In which direction does your cricketing moral compass point? © Getty Images

Welcome to the Official Confectionery Stall Cricketing Morality Challenge, following on from Andrew Strauss actions in the Champions Trophy – first recalling Angelo Mathews like a benevolent shepherd allowing a naughty fox one more chance to prove he can cohabit with your flock, then spurning Graeme Smith’s supplication for a runner like Henry VIII definitively telling Anne Boleyn that it was over for good because he didn’t go for women without heads, if I may use two largely inaccurate similes. I now give you the opportunity to find out the direction in which your cricketing moral compass points. Will it be north, towards the good of cricket and humankind, or south, towards 'win at all costs and damn the consequences'?

SCENARIO 1

It is the final over of a unfeasibly crucial limited-overs match. Your team needs four runs to win with just one measly wicket remaining. The opposition’s star fast bowler, who has taken five for 15 from nine overs of helmet-clattering fury, is walking back to his mark. All the other main bowlers have completed their allocation. No one else on the fielding team knows how to bowl. As the bowler turns at the end of his run-up and prepares to run in, you notice that a man-eating bear has escaped from the crowd and is charging up behind him. You realise that your chances of victory would be greatly enhanced by the fast bowler being eaten by the bear. Do you alert him to the impending danger?

(A) Yes, immediately. You know in your cricketing heart of hearts that victory is not all that counts. It must be victory subsequently unsullied by people constantly saying that you only won because the opposition’s best bowler was eaten by a bear at the start of the final over.

(B) Yes. But only after the man-eating bear has got close enough to scare the bowler out of his mind, reducing him to a quivering, whimpering shell of a man, thus affecting the quality of his decisive over.

(C) No. It is the umpires’ responsibility to monitor on-pitch predators. Luck is part of cricket. Being eaten by a bear or not being eaten by a bear are simply elements of luck within the broader tapestry of cricketing fortune. Anyway, the number of players eaten by bears will probably balance out in the long run.

SCENARIO 2

An opposition batsman is blasting your bowlers to all twelve corners of the ground. Your twelfth man runs on in between overs with a selection of new hair gels for the wicketkeeper, a handful of hungry termites, and an instruction from the coach to sprinkle the termites in the batsman’s crease so that when he next settles to face a delivery, the ravenous insects will gobble his bat. Do you:

(A) Grab the termites off the 12th man, start shovelling them into your mouth, while shouting to your coach in the pavilion that you will not stoop so low in an effort to win a cricket match, and send the 12th man back to the pavilion to fetch some salt and tomato ketchup to make the termites tastier.

(B) Take the termites but refuse to go through with the coach’s cheeky scheme. Instead, spread the termites on a good length in front of the batsman, and hope that he has an irrational fear of termites. If he seems unconcerned by the termites, simply sit back and wait for one of the following to happen: (1) some local snakes smell the termites, slither to the crease, and eat the termites, then hope that the batsman has a rational fear of snakes; (2) the termites build one of their trademark mounds just outside off stump on a good length, rendering batting much more difficult (it is a fact that even Bradman never scored a hundred on a pitch containing a functioning termite mound); or (3) the umpires abandon the match due to a termite and/or snake infestation.

(C) Put the plan into action. The coach is boss – he calls the shots. You take the termites from the twelfth man, then stand by the stumps (which your wicketkeeper is surreptiously smearing with the hair gel, a notorious termite repellent) pretending to move your fielders around whilst furtively dropping the termites all over the crease. Then jog slowly towards the bowler and tell him to take the longest and slowest imaginable run-up, before crouching in the slips and deliberately distracting the batsman just as the bowler finally arrives, causing your adversary to pull away at the last second. This will give the termites maximum bat-eating time. Then, when the batsman notices that his bat has been eaten by termites, refuse him permission to replace it, on the grounds that the ICC Match Regulations do not stipulate that a batsman should be allowed to replace a bat that has become part of the food chain, for fear of destabilising local ecosystems.

SCENARIO 3

Your team needs two runs to win at the end of a pulsating match. Nine wickets are down. You are one of the last wicket pair trying to squeeze out a spectacular victory. You get an obvious thick edge to the wicketkeeper, who tosses the ball high in the air in celebration. The umpire however, had been distracted by a passing airship that he thought looked a bit like Inzamam-ul-Haq, did not see the delivery and gives you not out. What do you do?

(A) Either walk, or, preferably, persuade the umpire to give you out, or wait for the next ball and smash the stumps to pieces with your bat. Then return to your frosty dressing room and say: “Cricket was the winner,” before taking refuge in a cupboard.

(B) Refuse the runs, but stay at the crease. When the opposition players berate you for not walking, remind them that it’s only a game, and that there is no documented proof that famous names in history ever walked when playing cricket, so why should you? In the spirit of fair play, you decide that neither side deserves to win, so you bat out the remaining four hours of play without scoring another run to secure a draw.

(C) With the ball still in the air and the wicketkeeper and fielders celebrating like a giraffe who has just eaten a lion, you sprint through for two runs, screaming: “Yes, yes, yes, in your faces, losers, Almighty Zeus himself decreed that we should win this game.”

How did you answer?

Mostly ‘A’s: You are a hero, a cricketing saint, and, as such, have no future in the professional game.

Mostly ‘B’s: You are too philosophically indecisive for top level cricket. Retire.

Mostly ‘C’s: Congratulations. You have displayed the hard-edged practicality of all great captains. You have an ability to take tough decisions, even when those tough decisions are wrong. You’ll go far in cricket, life, and, potentially, politics.

	We are so exhausted that we will surely win the Champions Trophy © Getty Images

Well, be honest. Did you see that coming from England? If you are claiming that you did, I want to see written proof, verified by an independent third party.

The latest upward surge in England’s wildly fluctuating 2009 has seen them give two outstanding and dominant performances in three days, including a new England record for sixes in a one-day international – 12 (twelve, honestly, twelve) (I saw them all with my own eyes) (albeit on television, so the possibility remains that the entire match was in fact a hoax).

Let’s put this in perspective. The dozen missiles launched by Shah, Morgan and Collingwood into the Centurion stratosphere on Sunday eclipsed England’s previous ODI record of 10 sixes in Napier two winters ago. Let’s put this in further perspective. England hit just eight sixes in the seven-game series against Australia just completed. And let’s now complete the perspective putting − Shah’s six bombs put him second equal on England’s all-time list for ODI aerial boundary blasts (as they will in due course become known to TV audiences); Morgan’s five place him fifth equal.

Once again, following their ultimately successful Ashes blueprint, England have shown that they are never more dangerous than when they have been playing like a bag of pumpkins (nor, worryingly for the rest of the tournament, are they more vulnerable than when they have been on fire). Expectations had been hovering between low and non-existent, even amongst those England fans who had noticed that the tournament was taking place. However, as in the Ashes, they deserve immense credit for rebounding from performances of rare ineptitude for which they were rightly slammed. What a thoroughly odd team.

England thus reach the semi-finals of an international one-day tournament for only the second time in ten attempts since the 1992 World Cup, whilst South Africa depart another event they had looked well-equipped to win, having conceded well over 300 twice in three rusty games.

For all the high-tech scientific methodologies of 21st-century cricket, England may be establishing a new blueprint for tournament success in the modern hyper-crowded international cricket calendar.

1. Ensure that you begin the tournament with your two most important players out injured.

2. Ensure that the remaining players are completely out of form, freshly demoralised after a massive drubbing.

3. Enter the competition with a batting order that habitually crawls along nervously, ineffectively and unexplosively.

4. Back this up with a bowling attack that has lacked penetration and control.

It will be interesting to see whether other teams have the courage to put this plan into practice with quite the same dedication as England.

It has been an interesting enough tournament so far, although lacking a classic match that has gone to the last over, and missing too many of the world’s leading one-day players through injury. With its simple, condensed format, almost every game has mattered, there is no obviously dominant team and even the pretend West Indies team has performed creditably. The entire tournament will take three fewer days than the England-Australia seven-match jeroboam of tedium. And more than a month less than the 2007 World Cup. If brevity is indeed the soul of wit, then (a) my career is in trouble, and (b) it is also the key ingredient in the recipe for interesting 50-over cricket tournaments.

A word too for Anderson and Collingwood. Anderson was expensive, largely ineffective and apparently exhausted in the Australia series, he has taken 6 for 62 from his 19.3 overs against Sri Lanka and South Africa. Collingwood, as generally happens when people start to prematurely question his value, has been at his decisive best.

Both players appear reinvigorated after being rested during the recent 6-1 clobbering. If any further proof were needed that the world cricket calendar is counter-productively, idiotically overloaded – and the case for the prosecution is already struggling to cram all the existing bits of proof into a giant skip to dump outside the courtroom – this is it. International cricketers should not need to be rested. Doing so devalues the concept of international cricket – how can it claim to be the best that nations can pit against each other, when some of the best are too knackered to crawl out of the pavilion?

The authorities responsible are clearly devotees of the foie-gras school of cricket scheduling – the more matches, series, travel and press conferences they can force-ram down the straining gullet of cricket, the tastier the end product will be. Sadly for them, cricketers are not French geese. This is a slippery slope, and there are few signs that the powers that be have any other intention than to shove cricket into a bobsled with no brakes, and kick it down that slope.

	If England win the Champions Trophy, and it is an ‘if’ so big that it can be seen with the naked eye from space, it will be one of the biggest surprises in world history. © Associated Press

The short-awaited Champions Trophy is underway, and, ominously for the other seven teams involved, South Africa have started as if they mean business. The Proteas have suffered serial disappointments in recent tournaments, often pulling defeat from the jaws of victory like an enthusiastically sadistic medieval dentist (sometimes even having to stretch beyond the jaws, and wrench defeat from victory’s duodenum with special forceps).

Graeme Smith and his men have therefore unleashed a new tactic which is almost guaranteed to win them the tournament – getting their traditional choke out of the way early enough that it doesn’t matter. South Africa’s performance in being hammered by the excellent Sri Lankans suggests that they are hell-bent on ultimate glory, and are rightly unwilling to risk starting the tournament looking like potential winners. They even went so far as to enter the event underprepared and rusty, to minimise their chances of peaking fatally early.

I am mildly excited about the tournament. It is of a size and length that should preclude the possibility of losing interest in all cricket, as often happens during World Cups, and features the six strongest teams in ODI cricket, plus West Indies and England representing the world’s up-and-coming limited-overs nations, and hoping to spring a surprise or two as Ireland did in the last World Cup.

England’s 2009-10 season begins on Friday against Sri Lanka, a pathetic five days after their end of their 2009 season (which in turn had begun just over a month after their 2008-09 ended – it would seem fairer and more honest if the relevant cricketing authorities simply lined up the world’s bowlers on a bench and then walked along it, smacking each one in the kneecaps with a baseball bat).

If England win the Champions Trophy, and it is an ‘if’ so big that it can be seen with the naked eye from space, it will be one of the biggest surprises in world history. I have spent the last 48 hours locked inside a darkened scorebox in my garden attempting to envisage scenarios in which England win the Champions Trophy. I have failed. The closest I came was imagining the earth being destroyed by an asteroid strike on Thursday, leading to the tournament winner being decided by a series of coin tosses by the astronauts on the International Space Station. England lost to India in the semi-final.

After the recently-completed one-day series with Australia, I think most England fans would willingly accept such an eventuality. It should also be pointed out that, contrary to press reports, England actually won the series − their victory in game seven on Sunday gave them the whatever-it’s-called trophy under the ICC’s new ‘Winner Stays On’ rule. This was harsh on Australia, who had played well enough and put on a heroically good show of looking like they found the process stimulating and challenging.

England’s preparation for the Champions Trophy seems to have been based on engendering dangerous levels of complacency in their opponents. I know that professional sportsmen these days are repeatedly indoctrinated with the mantra that you must never underestimate your opposition, but England − entering the tournament with their two most important players absent through injury, and with many of the rest mentally and/or physically knackered after a summer that seemed destined never to end − will surely test the underestimation-avoidance capacity of the other teams in their group like it has never been tested before.

Arguably, slowly building up deep-lying complacency through 15 years of almost unbroken limited-over mediocrity might have been taking this modern-day Trojan Horse tactic a little too far, but such plans need to be adhered to with tenacity and persistence. It is clear that, in the aftermath of England’s excellent but ultimately unsuccessful World Cup campaign in 1992, those in charge of English cricket clandestinely decided that never again would the national team suffer the heartache of failing so close to World Cup glory. To date, they have been spectacularly successful in achieving that goal.

A few final thoughts on the England v Australia one-day series recently consigned to the dustbin of history like the half-eaten rat pastie that it was:

First, and most overwhelmingly: Thank goodness that’s over.

Second: The people running cricket are either idiots, or deliberately concocting the schedules of idiots. In England, not content with scarring this summer’s final weeks with a tortuously anticlimactic monotony masquerading as international cricket, they have penned in similarly uninteresting one-day series for next summer around a ludicrously compressed four-Test series with Pakistan.

I have no doubt that scheduling an international cricket season is tricky – I have trouble enough timetabling occasional showers into my weekly routine. However, if you were served the unappetising mess that passes for an English cricketing summer in a restaurant, you would send (or more likely throw) it straight back to the kitchen with a message advising the chef to look for another job better suited to his skill set.

Third: England should not be judged too harshly on this series, missing as they were key players such as Pietersen, Flintoff, Gough, Tendulkar, Warne and Henry VIII. With the first two fit and firing, they could easily have escaped with a 5-2 mauling instead of a 6-1 annihilation.

Fourth: International cricket is seldom seen at its best when it is a contractual obligation rather than the summit of the game.

Fifth: Some stats...

In one-day internationals between the eight major Test playing nations this decade, England’s batsmen:

• have the lowest batting average;
• have the fifth best batting strike rate;
• have blasted the equal fewest centuries;
• have nurdled the second fewest innings of fifty or more;
• have smote the second fewest fours; and
• have thwacked the second fewest sixes.

England’s bowlers cannot lay claim to such a broad smorgasbord of ineptitude, but can boast the third highest bowling average and third worst economy rate over the same period.

England’s batsmen have now racked up three centuries in the 41 ODIs they have attempted to play in the last two years. Among the current Test playing nations, the next least prolific century makers in that time span are New Zealand and Bangladesh with seven tons each. England have also nudged their way to only 37 half-centuries in those 41 games, giving them an average of less than one 50-plus score per match. Oh dear!

All in all, these numbers suggest that England (a) are not very good at one-day cricket, (b) haven’t been very good at it for a very long time, and (c) are unlikely to get much better at it in the foreseeable future. Never mind. It’s only a game. And we won the Ashes. And Australia lost the Ashes. Those are two beacons of hope to cling to in the dark winter months ahead.