"Players these days are just happy with OBEs and MBEs. In our time, winning a Test meant getting to hand out smelling salts round the ground" © Getty Images

Welcome back, Confectionery Stallers, just in time for the official Confectionery Stall preview of the end of the 2011 Indian tour of England. The final match in a damply curious ODI series will bring the curtain of mercy down on one of the most unsuccessful tours ever to fail to grace these shores. It might be a good game, it might not be, and either side could win it and/or lose it. Duckworth-Lewis, in fine form after their spectacular win at Lord’s, cannot be ruled out. No one will mind very much either way, I imagine. The schedule of the English international summer is specifically designed to maximise the chances of a prolonged anti-climax, and the weather has chirped in this year to assist the achieving of this oddly conceived goal.

On then to the official Confectionery Stall review of the 2011 Indian tour of England.

At the start of the summer, there had been rich anticipation for a titanic showdown between two of Test cricket’s leading forces. Titanic showdowns, however, as early-20th-century maritime historians will vociferously testify, can end with something that was widely lauded as indestructible and magnificent sinking rapidly and disastrously. The good ship India rammed repeatedly into Iceberg England, and the rest is now statistically alarming history that will be sifted over by curious students in decades to come. (If there are any curious students of Test cricket in decades to come.)

Back in April, as India briefly celebrated their iconic triumph in Mumbai before looking at their fixture schedules and thinking that they had better get some kip whilst they had the chance, and England recuperated from their Ashes megavictory and their barking-mad World Cup campaign, some mesmerising contests loomed – Zaheer against England’s batting machine; Sehwag against England’s demon swing attack; Tendulkar versus Statistical History.

The first flickered tantalisingly on the first day at Lord’s before Zaheer’s not overwhelmingly well-honed body rebelled. The second began (a) too late, as injury ruled out the Evel Knievel Of Opening The Batting from the first two Tests, and (b) too early, as he rushed back with insufficient preparation to face brilliant, in-form swing bowlers in swingy conditions. I am sure even Albert Einstein after a prolonged break from science needed to ease himself back into things with some basic physics - a couple of frames of snooker, at least, or juggling some tomatoes – before launching into the serious quantum stuff. The third saw Statistical History fighting a brave rearguard against the Little Master (whilst taking its eye off the majestic Dravid, allowing him to put on one of the finest displays of batsmanship in a losing cause and become only the second player after Bradman to twice score three centuries in a series in England).

India were underprepared, knackered and unlucky, but their response to their misfortunes is unlikely to have the world’s poets wielding their quills in excitement, ready to poet out some stirring tales of steadfast heroism in the face of adversity.

Consequently, as a contest it has been strange and unsatisfying, like eating a plate of high-quality filet steak lathered in a once-delicious lemon mousse that had been left out of the fridge for a couple of weeks. For England, the Test series was unremittingly glorious. Players reached or maintained peaks that a year ago had seemed inconceivable. They were ruthless, dazzling, thrilling. Those are three adjectives that have not always been applicable to English cricket over the last 30 years. They have slap-hammered their opponents for seven innings victories in 14 Tests over 12 months – one more than England managed in 211 Tests over 20 years in the 1980s and 1990s. England have averaged 59 runs per wicket with the bat in 2011 – the best year ever for England batting, and the best by any team that has played more than six Tests in a year. Their pace bowlers have collectively averaged 24 this year – the second-best such figure by England since 1979, behind 2000, when Gough, Caddick, Cork and White eviscerated the hapless West Indians.

England had an almost supernaturally stellar Test summer, to follow a similarly successful winter, and ascended to the official top of the Test rankings with ease. Reaching summits is often considered tricky in mountaineering circles (I am reliably informed). England scaled the ICC Rankings Peak in the the manner of Hillary and Tensing unicycling the last few hundred metres up Mount Everest whilst juggling apples and singing Viking drinking songs.

It is hard to know exactly how good this England team is currently and can become in the future – they have had a happy knack of playing opponents who are in transition, meltdown or need of a holiday, and have exploited weakness, misfortune and fatigue with merciless power and precision. A winter in various parts of Asia will give further evidence, and next summer’s annoyingly brief showdown with South Africa could prove to be the crucial exhibit.

EXTRAS
Lancashire clinched a staggering triumph in the County Championship, with two bone-jangling late victories in their final two matches. Last time Lancashire won the championship outright, in 1934, it heralded a 19-year spell in which Britain fought a World War, saw a king abdicate, and presided over the collapse of its empire, and in which, more importantly, England failed to win the Ashes. So whilst this extraordinary and long-overdue triumph will be rightly celebrated across Lancashire, the rest of the country and the government may be understandably more muted in its response.

When I was a cricket-obsessed boy, I patiently endured a four-year period from 1986 to 1989 when my country won three Tests out of 40. Fortunately, two of those wins were in one Ashes series, so the late ‘80s seldom get the credit they deserve as the absolute nadir of English cricket history. It was often said at the time that county cricket was not producing Test-quality cricketers. This was not entirely true. It was producing them, but they were mostly playing for England’s opponents. County cricket is still producing Test-quality cricketers, and England’s opponents, too busy to allow their players be properly schooled in English conditions, as they once were, are suffering the consequences, trying to learn on the hoof in the Test arena, like schoolchildren trying to cram in some desperate post-last-minute revision after a crucial exam has already started.

Following the trial of a pink ball in a County Championship game, the ICC has announced that in the forthcoming Sheffield Shield season in Australia, umpires’ index fingers will be painted fluorescent green, and topped with a flashing light. “We want to make the moment of dismissal a more spectator-friendly experience,” explained the secretary of the ICC Tinkering Around Committee. A further proposal under consideration is forcing batsmen’s helmets to be coated in a bronze casing, to ensure that a bowler clonking a batsman on the noggin with a bouncer makes the metal clang loud and amusing enough to prevent the crowd drifting off and thinking about gardening.

Apologies for my lengthy absence, which was caused by a range of factors: (1) spending a month telling jokes at the Edinburgh Festival; (2) taking my wife and children on holiday to compensate for spending a month away from home at the Edinburgh Festival; (3) trying to explain the difference between cricket and football to my two-year-old son; (4) Statsguru asking me for some time apart to think about where our relationship is going; and (5) a rest and recuperation period advised by my doctor to help adjust psychologically to the fact that England are now officially the universe’s leading Test Match cricket team, a state of affairs for which cricket supporters in my age bracket in this country have not been adequately conditioned. In fact, medical staff at cricket grounds have reported cricket fans complaining of a range of previously unimaginable ailments, including disbelief, delirium, smugness, an unshakeable suspicion that it is all an elaborate trick, terror that England’s ascent to the summit of the world’s greatest sport is an unarguable sign of impending apocalypse (it is all in The Book Of Revelations, if you read it backwards in John Arlott’s accent), and in several cases “feeling disconcertingly Australian”.

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Clarrie Grimmett: the first-choice spinner for Australia in Sri Lanka if not for his "foreign" status © PA Photos

I am fairly confident that there were not any actual champagne corks popped in the England dressing room at the sight of Zaheer Khan limbering up in practice so gingerly that a Nottingham Chinese takeaway reportedly inquired whether they could use him in a stir-fry with some spring onions, or at the news that India’s lynchpin would, as expected, miss the second Test due to his misbehaving hamstring. However, England’s batsmen must have been mentally high-fiving themselves at the prospect of not having to face the man who tormented them on the same ground four years ago. Seven of England’s current team played in that series-deciding 2007 defeat, in which Zaheer took 9 for 134, with eight of his victims being top-six batsmen.

Lord’s was a very good Test, richly speckled superb individual performances and driven by a fluctuating narrative, but it could have been a great one had Zaheer stayed fit (or at least not injured). England’s bowlers applied remorseless pressure, led by Broad’s extraordinary and brilliant renaissance – after 18 months of largely ineffectual toil, he found his 2009-Ashes-winning length, took 7 for 94 in the match, had three catches shelled off his bowling (including a Strauss blooper so simple that he could, should and probably would have taken in his sleep, as the ball would likely have lodged in his pyjama pocket), and had two lbw appeals refused that were so plumb they were last seen heading off in overalls with a tool-kit to fix some broken piping in the Lord’s bathroom. It was a startling performance, and vindication for England’s selectors. Slightly belated vindication, perhaps, but vindication nonetheless.

Broad’s bowling might have touched perfection at times at Lord’s, but he still needs to do some major work to refine his appealing technique which remains a counterproductive caterwaul of almost Viking intransigence, and it seems a bizarre oversight that England have not invested in a backroom appealing coach. England are famously well prepared by their large and well-honed support team. Zaheer’s injury – to add to the ones suffered by, amongst others, McGrath in 2005, and Steyn in 2008 and 2009-10 - suggests that amongst that backroom staff is a high-quality voodoo practitioner, who has been working overtime to give England that crucial extra edge.

India’s bowlers, by contrast, released England at crucial times in both innings, and ended up twiddling their thumbs until the declaration came, and generously donating runs to the Matt Prior Century Fund (a worthy cause, given how well he played at the start of his innings, but allowing him to negotiate the supposedly-nervous 90s against the fearsome two-prong attack of Dhoni and Raina was surely taking well-meaning charity a step too far).

The current world No. 1 team habitually improve as series progress (none more so than Harbhajan Singh, as discussed in last week’s Multistat), but the lack of depth in their bowling is a concern. England may be without the outstanding Chris Tremlett, who has taken to Test cricket like a duck to a Chinese pancake. Should he fail to recover, England will replace him with either Steve Finn, their youngest bowler to take 50 Test wickets, or Tim Bresnan, who took 11 tight-fistedly cheap scalps in the final two Ashes Tests in Australia. India will have to replace Zaheer with either Sreesanth, who since his last tour of England has taken 33 wickets at 44 in 13 sporadic Tests, or Munaf Patel, who seemed to have given up on Test cricket, a form of the game in which he has harvested just 11 luxuriously expensive wickets in the last five years.

It will be fascinating to see how India go about trying to retain their No. 1 status after such a disappointing defeat, in which they mixed penetration and listlessness with the ball, and dogged resistance and careless errors with the bat, into a bizarrely inconsistent cricket cocktail that few would order on a night out. It would have been more fascinating to see them try to do so with their best bowler in action, but such is the way of modern cricket. I think India will do well to win a Test. But then, I and many others thought the same after their first-Test griddling last winter in South Africa.

Whatever happens in Nottingham, Lord’s provided further proof that one three-day game is insufficient preparation for a touring Test team. Of course, the days are long gone when a touring side would begin the first Test after a solid six to 12 months of warm-up matches, with various players having changed marital status since leaving home, or written epic novels.

It should be said that, in days gone by, a long build-up was not always a guarantee of hitting the ground running in the Test series. Len Hutton’s ultimately victorious 1954-55 England Ashes side prepared for the first Test with six four-day matches, and promptly hit the ground stumbling like a drunken pensioner trying to go the wrong way down an escalator – they were hammered by an innings and plenty, before fighting back to clinch the Ashes 3-1 in the fourth Test. Two months after their Brisbane battering. They had fun for another month, drew the final Test, and then hopped on the boat home at the beginning of March, wondering whether their families would still remember them.

Nevertheless, one warm-up match to prepare players who had either been playing somewhere else in completely different conditions, or not playing at all after a three-month binge of limited-overs cricket, was clearly insufficient. India at Lord’s reminded me of England in Pakistan in 2005-06, when, after scaling their greatest peak and achieving their ultimate ambition, and weakened by a couple of important injuries, they suffered a post-Ashes anti-climax, a disappointing fishfinger sandwich to follow some mouth-explodingly high-grade sushi.

Extras

The one question on the south hemisphere’s lips this week has been: for their forthcoming tour of Sri Lanka, should the Australian selectors have recalled Clarrie Grimmett? The pre-war legspin legend has admittedly not been at his best since departing Test cricket in 1936, retiring from the first-class game in 1941, and dying at the age of 88 in 1980.

However, in the absence of any cast-iron contenders on the Sheffield Shield scene, Grimmett was probably worth a selectorial punt. After all, as sports pundits – the wisest of all philosophers, according to the Massachusetts Institute Of Sports Punditry - often say: “There is no substitute for experience.” Before adding: “Form is temporary, class is permanent.” With 127 five-wicket hauls in first-class cricket, Grimmett is ahead of Michael Beer and Nathan Lyon by, respectively, 127 and 127 first-class five-wicket hauls. (Although both Beer and Lyon can boast superior Twenty20 records.) (And Grimmett was born and raised in New Zealand, so for Australia to select him now, after all the carping about England’s various imports over the years, would be to slug deep from the thermos flask of hypocrisy.) (The late great Bill O’Reilly was ruled out with a calf strain.)

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Will India miss Sehwag like the deserts miss the rain? Or merely like a child with attention-deficit syndrome does an uncle who occasionally pops around with a bar of chocolate? © AP

Greetings, Confectionery Stallers. As a preview before the salivatingly anticipated first England v India Test at Lord’s, here is a multiple-choice quiz for you. No conferring. No looking up the answers on the internet. No hacking into my telephone, computer or brain to see if you can gain an unfair advantage on other readers.

Question 1: Who is going to win the England v India series?
(a) England. When the ICC Reliance player rankings for both teams are totted up, England have an advantage in batting (mostly arising from Sehwag’s absence), and bowling (mostly through Anderson’s superiority over Sreesanth/Praveen). They have not lost a series for two and a half years, and have in Cook a batsman in form so prime you could griddle it and serve it as a steak in a Michelin-starred restaurant. They are confident, settled, in form with bat and ball, and ambitious.

(b) India. Lord’s looks set to be rudely rained on, and – brace yourselves, stats fans ‒ India have not lost anything other than the first Test in a series in England since being unceremoniously splattered like a catapulted tomato on a granite snooker table in 1974. India have not been overwhelmingly impressive in Tests in the last year, but they are tough. They won two tight Tests against Australia, recovered from a first-Test flambéing by South Africa to draw an away series, and won in West Indies without several first-choice players. They won a World Cup under unprecedented pressure of expectation. They won here in 2007. They have lost only one of their last 10 Tests against England, and only three of their last 30 against anyone.

(c) No one. It’s going to be a draw. They are both very good but not flawless teams, and both are hard to beat. Besides, it is going to rain solidly for the next six weeks. It will be snowing by the time of the Oval Test. It’s the end of the world, I tell you. Alastair Cook turning into the world’s most unstoppable batsmen is one of the cast-iron signs of the apocalypse. It’s in the Book of Revelations. If you read it backwards after a couple of bottles of whisky.

(d) Cricket. Six of the world’s current top-11-ranked bowlers against six of the top 13 batsmen (once Sehwag is fixed). Legendary batsmen against the world’s best bowling attack. India’s best-ever team against perhaps England’s strongest in decades. It could be magnificent. As long as the captains don’t just meet on Thursday morning and decide to call it a draw at the toss.

(e) Technology. The continuing search for the perfect version of the DRS is being conducted with the scientific ruthlessness of a blind lion at a supermarket checkout trying to find the barcode on a zebra. The latest scheme is to remove one of the bits that seemed to working the best, and replace it with other bits that no one seems quite about. It’s crazy, but it might just work. Although more likely it won’t work, and the lion will soon enough poke his scanner at another part of the increasingly irritable zebra.

Question 2: Who should England pick: Broad, or Bresnan?
(a) Broad. He turned the 2009 Ashes single-handedly in England’s favour, and his selfless injury in the 2010-11 series opened the door for the fire-breathing renaissance of Tremlett. He has a dreamy cover-drive.

(b) Bresnan. He took 11 wickets at 19 in the Ashes. Broad has taken 10 wickets at 55 in five Tests since the start of the Ashes. Bresnan has taken at least four wickets in each of four of his last five Tests. Broad has done so in two of his last 13. Admittedly Bresnan does not have a dreamy cover drive.

(c) Both. It is a tough selectorial call, but it can be avoided by making the two allrounders play jointly, dressed in a pantomime horse outfit. This solution, whilst contrary to the usual Flower-Strauss era game plan of not picking two players in a pantomime horse outfit, remains more likely to be adopted than dropping a batsman and playing five bowlers. (They could alternatively play in a pantomime Ian Botham outfit. Whichever is more readily available in the MCC costume shop.)

Question 3: How much will India miss Virender Sehwag until he returns from injury?
(a) A huge amount. India will miss Sehwag like a picnic would miss gravity. He scores more runs, faster, than any other opening batsman in history – averaging 55 off 66 balls when he has gone in first for India. He is a certifiable immortal of the game with previously inconceivable statistics.

(b) A small amount. He struggled against the moving ball in South Africa, and has not scored a Test run in England for nine years. Largely through lack of opportunity, admittedly.

(c) Not at all. He makes absolutely no difference to the side. In Sehwag’s 86 Tests, India have won 35 (40%), and lost 19 (22%). In the 21 Tests he has not played in that time ‒ when he has been omitted either through injury or because the selectors ate a poisoned mushroom and convinced themselves that he was not nearly as good at hitting cricket balls with cricket bats as Dinesh Karthik or Wasim Jaffer (neither of whom, it must be said, currently averages 55 off 66 balls each time he has opened in Tests) ‒ India have won eight (38%), and lost four (19%). So India win, draw and lose an almost identical proportion of games whether the Delhi Dazzler is playing or not. The same applies to Tendulkar – India have won 34% and lost 26% of the Mumbai Mathematical Mammoth’s 177 Tests. In the 17 games he has missed since his debut (albeit without the selectors ever tucking into the mushrooms and deciding he was not as good as Dinesh Karthik or Wasim Jaffer), they have won 35% and lost 24%. All of which suggests that the result of a Test match is completely unaffected by the players playing in it, and the Indian selectors might as well pick Bollywood starlets, random names out of the phone book, or Dinesh Karthik and Wasim Jaffer. You cannot argue with statistics.

Question 4: How significant is the 2000th Test milestone?
(a) It is the greatest moment in the history of cricket, and therefore, by logical extension, the greatest moment in the history of civilisation. When Dave Gregory and Jim Lillywhite marched out to toss the coin at the MCG in 1877, it is fair to assume neither said to the other: “This is going to be the first of at least 2000 Test matches.” Shakespeare only wrote 38 plays, but people still witter on about him all the time, almost 400 years after he popped his drama-obsessed clogs. Test cricket therefore has proved itself at least 52 times better than Shakespeare, and the moment deserves to be celebrated accordingly.

(b) It is nice.

(c) It is irrelevant. The currency of the Test match has been devalued like a Zimbabwean dollar, with too many featureless series, inadequate teams, and the idiotic Australia versus Half-Hearted World XI being inanely and pointlessly upgraded from “a bit of a jolly” status to Test match status. If you keep scheduling lots of Test matches, mathematics suggests that you will pass mathematical milestones for how many Test matches have been played. The greater concern is: will there be a 3000th? And if so, will anyone know what you are talking about when you say: “Hey, folks, it’s the 3000th Test match today”? Or will you have to explain: “It’s like two really, really long games of Twenty20 joined together. Still no? Bit like football but with sticks and no goals?”

Question 5: Does the fact that Sachin Tendulkar has thus far scored fewer Lord’s Test centuries than Ajit Agarkar mean that the latter is a greater batsman than the former could ever dream of being?
(a) Yes. You cannot argue with statistics.

(b) No. You can and should argue with statistics. And you should keep arguing with them until they back down and start talking some sense.

(c) Too early to say. We should not rush to judgement on such matters. Let us wait until both players have retired and then judge their batsmanship careers objectively.

You have eight seconds to complete your answers. If you get all five correct, you win your choice of Yuvraj Singh or Kevin Pietersen to keep (subject to availability). Enjoy the game. And if you are a rain cloud reading this and thinking of heading to Lord’s to see what all the fuss is about, please stay away and follow the match on TV.

EXTRAS
The news in Britain has been dominated by a murky swamp of subterfuge, falsehoods and half-truths of late, so the occasional incontrovertible fact is a source of both solace and excitement. Sachin Tendulkar has had a long career. That is a fact. He is only the fifth man to play Tests in four separate decades. And only the second to have done so without having played before the First World War. And the first to have done so without being English.

Tendulkar played his first Lord’s Test 21 years ago, against an England team containing moustachioed offspinster Eddie Hemmings, who had made his first-class debut in 1966, when Wilfred Rhodes was still alive and well and with a few more years in the tank. Rhodes made his Test debut in WG Grace’s final international match in 1899, and went on to become the only man in the history of civilisation to play Test cricket in five different decades. Could that be Tendulkar’s next challenge once he has notched up his 100th international hundred? To equal, and then surpass, Rhodes’ Most Different Decades Played In Test record? He looks in good enough shape. He probably does not have much else in the diary for the next two decades that cannot be put off until the 2030s. He might as well give it a go.

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