Graeme Swann practises his "Levitating Fakir" trick ahead of the game © Getty Images

Tuesday, 13th September
I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I say that the Indian cricket team have been a bit of a disappointment this summer. In fact they’ve taken us on a tour of the Disappointment Museum, which included four extended diaromas of disappointment and six smaller exhibitions, each one slightly more disappointing than the last, followed by a visit to the Damp Squib Gift Shop and a cup of disappointingly weak tea in the Dear God Let It End Soon Cafeteria.

And newspapers too have had a thin time of it. Sachin not getting that thing that we don’t talk about in case we jinx it meant that once they’d run the “England are now quite good” story a couple of times, there was very little left to say. In particular, there have been thin-pickings controversy-wise. MS Dhoni’s generosity at Trent Bridge spoiled a perfectly good diplomatic incident and neither Vaselinegate nor Donkeygate really caught on, despite the best efforts of all concerned.

So with only a week to go until the cold bath water of India’s tour finally trickles down the plughole of fate, time is running out for desperate hacks to make a big splash. Hence today’s attempt to turn the Indian team’s non-attendance at the ICC Awards ceremony into a Big Event. The details are thoroughly yawnsome. It was either an administrative blunder or a diplomatic absence. Either way, who cares?

The ICC Awards ceremony, like most awards ceremonies, registers highly on the Hughes Tedium Scale, just above weddings and just below a trip to a carpet warehouse. Expensive suits, tedious speeches and long-winded ceremony: I can get all that on the Parliament Channel. If the Indian players didn’t want to go, who can blame them. I wouldn’t go either, not even if I was offered a ride to the venue in a diamond-studded sleigh pulled by Haroon Lorgat’s flock of prize peacocks.

Thursday, 15th September
I’m looking forward to Graeme Swann’s captaincy in the same way that I used to look forward to the clowns at the circus. I don’t mean to imply that Graeme is a clumsy, red-nosed buffoon in oversized shoes and amusing trousers, but he is the comic relief in this England team, the light entertainment amidst the straight-faced performers;
a comedy captain for a couple of comedy matches.

And a lot of credit must go to the ECB for their daring scheduling. What better way to satirise the Champions League Twenty20 than by forcing their own players to take part in two meaningless T20 games in order to fulfil the requirements of a television contract based on a deal with an international fraudster. Take that, BCCI! I only hope Giles Clarke will be popping into the England dressing room before the game to ensure that he gets all the credit for this extension to the players’ season.

Munaf Patel was understandably jubilant, having dismissed Ravi Bopara by virtue of knowing the 16 times table by heart © Getty Images

Sunday, 11th September
The forces arrayed against India this summer have been formidable. The fixture list, the England team, the fragility of the human body, and the weather have all conspired to make this the least successful visit to these islands since Julius Caesar spent a late summer break shivering in a tent on the Sussex coast.

And now even mathematics has turned its back on the tourists. Anyone who has tried to dry their washing in England in September knows how umpires Erasmus and Illingworth felt today. Is it really raining? It is just spitting? Is it worth fetching your underpants in again? Is it brightening up over there?

But amidst all the traipsing in and out, the shaking of umbrellas and the holding out of rainfall-measuring palms, India appeared to have won. That was, until maths jumped out from behind the scoreboard and yelled “Surprise! You got it wrong!” before stamping all over their victory cake and high-fiving Alastair Cook.

I know how they feel. Maths was always doing that to me. No matter how hard you think you’ve studied the equation, there is always something you’ve missed. It wasn’t quite as wince-inducing as Shaun Pollock’s numerical faux pas in 2003, when he failed his maths GCSE live on national television, but you had to feel sorry for India.

Now personally I like Duckworth Lewis. Its very complexity is reassuring. After all, something that complicated must be accurate. And it has succeeded in making precipitation entertaining - a godsend for a game so frequently plagued by the wet stuff. But this messing about with bits of paper full of numbers is all a bit old school.

What we need is an entirely separate scoreboard; the Duckworth Lewis-ometer. It could be concealed below ground, rising like the Lord’s floodlights should it be required, to keep us all updated, ball by ball, on the D/L situation. And Ravi Bopara could even have the numbers beamed directly onto the inside of his helmet so he could choose just the right moment to play that pointlessly risky match-turning slog.

Monday, 12th September
Today’s ICC awards were, quite rightly, dominated by the modern game’s titans of crease-occupation, Mr Trott and Mr Cook. Despite an apparently shaky microphone technique and uncertain podium footwork, the England vice-captain kept up a dogged acceptance speech and proved difficult to remove, though after two hours, officials did finally persuade him to leave by tricking him into believing it was the tea interval.

Having kept the audience waiting while he scraped an immaculate line in the carpet, Trott’s speech was a risk-free affair, featuring no expansive verbiage, just a careful accumulation of thank yous and platitudes. He left the stage to enthusiastic applause, as the rumour that KP was on next brought people back from the bar .

And amidst all the high-profile winners, it is worth mentioning some of the unsung heroes. The Sir Humphrey Appleby Award for Administrator of the Year was announced towards the end of proceedings, though it was delayed for several minutes as Haroon Lorgat had to ask the cleaning lady to turn off her vacuum cleaner.

Sadly none of the nominees for the award could be present. Dr Julian Hunte had caught the wrong flight and ended up in London, Ontario. Mr Ijaz Butt had accidentally locked himself in his pantry, and Mr James Sutherland was detained in his hotel room, having caught his Cricket Australia tie in the executive trouser press. In the opinion of the judges, there were no winners in this category, only losers, and the award was held over.

Donkeys have been a natural and integral part of cricket since the Chappell-Ganguly era at least © AFP

Saturday, 3rd September
You’ve got to feel for MS Dhoni. We’ve all had holidays like this. Trapped in a caravan, a tent or a four-star hotel, surrounded by the same old faces, going slowly insane with nothing to do but watch Alastair Cook bat for weeks at a time, listening to everyone complaining about their aches and pains, and counting the days till it’s time to go home. And then, just when it seems things might be looking up, it starts to rain.

I can remember following England tours that scored just as high on the angstometer, in which the only sounds you heard were the clatter of wickets, the roar of the home crowd, and the stamping of passports as another batch of trembling replacements arrived at immigration control. As it happens, Nasser Hussain and his fragile fingers featured in many of those tours, so you’d think he would understand the tourists’ pain. Instead, his loose talk of donkeys has caused the summer’s third “Gate”.

But it isn’t always a good idea to take cricket folk literally. When KP called Graeme Smith a muppet, he didn’t mean that he believed the South African captain was made of cloth and operated by strings. When a commentator tells us that Sehwag has launched himself at a short one, he is not implying that rocket fuel was involved. Then there are the phrases like “impetuous hooker” and “flashing outside off stump” that could lead to all kinds of litigious misunderstanding if they were taken literally.

So in the interests of international harmony, here’s another, more positive interpretation of Nasser’s agricultural metaphor. A field is, after all, where a donkey belongs. Therefore the phrase, “he’s a donkey in the field” simply means “to be in his element” or “to feel at home” and is an adaptation of the well-known saying, often heard in the villages of rural Essex: “He’s as happy as a donkey in a field.”

Monday, 5th September
The pitch at Galle was dryer than a dry gin in the Gobi desert and dustier than the trophy cabinet at Sahara Smiles, the world’s least successful synchronised swimming team. The ball was doing sneaky things from day one and batting was as tricky as trying to tiptoe through a snake pit in the dark. Which is precisely how it should be.

A Test run should be a hard-won thing, a precious jewel wrestled from the teeth of an angry clam at the bottom of a piranha infested lagoon*. Instead, we are currently in a period of rampant inflation, in which the value of the Test run has plummeted. A double-century in 2011 would be worth 150 back in 2001, whilst an Alastair Cook accumulatorathon translates as a pretty little thirty-something cameo at 1930 prices.

So do we celebrate this triumph? Do the powers that be initiate The Most Noble Order of the Gracious Groundsmen and give the Galle curator a yacht, a lifetime’s supply of broom handles and a complimentary Test century? Nope.

Chris Broad (a batsman, let it be noted) refers the venue to the ICC’s Department Of No Fun. Next spring, the Galle pitch will be flatter than the M25, England will declare on 750, Jayawardene will score a triple-century, and the crowd will need to be woken up at the end of the fifth day to remind him to go home. Sometimes I think the ICC don’t really want people to watch Test cricket.

*Marine biologists may query one or two of the details in this metaphor. However, I would refer them to the renowned documentary series, Spongebob Squarepants which is, as we are all aware, the authority on matters aquatic.

Ajantha Mendis: Kept safely out of the opposition's way so no one can work him out © Getty Images

Wednesday, 31st August
Don’t ever gamble, readers, it is a perilous and painful business, as risky and as futile a pastime as setting fire to your hair and standing in the garden waiting for it to rain. It is like putting a five-pound note into a post box in the hope that it will somehow be delivered back to you and that in the meantime it will have turned into a ten-pound note. At least it is the way I do it.

The failed gambler always has an accomplice, a stooge who can take all the blame. Today his name was Virat. It is a shame when a career that promised so much takes such a disappointing turn. I feel a lump in my throat when I remember watching the wee fella scoring all those runs for the Royal Challengers Bangalore. One day, I thought, one day, I’ll bet on you to top score for India in a meaningless Twenty20 game in the north west of England.

And today his moment had come. What better opportunity for him to emblazon his name across Duncan Fletcher’s frontal lobes than to top-score for India (at 5-1.) So what happened? Nudge, nudge, nudge, swipe, oh dear. There are some things in life you should never try to pull: Steven Seagal’s ponytail; a hippopotamus through a revolving door and a ball short and wide outside the off stump unless you are Viv Richards. Are you Viv Richards, Virat? No, you are not. Don’t do it again.

Thursday, 1st September
The mystery of Sri Lanka’s Mendis-phobia is frankly mystifying. The man formerly known as the most exciting spin bowler in the world is now more or less permanently languishing in the Johnny Gleeson Wing of the One-Trick Pony Retirement Home.

He was to be the skittler-in-chief in Sri Lanka’s demolishing of Australia. Instead, his record of squad superfluousness means he is in danger of becoming the new Adil Rashid.

The Sri Lankan selectors seem worried that batsmen will work him out. Well yes, they might. Some of them already have. But in the meantime he might pick up a wicket or two. He might even get better with experience. He averages 32.48 which is only 0.48 worse than Stuart Broad and 1.91 worse than James Anderson, who is, as we all know the new Dennis Lillee.

Instead, in order to ensure their impact spinner doesn’t lose his impact, they are going to keep him in his packaging like an unwanted birthday present. So today we had the spectacle of Sri Lanka, with a mystery spinner up their sleeve, being skittled out by the other team’s mystery spinner, who isn’t really a mystery spinner, but is a spinner who proved something of a mystery to the home side. It’s all very confusing.

Friday, 2nd September
Earlier this summer we learned that Hotspot was rubbish. Now Simon Taufel, umpiring superhero, is to refer Phil Hughes’ Hawk-Eye-aided dismissal to the ICC’s Hindsight Committee on the grounds that it looks a bit dodgy to the naked eye and can we really trust this gizmo anyway. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Technology was going to sort everything out. Instead, it is getting horrendously complicated.

We have applied the tin opener of accuracy to the can of decision-making, and now our cricket kitchen is full of worms. Accuracy is like a drug - 96% was okay last year, but the accuracy addict always wants more. Hawk-Eye was fine, we thought we could handle it, but now it doesn’t give us enough of a buzz, we want more, shinier, faster technology, which not everyone will want to use straightaway and which will anyway turn out to be less than 100% accurate and will in turn need to be replaced and so on.

So I have an alternative. We simply need to clone Taufel, who is as accurate as Hawk-Eye and doesn’t even need to be plugged in. An elite panel of Taufels will then be able to umpire the whole international calendar to a high standard. And we could have a wardrobe full of Aleem Dars standing by, just in case.

"... uh nothing, it's just that I have two tickets to Avril Lavigne, and I was wondering..." © Getty Images

Wednesday, 17th August
The Champions League will soon be with us. But this year the ECB (motto: “Show Me The Money”) are not going to let any counties play in it unless they are paid before the tournament. Quite right. You should always get the money upfront, then if something goes wrong, and you don’t actually turn up or, to take a hypothetical example, the person paying you turns out to be an international fraudster, you can always hide it under your mattress and deny everything.

Thursday, 18th August
While watching Sreesanth pretend that he wanted to throw the ball at KP today, it occurred to me that this is one of modern cricket’s odder rituals. Why would you pretend to do something that you almost certainly aren’t going to do, that even if you did wouldn’t achieve any purpose, and for which you’d have to apologise immediately?

If the intention is to frighten the batsmen, there are surely better ways. You could for instance, tell him that you’re in love with him and that you want to stop the madness for a moment so you can share a hug. You could bring out a microphone and invite him to say a few words. You could warn him about the tarantula on his shoulder.

But threatening to throw a ball at a man kitted out like a particularly safety-conscious samurai warrior seems a rather futile pursuit. You know you probably won’t, and he knows you know you probably won’t, and we all know that he knows that you know that you probably won’t, so knock it off, get back to your mark and bowl.

Friday, 19th August
Introspection is the fashion in Antipodean circles right now. Since the last Ashes, Australian cricket has locked itself in the bedroom with the curtains closed listening to the Smiths and now the Big Australian Review of Everything (subtitled “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”) has finally been published. It’s a masterpiece of self-flagellation, as brutal an exercise in cricket masochism as RP Singh agreeing to cut short his holiday in Miami to chase a ball around south London for two days.

The Review is a 40-page cry for help, a long list of all the things that Australians think they aren’t very good at. Here’s a brief extract:

“…batting for long periods, batting against the moving ball, batting against spin, batting technique, overall fielding, catching, fitness, bowling to a plan, building pressure, spin bowling, swing bowling, reverse-swing bowling, gum-chewing, palm-spitting, we’ve got really stupid hair, no one loves us and frankly we don’t deserve to be happy anyway...”

The solution to all this angst? “Adult conversations” and “360 degree feedback”. Captain Clarke will be expected to go around the dressing room asking his blokes to pull their f*****g socks up, and they in turn will be encouraged to respond in forthright fashion, along the lines of telling him to stuff his f*****g feedback where the f*****g sun don’t shine. And then everything will be all right again.

Team-mates restrain PK from unleashing his best “You talkin’ to me?” impression on a departing batsman © AFP

Saturday, 13th August
I was wrong about Praveen Kumar. I thought he would be squad-filler, a scorecard padder-out, the man who dries the handkerchief with which Zaheer wipes his brow. I knew him as a growly plodder, a dibbly dobbler, a bit of a tail-end thrasher. Typical Twenty20 star, you know the type: all goatee and no chest hair.

I was wrong. After three successive Waterloos (or if you like, a Waterloo, a Trafalgar and a retreat from Moscow) he is the only one still standing, albeit with a wonky ankle. That injury is not surprising, considering he has hit the bowling crease 951 times already this summer in exchange for 15 of the toughest wickets runs can buy.

He’s like Fred Trueman in Mark Ealham’s body. He trots in off a few gentle steps, offers a Pringle-esque unfurling of the right wrist, followed by a Ray Lindwall follow-through and the stare of an angry father who knows you’ve been hanging round his daughter. He’s the Robert de Niro of Indian cricket. He’s tougher than Ganguly and cooler than Dhoni. Praveen for captain, I say.

Sunday, 14th August
England are top. But people will soon be trying to knock them off their perch, as if they were a row of jelly bean-filled parrot-shaped pinatas. So how to keep it real? Or for those of us used to years of disappointment, who find this outbreak of unmitigated English success makes us dizzy, how to keep it unreal?

Andy and Andrew have already set some new targets. Win in Pakistan. Win in Sri Lanka. The Test Championship. The 2012 Balti Pie-Eating Trophy. KP has a new book of word searches, and Alastair Cook has been challenged to reach Level 3 of the hit console game, Super Mario Takes No Risks In Attaining His Goal.

But there is a nagging feeling that we have forgotten something. It is there in Michael Vaughan’s patriotic ramblings, as he pauses momentarily in the middle of explaining how England are the greatest team ever. What is it? Did we leave the gas on? Did we forget to feed the fish? Oh no, now I remember. We haven’t beaten South Africa.

They are the forgotten contender. The other Klitschko. And I imagine that somewhere near the tip of the world’s warmest continent a collection of burly men are probably getting quite annoyed about it. I imagine Mr Steyn and Mr Morkel sitting by their pool, pet crocodile splashing happily at their feet, a couple of antelope on the braai.

“D’ya see that Morne?”
“Ja Dale.”
“Think they’re No. 1, eh, Morne.”
“Ja Dale.”
“Well we’ll show them next summer, won’t we.”
“Ja Dale.”
“The only recall Bell will be getting is the ambulance to take him home from hospital.”
“Ha Ha Ha, good one Dale.”
“Shut up now Morne.”
“Ja Dale.”

Monday, 15th August
After the epic defeat comes the post mortem. As an Englishman I’ve been through this sort of thing before, so I can offer some advice to the BCCI. Trust me, you can get through this. There is, however, a shopping list of psychological props that you’ll need to tick off before you can get closure.

1. Someone to blame. This is the easiest part and much preferable to blaming, say, a system, a culture or a lack of planning. Prime candidates are usually unpopular fringe players or, if you have one, a foreign coach, who almost certainly doesn’t understand how things are done round here, because he is foreign.

2. A minor administrative shuffle disguised as a bold fresh statement of intent for the nation’s cricket. I suggest changing your stationery contract and firing the guy who repairs the photocopier in the chairman of selectors’ office.

3. A country to model yourself on. Australia’s currency in this market is devalued these days. But Sri Lanka managed to put up a decent fight this summer and they seem like fun. So practise saying after me: “I wish we were more like Sri Lanka.”

4. Diversion. Like toddlers, the press are easily distracted. They’ll soon stop complaining if you show them a shiny new toy. What’s that, Mr Manohar? It’s Champions League time again! Hooray! Test cricket? Never heard of it!

Which one is the human and which is the machine? © Getty Images

Tuesday, 9th August
It seems that Kamran Akmal is being shunted out of the Pakistan team, an incredibly short-sighted move that can only have been taken by the kind of narrow-minded person who obsesses over trivial details like runs and catches. Yes he’s dropped a clanger or seven over the years but he was never dull, and he had an astonishingly brutal cover drive. Like Hot Spot, he doesn’t always function as intended but cricket is less entertaining without him.

Thursday, 11th August
Xavier Doherty has packed a decade and a half’s worth of disillusionment into eight months. A sudden and unexpected promotion, a short but eventful Test career and already he’s concentrating on one-day cricket. In six months time he’ll be restricting himself to Twenty20, applying to go on Masterchef Australia and accepting an invitation to join the crack commentary firm of Heals, Tubs and Slats Ltd.

Being an Australian spinner must be like auditioning for one of those reality talent shows. You rehearse for months, you get a telephone call out of the blue, and then when you’re on the stage, you’ve only got 30 seconds to do your thing. One bum note or unintentional long hop, the buzzers sound and off you go. Bye bye, Xavier, you’re not quite right for us. Come back and try again next year.

He has today humbly suggested that perhaps Australian spinners need to be given longer than say, a couple of sessions, to prove themselves in the national team. Shane Warne took four wickets and averaged 96 in his first four Tests. Would Hilditch, Chappell and chums have given him a fifth?

Friday, 12th August
So England grind on with the relentless efficiency of an automatic coffee-grinding machine set to “relentless”. Strauss and Co are now a byword for ruthlessness and the inspiration for the new film Terminator 5: The Rise Up The Rankings in which a team of deadly androids with sensible hair cuts travel back in time to destroy the careers of leading Indian cricketers by making them look silly.

Now I’m not saying that the England cricketers are soulless killing machines without consciences. But they are freakishly tall. And they often wear sunglasses. All summer long they have been bulldozing through the picturesque and hitherto undisturbed valley of India’s reputation like a gang of construction workers without planning permission building a six-lane motorway.

And now with only seven, or more likely five, or possibly even four days left in this series, India’s chances of being able to go home without having to wear disguises depends on three unlikely eventualities:

1. Rahul Dravid not getting out again

2. Conveniently timed precipitation of Biblical proportions

3. English overconfidence on the brink of victory, of the kind that once enabled the tortoise to win an unlikely 10,000-metre gold medal at the 1904 Olympics.

This last hope is a particularly forlorn one. The English hare has been working with a leaping endurance coach and is on a high-energy carrot-based diet. Having hit the ground running, he’s determined to push on to the line and indeed beyond it, and there appears to be very little chance of him ducking behind a tree for forty winks any time soon.

“If you don’t get five they’ll take you out back and shoot you, you know” © Getty Images

Sunday, 7th August
That Zaheer Khan won’t be playing again this series is the least surprising injury update since the Philistine physio confirmed that Goliath wouldn’t be available for the rematch against the Israelites.

Zaheer’s body is clearly sabotaging itself. The fibres in his hamstring have made the ultimate sacrifice and spontaneously torn themselves in half so that his creaky ankles and burned out swing neurons can get some R and R.

This is nothing new, of course. Fast bowlers have been breaking down since Lumpy Stevens of Hambledon first dislocated his left pinky attempting a fast-medium underarm topspinning doosra against Old Peculiars in 1751. For most of the 1990s, I watched an attack that was cobbled together from the parts of English bowlers that still functioned: Cork’s larynx, Caddick’s ears, Gough’s buttocks.

That is why these days England have a stable of fast bowlers. That is not just an expression. Somewhere near Newmarket is an ECB facility where Onions, Bresnan and Finn are safely installed. Every morning, they are allowed to trot around the paddock, fed sugar lumps, given a pat on the nose, then put back safely into their stall with a blanket, a pile of straw and access to a Twitter account.

But even with 24-hour mollycoddling and regular veterinary inspections, the thoroughbred fast bowler can still succumb to a staggering range of ailments, from Anderson Syndrome (characterised by an inability to swear with conviction) to Zaheeritis (a severe allergic reaction to sweets). The lesson is that if you want a tasty Test omlette, you shouldn’t put all your victory eggs in a Zaheer-shaped basket.

Monday, 8th August
“If we don’t make mistakes or do anything silly, we should win.”

So says Tamim Iqbal and it’s hard to disagree. In fact, therein is the whole story of our sport. Every bad cricket thing that has ever happened since the first neanderthal threw the first rock at his brother, who happened to be standing in front of a tree stump holding a mammoth tusk, and was hit for six (boundaries in the Pleistocene period being notoriously short) can be categorised either as “Mistake” or “Silly”.

Into the “Mistake” box go all those wafts outside the off stump resulting in a nick so faint that only dogs and wicketkeepers can hear them; the times when the ball went through your legs because you couldn’t bend down far enough; and pretty much everything that Kamran Akmal did after he cleared customs at Perth International Airport in December 2009. And under “Silly” we can file Ian Bell’s amnesia, Dennis Lillee’s metal bat and Sreesanth’s interpretation of a man with fire ants in his trousers.

If you can manage to keep these two columns empty then you will probably win every Test match by an innings and lots of runs. History tells us that this hardly ever happens, particularly not to Bangladesh. They’ve spent the six years since the old Zimbabwe were expelled from Test Match High School being picked on by everyone else, and it will be particularly depressing if the new Zimbabwe starts bullying them too. Seem like they’ll have to wait a while to get their own whipping boys, at least until the ICC grant Papua New Guinea, Alaska or Narnia their long overdue Test status.

Foreign Minister Dhoni announces a new trade pact while skilfully deflecting questions about India’s latest loss © AFP

Saturday, 30th July
Michael Vaughan found himself in a sticky situation today, thanks to a popular ointment, Britpop, and the perils of Twitter. An entire sewage farm of e-effluence was poured onto his virtual head when the world mistakenly assumed that he had accused VVS Laxman of applying slippery foreign substances to his bat. In fact, MPV was a hapless victim of circumstance. Earlier in the day he had received this tweet:

“@MPVaughan what’s your favourite petroleum jelly-themed chorus by an English indie band?”

To which he had little choice but to reply:

“Vaseline! La la la-la la la la la-la-la la! #Elastica”

Unfortunately this tweet was tweeted at precisely the same moment that television replays were showing no hint of hot whiteness on VVS’s ghostly grey bat.

I hope this clears up any misunderstanding and also defuses any hostility that might have been provoked by his later tweeting of “Cigarettes and Alcohol” just as Nasser Hussain was asking why Sachin is out of form, and his unfortunately timed reference to “Big Mouth Strikes Again” as Geoffrey Boycott began his commentary stint.

Sunday, 31st July
Poor Ian Bell. He was going along swimmingly, having scored 137 of the politest, most well-behaved runs in Test match history. The world was a lovely, happy place. Already his thoughts were turning to his tea-time glass of strawberry-flavoured milk and his post-game episode of Peppa Pig. He watched Eoin Morgan hit the ball towards the boundary, the little umpire in his head called over and he was off.

And well done to MS Dhoni for saving the day. His noblesse oblige belongs to a parallel universe in which Geoff Hurst went to check with the Azerbaijani linesman, because from where he was standing, he didn’t think the ball had crossed the line; the Greeks got back into their wooden horse and asked to be wheeled out of Troy because it just didn’t feel right; and George W Bush asked for a state-wide recount in Florida on the grounds that he wanted to win but he didn’t want to win like that.

There was more to it than that. Dhoni, in addition to being one of India’s foremost commercial endorsers, a jetsetting magazine interviewee, a national hero and an occasional cricketer, also holds down a part-time job in the Indian Foreign Office. Yes, Ian Bell scored another 22 runs, but those runs didn’t come cheap. This evening there’s a new Anglo-Indian trade agreement on the regulation of prices in the paper clip industry that wasn’t there yesterday. Nice diplomacy, MS.

Monday, 1st August
Zimbabwe’s new captain, Brendan Taylor, has declared that his team may have a few surprises for Bangladesh in their forthcoming Test clash, which is already being billed in some quarters as Bangladesh’s fourth Test win. But what, we wonder, could Zimbabwe have up their sleeves to surprise an opponent they have met 18 times in the last two years? Here are three possible surprise scenarios.

1. Zimbabwe don’t turn up at all, later claiming that the entire team developed Bell’s Syndrome, a rare and only recently discovered form of temporary cricket-related amnesia. The match is abandoned, which is officially not the same as losing.

2. Soon after arriving at the ground, they express indignation at the lack of a gluten-free vegetarian option on the lunch menu and remain in their dressing room for five days, hoping the ICC will declare the game a draw.

3. Just before the toss, Taylor goes into the Bangladeshi dressing room and asks Shakib Al Hasan if, in the Spirit of Cricket, he wouldn’t mind conceding the match. It’s worth a try.