Former South African and former Royal Challenger from Bangalore, and current Delhi Daredevil Kevin Pietersen shakes hands with former Royal Challenger and current South African and Deccan Charger Dale Steyn. Keep track people, it’s a question of loyalty © AFP

Kevin Pietersen clobbered his first Twenty20 hundred yesterday, clinching the match for the Delhi Daredevils, and passing three figures with a characteristic six. It was a startling innings by a startling player, although startling things happen so often in the IPL that their startle capacity is less startling than you might expect of cricket so startlingly startling.

Last week Pietersen, who is admirably open, passionate and forthright in his media utterances, bemoaned the lack of English interest in the IPL, and the sometimes negative publicity it receives in the press here, attributing some of these problems to “jealousy”. From the selected quotes reported, it is hard to know who is supposed to be being jealous of the IPL – ex-players in the media who missed out on its glamour and financial bounty, or supporters who feel it takes the sun-kissed multi-million-dollar glitz and glory away from the April skirmishes in the County Championship, or the prime minister, who secretly wishes he was an IPL dancing girl.

However, the reason for any lack of English interest in the IPL is simple. It is not because the “I” stands for Indian. The same would be true if it was the Icelandic Premier League or the Idaho Premier League. More so, probably. Idaho has no business muscling in on cricket. They have snowmobiles and processed cheese. They should leave cricket well alone.

Nor does this relative lack of interest have anything to do with the format of the cricket and England’s general national preference for the longer game. Nor does it reflect on the quality of play, which although variable (as in any league in any sport), is often spectacular and dramatic. Nor even is it because the rampant hype and commercial insistence of the IPL might grate with a sport-watching public unaccustomed to having branded excitement blasted into their faces with the relentless determination of a child who has just discovered the joys of banging an upside-down cereal bowl with a spoon.

It is simply that, in an already saturated sports-watching market, the IPL does not, and I would argue cannot, offer enough for the English fan to actively support.

As a sports fan, you cannot force an instant emotional attachment to and investment in a team with which you have no geographical or familial link, and which has little history or identity with which to entice you. A Mongolian football fan might support Barcelona, or a Tanzanian baseball nut could develop a passion for the New York Yankees, for what those clubs are, what they have achieved, and what they stand for, and be drawn into their historic rivalries that have evolved over 100 years or more; but an English cricket fan is, as yet, unlikely to find the same bond of attraction to the five-year-old Chennai Super Kings. Supporting sport requires more than guaranteed entertainment and being able to watch great players competing.

Perhaps, in time, this will develop. The process was probably not helped by the franchise teams being largely disbanded and reconstituted before the 2011 season, so that any identity that had been built in the first three IPL seasons was fractured or destroyed.

It is also not helped by the fact that the star players might represent three or four different T20 franchises, and a country if time allows, over the course of a year. What if I love the Barisal Burners but am non-committal about the Sydney Thunder, scared of the Matabeleland Tuskers, unable to forgive Somerset for a three-hour traffic jam I sat in on the M5 ten years ago, and absolutely viscerally hate the Royal Challengers Bangalore (how dare they challenge our Royals, in Jubilee year especially) (despite any lingering historical quibbles)? What am I supposed to think about Chris Gayle? Is he hero or villain?

English cricket fans, even if sceptical or ambivalent about Twenty20, can admire the range of skills on display, appreciate how the format is expanding human comprehension of what mankind can and will do to small round things with flat bits of wood, and relish the high-pitched drama and tension of the endgames. They can simply enjoy seeing dancers jiggle their jiggly bits for no obvious reason, and be moved and uplifted by the sensation that unbridled commercialism is slowly destroying everything pure about sport and the world.

But, without teams and identities for which English supporters can root, and thus the emotional commitment that makes supporting sport such an infinitely rewarding experience, the IPL will continue to struggle to find active support in England. Not that the IPL, or Pietersen, or any of its other players and protagonists, should give two shakes or Billy Bowden’s finger about that.

I’d be interested to know your views on this, from English, Indian and other perspectives. I love cricket. I think I have probably made that abundantly clear in the three and a half years I have been writing this blog, and in the 30 years I have been boring my friends and, latterly, wife about it. I have tried watching the IPL, I have enjoyed some of it, but it just does not excite me. Am I normal, or should I see a shrink?

● At the opposite end of the scoring-rate see-saw, a curious but increasingly intriguing Test match in Trinidad found itself donning its Wellington boots and staring forlornly at a dark and soggy ending. Not for the first time in its annoying history, The Weather intervened to spoil a potentially thrilling Test match denouement.

Much of the cricket had been on the stodgy side of gloopy, and the seemingly endless behavioural idiosyncrasies of the DRS continued to irritate more than resolve, but another trademark jaunty Michael Clarke declaration had set the West Indies 215 to win in 61 overs. The stage was perfectly set for Chris Gayle. Or Dwayne Bravo. Or, at a stretch, Marlon Samuels.

They were, regrettably for Test Match fans, otherwise engaged. A full-strength West Indies would not be world-conquering, but they might at least conquer the occasional Test match. Selectors, schedules and squabbles look set to conspire to ensure that the world waits an extremely long time to see a full-strength West Indies Test XI again.

In the absence of proven hitters, Darren Sammy, the West Indies captain, after a largely ineffective match in which he had raised further questions about his suitability as prong four of a four-pronged bowling attack, promoted himself from 8 to 3 in an effort to kickstart the chase. Many things have been written about Sammy as a cricketer, but the words “reliable batsman” are not amongst them. At least, not unless preceded by the words “no one’s idea of a”. He is, however, a potent thwacker of a cricket ball, and knew that, on a pitch that had been a connoisseur of slow-scoring’s dream, a swift blast from him could potentially enable the eternally crafty and virtually impregnable Chanderpaul to shepherd the rest of his fragile team to victory.

Sammy promptly clonked a rapid 30 before the gloom intervened. Victory was still distant, but had become possible, and it was refreshing to see both captains striving to concoct a positive result from a somnolent surface.

● If Clarke’s declaration was enterprising, his team’s batting had lacked the positivity that had become its trademark in the early part of the millennium. The Baggy Greens plinked their runs at 2.39 per over – their slowest batting match since the Galle Test of 1999. In their 147 Tests since then, Australia had averaged 3.59 per over. Their first innings of 311 in 135 overs was their slowest score of 300 or more since 1989. During it, four different West Indies bowlers bowled more than 15 overs for less than two runs per over – the first time any team had done this against Australia since 1961. Watson’s 56 off 172 and Hussey’s 73 off 207 were respectively the second-slowest 50-plus and 70-plus scores by Australians in Tests this millennium.

The pitch was awkward and the bowling admirably disciplined, but Australia plodding along at under 2.5 runs per over is further proof that the apocalypse is nigh ‒ alongside economic collapse in Europe, political upheavals around the world, the unstoppable rise of reality television, the branding of time-outs in the IPL, anything to do with Silvio Berlusconi, Vernon Philander’s Test bowling average, and the current state of the world cricket calendar.

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Darren Sammy: he’s a Star Trek character, he’s not © Getty Images

The dust is settling on England’s fascinating, and, until Colombo’s belated redemption, spectacularly unsuccessful Test winter. And that dust is confused. Very confused. Is it covering a landmark underachievement, or an unfortunate blip? Has 2011-12 shown how vulnerable this supposedly world-leading England side is, and how the weaknesses in it had been camouflaged by an unprecedented collective burst of form and some fractured, sub-standard opposition; or has it strangely proved, as suggested by my World Cricket Podcast compadre Daniel Norcross, quite how good they are?

They were, after all, not far from winning four Tests out of five despite having batted for most of the winter like a long-forgotten salad in an abandoned fridge, and they bowled persistently superbly (statistically far better than in 2000-01, when they returned from Asia with two series victories). As soon as the batsmen for the first time applied themselves correctly, they waltzed to a resounding victory. Albeit that the sound that resounded was the echo of the words, “Where the hell was that in the Gulf in January?” rebounding back from outer space.

So many questions remain to be answered. Which was the batting blip – the first four Tests or the last one? Will the Pakistan whitewash remain a scar on this excellent England team’s record, or will it prove to be an open wound in which the maggots of doubt have laid out their towels for an interesting year’s sunbathing ahead?

Your witness, history. Get back to us in nine months’ time with some supporting evidence from (a) this summer’s series against an increasingly-determined-but-almost-entirely-unacquainted-with-early-season-English-conditions West Indies, and a probably-should-be-No. 1-side-in-the-Test-world-if-only-they-didn’t -keep-tanking-one-nil-series-leads South Africa, and (b) the four Tests in India at the end of the year.

Personally, my expectation is that England will beat West Indies comfortably, draw 1-1 with South Africa, and win narrowly in India, guided by their freshly printed multi-volume Encyclopaedia Of Lessons Learned, which they are no doubt busy scribbling down from their failures this winter.

However, my expectation was that they would win in the UAE against Pakistan, and they managed to avoid doing that in some style, in much the same way that the Titanic managed to avoid overshooting America on its maiden voyage.

And, just as they had not faced high-class spin for a lengthy period before subsiding to Ajmal and Rehman, so they will not have faced the calibre of swing bowling they can expect from Steyn and Philander since Amir and Asif brilliantly hooped them to distraction two years ago before. Just as facing Xavier Doherty in Brisbane, or Mishra and Raina at The Oval, was not ideal preparation for encountering Pakistan’s crafty tweakmen in the Gulf, so seeing off Lakmal and Prasad in Colombo, statistically one of cricket history’s least penetrating new-ball attacks (their career figures suggesting they offered the incision of an ice scalpel in a sub-Saharan operating theatre), will not have honed England ideally for the South African pace and swing barrage. As preparation for that task, it was about as appropriate as Neil Armstrong training for his rocket trip to the moon by hanging a cantaloupe melon from his bedroom ceiling, saying “5-4-3-2-1-blast-off” and throwing a dart at it.

Luckily, Strauss and his men have time and the West Indies series in which to reactivate their facing-swing-bowling heads. And hope that they work better than they did in 2010. And that England’s bowlers continue to provide the grip and penetration of a Viagra-addled boa constrictor, as they have done consistently for the last two years.

Then, in November, England’s batsmen will have to switch heads back to the spin-oriented ones that only started showing signs of neural activity briefly in Galle, and only uttered coherent sentences in Colombo. India will enter that series with scores to settle, both with England and, more specifically, with themselves.

They will be hoping by then that they still have a left-arm spinner who can remember how to bowl anything other than four overs of balls speared in at leg stump. Not only has this been England’s worst ever winter or summer season against spin (they lost 77 wickets to spin in the five Tests, at a little under 19 runs apiece), but Abdur Rehman and Rangana Herath both returned series hauls of 19 wickets against them. That is more than any left-arm spinner in a series against England since India’s Dilip Doshi took 22 in a six-Test rubber 30 winters ago, and more than any non-Indian left-arm spinner since Alf Valentine twirled England to post-war befuddlement in 1950. England are likely to face legspinners Devendra Bishoo and Imran Tahir this summer. I never thought I would write this, but Pragyan Ojha could hold the entire future health of Indian Test cricket in his fingers.

EXTRAS
● Excuse me for largely skipping over the first half of England’s Test summer, despite West Indies’ impressively cussed all-round performance in the first three days against Australia in Barbados. The Caribbean team’s last two early-season tours to England have been pointlessly one-sided and deeply depressing. Darren Sammy’s team seems unlikely to cave in as readily as Chris Gayle’s did in the two-Test-total-waste-of-time in 2009, but West Indies have lost 12 out of 14 matches in England since they last won a Test here 12 years ago. Excluding tours of Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, West Indies have played 65 away Tests since 1997. They have won two of them. And lost 50. I just hope for something resembling cricket to occur.

● Is there a more underrated bowler in world cricket than Sammy? As I write (in between days three and four of the Barbados Test), the West Indian skipper’s Test bowling average stands at 29.60. This means that, of all West Indian bowlers to have taken more than 20 Test wickets, Sammy has the best average of anyone who has made their debut since Ian Bishop in 1989 (albeit only by a very slim margin over Jermaine Lawson, which a single boundary at the start of play today would wipe out).

Sammy currently has a better career average than Jimmy Anderson, Morne Morkel, Brett Lee, Zaheer Khan, Umar Gul and Andrew Flintoff. That does not mean he is a better bowler than them, but Sammy’s statistics suggest that he is a far better bowler than his action and speed-gun readings suggest he is.

● How much longer can West Indies continue to carry their captain, Sammy? His continued presence in the team, and the fact that he is not a good enough batsman to bat above No. 8, means that only two of a decent crop of Caribbean pacemen can play alongside Sammy and a spinner. Do not be fooled by his Test average of 29.60. It has been boosted by some cheap wickets against Bangladesh, and, excluding a home series against a weak Pakistan batting line-up, and a debut haul of 7 for 66 in England five years ago, in series against major opposition Sammy has not averaged under 34 runs per wicket, and has taken a wicket on average once every 14.2 overs. He might be forging a more dogged and disciplined West Indies team, for which all cricket fans should be wiping their brows in relief, but his limitations as a bowler are negating what could be their strongest attacking suit – an improving and increasingly potent pace attack.

● Stats are confusing.

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Jonathan Trott: the sort who'd ask Luck home but send her off without a cup of tea © AFP

England have one final chance to rescue some dignity from their unexpectedly disastrous Test winter. More specifically, England’s batsmen have one final opportunity to issue an official, long-overdue and suitably grovelling apology to England’s bowlers, in the form of a last-ditch outbreak of subcontinental competence. If any of England’s willow-wielders does manage to add to Trott’s solitary 2011-12 century, I hope he has the decency to hold up his bat to the bowlers in the Colombo pavilion to reveal an “I am so, so sorry” sticker plastered on the back, before flagellating himself in penance with a section of the boundary rope the England have found so elusive of late.

Seldom have two parts of the same cricket team performed at such extremes of proficiency. England’s bowling has been almost uniformly excellent. The batting has been historically poor. It has been a little reminiscent of the ill-fated mixed-doubles tennis partnership between Martina Navratilova and Henry Kissinger, or the RSC’s controversial 1960s production of Romeo and Juliet in which Hollywood heart-throb Paul Newman was cast opposite Chi Chi, the London Zoo panda. The difference is that Kissinger was never a truly world-class tennis player, and Chi Chi was more suited to comedic cameos than leading lady roles. Whereas England’s batting, just a few months ago, was smashing records as if they were plates at the wedding of two Greek discus throwers.

England’s bowlers enter their final Test of the 2011-12 season with a collective average of 26 this winter. Thus far, it has statistically been England’s second best bowling winter since 1978-79, when Mrs Thatcher was still a slightly unsettling twinkle in the British electorate’s eye, and Botham, Willis, Miller and others took advantage of a Packer-stripped Australia.

Since then, only in the 1996-97 season have England’s bowlers returned a (fractionally) better average, and then their opponents were Zimbabwe and New Zealand, the two lowest-ranked Test nations at the time. Even in the 2000-01 winter, when England achieved outstanding series victories in both Pakistan and Sri Lanka, they averaged 33 with the ball.

For years, England had struggled to dismiss their opponents away from home, but they have now bowled their opposition out in both innings in nine of their last 11 away Tests. They had done so just five times in their previous 27 Tests outside England, dating back to their post-2005-Ashes comedown series in Pakistan, and in just 29% of their overseas Tests over the previous three decades.

England’s bowlers (who in Galle became just the third attack in Test history to be on the losing side despite dismissing the opposition’s top three for a total of less than 20 in both innings) have done their job all winter, a message conveyed unmistakeably by Jimmy Anderson’s face when he trudged out to bat at 157 for 8, three hours after flogging a five-for out of the docile Galle surface.

England paid dearly for Monty's drops and Broad's no-ball (and, of course, for Jayawardene’s refound mastery and Herath’s crafty insistence), but the game was decided in their first innings, when they lost their top six wickets for less than 100 for the fifth time in four Tests this winter. They had been six down for under 100 just nine times in their previous 70 away Tests.

Can a batting line-up ever have sunk so far, so fast? Certainly not since Leicestershire mistakenly booked a pre-season tour to the bottom of the Marianas Trench in 1924. England averaged 19.06 runs per wicket in the UAE against Pakistan – their lowest figure in any series since 1890. Last summer, they averaged 58 runs per wicket ‒ their third best summer of all time, and best since 1962.

The 2010-11 winter (51.1 runs per wicket) had been their best since the timeless-Test-enhanced 1938-39 tour of South Africa. The 2011-12 winter is currently their worst since 1934-35. In the last year and a half, they have registered their highest runs-per-wicket season averages against Australia and Sri Lanka, and their third best against India ‒ but also their worst against Pakistan and, as it stands, Sri Lanka.

No wonder there was completely unnecessary panic buying of petrol in England last week in preparation for a fuel-tanker-drivers’ strike that may or may not happen at some point not especially soon. England’s batting in the last 18 months has left the nation confused, discombobulated, and willing to queue needlessly and stockpile lethal liquids in its houses.

Traditionally, dismissing your opponents twice gives you a strong likelihood of victory. But this England team is clearly no respecter of history and tradition.

To further illustrate the extraordinary lengths to which England’s batsmen have gone to finesse four Test defeats out of four this winter, consider this, stats fans: of the 50 away Tests in which England bowled out their opponents twice between 1980 and 2011, they won 37, drew 6 and lost just 7. And between the Sydney Test of 1998-99 and the Perth defeat late in 2010, England won 19 and lost just one of the 21 away Tests in which they took 20 wickets. Three times this winter they have dismissed their opposition twice. Three times they have lost. Truly, being one match away from a whitewashed winter, despite have bowled with such penetration, craft and consistency, represents one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of English batsmanship.

EXTRAS

● For anyone unconvinced at what an influential cricketer Luck is, consider not Lahiru Thirimanne’s literally gut-wrenching catch at short leg, when the Sri Lankan’s phenomenal anticipation and stomach-endangering bravery combined with good fortune and a friendly tummy-bounce to dismiss Matt Prior, somersaulting the Test back towards the home team. Consider Jonathan Trott.

Trott was rightly praised for his artfully constructed second-innings century, which put his team in a winning position and was England’s first century in their four Tests in 2011-12. (They had scored 22 tons in their previous 12 Tests; and 49 in the first 36 matches of the Strauss-Flower era.) The general consensus was that the rest of England’s batsmen should watch and learn from Trott, and take note of his patience, his sage selection of strokes, and the fact that he wisely opted not get out for not many runs. And so they should. But they should also learn from his Luck.

In the first innings, Trott was stumped when he charged out of his crease as if sprinting home to check whether or not he had left his oven on, and forgetting to hit the full-toss that was heading his way. In the second innings, when he was on 7, he tried to play an ungainly pull shot to an unthreatening short ball by Tillakaratne Dilshan. Tried, but failed. The ball thonked into his pads, Sri Lanka appealed, it looked close, and it was close. The umpire’s finger of doom must have contemplated a journey into the air, but decided to stay in the snug safety of the pocket, saving its harsh justice for someone else. Trott survived. Hawkeye suggested the ball would have trimmed the bails. If Trott had been given out, he would have stayed out. And he would have been slammed for getting out to startlingly dreadful shots early in both innings, for lacking the composure, gameplan and technique to succeed in Asian conditions, for not having learned his lessons from the Pakistan series, and, probably, because he is Trott, for not scoring quickly enough in one-day internationals.

The finger of doom was less kind to Trott’s Warwickshire team-mate Ian Bell, who was harshly triggered leg before wicket for 13, when he was well down the pitch to a ball that Captain Technology asserted was shaving his offstump. If he had been given not out, he would have stayed not out. Instead, he was slammed for playing yet another of England’s injudicious and/or ineptly-executed sweep shots. If he had not been given out, he might have stroked an almost-match-winning hundred. Or he might not. Luck reprieved Trott, but convicted Bell. But playing ungainly pull shots and injudicious and ineptly-executed sweeps is inviting Luck to stick its capricious snout into your business. And repeatedly chipping balls to infielders specifically placed for chipped balls into the infield is effectively saying: “You take the rest of the day off, Luck. We can lose this for ourselves.”

● The Official Confectionery Stall Prediction For The Colombo Test: I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. England might remember how to bat. They might not. Maybe they’ll bowl terribly for a change, but chase down 800 to win on the last day. It has been a baffling few months for England. Fascinating, but baffling.

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If the tattoo sleeve doesn't scare batsmen, some gentle ribbing will © Getty Images

I promised in the last Confectionery Stall to share some of the cricket-related questions that have been occupying me of late. Arguably, there have been too many cricket-related questions occupying me of late (and by “of late”, I mean “since the age of six”), but if they perform the useful function of helping me not think about, for example, the state of the global economy, the international response to the Syrian crisis, how my parenting skills are likely to fare when my children are teenagers, or the future of Test matches, then so be it.

Here they are. Write your answers on a piece of parchment, and bury them in your garden to confuse future archaeologists.

● Kevin Pietersen’s ODI hundreds are like London buses – you wait three years and three months for one, and then two turn up in the space of four days. (I admit that I did the empirical research for this joke years ago, waiting at a bus stop in La Paz, Bolivia.) (And that the two that eventually turned up were in fact not London buses, but my parents asking me to come back home.) (But the point stands.) Why the delay? (a) essential maintenance work; (b) Pietersen had been batting in the wrong position, at 3 or 4, for too long – most of his best ODI innings have now been played either early in his career at 5 or 6, coming to the wicket when his run-scoring task was quite clear, or, more recently, opening, when he can shape England’s innings from the start; (c) Fate; (d) rogue planetary alignments; (e) Pietersen wanted to disprove the fears expressed when he was appointed England skipper that the captaincy would affect his batting, by not scoring an ODI hundred for three years and two months after having the captaincy taken from him; (f) a combination of luck, form, injury, technical glitches and the opposition insisting on getting him out; or (g) I don’t know.

● Why does a team lose a DRS referral when the replay returns an “Umpire’s Call” verdict, proving that the referring team was either essentially right, or only infinitesimally wrong, to refer it, but either not quite right enough to overturn the decision, or wrong by a sufficiently small margin as to raise the very real possibility that the ball shown to be shaving the stump by a millimetre might not have actually knocked the bail off? Does this not penalise them twice?

● And, whilst we are on the subject of the DRS, why do teams only receive one referral in an ODI innings, despite the fact that they are allowed to lose the same number of wickets as in a Test innings? Does this suggest that the entire system, far from aiming to eliminate umpiring “howlers”, is in fact designed simply to make them even more annoying?

● Was Dr Faustus employed by the BCCI as part of their secret How To Win The World Cup panel? If so, does India now regret having implemented the naughty Doctor’s plan to trade World Cup glory for Test meltdown?

● If Jade Dernbach bowls more than 50% of his deliveries as slower balls, will he be officially be reclassified as a spinner? Albeit a spinner with a useful much-quicker ball?

● Is the success of Dernbach’s seemingly unfathomable and recently match-winning slower ball due to the fact that, when his heavily-inked arm rotates at the required velocity to deliver it, an optical illusion is created whereby the tattoos blend to create an animation of WG Grace biting the head off a squirrel, thus distracting the batsman?

● Given that Saeed Ajmal took 39 wickets at an average of 15.9 in the Tests, ODIs and T20s against England, and that amidst that run of scheming tweak wizardry, he took 0 for 32 in an ODI against Afghanistan, should England be sending their players to spend a year in Afghanistan to work on their techniques against mystery spin?

● Does Eoin Morgan realise that a batsman having a pronounced duck amongst his trigger movements could be risking bad karma?

● When, why and how did Shahid Afridi persuade himself that he couldn’t bat properly anymore, despite considerable evidence to the contrary? He was praised for his “maturity” in scoring a fine half-century in the third ODI – when he was an immature, hot-headed 18-year-old, he scored an ultimately match-winning five-hour 141 when opening the batting in a low-scoring Test match in Chennai. If only Pakistan had selected him at the age of six, he could have been one of the most immovable grinders of the modern age.

● What does Azhar Ali ‒ of whom this column is an unashamed admirer as a Test player but who had only played four List A one-day matches anywhere in the world in the
22 months before his recall to the green pyjamas ‒ think when he goes out to bat in a one-day international? Is it the same as what prominent miserablist songsmith Leonard Cohen would think if forced to take part in a World Heavyweight title fight, i.e.: “I am good at what I do, but I am seriously out of my comfort zone”?

● How good will Steven Finn prove to be? In the recent ODI series, he has looked as if he could become one of England’s best since Freddie Trueman. If he can get into the Test side. And not get injured. And keep bowling at an out-of-form Mohammad Hafeez. His 13 wickets for 134 runs (at an average of 10.3, the best by an England bowler with 10 or more wickets in an ODI series or tournament), mean that he has taken 20 wickets at 16, with an economy rate of 3.8, in his last seven ODIs. In his first eight ODIs, he took eight wickets at 50 and went for 5.5 per over. In his 12 Tests to date, he has 50 wickets at 26.9. If he can directly replicate his proportional ODI improvement in the Test arena, then, in his next 10½ Tests, he will take 125 wickets at 8.6. That will not happen, but, if it does, which it won’t, it will be worth watching. As will fast bowling in general in the next few years, if the last six months have not been an elaborate hoax.

● Ravi Bopara scored two half-centuries in two innings in the ODI series, but could, and probably should, have been out for 1 three times in those two innings, reprieved by a missed stumping, a botched lbw decision and a blooped run-out. So, for any philosophers out there, was Bopara batting well or badly?

● Why is it so hard to find decent statues of umpire Daryl Harper these days? My garden feels empty without one.

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”What do you mean, no backbone?” © Getty Images

A few quick thoughts and numbers arising from the Pakistan v England series (I will do a full review of it in next week’s World Cricket Podcast). Some people are outlandishly claiming that the series ended in a 3-0 whitewash of the Universe’s Number One-Ranked Cricket Machine by a side that recently was not merely plumbing depths of on-pitch ineptitude and off-pitch naughtiness, but was fitting a basin, bath and power shower in those depths. This story is so far-fetched that it must be discounted. It cannot have happened. It cannot have happened. It simply cannot have happened. I checked the rankings this morning. England are still the Universe’s Number One-Ranked Cricket Machine. It must have been a hoax.

Nevertheless, until the hoax is conclusively proved and accepted by the ICC, we must reflect on what allegedly happened. And what allegedly happened was one of the most extraordinary collective batting failures in cricket history, and one of the finest series wins of recent decades. England averaged below 20 runs per wicket for only the second time since Archduke Franz Ferdinand had his clogs controversially and unhelpfully popped, and registered their lowest team series runs-per-wicket figure since shortly after Tchaikovsky premiered his smash-hit ballet Sleeping Beauty, and shortly before the birth of professional French President and eight-time European Nose Of The Year winner Charles de Gaulle (in 1890 – thank you, Wikipedia).

England’s numbers 4, 5 and 6 (Pietersen, Bell and Morgan, with one innings at 6 by Prior) averaged 11.94, a figure that, since the First World War, has only been out-ineptituded once in a three-Test series ‒ by a motley collection of Indians against New Zealand in 1969-70.

The people I feel most sorry for, with regard to this historic disintegration of England’s stellar batting line-up, are the poor, unfortunate bat sponsors. For the last year they had got their money’s worth. In their previous 13 Tests over three series, England bats had been waggled in celebration on 93 occasions – 54 times on reaching 50, 22 times to mark a century, ten times for 150, six times to celebrate double-centuries, and once by Alistair Cook to mark England’s first 250 since Gooch clomped India all around Lord’s in 1990. These had been unprecedented times for English bat-waggling. But in the three UAE Tests, those same bats remained eerily unwaggly.

The five half-centuries England mustered in the series, none of which was converted into a hundred, represents the fewest times England batsmen have waggled their bats in celebration in a series of three or more Tests since the Ashes of 1888. Only once in that time have they scored fewer than five 50-plus scores – in the 1986 debacle against India, when England’s elite batsmen managed to pass 50 just three times. However, one thing you could not criticise England for in that series was failing to build on good starts. Of those three fifties, one became a century for Gooch and another a 183 for Gatting. It was the other 63 innings England’s batsmen played that were the problem.

This was also only the third series since the First World War in which England have mustered only one score above 75. The two previous occasions were the three-match series with India in 1946, when the third Test was heavily curtailed by rain, and the five-Test 1985-86 series in the West Indies, when England’s batting was heavily curtailed by the West Indian bowlers. Curtailed, and, on occasion, facially rearranged.

As wake-up calls go, for England, after a year in which they touched extraordinary heights against some far too ordinary opposition, this series was the equivalent of being whacked in the face with a live barracuda at 3.30am by a man dressed as a cross between Freddie Krueger and Richie Benaud. Bracing, unexpected, and hopefully not to be repeated.

Extras
● Azhar Ali justified his pre-series selection as The Confectionery Stall’s One To Watch with another innings of throwback craft and an almost medieval determination. Pre-medieval, perhaps. He gave the impression that, had he been a Roman gladiator facing up to a dangerously peckish man-eating lion in the Coliseum, he would have calmly blocked the lion with his sword, and kept blocking the lion with his sword until the lion got bored and tootled off to buy a hot dog from the fast-food stall outside. His partnership with Shafiq turned the Abu Dhabi Test, and his stand with the masterful Younis Khan effectively won the final match in Dubai. Both partnerships began with Pakistan trailing and having already lost second-innings wickets. Ajmal fractured England’s confidence in the first Test, and Abdur Rehman shattered its flimsy remnants in Abu Dhabi, but, in a bowler’s series, Azhar arguably had as much impact on the final scoreline.

● Rehman finished the series with 19 wickets at an average of 16.7, and, by the end of the series, some of the English pundits were even beginning to acknowledge that he is a useful bowler. I heard it said of him during the series that “he is no Derek Underwood”. However, nor has anyone else been, since Derek Underwood, other than Derek Underwood himself, and even he is not the bowler he was. Rehman currently has the best Test average of any left-arm spinner to have taken 30 Test wickets since the Kent Conniver ended his 297-wicket career, and the third best of any left-arm tweakman to have debuted in the last 50 years (behind Underwood and Pervez Sajjad).

● The ICC has rebuffed calls in the British media that they should step in and investigate after Saeed Ajmal appeared to admit in a TV interview that he was a French spy during the Napoleonic Wars. The Pakistan Cricket Board leapt to Ajmal’s defence, saying his comments had been misinterpreted, whilst the ICC confirmed that it had definitively cleared Ajmal of being an early-19th-century secret agent. One British journalist, who did not wish to be named, commented: “Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him in the background of a painting of the Battle of Austerlitz, wearing a distinctly French-looking hat and waving a baguette around. I don’t care what the evidence suggests.”

Comments (12)

“Everyone contributed to that loss, and I’m proud of you all” © Getty Images

England do not lose too many Test matches these days. But when they do lose, they lose properly. They go down hard, they go down fast, and they go down in a blaze of statistical ignominy. Since the Flower-Strauss era began, with an almost mathematics-defying innings defeat after collapsing to 51 all out in Jamaica three years ago, England have lost only five more Tests (which, to put their current travails in perspective, is as many as they lost in six weeks in Australia in 2006-07, or in two months against the West Indies whenever they played them in the mid-1980s). They have won 20, drawn 11, and risen to the top of the world rankings. But when they fail, they do not mess about with half-measures. They take a treble measure of neat cricketing vodka, and wash it down with a meths chaser.

The ten-wicket Dubai splattering by a resurgent, skilful and determined Pakistan followed in the pattern of the 267-run clouting in Perth in last winter’s Ashes (do not let Australians persuade you that was in fact “last summer’s Ashes”, it was not; it was in the winter; after watching it, I went outside and had to put a woolly hat on; therefore it was winter; the Australians play cricket in winter; that is a fact). The sequence was partially interrupted by a fluctuating four-wicket loss to Pakistan at The Oval, a close game but one that nevertheless featured some historically inept batting by England. Prior to that, England had been clobbered by an innings by South Africa in Johannesburg, and by Australia at Headingley.

All of these defeats have featured collapses of 1929 stock market proportions - displays of landmark batting uselessness in an era notable for its unusually persistent and increasingly dominant successes, and also for its dogged, match-saving rearguards. The Jamaica debacle was England’s third-lowest Test score of all time, and only the fifth time that ten Englishmen have failed to reach double figures in a Test innings; at Headingley, England had eight players dismissed for 3 or fewer in a Test innings for the first time in their history, registered 13 dismissals for less than five runs for the second time ever (the first was another 1880s scorebook-burning classic), and were dismissed in under 34 overs in an Ashes Test innings for the second time in 105 years; in Johannesburg, England failed to last 550 balls in their two innings combined for just the third time in over 100 years; at The Oval, all of England’s top six were dismissed for 17 or fewer in the first innings of a Test for the first time since 1887, none of England’s bottom six scored more than 6 runs in the second innings of a Test for only the seventh time in their history, and England lost their last seven wickets for less than 30 runs for the first time in over a decade; in Perth, they failed to last 100 overs in the two innings of a Test in Australia for the first time since 1903-04.

Dubai was the latest outbreak of proper, unmitigated batting failure. England slunk to 42 for 4 in the first innings and 35 for 4 in the second ‒ the fifth-worst match performance by England's top four wickets since the First World War. They then subsided to 94 for 7 and 87 for 7 – the first time since 1988 that England have lost their seventh wicket for less than 100 in both innings of a Test, and the sixth-worst match performance by England’s top seven wickets since the treaty of Versailles heralded 21 years of glorious peace for the world. (Those 21 years, of course, followed four years of war – giving Versailles an 84% success rate, and thus making it a better treaty than Bradman was a batsman. Arguably.)

It is a curiosity that England’s rare failures are so cricketingly catastrophic. They have succeeded through collective excellence with bat and ball. They seem to fail with similarly impressive levels of teamwork.

They have also tended to respond positively to their isolated failures. They may fall off their horse from time to time, but they get straight back on that horse, feed it a sugar lump, and then Knievel it over a row of buses. Each of their last four defeats has been followed by a victory. And a big victory – by and innings and lots in Melbourne in the Ashes, and at Lord’s against Pakistan, by 181 in Chittagong in the first Test after the Johannesburg blooper, and by 197 at The Oval after seeming to be intent on hurling the Ashes away at Leeds. They also followed the 51 all out schemozzle with 566 for 9 in the next Test.

Certainly England were deservedly beaten in Dubai, and they were beaten like a naughty egg white in a 1970s police investigation. On the evidence of the Flower-Strauss years, from that beaten egg white, a deliciously crunchy meringue may grow in the Abu Dhabi Test. However, this admirable Pakistan team, only the second Pakistan Test side to contain (a) seven players over the age of 30 and (b) no one under the age of 25, is unlikely to be quite such compliant assistant dessert chefs as Australia were in Melbourne in 2010-11, or as a very, very different Pakistan team was at Lord’s 18 months ago.

Extras
The more eagle-eyed Confectionery Stall readers among you may have noticed that I did not entirely predict the narrative and outcome of the first Test. My forecast of a one-nil series victory for England is now looking distinctly unlikely. At best. The two players I highlighted as the Ones to Watch did not adorn the match with scintillating brilliance. Azhar Ali adorned it with one solitary run, and Monty Panesar did not adorn it at all, other than by looking on lugubriously from the pavilion, wondering whether, given his glorious undefeated rearguard in his previous Test, in Cardiff in 2009, he might have been able to stem England’s collapses. In my minimal defence, I did write that England’s obviously imminent victory might not happen if they were “scuppered by the wiles of Saeed Ajmal”. At least seven true words out of 1100. That is by no means the worst performance ever by a British journalist. If I can indeed describe myself as a journalist. Which I certifiably cannot.

Some stats: Saeed Ajmal became the first bowler to take ten wickets in a Test against England since Murali (twice) in 2006, and the first Pakistan bowler to do so since Abdul Qadir, who did it three times in 1987. England had lost 16 wickets to specialist spin bowlers in their previous three major series, at an average of 86 runs per wicket. In Dubai, Ajmal and Abdur Rehman took 14 for 186. They bowled very well. England batted very badly. Before the last Test, Ajmal had taken 21 wickets in UAE Tests at an average of 34.

I did promise to write about India’s struggles in this blog. I have not done that. Many other people have done that. I may do it next time. Unless the struggles have been miraculously cured. Or become significantly worse.

Comments (2)

Azhar Ali, pictured here in Uncharacteristically Unseemly Haste mode © AFP

As I write, Pakistan and England are hours away from resuming a rivalry that has sparked some of our great sport’s most cantankerous cricket and least savoury squabbles. This time, hopefully, tempers will be tempered, and the cricket will not be an incidental curtain raiser to the controversy.

Provided that the Gulf pitches are not unremittingly somnolent ‒ and they have had a tendency to display the spritely vigour of a hypnotised and hibernating walrus ‒ the cricket should be compelling. Pakistan have been stable and steady, if not resurgent, and are unbeaten in six series since the legal blooper at Lord’s, although of those series, only one was against a team ranked in the top five in the world (a not-especially-thrilling nil-nil draw with South Africa in the Gulf late in 2010, the highlights of which have not been challenging the top of the DVD bestseller charts).

England, meanwhile, have had a prolonged Test break after a nine-month period in which they annihilated two of their greatest rivals. For the previous couple of years, England had veered between brilliance and debacle, as if they had read Rudyard Kipling’s smash-hit poem “If”, taken on board his suggestion that they should seek to treat the two impostors Triumph and Disaster just the same, and therefore attempted to spend plenty of quality time with both of them in turn. They then decided that Triumph was the preferable impostor to hang around with, and have since scaled peaks of performance dominance untouched by English cricketers for generations.

This dominance has been founded principally on high-class swing bowling ‒ which will be a less potent force in the billionaires’ sandpit that is Dubai ‒ supported by a batting line-up that has pulled off one of the most startling collective improvements of recent times, feeding off each other’s successes and confidence like lions at an all-you-can-eat zebra buffet.

Some stats: In England’s three major series before last winter’s Ashes (v Australia in 2009, South Africa in 2009-10, and Pakistan in 2010), only Jonathan Trott averaged over 38, with Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen below 30. In England’s three major series after that (Ashes 2010-11, and against Sri Lanka and India last summer), five of England’s regular top seven have averaged over 50, with Cook and Ian Bell close to 100. Were they underachieving wildly before, or are they overachieving wildly now? Probably a little bit of both. This year should provide a reasonably reliable answer, and Pakistan in the UAE should offer a stern challenge for a side that is reaching for greatness.

The official Confectionery Stall series prediction: England to win 1-0, provided they are not distracted by wondering how and why Dubai came to be full of so many empty skyscrapers. Or scuppered by the wiles of Saeed Ajmal. Or neutered by the heat and pitches. Or about to embark on a startling collective dis-improvement. Or possessed by a sudden urge to abandon the seven-batsman-four-bowler strategy that has served them so well. In which case, they will win 2-1. Possibly. Or it might be 1-1. Depending on what happens, and who does what, and when they do it.

One to watch (England): Monty Panesar
He has been out of the England side for so long that it is easy to forget that Panesar was once much more than a bizarrely (and very intermittently) stylish No. 11 batsman, who in effect won the 2009 Ashes single-handedly. He was for a couple of years, against everyone other than India, a bowler of skill and penetration, and England’s most consistently effective spinner since Derek Underwood. He was then surpassed by the new England’s most consistently effective spinner since Derek Underwood, Graeme Swann.

Panesar is 29, with 125 Test and 500 first-class wickets under his specialist belt. With away series in the UAE, Sri Lanka and India, 2012 is a good year for him to be entering his tweaking prime. (Although his record in Tests in Asia is hopeless.) (But those Tests were quite a long time ago now.) (And England might not pick him anyway.) (Predictive punditry is pointless.) (What am I doing with my life?)

One to watch (Pakistan): Azhar Ali
Azhar Ali is a throwback, a one-man war against 21st-century batting fripperies, a defiant protector of the coaching manual. Of the 55 top-seven batsmen who have played ten Tests this decade, Azhar has the second slowest scoring rate, behind only Tharanga Paranavitana. Throughout his 18-Test career, Azhar has shown defiance, patience, and a willingness not to edge the first available outswinger to the slips that some more celebrated batsmen around the world would do well to emulate. He has the classical style and methodical approach of a 1950s cricketer (although it should be noted that his strike rate of 39 runs per 100 balls faced would, by 1950s standards, have made him something of a reckless cavalier). I find him quite fascinating to watch. I would not want all batsmen to play like Azhar Ali, but I do want some batsmen to play like Azhar Ali. Including Azhar Ali.

(Warning for neutral spectators: four of Pakistan’s current top six are in the Eight Slowest Test Batsmen of the Decade list. Whether that is a negative warning or a positive warning is up to you.)

Extras
I will write more about India’s statistically staggering disintegration next time. I have not enjoyed watching this cricketingly-macabre series, for all Australia’s excellence with the ball, and Warner’s thermonuclear innings in Perth. For a man recently viewed as a Twenty20 specialist, he has played two of the best innings of the decade in his first five Tests, which he, the baggy green selectors, and the whole of Baggy Greenland must be quite excited about. Maybe Pakistan should unleash Azhar Ali in their next T20s.

Most players and teams eventually decline before finally departing the scene, but few have done so as precipitously as Dhoni’s India. A year ago they had won several Tests by chasing down testing totals with skill and resilience. They had won in England, drawn in South Africa, and beaten Australia twice. They were about to successfully withstand arguably the most-high pressure cricketing campaign of all time. They were a good team, and a tough one. Now they are neither of those. They have responded to adversity in England and Australia by fighting like cornered tigers ‒ but tigers which, once cornered, have been shot at point-blank range and turned into fetching fireside rugs.

At least if India want to seek inspiration from a team that has emerged rapidly from an apparently long-term slump, they need only to knock on the home dressing room door and ask for a cup of tea and a chat.

Comments (95)

Lily-livered MP Debbie Abrahams decided she’d rather kiss babies than front up to Malinga at The Oval © Getty Images

MS Dhoni has had little to complain about of late. If he had eaten a fried breakfast every time he had received a trophy, an accolade or a blast of public adulation this year, he would now be the size of 18 Inzamams. However, he received a minor setback in the current Barbados Test, when a blooper in the TV umpiring box led to him being dismissed on the rogue evidence of the wrong ball.

As an Englishman, I cannot help but regret that this new strain of dismissal was not available to umpires during my nation’s dark days of Ashes humiliation in the 1990s and early 2000s. “That’s out, Hayden. Technically, you smashed that wide long hop for four, but I’m going to judge you on the evidence of the ball Warne bowled to Hussain yesterday afternoon. Out. Plumb in front. Hitting the middle of middle. On your way, sunshine. 0 for 1.”

The prancing stride of technological progress is supposed to be ridding the cricketing world of the vicissitudes of umpiring error, yet it frequently adds an entertaining element of random injustice to proceedings. Players are given out or not-out when technology suggests they were in fact respectively not-out and out, on the grounds that they were only marginally not-out and out, and therefore should remain out and not out. Players are given not-out despite technology suggesting they were definitely out, because someone in a suit somewhere doesn’t like one of the bits of technology used. Players are given out when they were clearly not-out, because one of their team-mates had earlier pretended he was not-out even though he must have known he was out. Catches are denied because the tip of an unusually curious blade of grass could theoretically have been protruding through a fielder’s fingers. And now Dhoni has been despatched back to the pavilion because someone put the wrong roll of cine film into the projector in the TV umpire’s private cinema (I admit I am not entire up to speed with what technology the ICC is using these days).

The spirit of randomness at large in the adjudication of cricket could and arguably should be extended further. The Confectionery Stall fervently believes that there should be scope within the game of cricket for a fielding team, once an innings, to decide summarily that an opposition batsman is out. This would add another fascinating level of tactical intrigue to the great game – do you save the AutomaticOut^TM to dismiss the opposition’s best player as soon as he walks to the wicket, or do you wait to see whether or not he is in form, in case you need to get rid of a lesser player who is proving more dangerous on the day? In a tight game, do you hold on to your AutomaticOut^TM as long as possible, saving it for when one or two wickets are left and just a few runs are needed to win, or do you play it early in an effort to turn the momentum of the match at a critical juncture? Does a captain merely use it to settle his own personal vendettas against opposition players – in a game meandering towards a draw, a fielding captain could wait until his nemesis is on 99 before calling the AutomaticOut^TM and depriving his loathed opponent of personal glory, whilst running around punching the air and shouting, “Got him, got him, yes, he’s gone.”

Throughout cricket history, some umpires appear to have unilaterally applied their own version of the AutomaticOut^TM, triggering innocent and baffled batsmen with a proud waggle of the finger and an internal giggle. For the sakes of consistency and fairness, the system must be formalised, and the AutomaticOut^TM is clearly the best way to do this.

Of course, the AutomaticOut^TM, whilst providing huge interest for spectators, players and pundits alike, would further undermine the authority of the umpire. Amidst the squibbling squabbling over the DRS, with both sides claiming to have emerged victorious and having clung on to their precious principle that some decisions should remain wrong, no matter what system is used.

Ultimately it seems inevitable that umpires as we know and intermittently love them are an endangered species. In time, they will be replaced either by omniscient robots or by grim-faced, shaven-headed, bicep-twitching, tattoo-headed nightclub bouncers employed to stop players scuffling through a mixture of intimidation and growling. Or, in an ideal world, by omniscient robot nightclub bouncers armed with flamethrowers and an overriding sense of justice.

Aside from the Dhoni controversy, the second Test has been another intriguing low-scoring game on another pitch whose jaunty behaviour might have been annoying if it was a noisy teenager on a crowded train carriage rather than a cricket pitch, but which makes for good and interesting cricket. Such surfaces may be an unintended and happy by-product of the pitifully low crowds that attend Test matches in most parts of the cricketing universe these days. Ground authorities no longer need to worry about losing gate money on non-existent days four and five if no one is coming through that gate on days one to three.

In fact, the evidence of this game suggests that, for the good of Test cricket, administrators should do absolutely everything in their considerable powers to dissuade spectators from attending Test cricket. Thus freed from the constraints of financial necessity, the groundsmen would be free to prepare pitches that produce the kind of Test cricket that spectators would happily pay to watch.

Meanwhile Alistair Cook’s England established themselves as odds-on favourites to win the 2015 and 2019 ICC World Cups by thrashing Sri Lanka in the Sanath Jayasuriya Testimonial match on Tuesday. If they can replicate the form they showed at the rain-splattered Oval – decisive and positive batting, followed by incisive bowling and sharp fielding, all leading to a thumping victory ‒ in every match of the tournament in Australia in just 45 months’ time, they will fly home with a sparkly new trophy.

New captain Cook set a blazing tempo, clattering away at a super-Sehwagian 160 runs per 100 balls at the start of the innings. Admittedly he blazed and clattered for only three balls, but he evidently inspired his troops. If he can maintain that scoring rate for the rest of his captaincy career, and, ideally, rectify the getting-out-third-ball problem that has bedevilled him throughout his current one-match tenure as ODI skipper, he will silence any press-box sceptics.

It might be a little presumptuous to draw too many conclusions from any one game – as England’s World Cup campaign proved on a match-by-match basis ‒ but it was a good beginning, particularly given that, in the Colombo quarter-final at the end of March, England had been unceremoniously heffalumped by Sri Lanka, after curiously deciding not to risk disturbing any rare birds that might have been nesting in the proximity of the boundary rope. They were aided by the fact that, unlike in the World Cup, key bowler Jimmy Anderson is no longer running in to bowl as if he has just finished a 36-hour-shift as a junior doctor in a busy hospital’s accident and emergency department.

Sri Lanka were perhaps encumbered by the fact that, whilst they showed their support for the ICC’s democratisation drive by selecting a member of parliament to open their batting, England, by unsporting contrast, did not send Cook in alongside Debbie Abrahams, the Labour MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth.

Comments (34)

The author poses with yet another satisified celebrity customer at his cricket clinic © Andy Zaltzman

It is unlikely that, if asked what single luxury they would take with them to an isolated desert island, many people would excitedly respond: “Oh, well, that’s a tough question, but of all the things in the world, I’d have to go with a copy of the commemorative DVD containing extended highlights of the 2011 England v Sri Lanka Test series. Yes, I would definitely choose that, ahead of other possible luxuries and life-enhancements, such as a vintage gramophone equipped with the complete works of Mozart, or a cast of Rodin’s smash-hit sculpture The Thinker, or a lifetime supply of high-class milkshakes, or a rocket pack like the one that guy flew into the stadium with at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles in a moment that really should by now have presaged an age of universally available rocket packs for all, or an illustrated teach-yourself-to-pole-vault book, or an Aleem Dar Hair Care Kit, or Aleem Dar.”

It was an autumn-weekend-in-Aberdeen-with-your-in-laws of a series ‒ damp, grey and frustrating. There was plenty of good cricket, but The Weather came away with two wins out of three, and will be disappointed that it did not claim a 3-0 series wetwash, after having done all the hard work in Cardiff before leaving Sri Lanka a tiny window of opportunity from which to tumble to defeat, a window out of which England promptly defenestrated them.

Sri Lanka were never close to forging a winning position in any of the three Tests, against an England batting line-up that, after a couple of years of individual and collective inconsistency, has hit a rare and statistically mind-bending tranche of form. Strauss apart, they were seldom inconvenienced by a game but limited bowling attack. Ian Bell has reportedly commissioned a set of curtains depicting Sri Lanka’s bowlers to make himself feel invincible when he wakes up in the morning. England mostly played well, consolidating their stellar Test winter, but cricket – like most sports, as well as arguments, divorce proceedings and space races ‒ is seldom at its best when only one side has a realistic prospect of victory.

Nevertheless, three important things have been learnt from this series.

1: A six-week 50-over World Cup, followed by another six weeks of Twenty20 in the IPL, is not ideal preparation for a Test series in England.

Sri Lanka’s bowling always looked wafer-thin, and England’s in-form batting juggernaut duly gobbled it up like a hungry child munching its way into an ice-cream. This left the tourists depending heavily on their four experienced top-order batsmen. Of the two who played both warm-up games, Tillakaratne Dilshan left the IPL early and prospered, and Thilan Samaraweera, who is not most IPL owners’ idea of a dream DLF-Maximum-blasting batsman, did well enough; but Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene, who arrived in time only for the second warm-up game, in which they both failed, each reached 30 only once in six attempts, and, despite the former eventually finding his game in his outstanding match-saving final innings of the final Test, each recorded his lowest series average for several years.

Perhaps they failed to make technical and mental adjustments to their games, perhaps they were suffering physical or psychological fatigue, perhaps it was merely coincidence, perhaps it was all of the above, but a key factor in Test series nowadays often seems to be which side’s players arrive at the start line less knackered.

2: All Test matches should be played in giant underground bunkers.

Rain is boring. Almost all cricket fans agree that a cricket ground with giant tarpaulins all over it and a grumpy-looking groundsman in a waterproof jacket peering at the sky is less interesting to watch than a cricket ground with cricketers on it, playing cricket. Umpires cannot be trusted not to use any marginal dimming of the light as an excuse to scuttle everyone back to the pavilion so they can check their emails, finish their game of online Scrabble, or practise their karaoke.

The giant underground bunker would, of course, remove the weather from the equation. But it would have other benefits for the spectator as well. Crowds at Tests around the world are often barely discernible, but the acoustics of a giant underground bunker would mean that even a few hundred spectators could create a decent atmosphere. It would also help with over rates. If the authorities could threaten players and umpires with being locked overnight in a giant, and ideally haunted, underground bunker if they did not complete their allotted 90 overs in a reasonable time, I am convinced that we would swiftly see a return to a brisk 1950s tempo. (And to make sure, there should be an ICC-trained man-eating tiger in a cage just beyond the boundary rope. The computerised door of the cage should be programmed to open automatically whenever the over rate falls below 15 per hour. No one likes being eaten by a tiger. This scheme would be 100% successful. As well as helping out an endangered species.)

Of all the potential Test-improving innovations being trialled – pink balls, floodlights, a Test championship, supermodel umpires, rocket-powered bats, the development of Sehwagium (a new chemical element derived from Virender Sehwag’s DNA, which, when ingested, gives a cricketer a remorselessly cavalier approach to batting) ‒ it beggars belief that playing all Test matches in giant tiger-infested underground bunkers has not even been discussed.

3: Stuart Broad needs to learn to take wickets again.

His Test bowling career is in a slump. He has taken more than two wickets in a Test innings only once in the last 18 months, and after playing a decisive role in the Ashes victory of 2009, and an important one in the drawn series in South Africa that followed, he has since been marginal to England’s continuing successes.

It was often said in the past that Broad did not know what type of bowler he was trying to be – was he a McGrath-style prober, nagging away like a deeply regrettable girlfriend, or a hostile paceman armed with fire, brimstone, a range of wicket-taking options, and some volcanic vocabulary to back it up? At the moment he is neither. Many pundits suggest that Broad generally bowls too short. In his two best spells in Test cricket – his Ashes-winning five-wicket blast in the first innings at The Oval in 2009, and his 4 for 43 in the Durban second innings to help Graeme Swann bowl England to victory the following winter – he took seven of his nine wickets either bowled or lbw, and another to a mistimed drive, and all were top-seven batsmen in two of the world’s stronger teams.

Of course, this does not mean that, were Broad to bowl every ball on a full length, he would slice through any top-class batting line-up like a hot chainsaw through a tree made of butter. But he is probably more likely to do so than he is when banging it in at a brisk but seldom bone-shuddering pace.

Broad took up bowling relatively late, and had a rapid ascent to the international team. Perhaps a spell in county cricket honing his craft and rediscovering his penetration – and getting some regular batting ‒ would help him complete his journey to becoming a world-class Test allrounder. Perhaps not. A little under a year ago, I was convinced that Alistair Cook needed a spell in county cricket to re-find and refine his game. I stand by that. If he had had that spell in county cricket, he would definitely have averaged over 200 in the Ashes. Without question.

Extras

A fascinating Test in Jamaica will reach its conclusion tomorrow. India remain favourites, after a nostalgia-fuelled century by the ageing master craftsman Rahul Dravid, a throwback innings on a throwback pitch. Dravid’s career has seemed to be in decline, but in his one Test since posing for a photo with my cuddly woollen WG Grace during the World Cup, he has averaged 76. In his previous 46 Tests over five years, he had averaged 39. You cannot possibly argue with cold, hard statistics like that.

[Any other Test players concerned about their form are welcome to rent WG Grace for a photograph at a cost of just £9995 per hour.]

[Disclaimer: posing for a photograph with a cuddly WG Grace is not guaranteed to ensure long-term cricketing success.]

Comments (29)

Umpire Chester demonstrates the victory jig he would have performed every time one of his reviewed decisions was upheld © Getty Images

England and Sri Lanka will do cricketing battle with (a) each other and (b) another unpromising weather forecast in the final Test at Southampton today. It is the Rose Bowl’s first Test match. As the old joke goes, new Test grounds in England are like London buses – you wait 100 years for one to turn up, and then three come along in under a decade.

Thus far, excluding the final-afternoon mayhem in Cardiff, when England’s bowlers obliterated their opponents like a hungry rhinoceros turning up at a somnolent picnic just as granny was packing away the remnants of a half-eaten pavlova, it has been a middling series. England’s imposing batting has only briefly been inconvenienced by Sri Lanka’s rather blunt and inexperienced bowlers, and there has been a degree of tactical caution by both sides that has further bunged up the already-rain-stifled cricket.

From England’s point-of-view, the series has further illustrated how crucial James Anderson has become to a seam attack that looked both one-paced and one-heighted at Lord’s. After averaging under 33 in just two of his previous 11 Test series (early-summer series against New Zealand and West Indies), the Lancastrian is now one good match away from his fourth consecutive series average of 26 or less. From the early days of his international career it was clear that Anderson could, in bowling parlance, “make the ball talk”. Unfortunately what he made the ball say was not always “Look out, batsman, I’m an unplayable outswinger”; slightly too often it was, “Ouch, I’ve been smashed for four again”.

As many of his team-mates have done, he has improved markedly with experience and, in an age of dominant batting and often pallid pace bowling, is now one of the most exciting players to watch in world cricket today.

Meanwhile there has been little talk in my house of anything other than India’s refusal to use the Decision Review System – easily my favourite decision review system – in the Test series in England later this summer.

The Confectionery Stall decided to consult one of the world’s leading umpires in order to acquire the officials’ view on this contentious matter. Unfortunately a stroll to and from my local station had resulted in no chance meetings with umpires from the ICC Elite Panel, and a telephone call to a confused Steve Bucknor resulted in the Jamaican Justice Dispenser informing me that he was being chased by a giant fire-breathing Allan Border, claiming that he had got an inside edge on that apparently plumb lbw appeal, whilst a fire-breathing dragon with Darrell Hair’s face was barking “that’s not out” in inflammatory morse code (a salutary lesson never to call a former Test umpire at 4.30am, particularly not after he has hosted a late-night cheese-tasting competition).

Therefore I was left with little option but to hire an ICC-ratified medium to make contact with the ghost of the legendary Frank Chester, who stood in a then-record 48 Tests from 1924 to 1955. After some small ice-breaking small-talk, in which Chester admitted that if he had had access to Hawk-Eye in the inter-war years, he would definitely have given Don Bradman out more often, just to see the look on Bradman’s face, he said that he is largely in favour of the DRS, but suggested some modifications to make it more spectator-friendly.

“There is much that I like about it,” commented the spirit of perhaps the greatest umpire of all time. “In particular, it provides the umpire with the opportunity to look triumphantly smug when his decision is upheld by technology. I would, however, suggest that a new signal for ‘that’s still out’ should be introduced, for when a batsman wrongly refers a decision. The umpire should raise the index finger in the traditional manner, but then add his middle finger and send the batsman on his way with a salute as old as time itself.”

Chester continued: “Imagine the atmosphere in a dressing room after a batsman who had clearly edged a ball then pointlessly referred it anyway. Development required: Dressing-room cameras and microphones to enable the viewer to see and hear the dismissed batsman claim, ‘I didn’t call for the referral. I was just asking for someone in the dressing room to make me a cup of tea.’”

Chester also observed that “boring batsmen always seem to be the ones to be reprieved”, and proposed that “a degree of democratic flexibility needs to be introduced to factor in whether a majority of the crowd wants to continue watching the appealed-against player bat”. He ruminated: “Perhaps Hawk-Eye could assume that the stumps are, say, 50% bigger when someone like Chris Tavare is batting.”

Chester concluded by expressing concerns that any system of appealing against a judicial decision inevitably leads to legal complications. “You wait,” he muttered ghostlily. “Lawyers are like Jonathan Trott. Once they get in, they are almost impossible to get out. Mark my words, within 10 years, most lbw decisions will be dragged through the courts like an American murder trial. It will take between five and 10 years to find out whether or not a batsman is out. And that is not going to help with over rates that are already so slow that if I had simply woken up from my 1957 death and looked at a scorecard of a complete day’s Test cricket, I would have assumed that a volcano had erupted at the tea interval and ended the day’s proceedings.”

The ghost of Frank Chester then thanked me for getting in touch, and said that he had to leave to umpire a Bodyline rematch.

Comments (35)

Domingo, yes. Placido, no © John Dawson

Mohammad Amir’s rather naughty appearance in a village match in Surrey has created an understandable stir in the world of cricket. Unsurprisingly, a man who spent much of last summer making Test batsmen look like village players returned tidy figures when bowling to actual village players. Perhaps not tidy enough to have made it worth his while risking his already career-shattering ban being increased still further - even a spell of 10 for 0 would not have tipped those scales - but tidy nonetheless. And the four St Luke’s batsmen dismissed can take solace in the fact that Alastair Cook was routinely scalped by Amir last summer, and it seems to have transformed him into an unstoppable animatronic run robot. By this time next summer, expect to see several of the current St Luke’s XI firmly ensconced in the England set-up.

I hope Amir’s ban is not increased, or that any increase is at least suspended. It would be a shame if any lingering chance of one of the 21st century cricket’s greatest talents finding on-the-field redemption is reduced still further by such an idiotic offence.

The selection of “the ringer” has a long and proud history in lower level cricket. And, some would say, in the England team. In fact, the struggles of several Test nations suggests that the ICC should consider allowing the lower-ranked teams to field one ringer of their choice in each match. This would make the international game much more competitive and unpredictable. And make Dale Steyn a very tired man.

Another man in the cricket news this week can also claim to have enjoyed “ringer” status earlier in his cricketing life, albeit without either attracting quite such media attention at the time, or flouting the terms of an ICC ban.

One of Gary Kirsten’s first acts as the undisputed Nebuchadnezzar of South African cricket was to appoint a coaching team of Allan Donald, whom ESPNcricinfo readers will remember as one of the most spell-binding cricketers of the modern era, and Warriors coach Russell Domingo, whom ESPNcricinfo readers will probably not remember in quite the same manner.

I, however, do remember Russell Domingo. As a ringer. For my village team. In a mid-week friendly, in the mid-1990s. Mid-week friendlies often present serious recruitment problems for village selection committees, and on this occasion the mighty Penshurst Park CC found themselves struggling to field the traditional 11 players for the annual match away at Hartfield (a largely ceremonial occasion that was, to all practical intents and purposes, a time-killing curtain-raiser for the much more serious business of a pub crawl back to Penshurst). One of our players had already recruited a friend for the day; with the team still short, that friend offered to bring along his friend, a “useful player” from South Africa, who was free for the afternoon, and who, it transpired, was Russell Domingo.

The game proceeded at the usual low-octane, semi-arthritic pace of a village friendly, as Penshurst tootled along towards the standard tea-time declaration (as I recall, star opener Andy Zaltzman only partially troubled the scorers that day). About 15 minutes before tea, a wicket fell, and Domingo – heart no doubt thumping like a divorced kangaroo, as the magnitude of his Penshurst Park debut sank in – marched out to bat.

Approximately 14 minutes later, he was slightly sheepishly raising his bat to the pavilion to acknowledge his half-century, clouted off about 16 balls, greeted with considerable grumblings and mutterings of “ringer” from the Hartfield team, and with even more considerable grumblings from the people on the adjacent tennis court, unfortunately located just over the midwicket boundary, whose gentle Thursday afternoon mixed doubles had been interrupted by a bombardment of cricket balls plummeting from the Sussex skies via the heavy artillery of Domingo’s bat.

That innings represented the high-water mark of Domingo’s Penshurst Park career – the only water mark, in fact, as he returned to play at a level more suited to his abilities. This was, of course, neither the first nor the last incidence of an English team benefitting from selecting a South African who was far better than the local talent available. But Domingo’s career path since then suggests that the confidence gained by playing as a ringer for Penshurst Park set him on the path towards reaching the highest level as a cricket coach. If England have benefitted in recent years from the production line of South African cricket– from D’Oliveira and Greig, via Lamb and Smith, to Pietersen and Trott – now South African cricket should be eternally grateful to English village cricket for its role in developing an international coach for them. Let’s call it quits.

Comments (22)

”Well done Trottsky, you well-shorn little communist, you” © Getty Images

Watching the Sri Lankan bowlers struggle in this series – 21 wickets at 61, aided by a late flurry of slog-induced dismissals as England cut loose in an attempt to make sure the game was at least 101% safe before declaring, rather than a risky 100% safe – it is hard to be optimistic about their team’s prospects as a Test force in the near future.

Life after Murali is proving to be as difficult as everyone had thought it would be. It was, of course, obvious that Sri Lanka would miss the great tweakster very much, in the same way that a champion racehorse would miss one of its legs, or Sebastian Vettel would miss his steering wheel, or Michelangelo would have missed his paintbrush.

In the seven Tests since Murali bid his spectacular and victorious farewell last July, bowling his team to victory and himself even further into statistical immortality, in Galle against India, Sri Lanka’s bowlers have dismissed their opponents for under 430 just once, and have collectively averaged 50. Four of those seven Tests have been against the formidable batting line-ups of India and England, on some fairly unforgiving pitches, but they are inauspicious figures nonetheless.

ESPNcricinfo’s undisputed Jimi Hendrix of Stats, S Rajesh, compiled this excellent comparison of Murali and Warne when the former retired last year. The numbers suggest, strongly, that both men were very good at bowling a cricket ball.

No team has ever been as reliant on one bowler as Sri Lanka were on the Kandy Konjuror. Over the course of his career, Murali took 41% of his team’s wickets, and bowled 33% of their overs – so he was bowling a third of the time that Sri Lanka were in the field. For nearly two decades. (By comparison, Warne, in a much stronger Australian attack, took 28% of Australia’s wickets, and bowled 28% of their overs.)

Sri Lanka have played 190 Tests since being admitted to Test cricket in 1982. Murali played in 132 of them; and they won 54 of those games. He was his team’s leading wicket-taker in 43 of those 54 wins, including 37 of 41 between September 1996 and December 2007. Sri Lanka have won just seven of the 68 Tests that Murali has not played in. History suggests Sri Lanka were four times as likely to win with Murali than without him. And that the Sistine Chapel would have 25% of the current number of tourists visiting it if Michelangelo had had to paint it with his fingers.

The closest equivalent in terms of importance to a Test team is probably Richard Hadlee, who over the course of his unstoppably moustachioed career bowled a quarter of New Zealand’s overs, and took 35% of their wickets. His country had won seven out of 102 Tests before he made his debut. They won 22 of the 86 in which he played, with Hadlee top wicket-taker in 16 of those. They won none of the 14 Tests he missed during his career, and only seven of the next 55 after he retired. Until a new generation emerged in the late 1990s, New Zealand without Hadlee were like steak and chips without the steak. And often without the chips.

In all, it was a decent but ultimately unsatisfying Test match, decorated by Dilshan’s brilliantly ballsy 193, an innings of mental and physical courage against a strong if misfiring attack whose pace bowlers looked increasingly one-paced and one-heighted as the Sri Lankan skipper unfurled his masterpiece.

Dilshan is a captivating player, a risk-taking strokeplayer who has become increasingly daring and attacking as he has become older and moved higher up the order. Since being shunted up to open two years ago, he averages almost 54 – the highest of any Sri Lankan opener – with a strike rate of 80. As a younger middle-order player, he scored significantly fewer runs significantly less quickly, which suggests that, by traditional standards, Dilshan is living his Test career backwards, a cricketing Benjamin Button. And also suggests that, when he is 75, he is going to be one hell of a player.

Extras

The closing stages of the match, and indeed the entire modern history of Test cricket, were overshadowed by the Smashed Window Incident, which threatened to plunge the international game into a crisis from which it may never have emerged. Thankfully this seems to have been averted after a swift apology and an explanation that proved to be disappointingly mundane and suspiciously plausible.

As soon as the sound of shattering glass was heard, the rumours abounded - had a passing Graeme Smith popped in for a chat with his English pals, casually picked up a bat, and watched himself play a cover drive in a mirror? Or was it Jonathan Trott’s attempt to recreate a rather grisly scene from the 1970s horror classic The Omen? Or perhaps Steve Finn’s lucky pelican had escaped from his kit bag and flown beak-first into the window in an attempt to make it to the fish-and-chip van at the Nursery End before they had sold out of fresh herring? Or had a local burglar chosen an extremely inopportune moment to try to furtively break into the England dressing room?

A story then emerged that Matt Prior had been so incandescent with rage at falling an agonising 96 runs short of becoming the first wicketkeeper to score hundreds in both innings of a Lord’s Test, that he marched up to the window and growled at it until it smashed itself in fear. Or put his bat through it.

This was soon contradicted by the rather prosaic official explanation proferred by the England management, who blamed that convenient old scapegoat, Physics. They claimed that Prior’s bat had simply fallen down and broken the window in a freak accident.

England’s numerous back-room team fortunately includes a glazier, who replaced the shattered pane with some very fetching stained glass depicting Alistair Cook nurdling a single to fine leg.

(Incidentally, the last recorded instance of a window-smashing at Lord’s was when a hung-over Denis Compton was woken up from his traditional pre-innings snooze whilst in the middle of a dream about being attacked by a giant wasp. He attempted to swat Peter Parfitt with his bat, which smithereened the window. Compton then went out to the middle using a shard of glass as a bat, and promptly scored a brilliant century against a Yorkshire attack featuring Freddie Trueman, Johnny Wardle and Bob Appleyard. Compton later claimed he preferred playing with a glass bat to a wooden one, as “it gave me a great incentive to wait for ball and stroke it, rather than trying to hit it too hard”. Here endeth the lie.)

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

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

A few thoughts on what has happened during my sabbatical:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXTRAS

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

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

Comments (45)

Graeme Smith tries to calm his troops and remind them that choking now is better than choking in the World Cup semis © AFP

England’s flawless tour of Australia has continued impressively with two superbly constructed defeats in the opening two one-day internationals, confirming that the England management will leave nothing to chance in their pursuit of ultimate success.

The immaculate, all-encompassing preparation that helped secure the Ashes (where every detail, from sweatiness of fielders’ hands, via Alastair Cook’s four-year undercover operation as a middling Test opener, to injecting psychotropic substances into the Australian selectors’ breakfast sausages) is now being applied to the World Cup campaign. Strauss and his team, well aware that they could not sustain their Ashes form until April 2, have tactically dipped at just the right time. They will be looking to endure at least a 6-1 drubbing in the Commonwealth Bank series, before slowly finding their game again during the month-long group stage of the World Cup, then exploding into form for the crucial quarter-semi-final week at the end of March.

England proved their mastery of the well-timed Test match defeat in Leeds in 2009 and in Perth in December, brilliantly allowing Australia to believe that everything was just fine, that England’s brief and uncharacteristic dalliance with excellence was over, and that normal service had been thoroughly resumed. Then, with the Baggy Greens still high-fiving themselves in delight, they burst out of their tactical Trojan horse like the modern-day Odysseuses they are, and skewered Australia like a cheap kebab.

For their part, Australia will be delighted that, having underperformed with such determined persistence in the Ashes - or, as Cricket Australia has now officially rebranded them, “The Commonwealth Bank Series Official Six-Week Curtain-Raiser” - they are now proving that, at the business end of their international summer, they can still perform like the Australians of old. They too still have plenty of players nicely out of form two months away from the key games, as well as players in form who have not been selected for the World Cup, so whose inevitable drop-off will not affect the team as they push for a fourth consecutive trophy.

India and South Africa are also not quite bubbling under nicely. Both will be happy with not taking a decisive lead in the ODI series, and be hoping that rain in Centurion tomorrow removes the possibility of either of them winning. A notable victory against a strong opponent at this stage is likely to prove fatal for their World Cup hopes.

Both teams also took every available precaution to make sure they did not win the final Test of the three-match series recently concluded, avoiding the EPM (excessive premature momentum) that all coaches fear. (It was a disappointing end to a compelling series akin to Shakespeare writing Act V of Hamlet as a single scene in which Hamlet does a crossword, eats a packet of nachos, and twangs a ruler on his desk, or Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier concluding the Thriller In Manila by spending rounds 14 and 15 filling in their tax returns and phoning their accountants to check what they were allowed to claim as expenses.)

India’s glut of injuries also bodes very well for the tournament favourites. Those players should be in peak condition come March 23.

New Zealand’s win over Pakistan in Wellington (described as “worryingly comprehensive at this stage of our preparations” by Daniel Vettori) should not detract from their expertly crafted 11-match losing streak that preceded it, whilst their opponents know that, such is the fluctuating nature of their cricket, how they are playing now bears no relation to how they will play in late March (indeed, how they play in late March will have no impact on how they play five minutes later in March).

Sri Lanka and West Indies are no doubt practising half-heartedly to make sure they do not hit the ground running in their three-match ODI series beginning on January 31, whilst Bangladesh are keeping a low profile after whitewashing of New Zealand, desperately hoping they will not take that form into the early stages of the World Cup. All in all, the tournament is still anyone’s.

Meanwhile, the Chairman of Baggy Green Selectors, Andrew Hilditch has, after an investigation lasting two weeks, issued the Official Cricket Australia List Of Positives To Be Taken From The 2010-11 Ashes. It reads as follows:

1. Selectors seek consistency from their players. Many of the team provided us with admirably, almost unprecedentedly, consistent performance levels. The captain, as so often, led the way, churning out a series of scores that were so consistent as to be barely discernible from each other. He was ably supported in this by his vice-captain, whilst Ben Hilfenhaus set new standards for reliable, guaranteed consistency with the ball.

2. Sportsmen are never more determined than when they set out to “prove the critics wrong”. By garnering for themselves a record number of critics, Australia’s cricketers will be more motivated than ever, and will play for the next 25 years in an almost hypnotic trance of critic-disproving frenzy.

3. The pain of defeat in 2005 and 2009 was exacerbated by the the fact that had one ball happened differently in each series, the result would have been reversed. If Lee had slapped Harmison’s full toss either side of the fielder at Edgbaston in 2005, or if the umpire had given Kasprowicz not out to a marginal caught-behind appeal moments later, and if one of the 35 balls bowled to Panesar in Cardiff in 2009 had, as might reasonably have been expected, cleaned him up, then Australia would have triumphed gloriously. Life is too short for “what ifs”, so, by being obliterated by an innings in three Tests and conceding a record statistical superiority to England, the Australians will now be able to proceed happily with the rest of their lives, unencumbered by nightmares of the ones that got away.

4. Since the retirement of the irreplaceable Shane Warne in 2007, Australia have been trying to replace him, and find a spinner who is indispensably crucial to the side’s success. Over the course of the Ashes, Nathan Hauritz grew into that role.

5. The international game is short of star names. In this series, Australia created a new generation of potential world superstars – Cook, Trott, Bell, Anderson, Tremlett, Bresnan, to name but six.

6. Taking positives from abject defeat is long-established as a method of helping captains avoid breaking down in tears of humiliation at post-match interviews, no matter how spurious and desperate those supposed silver linings dully glistening around the mushroom cloud of defeat may be. Australia helped prove that taking negatives from victory is an equally valid procedure. As Ricky Ponting said in Perth, after leading his team to a thumping victory: “Well, obviously we’re delighted with the win, but let’s not forget we can still take a lot of negatives away from this victory. Our top-order batting was useless, we were bailed out by Hussey yet again, and there is absolutely no way he can do that for five Tests in a row, and only two of our bowlers took any wickets, one of whom blows notoriously hot and cold, the other of whom picks up injuries like Warren Beatty used to pick up women in his prime. So, all in all, whilst we cannot deny that we did win this game, there is still much to be downbeat and pessimistic about, and we’ll focus on that carrying that forward to Melbourne.”

Comments (46)

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

Mitchell Johnson looks on in stoical horror as a mythical unnameable evil flying beast bears down on him, thereby brightening England’s prospects in Melbourne © Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments (35)

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.

"Control room, this is Smithy. Danger averted, do not push the button, I repeat..." © AFP

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.

Comments (6)

"Come on Morgs, this yellow stand thingy can totally be my Jason hockey mask" © PA Photos

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.

Comments (80)

Alastair Cook: from the rare species of English batsmen who make housewives gush instead of groan © AFP

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

Comments (59)

”Watch closely children, this is how you manufacture an allegation out of thin air” © AFP

Finally, after weeks catching snippets of cricket on highlights programmes, intermittent blasts of radio commentary, morsels of Cricinfo’s text commentaries, and infinitely more news bulletins than would have been ideal, I actually sat down to watch a cricket match, live, on a television. During that accursed cricketless time, I have conclusively proved that work and family commitments can seriously impinge on a man’s fundamental human right to watch more televised cricket than is medically advisable, and that seven weeks without live cricket is more than flesh and blood can stand.

The media outrage has continued. Earlier this week I heard a radio sport commentator who specialises in boxing and athletics bemoaning the fact that, due to the alleged spot-fixing, the action on the international cricket field was no longer believable. He may be right, at least partially, but to hear a boxing and athletics commentator make this complaint was rather like listening to famous flamboyant cooking starlet Heston Blumenthal whinge about overcomplicated recipes, or paint-splattering art wiz Jackson Pollock grumble at a picture not being realistic enough.

The Lord’s game yesterday began under the now-traditional shadow of match-fixing allegations, as England responded to the latest inane witterings of PCB Chairman Ijaz Butt with furious threats of legal action, damnation and teeth-gritting. A slowly extended middle finger would probably have done the job more promptly and equally effectively.

Butt, a man who has evidently not fully mastered the delicate arts of diplomacy, claims that he merely claimed that he had heard some bookmakers claiming that England threw the Oval game. This claim about claims that may or may not have been claimed in itself raises a number of questions:

1) Why was Butt talking to bookmakers? At this time, of all times, you would have thought he might have made an excuse for not talking to them – dinner with the wife, or polishing his new Kawasaki 750cc motorbike, or translating The Iliad into Australian. Let us cut him some slack – perhaps he was eavesdropping like the ace private detective he has always dreamed of being.

2) Does Butt think every England collapse in history has been prompted by bookmakers? If so, he must imagine that all England cricketers of the mid-80s to late-90s live on enormous yachts and smoke gold-plated cigars.

3) Is Butt trying to start a rumour in the hope that, in accordance with the rules of the modern media, if that rumour is repeated in more than four newspapers, and/or printed in unusually big letters on a front or back page, it becomes a fact?

And 4) Is Butt unaware that attempting to play the “no smoke without fire” card is less convincing when you are obviously holding and operating a smoke machine?

It was, therefore, in the circumstances, a delight to watch an excellent cricket match break out amidst the morass of allegations, counter-allegations, garbage, counter-garbage, assorted bickerings and the general sensation that cricket is not merely going to the dogs but actually arrived at the dogs some time ago, and is now operating undercover as a dog.

Both teams played intermittently well and not well, which is often the recipe for an exciting game, and Pakistan won largely thanks to Abdul Razzaq catablasting 40 from 10 balls in the last two overs of his team’s innings, and Jimmy Anderson failing to do the same for England.

Both teams are potential World Cup winners, if only by virtue of the fact that they might win three games in a row against other teams of roughly equal ability, which is, in essence, what will be required to triumph in Mumbai in April. The final 10 days of the six-week tournament should be thrilling – all of the top eight-ranked teams have displayed potentially fatal flaws, and all possess the capacity to lose at least one of those three matches.

With a longer group phase, it is likely that at least seven of those eight will progress, and a three-game hot streak from a couple of key players, or even a three-game lukewarm-streak of not doing anything idiotic, could be enough to win it, or at least not lose it. Who knows what the format will be next time – probably something at least a bit silly – or whether Australia will have recovered their previous dominance; 2011 offers a golden chance for a team from outside the Big One of 50-over cricket to win the trophy.

The series, and this most bizarre of English cricket summers, reaches an unexpectedly exciting climax at the Rose Bowl on Wednesday. Whatever happens will always be a footnote in a cricket season that will, sadly, not be remembered for cricket. Even if Tim Bresnan rips through the Pakistan batting to take 9 for 13 in a spell of fast bowling unmatched since the halcyon days of Alan Igglesden, even if Mohammad Hafeez follows up his second ODI fifty in seven years and 42 matches with a blazing match-winning 65-ball double-century reminiscent of a young Asif Mujtaba in his non-existent pomp, even if a spaceship lands on the outfield and deposits a fully padded-up WG Grace to smash England to victory with his magic beard, the cricket will always be a footnote.

This is, to everyone apart from inveterate cricket-haters or lifelong lovers of the impact of illegal gambling, a great shame. It has been among the lowest-scoring English summers since 2000, and the fourth-lowest in the last 50 years. After a decade in which bowlers have been increasingly reduced to jelly, this was (even allowing for the landmark ineptitude of Pakistan’s batting) a refreshing change.

Mohammad Amir should have been the unquestioned star of 2010 – 30 wickets in six Tests at 19.80 gave him the biggest haul ever by a left-arm fast bowler in an English Test summer. No teenager had previously taken more than nine wickets in an English season, and of bowlers under the age of 22, Amir’s total was second only to Alf Valentine’s 1950 record of 33 scalps. Cricket is full of stories of unfulfilled promise, careers cut short by injury, politics, war, underachievement, or the misfortune of having been born before cricket was invented (how good at cricket might Shakespeare or Joan of Arc or Jesus have been?). If Amir’s career is ended, or severely curtailed, by his being caught up in a piddling if highly illegal little no-ball scam, it would rank amongst cricket’s stupidest wastes.

I had the unquestionable pleasure of watching the first half of yesterday’s match in the company of the fine, cricketous gentlemen of TestMatchSofa.com, a noble battalion of cricket nuts who seem to have, rightly, decided to devote their lives to watching, commentating on and talking about cricket and related subjects, such as, for example, life and more cricket. Whilst sitting on a sofa. And intermittently complaining about a lack of beer. Heroes. I commend their highly entertaining live commentaries to you.

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Shaun Tait: that's Mr Grumpy to you © Getty Images

England have chosen a very good time to register a convincing win over Australia. It has dovetailed extremely neatly with the hydraulically hyped football team exploring hitherto uncharted territories of incompetence in a World Cup humiliation that is being widely viewed as the nation’s biggest embarrassment since King Harold was tricked by the Normans into a game of Catch The Arrow With Your Eye. (In relative terms, watching England’s World Cup unfold was the footballing equivalent of sitting in a darkened cellar, watching Steve Harmison’s first ball of the 2006-07 Ashes on a continuous loop for two weeks.)

The one-day series triumph has also coincided with the government’s jovially portentous forecasts of continuing economic gloom. So by playing to their potential, and by offering genuine promise for the future, Strauss’s team have surely thrust cricket back to the top of English children’s favourite-hobbies lists, ahead of football and macroeconomics.

Congratulations are due to England not only for the all-round excellence of their play in the first two-and-nine-tenths matches, but also for cleverly raising then crushing Australian hopes by collapsing spectacularly to the point of defeat in the final one-tenth of match three, and then convincingly losing match four in order to maintain public interest in the build-up to the Ashes. If the whitewash that was obviously inevitable had been allowed to happen, who would have bothered tuning in to see Ponting’s men ritually humiliated yet again this winter? Only true sadists with no love of a genuine sporting contest.

Perhaps I read too much into it. But England have now played well enough often enough in recent limited-overs matches to suggest that their current run is not an uncharacteristic blip in a long era of carefully nurtured underachievement.

This five-match effective whitewash spread over a mere 12 days will sadly be of little value when the World Cup comes around next year. The tournament will be a test of psychological endurance as much as cricketing ability, as it crawls slowly onwards like the asthmatic brontosaurus it is. In fact, the gaps between games are mostly long enough to allow teams to commute to and from home to minimise the chances of homesickness.

Perhaps the much-and-rightly-criticised World Cup schedules of recent tournaments have been designed with this specifically in mind – not, as most people had assumed, in order to render the events so stultifying that by the time they finally ended, no one really noticed Australia winning, thus taking the gloss from their triumphs, but as a means to reduce the unfair advantage enjoyed by the host nation, by enabling all the teams to nip home to spend some quality time with their family and check their post.

Nevertheless England look a well-balanced team with plenty of batting power. Whether they can adapt to subcontinental conditions and take enough top-order wickets early in their opponents’ innings will probably dictate how far they can progress. However, the tournament basically involves a largely ceremonial month-long group stage to whittle the seven teams with an ICC ODI ranking score of 100 or more up to eight teams, followed by a three-round shoot-out featuring all the potential randomness of tosses, conditions, weather and Daryl Harper. Therefore, any team could win it with a well-timed streak of (a) form, (b) luck and (c) Daryl Harper.

It was good to see Shaun Tait damaging the speed gun again. The world needs a few more bowlers who waddle up the crease and then wang it as fast as possible. It makes for unavoidably exciting cricket. Especially if “as fast as possible” clocks in at above 95 mph, as Tait did in that fourth game.

He has played one wicketless Test in the five years since his 2005 Ashes debut games, in which he proved himself to be fast, erratic, occasionally dangerous, and, as I witnessed first-hand at The Oval, exceedingly (and self-defeatingly) grumpy in the face of mild crowd banter. Since playing a major role in Australia’s 2007 World Cup campaign, he had played just a handful of ODIs before this series, so let us hope he will feature considerably more in coming years. Too many properly fast bowlers have played far too little top-level cricket this millennium, in particular Shane Bond, Shoaib Akhtar, Jermaine Lawson and, more understandably, Harold Larwood.

I well remember my first encounter with fast bowling. It was in my second ever game of cricket, as an eight-year-old. On the back of a battling, almost heroic, innings of 1 in my debut match, I was promoted to open the batting. Having taken two extraordinary slip catches – extraordinary at least to all those who had seen me attempt to catch before – I had helped my school Under-9s reduce our opponents to 63 all out. At the age of eight, with a career best of 1, this was a daunting target, the mental equivalent, I imagine, of chasing 500 to win a Test match.

I walked out to bat with the confidence of one who had never known true failure, like a pre-1991 Graeme Hick but smaller. I was the non-striking batsman. The umpire said “Play”. I looked round to see the bowler. He was not there. Odd, I thought. I looked again. He was there. Standing on the boundary with the ball in his hand. At this point, I was 90% defeated. I had seen Michael Holding on TV. In thundered the bowler, if an eight-year-old can indeed thunder, before flinging his missile of destruction towards my opening partner. I barely saw it. Perhaps because my eyes instinctively closed in anticipatory terror. I heard a distant thud, as the ball hit the batsman on the pad. He called me through for a single. It was an easy single. It was also a single that was extremely low on my priority list. My partner was half-way up the pitch, I had to run. I now had to face the demon. I took a nervous middle-and-leg guard, and surveyed the potential gaps in the field, for the sake of convention if nothing else, and also for potential escape routes. I settled into my stance. The run-up began.

As the bowler’s long approach unfolded, like a lion sprinting towards a 2-for-1 offer in a zebra shop, I steeled myself to be brave, watch the ball, and trust my brand new pads, gloves and box to avoid life-threatening injuries. He passed the umpire, uncoiled like the eight-year-old Garner-Croft-Holding-Roberts hybrid he clearly was, and whanged it. I studiously played the perfect forward-defensive. The ball smashed into the stumps. I looked up to see a disapproving teacher looking at me as if I had just betrayed my team-mates, my school and my country. I looked at the stumps. Which were further away than I had remembered them being. I looked at my feet. They were just off the edge of the pitch, heading towards square leg. It transpired that what would today be called my “trigger movements” had let me down. And taken me a good four feet out of harm’s way. A technical glitch to be ironed out, certainly. My career average slumped to 0.50. I batted at eight in the next match.

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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.

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	England: unconscionably heroic at the World Twenty20 © Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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