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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	Bear facts: New South Wales’ finest pose with a somewhat hirsute training partner © New South Wales Cricket Association

Hello, Confectionery Stallers. As you read this, I am attempting to convert Southern Italy to cricket and/or discussing with my wife and children over a few plates of pasta the likely outcome of the forthcoming epoch-defining two-Test series between England and Bangladesh that will bring the planet to a standstill from Thursday. (That was poorly phrased – I did not mean that I will be discussing the Tests with someone whilst my family are suspended in mid-air from the ceiling of a nice trattoria. Let me be quite clear on that. That will almost certainly not happen, provided they behave and listen to my analysis of Junaid Siddique’s technical shortcomings.)

In the meantime, here is the first Official Confectionery Stall Q&A, in response to your responses to my Elvis-style Comeback Special blog last week.

Question (posted by “Circe”):
Do you think Sachin Tendulkar can beat Vishy Anand (or maybe Veselin Topalov) at chess? What do you think his fans think? What do they really think? What does David Cameron think?

Zaltzmanswer:
Tendulkar can and would beat Anand at chess. Whilst I have no idea whether Tendulkar even knows the rules of chess, I am confident that Anand’s legendary concentration would be broken by his being fully star-struck in the presence of the little maestro at his table. Especially if Tendulkar was padded up, wearing a helmet and brandishing a bat (coincidentally, the exact attire worn by Emanuel Lasker when he defeated Wilhelm Steinitz to become world chess champion in 1894). Anand would forget all about his Napoleonic openings, Bogoljubov defences and Falkbeer countergambits (thank you, Wikipedia), and try to ask Tendulkar about his greatest moments as a cricketing megastar. Tendulkar, who must be used to sledging, would ignore Anand and remain focused on the game, leading the champion chess wiz to resign in frustration and ask Tendulkar to autograph his bishops.

Tendulkar’s chances against Topalov would not be so good. Bulgaria’s Topalov is a renowned cricket-hater ever since he went to the circus in Sofia as a child. Due to a mix-up with bookings, instead of the circus Topalov saw Chris Tavare presenting a three-hour seminar on the forward-defensive, whilst Kent were deducted 16 County Championship points for sending out a performing rhinoceros and a trapeze artiste to open the batting against Middlesex at Canterbury.

David Cameron thinks that either Anand or Tendulkar could win, even though three weeks ago he was publicly adamant that Anand was useless at chess and wouldn’t stand a chance against Sachin.

Question (posted by Mick):
Here's a question for you: are you ever going to finish that "greatest moments of the decade" thing you started but only got up to 2003? Also, if they manage to succeed in human cloning, which former English cricketer would you like to see brought back from DNA? WG Grace or Douglas Jardine, perhaps? And which cricketer would make a good stand-in PM for England given your current political madness?

Zaltzmanswer:
I’ll answer those in turn.

(A) Ah, yes, er, sure I’ll finish it, I just don’t want to rush into it and accidentally pick moments which were not actually “the greatest”. By which I mean, thanks for the reminder. I may finish it. But given that England won a tournament whilst it remained unfinished, I may sit on it for a few more decades.

(B) Regarding a former England star to recreate in a laboratory, it would have to be 19th-century grinder William Scotton. His Wisden obituary stated that “he carried caution to such extremes that it was often impossible to take any pleasure in seeing him play”. In fact, his batting was so ceaselessly tedious that he committed suicide in 1893. It is not clear whether or not this was during an especially painstaking innings, but it remains a rather extreme method of making yourself a more interesting cricketer.

I would bring Scotton back to life, build a net with a bowling machine in a secret location, kidnap Gary Kirsten, and force the South African Beethoven Of Bore to watch Scotton block it for the next 10 years. I would treat Kirsten humanely and keep him well fed and watered, with internet access to communicate with his family, but I would make him sit through every single ball of Scotton’s decade-long vigil. And at the end of it, I would say to Kirsten: “Now you know how I felt after your double-century at Old Trafford in 1998.”

(C) Shahid Afridi. That would get the kids interested in politics again.

QUESTION (posted by Graham Bingham):
Which cricketer (past, current or future) do you think would have the best chance in a fight with a bear?

Zaltzmanswer:
This is a very difficult question to answer. The obvious temptation is to say England’s Alistair Cook, who tends to look awkward even when creaming the ball to all parts, and when struggling for form bats as if he is being attacked by a bear. He would therefore be better equipped to fight an actual bear than most international cricketers.

Other candidates include: Douglas Jardine, who would irritate the bear with his haughty manner and have no qualms about using dubious tactics to win (or at least asking Harold Larwood to do so); Merv Hughes, who may have actually been a bear (and recent scientific tests suggest that he shares 98% of the same DNA as a bear); and Bhagwath Chandrasekhar, who took his six pet grizzly bears with him on all his tours with India (“I can’t spin the ball if I don’t know they’ve had their lunch and a good snooze,” he once said tearfully after a careless Edgbaston groundsman let them loose onto the streets of Birmingham).

QUESTION (posted by Aidan):
Andy, with the recent success of the South Africa A-England coalition in the ICC World Twenty20, is this the birth of a "New Cricket"?

Zaltzmanswer:
Yes. The first international limited-overs tournament occurred in 1975, the year after the last UK hung parliament. England proceeded not to win a tournament until just days after the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was formalised. This cannot be coincidence. Clearly, English cricketers can only perform (in the shorter forms of the game) under a compromise administration. It makes them feel safe and wanted. So with Prime Minister Cameroniclegg’s “New Politics” changing the democratic landscape of Britain, we can also say that Collingwood’s triumphant South Africa-tinged England represent “New Cricket”.

England have long utilised foreign labour in their national cricket team – WG Grace famously once kidnapped the Australian player Billy Midwinter, and recently unearthed MCC papers suggest that WG himself was in fact originally an Italian chef called Luigi who was found chained to a lamp post in Gloucester, wearing a fake beard, after a stag night in 1865. He escaped jail and potential deportation to a colony only by agreeing to make up the numbers for the county team the next day after the opening batsman died of scurvy. And the rest is heavily bearded history.

I hope that resolves your queries. Please leave any further questions you would like me to answer in the comments section underneath this blog, and I will answer them on my return to Cricketland.

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