“Daddy, why does that man have no sartorial sense?” © AFP

Thank you for your responses to last week’s blog on English interest in the IPL, which provoked some lively and varied reactions. Some agreed with my viewpoints, others did not. Some in a more strongly worded manner than others. Several Indian readers expressed a similar lack of emotional connection with the tournament, some from elsewhere in the cricketing world have fallen for the new-fangled charms of the talent-packed short-form spectacular.

The IPL continues to be the biggest issue in the game at the moment. It clearly arouses strong and divergent opinions, in India and outside. I do not, however, think there is any element of “English jealousy” involved. Test match fans the world over – whether they love, hate, or remain undecided about Twenty20 as a format ‒ are rightly concerned about the impact it is having, and will inevitably continue to have, on the game they love. Its effects have already been seen in international schedules, team line-ups, players’ techniques, and the volume and unchangeability of the excitement in the voices of stadium announcers.

Clearly, T20 and the IPL have done and will do much good for the game globally. They could also, in some ways, do irreparable harm. The balls are, literally and metaphorically, up in the air, swirling around in the floodlights after cricket took an almighty swish with its eyes partially closed, and we do not yet know if those balls will land safely pouched in our hands, splash messily into our plastic beer glasses, or plummet hard and fast straight on the bridge of our cricket-loving nose. Or a combination of all three. The anxieties many people have about the future of the game are nothing to do with national affiliation.

A final footnote to last week’s piece (which, I would like to stress, I did not intend to be an “anti-IPL” piece, still less an “anti-Indian” one, nor do I think it was one)… During my children’s supper time on Monday evening, we watched the closing stages of the republican-minded IPL fan’s nightmare match-up between Royal Challengers Bangalore and the Rajasthan Royals, won easily by Bangalore after some characteristically brilliant striking by the Virtuoso of the Veldt, AB de Villiers.

My children, aged five and three, asked a range of questions of varying pertinence, from “Is he out?”, “Why has that man got big gloves on?”, and “Why do the blue team keep hitting the ball in the air?”, to “Whatever happened to getting your foot to the pitch of the ball, keeping your front elbow high, and stroking the ball along the ground?” (The last of those questions may, on reflection, have been asked not by my offspring but by the ghost of Gubby Allen, who had popped round unexpectedly for a cup of tea and a quick haunt.)

With a few overs remaining, my daughter chose to support the Royal Challengers, largely because I told her they were by this stage definitely going to win, but partly also because I had been to Bangalore. We have therefore picked the RCB as our team for the rest of the tournament, thus giving us the not-quite-umbilical emotional connection to an IPL franchise that I wrote about English viewers generally lacking. I am taking her to the tattoo parlour tomorrow morning to have a portrait of Vinay Kumar inked indelibly onto her bicep. Whilst I go into surgery to attempt to have my hair rendered as gloriously luxuriant as Zaheer Khan’s. It may be a long operation.

These early encounters with cricket can prove deeply influential – my children may well grow up thinking that RCB’s four-wicket hero KP Appanna is the greatest bowler in the history of the game, just as I grew up convinced that Chris Tavaré was the inviolable blueprint for the art of batsmanship.

After supper, we retired to the children’s bedroom, armed with a plastic cricket bat and ball, and for the first time in their young lives, the junior Zaltzmans showed genuine interest when their daddy tried to make them play cricket. My son displayed a penchant for leg-side drives that can only have come from his mother’s side of the family (if he had sliced everything through gully, any paternity issues would have been verifiably laid to rest), whilst my daughter clonked a straight six ‒ all the way to the curtain on the other side of the room, a mighty carry of some 10 or 12 feet ‒ of which Ian Botham himself would have been proud. If their strokeplay was a little on the agricultural side of the MCC Coaching Manual, their youth and inexperience can probably be held responsible more than the IPL hoicking they had just been watching.

Would the same youthful enthusiasm have been created if I had switched over to the West Indies v Australia Test match? Probably not. The children’s questions would certainly have been different – “Why aren’t they hitting the ball in the air?”; “Whatever happened to the concept of risk-taking initiative in Australian batsmanship?”; “Why are both teams wearing white?”; “Why are you so interested in this, daddy?”; and “Why isn’t Chris Gayle playing?” To all of which, the answers would have been: “It’s complicated, darling. It’s complicated. Eat your broccoli.”

● Australia’s left-arm tweaker Michael Beer is few people’s idea of the spiritual descendant of McGrath, Lillee, Davidson, Lindwall and Spofforth. But last week, in just his second Test, he became the latest addition to the illustrious line of baggy green new-ball tearaways. History will probably judge Beer to not have been the most terrifying opening bowler in the history of Test cricket, particularly on the ground where Curtly Ambrose’s soul-curdling new-ball spell in 1994 obliterated the cream of English batsmanship like a divorced steamroller squishing the bowl of satsumas that had run off with its wife.

Nonetheless, Beer became the first Aussie spinner to bowl the first ball of a Test match since Bill O’Reilly in 1938, and ‒ possibly ‒ the first spinner to bowl the first over in both innings of a Test match since 1909.

Possibly, but not definitely. My dear, dear friend Statsguru, a trusted and loyal companion on many journeys through the strangely chirping jungles of cricket statistics, a source of refuge and comfort in an increasingly troublesome world, enables the curious-minded (by which I mean, those with nothing better to do) to tick a box to find only statistics relating to those defined as “spin bowlers”. The Guru and I therefore searched for tweakmen who had bowled the first over in two innings of a Test. This is the result of that search. The almost-all-knowing Statsguru lists 1960s Indian batting stylist and part-time bowler ML Jaisimha as the only other spinner to have bowled the first over in both innings of a Test since mystery wrist spinner Douglas Carr did so for England in his only Test, at The Oval in 1909. I conveyed this information to an understandably ambivalent universe via Twitter, the 21st-century’s version of shouting at traffic.

Moments later, thanks to the magic of technology, the renowned Indian cricket writer Ayaz Memon had tweeted back to inform me that Jaisimha, in defiance of his official Statsguru accreditation, had also bowled seamers on a fairly regular basis, proving that, sometimes at least, human beings, with their rather more nuanced memory chips, still have the edge over computers.

Ayaz described Jaisimha as a childhood hero (as he also was, apparently, to Sunil Gavaskar), who was “stylish, charismatic, an astute captain, and loads of fun” (qualities which Michael Beer may or may not prove to share, although the early two-Test evidence of his career is that he probably does not share all of them).

I admit that Jaisimha had been little more to me than a name on vaguely remembered scorecards, before Ayaz furnished me with this microbiography hinting at an engrossing cricketer. The internet is a remarkable tool that enables the human race to share everything instantly and globally ‒ its life-changing scientific discoveries, its revolutionary innovations, its artistic creations, its political movements, its boobs, and most importantly, its articles about cricketers from times gone by, from an age before Jaisimha’s Test average of 30 would have been dissected, harangued and yelped about on message boards and chat forums. So here is some more on Jai, a player who clearly enchanted his contemporaries as well as confused the mighty Statsguru.

Duly corrected, I returned to a chastened and apologetic Statsguru and broadened the search remit to include that most enigmatic of bowling categories – “mixture/unknown”. And I can (almost) confirm that it is (perhaps) a fact that Beer is (in all probability) the first spinner to bowl the first ball in both innings of a Test Match for over 100 years. He might not be, but he probably is, and at the very least he is now entitled to treat himself by slapping on a Dennis Lillee headband, twizzling out a Fred Spofforth moustache, and going to bed in commemorative Ray Lindwall pyjamas. Even if he has been left out of the third Test.

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Sehwag acknowledges the upward bump in his SIRI percentage with a fist pump © AFP

Virender Sehwag has blasted his way into the cricketing history books often enough during his captivating career. He has written entire chapters about fast scoring. He has helped his country to the top of the Test rankings, and to World Cup glory. He has set new benchmarks in the illustrious athletic discipline of most-slowly-trudged singles. Now he has clattered the highest ever one-day international innings, becoming the second (a) human being and (b) stocky Indian wizard to score an ODI double-hundred. Of all great batsmen, he has arguably been the easiest to dismiss, but the hardest to contain. When in form, he makes scoring runs appear easier than any batsman of his, and possibly of any, generation. When out of form, he makes scoring runs appear easier than most batsmen do, but not for as long.

His latest assault on the great game’s numerical heritage was aided by a pitch that was not so much batsman-friendly as batsman-amorous, and by Darren Sammy shelling a catch so simple that the only explanation was that he was thoroughly enjoying watching the Delhi Demolisher bat. Sehwag had already scored 170, India were well on course for a trunkily elephantine total, and Sammy knew that his entire batting line-up boasted a total of three ODI hundreds (only one of which had been scored since 2007), and that his No. 4 batsman, Danza Hyatt, had passed 50 only once in any List A one-day match. In the circumstances, where the prospect of victory was almost as far-fetched as the stick that Neil Armstrong’s dog Mildred brought back from the moon, why not treat yourself to a ringside view of a batting genius in full flow? What better time to drop a player as annihilative as Sehwag than when he has already effectively won the match? As Aristotle himself would have said, had he been a cricket fan, “If you are going to be hammered in a cricket match, better to be hammered with a bit of history.”

Despite all this, it was another extraordinary innings by one of cricket’s most extraordinary players. In terms of averages, Sehwag has not always been a stellar ODI player. In his first 173 one-dayers, he averaged 31. India won 53% of those matches (excluding ties and no-results). Of the games Sehwag missed in that time, India won 52%. Since June 2008, however, he has averaged 50 in 57 ODIs ‒ India have won 37, and lost 17, a 68% winning percentage in games with a positive result. But in the games Sehwag has missed over this period, India have won 63%. Whether Sehwag is playing or not playing seems to make minimal difference to India’s success.

However, over the course of his ODI career, whether Sehwag succeeds or fails has had a major impact on his country’s fortunes. I have been on a stat hunt, readers. Stat hunts can be lonely voyages, during the course of which you may find yourself questioning what you are doing with your life, and wondering whether your parents would think all the years of nurturing care they gave you were worthwhile if they could see you hunched over a computer squinting at Gary Kirsten’s batting average in games South Africa lost away from home during the years 1996 to 2001. Thankfully, I have returned from this particular stat hunt clutching some numerical antlers that I think are worth mounting on the wall; antlers that might interest more people than just myself. Not quite Walter Raleigh returning from the Americas proudly waggling a potato in the air and announcing to Elizabeth I: “I reckon this would be awesome deep fried and slathered in vinegar, ma’am. Awesome.” But still, my wife found the stats mildly interesting, so here goes…

Forty-one of Sehwag’s 52 scores of 50 or more (including 14 of his 15 hundreds) have contributed to Indian wins – India have thus won 79% of the matches in which Sehwag has reached 50. They have won 86 of his other 188 ODIs – 46%. So, when Sehwag scores a fifty, India are 72% more likely to win than when he does not.

Of the 37 players who have 50 or more half-century-plus scores in ODIs, Sehwag has had the fifth-greatest impact on results with his fifties. Pakistan were 73% more likely to win when Saeed Anwar passed 50; West Indies had 89% more victories when Brian Lara did so; Andy Flower’s half-centuries gave Zimbabwe a 92% greater chance of triumph; and, leading the way – any guesses? no conferring… ‒ New Zealand’s Nathan Astle. The Kiwis won 70% of the 57 ODIs in which the Christchurch Clouter raised his bat to the crowd, but only 31% of the 166 games in which he did not. When Astle reached 50, New Zealand were 124% more likely to win.

Key batsmen in weaker teams tend to have a higher “Successful Innings Result Influence” (SIRI) – Arjuna Ranatunga, Chris Gayle, Stephen Fleming and Aravinda de Silva are also in the top ten ‒ and good batsmen in strong teams tend to score lower on this measurement, as they are more likely to have their failures counterbalanced by other team-mates succeeding. Australia have won 84% of the games in which Ricky Ponting has scored 50 or more, but have still won 64% when he has not, so his SIRI score is 31%. MS Dhoni’s is 30%, Adam Gilchrist’s 25%, Javed Miandad’s 16%, Viv Richards’ and Jacques Kallis’ both 13%. Sehwag and Saeed Anwar stand out for being batsmen in good teams whose successful innings have made victory considerably more likely.

(I understand that there will be millions, perhaps billions, of people reading this clamouring for a full breakdown of all the players concerned. I have therefore provided a full list at the bottom of this blog.) (Don’t just scroll down and spend the rest of your day memorising it, this blog is not finished yet.)

What can be read into all this? Frankly, I am not entirely sure. SIRI is a flawed statistic for a number of reasons. Fifty is a slightly arbitrary dividing line, because an ODI innings of 30 can prove decisive (Michael Bevan, one of the finest ODI batsmen, has the lowest SIRI of anyone in the list, 8.5%, but batted in the middle order and played many crucial 30s and 40s). It does not take into account the frequency of a player’s successful innings, nor the quality of opponents or importance of the match. And due to time constraints and the desire not to further strain the delicate balance in the ménage-a-trois involving me, Mrs Confectionery Stall and Statsguru, I did not take account of non-result matches or games in which the player concerned did not bat. SIRI is not likely to hotfoot it into a player’s career stats on ESPNcricinfo. Or ever be mentioned again after this Confectionery Stall post.

Nevertheless, it is I think a statistic that shows how Sehwag is a cricketer who defies conventional statistics. His career is not without its numerical flaws. His Test average is magnificent, his strike rate is otherworldly. But his Test and ODI records in England and South Africa are poor, and his career ODI average is a decent but unexceptional 35. But part of the thrill of watching him bat is that, aside from the simple majesty of his strokeplay and the ceaseless daring of his cricketing soul, an hour of Sehwag will probably decide a match.

Extras

One consolation for West Indies was that, when Denesh Ramdin and Sunil Narine added 64 for the tenth wicket, they too had achieved something that had never before been accomplished in the history of human endeavour – they had become the first team to post two half-century last-wicket partnerships in a single ODI series. Understandably the Indore crowd seemed a little less excited at this unprecedented milestone in cricketing history, but reports suggest that the celebrations in Kingston, Georgetown and Port-of-Spain are still raging, and look set to last until well beyond Christmas.

Kieron Pollard is still struggling to turn his unquestionable ball-striking talents into an ability to consistently score more than 4 in ODIs. He has played 18 ODI innings in 2011, and been out for less than 5 in eight of them. Given that, on occasion, he makes scoring 6 off one ball look as easy as pointing at a fish in an aquarium, this has be considered a statistical disappointment for the big-earning sporadically big-hitter.

Here, for all those clamouring for it, is that list of the Successful Innings Result Influence ratings of all players with 50 or more ODI half-century-plus scores. Read into it what you will. Then mulch it up and fertilise your flowerbeds with it.

1: NJ Astle (NZ), 124.3
2: A Flower (Zim), 91.9
3: BC Lara (ICC/WI), 89.5
4: Saeed Anwar (Pak), 73.8
5: V Sehwag (Asia/India), 72.4
6: A Ranatunga (SL), 70.6
7: CH Gayle (ICC/WI), 61.9
8: SP Fleming (NZ), 57.4
9: MS Atapattu (SL), 56.8
10: PA de Silva (SL) 55.3

11: GC Smith (SA), 51.5
12: SC Ganguly (Asia/India), 51.3
13: DM Jones (Aus), 50.6
14: G Kirsten (SA), 46.0
15: Younis Khan (Pak), 45.8
16: Yuvraj Singh (India), 44.7
17: SR Tendulkar (India), 41.9
18: ST Jayasuriya (SL), 41.6
19: ME Waugh (Aus), 38.4
20: R Dravid (Asia/India), 36.5

21: Mohammad Yousuf (Asia/Pak), 33.3
22: S Chanderpaul (WI), 31.9
23: RT Ponting (Aus/ICC), 31.3
24: MS Dhoni (Asia/India), 30.5
25: Saleem Malik (Pak), 26.0
26: AC Gilchrist (Aus), 25.5
27: Inzamam-ul-Haq (Pak), 23.7
28: HH Gibbs (SA), 22.9
29: KC Sangakkara (Asia/ICC/SL), 21.5
30: DL Haynes (WI), 20.5

31: M Azharuddin (India), 20.2
32: DPMD Jayawardene (Asia/SL), 20.0
33: MJ Clarke (Aus), 18.1
34: Javed Miandad (Pak), 15.9
35: JH Kallis (SA), 13.4
36: IVA Richards (WI), 13.1
37: MG Bevan (Aus), 8.5.

Please note that the first name I gave to the stat was the “Half-century Impact on Victory”, before I realised that this could have resulted in describing some of the greats of the modern game as HIV-positive. Which might have led to legal complications.

(For a more comprehensive method of measuring players’ impact on cricket matches, please take a look at my friend Jaideep Varma’s Impact Index, an interesting site with some interesting results (if you are a cricket fan) (if you are not a cricket fan, you are unlikely to add it to your favourites) (if you are not a cricket fan, why are you still reading this article?) (even most cricket fans probably canned it around paragraph three).

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Note cricket-playing Roman emperor top left, initials JC © Getty Images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is all.

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”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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