one mostly rubbish one. If they both play well at the same time, or indeed if they both play rubbishly at the same time, we are in for a truly unforgettable game at some point in the series.

England got away with their Cardiff blooper, saved by a combination of Collingwood, a stubborn tail, fourth-day rain and a comatose pitch. Australia were not so fortunate at Lord’s. Monty Panesar’s sudden and unexpected conversion to being a genuine allrounder – a latter day St Paul, with similar publishing opportunities in the pipeline − now looks even more precious than it did at the time.

The unquestionable highlight of the second Test was the iconic, quintessentially Flintoffian second-innings bowling display by, appropriately enough, Andrew Flintoff. This was classic Flintoff – majestic, charismatic, unstoppable, game-changing, but statistically unremarkable. Relatively, at least. As momentous spells of bowling go, the figures of 5 for 92 barely scratch at the surface of what Flintoff did – the same analysis as Graham Dilley etched onto the Edgbaston honours board against Pakistan in 1987, and slightly inferior to Chris Silverwood’s immortal 5 for 91 as England subsided to an innings defeat at Cape Town in 1999-2000, or Paul Wiseman’s epoch-defining 5 for 90 for New Zealand in Bulawayo in September 2000.

5 for 92 – not quite as numerically memorable as Laker’s 10 for 53, Ambrose’s famous spell of 7 for 1, or Botham’s 28-ball stint of 5 for 1 at Edgbaston in 1981. Or even as his own, strikingly similar, 5 for 78 at The Oval in 2005.

The game was labelled by some as ‘Flintoff’s Match’ – rightly so, as his performance is what the game will be remembered for above all else – yet, as an all-round display, it was not quite as impressive as Abey Kuruvilla’s effort for India against Sri Lanka in Mohali in 1997-98. Kuruvilla scored 35 not out, compared to Flintoff’s 34 for once out, and took 6 for 117, as opposed to the English titan’s comparatively profligate 6 for 119. Few in the cricket world, however, talk excitedly of ‘Kuruvilla’s Match’. None, in fact. Not even members of the Kerala quite-quickman’s immediate family.

Yet, for drama, hostility, and the impact of one player grasping a match by the neck and throttling it until it stopped squeaking, Flintoff’s efforts on an unresponsive wicket on rebellious knees were staggering. If England take the series, Flintoff will retire from Tests as the first bowler in history to be able to claim that 50% of his career first-class five-wicket hauls had played decisive roles in securing Ashes.

He is a cricketer who transcends statistics. He will not be remembered for his apparently unremarkable numbers. Which is fortunate, because his statistics themselves are hugely misleading, to the extent that any half-decent judge would throw them out of court as evidence in the case of R. versus Flintoff’s Claims To Cricketing Greatness.

Ignore his career bowling average of 32.17 – identical to Ewen Chatfield’s to two decimal points, almost a run-per-wicket worse than Alan Mullally’s. Flintoff was barely even a bowler at all when he began in Test cricket. He took seven wickets in his first 10 Tests, and just 43 in his first 26 games, spread over five years to the end of the 2003 series with South Africa. His first Test wicket was just his eighth in first-class cricket, hardly the sign of a natural wicket-taker destined to take the world by storm. More the sign of a poor man’s Derek Pringle.

Essentially, Flintoff had to learn to bowl in the international arena (even today, over the course of his career, he has taken only 124 wickets in 104 first-class matches outside Test cricket, which is a fair few more than I have taken, admittedly, but fewer than the average county trundler). Since 2003, however, his long and usual bowling apprenticeship complete, he has taken 182 Test wickets in 51 games, at an average fractionally under 28 and with a strike-rate of 56 – figures in the same bracket as the likes of Jon Snow, Angus Fraser, Jeff Thomson, Merv Hughes, Darren Gough, Graham McKenzie and Wes Hall.

If modern batsman can be mentally debited around five runs from their career averages due to a combination of dead pitches, knackered bowlers, space-age bats and advertising-age boundaries, then bowlers should also be credited a little. If Flintoff had been bowling in the 1980s, and had entered the Test game somewhere near fully formed, I would suggest that his career average would almost certainly have been in the mid-to-low 20s.

Flintoff’s self-improvement, particularly as a bowler, aided by patience on the part of selectors and captains, is one of the most remarkable stories of modern English cricket. Seeing the shuffling 20-year-old who made an uncertain, ineffectual debut in 1998 against South Africa – two matches which brought him 17, 0 and 0 with the bat, and one wicket for 112 – who would have predicted that he would score even 370 Test runs or take 25 wickets, let alone 3700 and 225?

By all of which, what I really mean is: I’m going to miss him, and Test cricket is going to miss him. I don’t care if he sometimes bowls a bit too short, habitually gets out poking at something nondescript outside off stump, has occasionally drunk from a flagon containing something other than an isotonic sports drink, and hasn’t been involved in many England wins in recent years. (The last of these is hardly Flintoff’s fault. England haven’t been involved in many England wins of relevance in recent years.)

And if anyone is willing to donate a healthy pair of knees and ankles, I personally will contribute to a surgery fund to keep him going as a Test cricketer for the next five years. Whether he likes it or not.

To celebrate the once-in-anyone-under-the-age-of-75’s-lifetime occasion of an England Ashes win at Lord’s, The Confectionery Stall is delighted to announce the launch of the first ever Official Confectionery Stall Multiple Choice 2009 Ashes Mid-Series Quiz. The questions will be issued in the form of two exam papers, the first on Saturday, and the second on Monday.

If you score over 99.94% (the mark achieve by a computer simulation of the late Sir Donald Bradman when it sat this test), you will win the chance to captain your country in a Test match (subject to permission from the selectors and players of the relevant team).

Ah, the joys of youth. I spent most of the Cardiff Test feeling like a teenager again – in that it was harrowingly reminiscent of the 1989 and 1993 Ashes cloutings that England received. History, it seemed, was repeating itself like senile old biddy historians have always assumed it was. As the Australians tortured England’s bowlers and the English top order disintegrated more crumblily than a packet of dry biscuits in an earthquake, there cannot have been an England supporter who did not think at some point: “That’s that for the next fifteen years then.”

At lunch on the final day, I sat down with my wife and children and desperately attempted to write a list of positives for England take from the match. My family contributed little of use. My baby son seemed unwilling even to talk about it, so traumatising was the action unfolding before his seven-month-old eyes. I racked my brains, but did not make much progress beyond: (1) No-one died, (2) Worse things happen at sea, and (3) Shane Warne had taken fewer wickets than he had in any Ashes Test in England (or Wales) since the Oval Test of 1989. England have finally worked out how to play the Master Leggie – make sure that he (a) has retired, and (b) is in Las Vegas playing Poker. With hindsight, it now seems obvious.

However, the last-day heroics of Collingwood and the tail saved England’s extremely streaky bacon, and papered over some alarmingly seismic cracks in their performance. Looking on the positive side, ultimately time deprived England of the chance to push for victory. If only this had been a timeless Test – no side in the world would have fancied chasing an awkward 30 or 40 to win on a wearing sixth-day pitch.

It was an excellent end to a patchy Test. The wicket was consistently dull, offering minimal assistance to any bowler even on the final day. Only 25 wickets fell, and by my calculations, well over half of these were attributable more to batting error than bowling excellence.

England must therefore be congratulated for thinking not of themselves, but of the paying spectator and global TV audience, and making an exciting game of it – without their potent cocktail of carelessness and ineptitude in their first innings and a half, the game would have been a stultifying draw, rather than a nerve-clattering one.

Saving the game was a fine achievement, but on such a comatose surface, manoeuvring themselves into a position where defeat seemed inevitable was arguably even more remarkable.

England’s footwork in general was in an entirely different league to the Australians’ – some of it would even have been frowned upon in the West Kent Village League. Cook is a particular concern. He showed that the two main flaws that were apparent since the last time he faced Australia are still in fine working order.

It was notable that Pietersen, so roundly criticised for playing what was generally deemed a silly and needlessly aggressive shot in the first innings, received scant if any praise for playing no shot at all in the second. Hypocrisy on the part of the media? Perhaps. I would argue that he was too negative in both innings, and needs someone to say to him whatever it was that Vaughan said to him at lunch on day 5 of the 2005 Oval Test.

Certainly, if Pietersen had played the shot Prior concocted from the Encyclopaedia Of Wrong Shots, he would have been pilloried on pages 1-6, 23, and 45-56 of all national newspapers. It seems that he will always be a cricketer who does not merely split opinion, but who takes a chainsaw to it and goes Texan.

The rest of the top order owes Collingwood a strongly-worded thank-you letter. The Durham Defier added to his growing album of critically important innings, and even had the presence of mind to plink a catch to gully with the job nearly but not quite complete. Thus he further dented Australian confidence, by giving them the opportunity to try − and fail − to take the tenth wicket in the final 69 painfully tense balls. Monty Panesar’s bowling average of 34 now matches that of Garfield Sobers, and his batting is clearly starting to catch up as well.

If England had lost, such was the Australian dominance in every facet of the game apart from strategic glove ferrying, it would have been almost impossible to envisage Strauss’ men winning the series. As it is, the evidence on display in Cardiff suggests that it remains difficult to picture it, but, with a dose of imagination, a strong whisky and a blow to the head, it is possible. Unless they improve far and fast, however, if England want to take an open-top bus ride around London in August, they will have to queue up with the tourists and pay for it themselves.

So England managed to put themselves on the road to recovery. However, at Lord’s they must now endeavour not to swerve off it into a ditch at the first available opportunity. To do this, they must overcome the Hand Of History, which is flipping them an enormous bird and telling them they have no chance. England’s last Ashes win at the home of cricket occurred when Iran was still Persia, when Hitler was still considered to be in the ‘jaunty curiosity’ category by most of the world’s leaders, before briefs (closely followed by their rogue cousin, y-fronts) had revolutionised the world of underpants, and when Elvis Presley’s mummy was still waiting to feel the future King of Rock’n’Roll’s foetal hips gyrating provocatively in her womb for the first time.

Furthermore, if you wanted to have seen England win two Ashes Lord’s Tests, you would have to be the oldest man, or in the top ten oldest women, in the world – First World War veteran Henry Allingham, now aged 113, was 16 days old when WG Grace rumbled down the pavilion steps to lead England to a six-wicket victory in 1896. To put this in further context, there were still people alive at that point who had fought in the Battle of Waterloo. It is fair to say, then, that should England tear up both the history book and the form book, even the MCC members might muster a celebratory twitch of their collective moustache, if not quite a full whooping, shirts-off, chest-thumping, egg-and-bacon-tie-windmilling pitch invasion.

The Official Confectionery Stall Lord’s Test Prediction (Rough Version): Draw.

The Official Confectionery Stall Lord’s Test Prediction (Detailed Version): England 834-2 dec. Australia 103 all out and 23-9 (rain stopped play).

On second thoughts, it might be closer than that. I’ll stick with a simple ‘rainy draw’ forecast.

I will post again soon with some thoughts on the sad but inevitable retirement of Andrew Flintoff, a cricketer who has transcended his statistics, and, from 2003 to 2005, was touched all-round greatness; and the Official Confectionery Stall analysis of the 12th-Man-And-Physio Farrago, which brought England and Australia closer to war than anything since Bodyline.

Last Saturday’s episode of ‘Yes It’s The Ashes’, my Ashes comedy show on BBC Radio 5 Live, is available here.

Here are some of the early reviews of the most-talked about single production on the Cardiff arts scene in the last 24-hours – ‘That Shot’, starring Kevin Pietersen:

“Cocky... silly” – David Lloyd.
“Outrageous” – Michael Holding.
“Stupid shot” – Ian Chappell.
“Irresponsible... put undue pressure on the players below him... sometimes you have to play time and respect the bowler” – Michael Kasprowicz.
“One of the daftest shots a great player will play” – Geoffrey Boycott.
“A frantic sweep shot” – The Independent.
“Folly” − Sydney Morning Herald.
“A moment of madness” – Press Association.
“What on earth was Kevin Pietersen thinking about? Even by his own standards of unpredictability, his dismissal possessed no logic, especially at the start of an Ashes series” – David Hopps, The Guardian.

‘That Shot’ received a one-star panning across the board. However, the Confectionery Stall disagrees wholeheadedly with this analysis.

I would argue that Pietersen was not being cocky, silly, outrageous, irresponsible, record-breakingly daft, frantic, or mad enough. Rather, he was thinking too much, being too predictable, applying too much (possibly flawed) logic, and was perhaps overly constrained by the responsibilities of the first day of an Ashes series.

Pietersen was attempting a gentle paddle for a single, prepared to softly milk the udders of a bowler, when, in a different mood, he might have attempted to attach them to a high-powered industrial suction pump. It was hardly the height of folly.

If he had been in a more aggressive and instinctive frame of mind, he might have been better able to prevent Hauritz settling into a steady if unthreatening groove. As it was, KP had been regularly sweeping the off-spinner for singles, having logically concluded it was the safest way to keep the scoreboard chuntering contentedly to itself, and thus had become predictable enough that when he shaped to do so again, Hauritz was able to alter his line an induce the terminal, helmet-clonking error.

Admittedly, the assembled judges have a few more Test caps in their cricketing headgear cupboards than I do in mine (contents: a moth-eaten red sun hat I bought in a charity shop some years ago in a failed attempt to make myself bat more like Richie Richardson, and a Viking helmet purchased on eBay that is allegedly the one Wally Hammond wore on his Test debut to try to intimidate the young South African fast bowler Denys Morkel, who was known to be scared of Vikings).

To me, however, Pietersen is judged harshly due to his reputation, and because the shot looked hideous. His own denial that it was “over adventurous” was bang on the banana, and his widely-criticised claim that it was just the way he plays was also, I believe, close to the mark. The way he plays now is that of a calculating batsman who is far less of a risk-taker than in his early days in Test cricket. (Strap in for some numbers: in his last 35 Tests, his strike rate is 59, he has hit 16 sixes, one per 314 balls faced; in his first 18 Tests, he scored at 72 runs per 100 balls, and hit 32 sixes, one for 69 balls faced.)

Pietersen is a calculating player, who, from an unpromising start in cricket which casts doubt on those who claim he has supernatural innate cricketing gifts, has intelligently honed a technique for success. Arguably, he thinks too much, not too little, when batting. Personally, I hope that when the ball ricocheted off his carefully maintained head, it knocked some sense out of, not into, him.

There is another plausible explanation, however. Firstly, that Pietersen is a true sportsman, one who believes in fair play and sporting justice, and was merely balancing out the obvious injustice of being given not out to one of history’s more convincing lbw appeals. Perhaps Umpire Doctrove thought the ball was going under middle stump. Pietersen then attempted to give a catch to extra cover, and, having narrowly failed, then spooned one to short leg via his always-whirring bonce.

I would be interested to know what you think of my theory on this.

Overall, this has been a compelling start to the Ashes series. England, initially uncertain, then steadily conservative, took control of the game with an excellent mid-and-lower-order onslaught, displaying positivity that has sometimes been absent in recent years. Australia were bafflingly passive from a position of some strength at lunch on Day 1, facilitating England’s recovery. As I write, Phillip Hughes has been displaying his astonishing off-side timing and placement, as England patently fail to implement the plan they must have had for him. Flintoff has just come into the attack, and, after boding well with the bat, looks formidably ready with the ball.

The phoney war is over. After a build-up consisting of a couple of press conferences, some interviews, bits of general non-specific build-up, and, idiotically, no actual cricket to set the scene and establish the rivalry, the 2009 Ashes today makes its long-awaited transition from media frenzy into reality. I am a 34¾ -year-old father of two, and I am, frankly, a bit giddy with excitement.

At 11am, the world will gather around its TV sets and watch in amazement, as Aleem Dar emerges from the umpires’ module in the Cardiff pavilion, strides down onto the outfield where no man has previously stepped (at least, not in a Test match), and utters the immortal words: “Two small steps for two men (umpires, specifically), one giant leap for mankind (or, at least, the subset of mankind that consists of the cricket-watching publics of England and Australia).”

(Incidentally, so incredible was the 2005 Ashes that cynics have suggested that the entire series was a forgery, filmed in a studio in Texas, to stop the Russians hosting the perfect cricket series first. They cite as evidence Matthew Hoggard’s cover drive for four at Trent Bridge, a shot they claim was so unlikely and outlandish as to have been a patent hoax. And Ricky Ponting clearly flapped when he shouldn’t have flapped.)

Here, then, is the Unremittingly Official Confectionery Stall List Of The Six Factors That Will Decide This Ashes Series (excluding the six most obvious factors that will define the destiny of the urn, namely: (1) batsmen, (2) bowlers, (3) fielders, (4) wicketkeepers, (5) umpires, and (6) the magic bionic knuckle Nathan Hauritz bought from a backstreet alchemist’s shop in Cardiff yesterday).

Luck

Lady Luck is notoriously one of the world’s more fickle females, to the extent that many now question her suitability as a peer of the realm and role model to millions. Nevertheless, the flighty temptress absolutely loves cricket, keeps interfering with it, and will undoubtedly pay a visit to the Tests at some point.

In what appears likely to be a close-fought series, both sides would be well advised to get down on their bendiest available knees, offer to take her out for an extremely expensive meal, and beg her to be nice to them.

Four years ago, England, although the dominant team for most of the decisive part of the series, still needed some giant splodges of fortune custard dolloped on top of their otherwise excellent cricket crumble. They won 2-1. They could have won 3-1. They could also have lost 4-0, if Edgbaston, Trent Bridge and the Oval had taken slightly different courses at critical moments.

Admittedly, a 4-0 scoreline would have been the greatest miscarriage of sporting justice since Goliath was posthumously awarded the Slinger Of The Match medallion by a home-town adjudicator from the Philistine Board Of Single Combat. However, 4-0 could easily have happened. And, if it had, I don’t think I would ever have left my house again. And nor would any other self-respecting England cricket fan. (Have left their houses, not mine.) (In case there was some confusion.)

These prime slices of honey-roasted luck included:

− an inquisitive little cricket ball deciding to take a peek at the ground underneath Glenn McGrath’s foot on the first morning of the 2nd Test;

− Brett Lee seeing the juiciest imaginable wide, low full-toss with only four needed to win at Edgbaston, but failing to juice it;

− the marginal caught behind decision against Kasprowicz immediately afterwards, which was clearly out in all but reality;

− Pietersen’s first-ball edge off Warne on the final day at The Oval, which was heading straight towards the safe hands of Hayden at slip until it thought, “Hang on, do I really want to deprive the watching millions of one of the great modern innings? No, I do not, I’m going to deflect off Gilchrist’s gloves and take the battering I deserve”;

− the boundaries at The Oval not being set a quarter of a mile deeper, out in the streets of South London, otherwise Pietersen’s hooks for six off Lee could easily have been caught; and

− Don Bradman being born in 1908, as opposed to 1978.

Upon such slender threads...

Balls (1)

Which, if either, leader will be prepared to whip out his captaincy cojones, thud them both down on red, and spin the roulette wheel?

Ponting may be known as Punter (partly due to his youthful love of gambling, partly due to his predilection for propelling himself slowly up rivers with a long pole), but as captain he has not always donned a cavalier’s hat (the rarest headgear in Test cricket after the sombrero (which has not been seen in an Ashes Test since Douglas Jardine famously ‘went Mexican’ in the final Bodyline Test, charged down the wicket to Bert Ironmonger shouting ‘it’s chimichanga time’, and spooned a catch to Vic Richardson)).

In the Caribbean this year, the Strauss-Flower axis showed itself to be not merely risk-averse, but risk-allergic. The mere concept of taking a calculated gamble in an effort to recover from 1-0 down in the series seemed to bring them out in hives of indecision. At some point, they will need to shut their eyes, glug down a powerful tactical anti-histamine, and pray that they are not allergic to that as well.

Injuries

McGrath’s ankle was arguably the single most influential factor in 2005. He had taken 9 for 82 at Lord’s. He took 10 for 358 in the rest of the series. If only he had trodden on a cricket ball before every Ashes Test he played in, there might be a few more MBEs floating around English cricket.

Brett Lee is already out of at least one Test, probably more − a major disappointment for the series, as, with his pace, attitude and vulnerability to counterattack, it is scientifically impossible to conceive of cricket being dull whilst he is bowling. Australia are thus denied a fearsome-looking and perfectly balanced pace quartet. Regardless of Lee’s statistically unimpressive record in this country, and Australia’s victory in South Africa without him, this is a potentially decisive development.

His absence leaves Ponting and Katich as the Australian bowlers with most Test wickets in England, each boasting a grand total of one. If they remain at the top of that chart come the end of the Oval Test, England will be either deliriously parading around Trafalgar Square in an open-topped bus, or catastrophically embarrassed. Whilst Andy Flower tries to explain to an angry press conference why occasional left-arm wrist spin and dobbly medium pacers are the toughest types of bowling to face in Test cricket these days.

It seems almost inconceivable that Flintoff will last for five Tests, although the entire English cricketing nation will spend the next seven weeks rubbing soothing lotions and tinctures into its Big Freddie voodoo dolls. Pietersen is irreplaceable, in terms of talent, tempo and temperament. If Cook or Strauss is injured, England have no Test-hardened cover.

But the key injury victim could be an unexpected one – Nathan Hauritz. Following his unimpressive performances in the warm-up games, and the rest of his career to date, the off-form offie will be keeping a sharp eye on his team-mates.

I am not suggesting that they will deliberately injure Hauritz. Far from it. But I am suggesting that, if they see him walking down the road, unaware that an especially slippery looking banana skin lies ahead on the pavement ... well, they might not warn him quite as quickly and loudly as they would alert Mitchell Johnson in the same scenario.

And then, when it subsequently emerges that McGain, Krezja, White and the rest have mysteriously all simultaneously lost their passports and been handcuffed to a lamppost in Alice Springs, Ponting will make a televised appeal to the patriotic nature of a certain member of the TV commentary team, and the rest will be talkative history.

Balls (2)

Recent research shows that most British cows, when facing up to the icy, mechanised hand of death, spend their final conscious moments hoping that their leathery hides will be made into Test-grade cricket balls. A lucky few beasts will be unwittingly playing potentially pivotal roles in this summer’s action, and how they choose to behave in the hands of Anderson and Johnson could dictate the series.

The Australians will have to adapt to the unfamiliar Duke ball, which is different to the Kookaburra used down under, which is made, I believe, of a fossilised platypus egg coated in a beer-soaked kangaroo pouch.

Stepping up to the plate

In competitive eating, ‘stepping up to the plate’ is merely phase one in a campaign of intestinal mayhem, base camp on the Everest of Herculean Hot-Doggery.

In the Ashes, however, both teams will need new heroes not just to step up to the plate, but to dive into that plate face first, with the fearlessness of an angry wife in a shopping centre, and keep eating up until victory is assured.

Each side is likely to start today with only three of their first-choice XI from 2005, and many reputations will be made and broken in this series. Is Hussey the untouchable perfectionist who averaged 85 in his first 20 Tests, or the uncertain grinder who averages 30 in his the last year and a half? Is Cook’s Test average of 45 that of a maturing master bordering on world-class, or of a flat-track accumulator flattered by the age in which he plays?

Will Broad ever be a major wicket-taker? Prior and Bopara certainly cut the mustard against West Indies, but the mustard was Scandivianly mild and came ready-cut. Will their cleaving be as effective against an altogether more nose-watering class of condiment? Is Pietersen able to dominate an entire series? Is Hughes the world’s next batting genius, or a flawed rookie with much to learn? Or both? I cannot remember a series in which there were so many uncertainties.

Choke Management

In 2005, England arguably managed to choke three times − in the second innings (with bat and ball) at Edgbaston, chasing at Trent Bridge, and on the final morning at the Oval – but still win. Having stepped up to the plate, they found themselves struggling to keep their food down, but they managed to Heimlich themselves to safety each time.

In Adelaide, they collectively turned a slight tickle in the throat into paroxysmic spasms of self-asphyxiation. If the series is close, the side better able to suppress the early splutterings of a choke, should emerge triumphant.

OFFICIAL CONFECTIONERY STALL SERIES PREDICTION

I have absolutely no idea what will happen. Both sides have enough question marks hanging over them to punctuate a Spanish quiz book. So I will guess that Australia will win 3-1. I hope I’m wrong. England can certainly win, but I think the English media underestimate the Australian pace attack (even without Lee). England have lost their last two late-summer home series. And I am a born pessimist. Roll on 11 o’clock.

You can listen to my Ashes radio comedy show ‘Yes It’s The Ashes’ on BBC 5 Live.

Obituary: Michael Vaughan’s Cricket Career (1993-2009). Passed away peacefully in its sleep, aged 16, after a long decline. Will be extremely fondly remembered by all who knew it.

Farewell, then, Michael Vaughan’s Cricket Career. Never again will the cricket world delight in a cover drive that seemed to have been plucked and polished from a 1900s coaching manual entitled “How To Score Runs In An Honourable Manner”.

It had seemed that the script was written for Vaughan to make an emotional comeback to the England team for the Lord’s Test after Andrew Strauss slipped a disc trying to hit Nathan Hauritz for a sixth consecutive six on the way to defeat in Cardiff, then leading England to their first head-quarters Ashes win for 75 years with a sensational unbeaten double hundred, and concluding the summer by clinching the Ashes on the final afternoon of the series with a spell of 8 for 23 on a turning wicket, before leaving the ground in a special hot air balloon, shouting through a loud hailer, “There, I told you I’d still got it.”

Unfortunately, that script was read, rejected and recycled by the commissioning editors of cricket, who plumped instead for something disappointingly more mundane – a slow fade-out in the relative obscurity of county cricket, followed by a low-key press conference with Hugh Morris.

Injuries have perhaps denied him a late blossoming – by the time Graham Gooch was a year older than Vaughan is now, he had scored only 8 of his eventual 20 Test hundreds. But the press conference gave further proof that Vaughan has made the right decision – the shocking revelation that his small son had joined the list of Unlikely People To Have Dismissed Michael Vaughan, alongside Ricky Ponting, Ramnaresh Sarwan and Daan van Bunge (although whether Vaughan junior can replicate that level of performance in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of international cricket, rather than the gentle surrounding of the back garden, remains to be seen).

	'He was viewed by the great Australian team as one of the finest they had faced.' © Getty Images

For a man who once destroyed the might of Australia in their own back yard, to be clean bowled by Archie Vaughan, 3, in his own back yard, clearly set alarm bells ringing − alarm bells which prompted Vaughan to send out the fire engine of common sense to douse the remaining embers of a sometimes magnificent and always compelling career.

In the pantheon of odd statistical cricket career shapes, Vaughan’s batting provides one of the oddest. In his first 16 Tests over two-and-a-half years, he had an average of 31 and strike rate of 40, with one century.

There had been little to suggest what was to follow. Then, in an 8-month, 12-Test incandescence in the summer of 2002 and the Ashes of 2002-03, he emblazoned seven hundreds into the history books, with an average of 76 and a strike-rate of 61, batting of a quality that few have surpassed. He was viewed by the great Australian team as one of the finest they had faced.

Again, there had been little to suggest what was to follow – a rather middling Test career. Increasingly niggled by injuries, perhaps encumbered by the captaincy, and mostly no longer opening the batting, he averaged just 36 in his last 54 Tests, with a strike rate of 50. Ten centuries punctuated periods of carelessness, lucklessness, and formlessness, but these were occasional peaks, rather the Himalayan achievements suggested by his 2002, and he too often tobogganed straight back down the other side of them back into the Valley Of Inconsistency.

At the start of 2003, Vaughan seemed to have the batting world at his feet. Unfortunately, the batting world, like the real world, turned out to be round, not flat, and the Lancastrioyorkshireman spent the rest of his career trying to balance his feet on it, with only intermittent success.

So did Vaughan underachieve, given the stratospheric heights he once reached, or generally fulfil his potential with one brief blast of overachievement? His career first-class average of 36 suggests that his final Test figure of 41 was one of player who, overall, made the most of his natural gifts, although the ease and beauty of his best batting may have led us to expect more.

(A side note for graph fans. Broken into sections and plotted on a graph, Vaughan’s batting average forms a career shape known to some scientists as ‘The Lopsided Sombrero’, or, to others, as the ‘Meerkat Popping His Head Up Above A Baseball Mound’. This compares with, for example, Matthew Hayden’s ‘Bactrian Camel Drinking From A Puddle’ (three slumps (periods in which he averaged 24, 30 and 23) sandwiching two humps (69 and 60)); or Brian Lara’s ‘Stuntman Chickening Out Of Jumping The Grand Canyon And Instead Riding Down One Side, Across The Middle, And Up The Other Side, Then Continuing On For A While To Escape The Disappointed Fans’ (average of 60 in his first 31 and last 51 Tests, 40 in the 49 Tests in the middle). Mike Gatting can also claim The Sombrero, although, with averages of 23 and 22 stretching out either side of a peak period of 62, his was pulled down lower over the wearer’s head than Vaughan’s. The Sombrero is probably the most common career shape, but few have had as tall or pointy a crown as Vaughan. More on this in a future blog. If you can bear to wait.)

	Archie Vaughan, son of Michael, demon bowler in the making © AFP

I have followed Vaughan’s fluctuating career with particular interest. We were born in the same month, and have much else in common besides – neither of us had played a Test match by the age of 25, we were both at some point schoolboys, we both list breakfast amongst our top four favourite meals of the day (I assume), we were both best as opening batsmen, neither of us is quite as mobile as we once were, we both like cricket, we can both be backed at 10,000-1 to win a Nobel Prize for Physics, and he got as many laughs as I did during a gig at the Rawhide Comedy Club in Liverpool in 2002 (although he at least had the excuse of not being on the bill due to his prior commitment to smashing Australia to all parts in that winter’s Ashes; I, by contrast, would have been able to hear my own footsteps as I left the stage, were they not being drowned out by the footsteps of the audience leaving the venue).

Having lived these almost parallel lives, it seems appropriate, in solidarity with my exact contemporary, the most significant England cricketer of our generation, and the man who, more than any other, stood in the way of my own dreams of becoming England captain, that I today also announce my retirement from all forms of professional cricket. Not that there were not a few million others also standing in the way – but Vaughan was the biggest obstacle of all, with his innovative, positive and record-breaking leadership.

He deserved a more fitting exit than this. Other recent former England captains have been more fortunate. His predecessor Nasser Hussain stepped off the international stage at Lord’s in 2004 exactly the way he would have wanted to go – scoring a match-winning hundred and running out one of his team mates.

Alec Stewart was applauded around the Oval the previous year after what seemed like an unbroken 5-day Barmy Army farewell serenade. Having spent two days at that game in close proximity to some of the top Barmy regiments, I have it indelibly inscribed upon my soul that there is, incontrovertibly, “only one Alec Stewart”.

Mike Atherton had exited the same arena in 2001 to the resounding applause of a grateful public willing to overlook the scorebook entry of “c Team Nemesis b Individual Nemesis 9” (or “c Warne b McGrath 9” as Wisden insisted on recording it) in recognition of his years of noble resistance.

Vaughan was one of England’s most stylish batsmen of all time, one of its greatest captains, dropper of some of its easiest catches, and bowler of probably the single greatest off-break in English cricket since the days of Laker, when he bowled a fully-firing Tendulkar for 92 at Trent Bridge in 2002, for one of his six career wickets. If he did not prove to be the great batsman he appeared to have become in 2002, he is unquestionably an English cricket great, and will be missed by all cricket supporters.

Apologies for my unscheduled absence for the last couple of weeks. Hear my thoughts on Pakistan’s magnificent victory in the World Twenty20 in the Zaltzman Report audio show. I hope you have enjoyed the audio (whether you have listened to it or not) (although clearly listening to it is (hopefully) more likely to cause you to enjoy it).

I will return with more later in the year. During the Ashes, I will be hosting a comedy show called ‘Yes, It’s The Ashes’, at 11am on Saturday mornings on BBC Radio 5 Live, starting this Saturday. It will also be available via the BBC website. I will also regularly updating The Confectionery Stall as often as work, fate and wife allow.

	Nightwatchman extraordinaire James Anderson has four ducks fewer than Don Bradman at the equivalent stage of his career © Getty Images

The announcement of the Australian touring party has cranked up the anticipation levels for the most hyped England series of recent times still further. This is a fortunate development, because the cricketing build-up, in the form of England’s alleged Test series against the supposed West Indies, has been numbingly undramatic, as is seemingly the modern way.

This was a short and not particularly sweet series, with most of the country, almost all of the cricket-watching world, and half of the participants seeming to take little interest in proceedings. England played increasingly well, confidently and decisively, but the overwhelming sensation as the visitors completed their contractual obligation of a second innings was: “What was the point of that?”

England failed to win even a single Test against West Indies for 16 years from 1974. They have just won two in a week and even the players themselves were struggling to look excited about it. There is much talk about the sanctity of Test cricket, but this series felt as special and meaningful as a Las Vegas wedding presided over by an unqualified Elvis impersonator who had lost his costume, wig and glasses in a poker game and was wearing a borrowed hospital smock instead.

The cricket-watching public stayed away in their millions. This was due to a number of mitigating factors, including, principally, that they are not imbeciles. Thanks to the internet, they now have easy access to meteorological records for the Durham area in May dating back thousands of years, as well as the ability to check scorecards from recent series in England and guess what kind of contest the West Indies were likely to provide. Perhaps they were also swayed by Chris Gayle’s pre-match posturing, which, following extensive computer analysis, has now been officially confirmed as the least inspiring team talk in the history of organised sport.

In five full matches since their abject capitulation in Jamaica, England’s batsmen − all of them, together, including Onions and Panesar − have averaged over 60 runs per wicket, with 12 hundreds and 12 half-centuries. This despite their best player, Pietersen, mostly saving his runs for when they are really needed, as is his tendency. They have now proved conclusively that they are good players against mediocre bowling attacks on friendly wickets backed up by fielders with sausages for fingers.

Whether this frenzy of accumulation has ironed out or merely camouflaged previous technical flaws will be revealed in two months’ time. The bowling was encouraging and impressive – Jimmy Anderson could have informed Taylor and Benn in writing several months in advance exactly where and when he was going to bowl those outswinging missiles of perfection to them, and they would still seen their off stumps annihilated. But (and this is a Mike-Gatting-sized but), West Indies are not Australia, and May is not July.

It is certainly unlikely that the Australians, tactical maestros that they are, will make the same mistake as Fidel Edwards, West Indies’ key bowler, in erroneously pinpointing Anderson as England’s key batsman. Perhaps the Barbados Ballista was duped by the Lancastrian’s world-record-breaking refusal to be out for nought – Bradman had four ducks quacking on his career board of shame by the equivalent stage of his career, and had taken 126 fewer wickets, making Anderson statistically by far the greatest all-round cricketer in history.

The upshot of all this is that my five-month-old son has already seen England score more hundreds (twelve) against West Indies than I saw in my first 12 years of cricket watching from 1981. He has also, more surprisingly, seen the West Indians plunder as many centuries (nine) off England’s bowlers as they did in 14 Tests between 1985 and 1990 – so he presumably thinks in his tiny bald head that Gordon Greenidge, Viv Richards and Richie Richardson were significantly worse than Devon Smith, Lendl Simmonds and Brendan Nash. Oh, the folly of youth. One day, I will sit him down and explain with the use of graphs why this is not the case. And he will humour me for a couple of minutes before putting on his Delhi Daredevils shirt and asking me what a Test match is.

History now points unerringly towards a home win in the Ashes – England have always won the urn after demolishing sub-standard opposition in a two-match early season series. Admittedly, this conclusion is based on the rather unscientific single previous example of 2005, but a fact is a fact. When you factor in that this West Indies team is better than the 2005 Bangladeshis, it becomes clear that England are all set to improve on their Ashes performance of four years ago, and win by at least 4-0.

They are, after all, unbeaten in six now, and coming off a run of three consecutive home Test wins. Australia, by contrast, are in disarray – they lost their most recent Test, have not won a series in England for eight years, have never won a Test in Cardiff, are bringing a squad with only one front-line bowler who has ever taken a Test wicket in England, have never won the Ashes with a player called Nathan in the squad, have not beaten the old enemy without a leg spinner for over 25 years, have never beaten England while there has been a black American president, have not won the urn when a Labour government in Britain has been within a year of being voted out of office, and traditionally struggle when a Queen has been on the throne for 57 years (England’s glorious win in 1894-95 will be preying on their minds day and night).

A further incontrovertible statistical truth is that England have never lost a home Test match finishing in May (10 wins, 4 draws), leading to the unarguable conclusion that the ECB should have crammed the entire five-Test Ashes series into this sacred month, to be followed by a 53-match one-day international series to bring the summer to a lucratively rousing climax.

Andy Zaltzman was born a satirist. He has a weekly podcast with John Oliver at The Times

Greetings Confectionery Stallers, and welcome to the first instalment of the Confectionery Stall’s Ashes result prediction blogs, which will pepper the year from now until the final over of the series.

By the time the action begins in, of all places, Cardiff, I confidently predict that I will have confidently predicted all 21 possible series outcomes. I will therefore be able to march onto The Oval outfield in August as the teams shake hands for the final time, brandishing a print-out of one of these blogs, shouting “I told you so” through a loud-hailer, before being manhandled by over-zealous stewards for attempting to express my historical right to walk on the outfield at the end of a Test series (see sub-blog below).

The last couple of months have given many pointers to what will happen in the Ashes. The difficulty is working out which of these are pointing in the right direction, and which are, like Italian road signs, completely and deliberately misleading. Are England plunging into turmoil, or plunging out of it, with Pietersen stung and invigorated and Strauss bringing wisdom and control? Are Australia really weaker than they have been for two decades, or already rebounding from their entertaining-for-the-neutral slump? Or both?

ENGLAND

	Some good innings, but not too many great series © Getty Images

My suspicion is that England’s messy but rapid bout of blood-letting will benefit the team in the short-to-medium term, which in an Ashes year is all that matters. All the evidence suggests that Strauss is a good captain, but he will need several of his players to break out of their current cycles of not-quite-bad-enough-to-be-dropped tolerability.

He will also require greater consistency from his one world-class batsman – the deposed captain and victim of one of the oddest coups in cricket or any other walk of life. Pietersen has been hit or miss for some time. He has scored an outstanding 7 centuries in his last 18 Tests (since July 2007), but still averages only 47 in that period. He has been out for less than 20 in 13 of these 32 innings, and has no scores between 45 and 94. He has played great innings, but not great series. England will need one from him in the summer, and they may well get it. If he seriously wants to captain England again, he knows the only way he will do so is by (a) behaving himself, and (b) scoring brontosaurus-loads of runs. Perhaps Pietersen’s entire captaincy reign was an elaborate ruse by the ECB to ensure his continued dedication and a crushingly dominant resentment-fuelled Ashes.

(As a possibly interesting statistical appendix to this, Pietersen has on occasion been compared to Viv Richards, and the Master Blaster himself was also not one for destroying his opposition with consistent, merciless unstoppability. After his annus mirabilis in 1976 – six centuries in 8 Tests – over the rest of his career he only once scored more than 400 in a series (446 v Australia in 1988-89), and only once hit more than one century in a series (two, against England in 1980-81). Brian Lara, by contrast, topped 400 in 11 series, and scored two or more hundreds on nine occasions.)

On the bowling front, England’s attack may not be the most consistently threatening, but the Ashes is a home series and since 2005, every single England bowler has a better average at home than overseas (apart from Broad, marginally and unimpressively). Panesar and Anderson both have significantly better records in England, and Harmison, since his breakthrough tour of West Indies four years ago, has averaged 29 at home and 46 away.

Furthermore, if Brett Lee fails to recover from his injury in time, it is probable that they will face a bowling attack with a grand total of zero Test wickets in England. If England can keep it that way for the duration of the series, they will probably win (barring some some overly cautious declarations, some overly jaunty declarations, an encyclopaedia of run outs, or a two-month monsoon) (although with Cook and Strauss opening, regular scores of 450-0 off 210 overs may not be enough to give the bowlers time to force a victory).

AUSTRALIA

	Ricky Ponting: the last surviving member of the gang © Getty Images

Australia’s victory in the Sydney Test has enabled the baggy greens to perch a little less baggily atop the heads of Ponting and his men, and, less importantly, allowed them to retain their position as number-one-ranked cricket team in the world, despite having lost consecutive series to the two best cricket teams in the world.

Cricket’s undisputed number-one-ranked sage, Sir Richie Benaud (his knighthood has been bestowed upon him unilaterally by The Confectionery Stall, in recognition of Sir Richie’s services to brightening my summers from 1981 to 2005), famously stated that “captaincy is 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent skill – but don’t try it without the 10 per cent”. Thus, in my book, cricket captaincy is statistically identical to scientific research, veterinary surgery, piloting an aircraft, and seduction. And it should be noted that Benaud had one of the biggest 10 per cents known to mathematics.

From 1995 to 2007, Australian skippers were blessed with a healthy wodge of the 90 per cent luck portion of the captaincy cake, simply by being able to say to themselves: “I think I should probably put Warne and/or McGrath on now. Yes, Warne and/or McGrath it is. Yup. Lovely piece of captaincy there Mark/Mr Waugh/Ricky [delete as appropriate], even if I do say so myself.”

Ponting, by contrast, now has Hauritz and MacDonald at his disposal. However much of the 10 per cent you believe Ponting possesses, and it is certainly not all 10, it should be remembered that even Michelangelo would have struggled in the Sistine Chapel if someone had snapped his paintbrush in half, and told him to work with a pair of chopsticks instead.

However, with the retirement of Hayden and the injury to Lee, only Ponting remains of the golden era regulars. Perhaps this will help the new generation to play without constant comparisons to the players they are not. Batsmen are queuing up in state cricket, and Johnson and Siddle should be dangerous in English conditions. England may be playing Australia six months too late. After all, Michelangelo would eventually have adjusted to his chopsticks and come up with a half-decent ceiling if the Vatican Painting and Decorating Committee had been threatening to sack him if he didn’t.

PREDICTION

The Confectionery Stall’s first Ashes series prediction, then, is England 2 Australia 2. These are currently two reasonable sides, neither as good as they were in 2005. They should be evenly matched, with England perhaps slight favourites due to home advantage.

As an England supporter raised in the 1980s, however, I am pessimistic by inclination, and see the cricketing glass as not merely half empty but also leaking all over my trousers. And thus I am aware that the last time an Ashes series began the sides apparently evenly matched and with England slight favourites, in 1989, England were on completely the wrong end of a seismic, era-defining 4-0 clattering from which it took the team and me 16 years to fully recover. But still, it’s going to be 2-2 this time. As long as the selectors don’t pick 29 different players. And as long as Terry Alderman stays in retirement. And Tim Curtis too.