Andrew Strauss keeps his mouth clamped after the ECB issues him a warning that England's matches would have to be PG-rated if he showed any teeth © Getty Images

Wednesday, 6th October
For the second year in a row, the ICC attempted to steal the thunder of the Long Handle Awards by holding their own, smaller-scale ceremony on the same day. Happily, they did not succeed in deflecting attention away from the main event and this year’s winners were celebrated by a packed audience (Mrs Hughes and Hughes junior) in a plush auditorium (the Hughes living room) and hosted by a distinguished former player (yours truly wearing a Ronnie Irani mask).

There was a surprise winner of the Most Appearances In The Long Handle Blog By A Former Indian Spin-Bowling AllRounder Award as Mr Ravishankar Shastri scooped the prize. A clearly emotional Shastri made a moving acceptance speech: “Who? What? Look, stop calling me or you’ll be hearing from my lawyers! No, I’m not shouting! You want to hear me shout? I’ll shout, I’ll shout so loud I’ll make your eardrums pop!”

Twit Of The Year is a relatively new category for which there was fierce competition from the English contingent. Messrs Pietersen, Mascarenhas and Rafiq all put in sterling efforts, but in the end, the panel of judges went for Mr Simon Trundler of Anothershire, whose Tweet to his county captain (“Give me the new ball or I’ll burn down your house”) was judged to have communicated a clear message with brevity and a welcome dose of dark humour. Mr Trundler’s prize has been forwarded to the open prison where he is currently awaiting trial.

Finally, there was another new award up for grabs this year: Captain With The Most Sinister Grin. Here at the Long Handle, we shy away from seeking undue levity in the physical characteristics of our fellow humans, for obvious reasons. That said, we cannot let the cricket awards year end without giving due credit to the considerable menace inherent in the smile of Mr Andrew Strauss. One judge said, “It gave me the shivers,” and another commented: “It put me in mind of a great white shark trying to sell double glazing to a family of tuna.”

Thursday, 7th October
Hussey major has expressed his disappointment that Cricket Australia didn’t refuse to allow him to play in the Champions League Twenty20. This is an interesting new development. Cricketers have always whinged about burnout. But here we have a subtle variation in which a player criticises his own board for not forcing him to stop playing for a team that he had previously agreed to play for. Kudos to Mr Cricket for his ingenuity and for taking his whingeing to the next level.

Friday, 8th October
Congratulations to Mr Misbah-ul-Haq who became Pakistan’s fourth Test captain this year (and advance congratulations to Mr Younis Khan and Mr Javed Miandad for their appointments in January and April 2011 respectively). Four captains is quite an achievement and equals the record set by England in that crazy summer of 1988 when the nation’s selectors dispensed with skippers as freely as Henry VIII rearranged his marital affairs.

To mark his appointment as Pakistan captain, Mr ul-Haq performed the traditional ritual of drinking an unspecified noxious liquid from an ornate chalice. He was then presented with a framed photograph of Imran Khan lifting the World Cup, a letter of support from the PCB (written, due to stationery cutbacks, in invisible ink) and a Dummies Guide to Cricket Tactics. Finally, he had the benefit of a handshake with Mr Ijaz Butt and (for a reasonable discount) got to take away a copy of the big man’s autobiography: The Butt Doesn’t Stop Here. Good luck Misbah!

"Confucius? I can do better that that" © Getty Images

Friday, 24th September
Like the build-up to a bout of sumo wrestling, there are many rituals to be observed before the Ashes combatants can get to grips with one another. Today Tim Nielsen ticked off another tradition by declaring that he was unsurprised by the English touring squad. In truth, he would have said the same had the list of names included Admiral Nelson and Coco the Panda. His non-surprise is a given. But he went on:

"We're always well and truly keeping one step ahead of where we are at the moment.”

Wow. Never mind that business about the one hand clapping; this is the mother of all Zen riddles. Even to try to comprehend what this means makes your cranium ache. I suspect Jonathon Trott will still be wrestling with that one all the way out to the crease at the Gabba and all the way back to the pavilion. We pick Tremlett, you hit back with enigmatic lateral-thinking puzzles. Round one to Mr Nielsen, I think.

Saturday 25th September
For many years I was a regular at Edgbaston for international matches. I don’t go so much these days. The prospect of sitting in a glorified beer garden for eight hours surrounded by drunks singing football songs palled after a while, as did the endless Barmy Armying (if I never hear that wretched chant one more time, it will be too soon) and the reek of lager, which took days to get out of one’s panama.

My wanderings took me past the old place today, which, as you may be aware, is currently a construction site. Fancy new buildings are all the rage in domestic cricket at the moment. Having indulged themselves for years by spending money they haven’t got on overseas players they can’t afford, the county set have a new wheeze: siphoning off enormous piles of taxpayer’s cash to fund a “Who can erect the most hideous cricket structure” competition.

Lancashire’s Big Red Hospitality Oblong is the winner at the moment, although Headingley’s homage to an East German secret police headquarters is not far behind. I shudder to think what fevered architectural imagination has in store for Edgbaston, but it won’t do them any good. Fancy architraves and elegant vomitoria are not going to tempt me back. I will not be setting foot in the place until they introduce match-day prohibition (though obviously with exemptions for certain vintages of champagne).

Sunday 26th September
Really, why must Ravi Shastri shout? Does he not trust his microphone? Are Indian audio devices notoriously unreliable? He is without doubt the scariest MC ever to set foot in a sporting arena. Had he been present at the Coliseum, the lions would be cowering in their cages, with their paws over their ears. He stands, bolt upright, like a stunt double from a Terminator film and roars mightily, exhorting, nay demanding, that the crowd get ready to rock. Scared out of their wits, they obey.

Sadly the Shastri crescendo was followed by a tension-slackening shambles as once again players stood around idly whilst someone searched for a tarpaulin to cover a sightscreen that had mysteriously frozen with the sponsor’s name in place. Fortunately television seems wise to this now and the producer steadfastly refused to focus on the offending screen and its corporate decoration. Good work. Good work too by Chennai, but to be honest, the whole tournament left me feeling rather empty. For all of Ravi’s efforts, the Champions League doesn’t grab you like the IPL or the World Twenty20. It swings, certainly, but it doesn’t really rock yet.

Saker: that spells mole © Getty Images

Friday 30th July
Breathe a long, deep sigh of relief, crack open a bottle of champagne or offer a prayer of thanks to the appropriate deity; the second Test in Colombo is over! I didn’t see the game myself, although I hear there was one man in a village somewhere near Kandy who watched every ball on television but was struck dumb shortly after tea on the third day and has not been able to speak since.

I wonder what the ICC pitch report for this game will say? Day One: Flat. Day Two: Flat. Day Three: Flat, hint of turn. Day Four: Flat. Day Five: Enormous cracks. Ball turned square. (Just kidding. It was flat.) Yet whatever the report says, you can be sure that no sanctions will follow. We may, therefore, have to take matters into our own hands. I suggest strapping the groundsman into a slightly uncomfortable plastic chair, without a cushion, and forcing him to watch the whole thing again. Twice.

Sunday 1st August
England have another Antipodean bowling “coach”, no doubt planted at the ECB by the Australian Secret Service. He has been busy ingratiating himself with the English bowlers, compiling a dossier on their weaknesses (embarrassing school nicknames, food allergies, where Stuart Broad is most ticklish). When the team arrives down under, he will defect to the motherland and hand over his secrets to Cricket Australia. Just like the other guy. (I mean, what kind of name is Troy? Clearly a spy.)

There were subtle clues for those of us eagle-eyed viewers who get twitchy about the old enemy during an Ashes year. For a start, when interviewed by Nasser Hussain this morning, Coach “Saker” seemed reluctant to talk about coaching. Suspicious. When asked who he wanted to win the Ashes, he said “England”, far, far too quickly. And then he claimed that he had been “upskilling” the English bowlers. This appears to be just harmless gibberish, but I suspect it to be some kind of code word that only his handlers back in Melbourne can decipher. He has to be stopped.

Monday 2nd August
Today I managed to catch highlights of the weekend’s Caribbean climax. It was a sweaty, drizzly, nervy affair. Barbados first gave the game to Guyana. Guyana had it for a while, but didn’t really know what to do with it, so gave it back. Barbados found themselves with the prize, but polite to a fault, returned it to the men in green, just as the music stopped. With two needed from two balls, Big Benn fumbled around at mid-on as though he were trying to catch an oiled-up frog, and Guyana celebrated.

Teenager of the match and the tournament was Jonathan Foo, the only batsman who played like it was a Twenty20 game, levering long-limbed sixes and fours with a wristy flourish. A few years back, his career would have involved rapid promotion to the West Indian team, failure, re-selection, failure, re-selection and so on, until retiring with an average of 25. At least these days, thanks to the IPL, he might make a few dollars along the way.

Tuesday 3rd August
Diminutive genius Sachin Tendulkar has asked for advertising hoardings above one of the sightscreens at the P Saravanamuttu Oval to be covered up. This is a good thing. I’m all for the covering up of distracting adverts. I’d suggest that during the next IPL someone could throw a blanket over Ravi Shastri, so viewers can concentrate on the game. Still, Sachin’s request might not have been successful if it had come from a lesser player. I believe that when Mohammad Ashraful made a similar request during the 2007 tour, he was told to wear higher shoes.

	‘I’m the needlepoint champion of the world’ © AP

The lot of the Indian cricketer is not always an easy one, and on Tuesday they found themselves in a familiarly perilous position. On the one hand, as Ravi Shastri helpfully suggested to the Indian captain, it was imperative that the players should relax and not get too tense about the whole thing. It’s only a game, after all. On the other hand, this was a match that they absolutely had to win! By at least 20 runs.

But for this spectator, much of the tension was removed from the situation due to the prominence given to the words “net”, “run” and “rate”. Now, individually, these are three perfectly honest and dependable words. I feel I know them, I can trust them. But put them together and they become as palatable as a mojito served with tomato juice and a slice of garlic; a cocktail of definitions that somehow doesn’t quite cause the right neurons to fire in the Hughes brain.

I realise, of course, that there will be large numbers of readers spitting out their coffee at this shameless display of mathematical inadequacy, readers for whom calculating the net run rate is as straightforward an affair as brushing one’s teeth or remembering the names of one’s children, but there it is. My name is Andrew and I can’t add up. Admitting you have a problem is the first step, they say.

But for the benefit of those of us for whom maths is a form of torture (I am far from convinced, for example, that the Spanish Inquisition had nothing to do with the invention of quadratic equations) there must be a simpler way to determine which of four identically pointed teams can progress to the next bit of a competition. And, more importantly, this being Twenty20, there must be a solution that is a lot more showbiz.

One obvious method is to give precedence to the team from the country that has the best flag. On the face of it, this would appear to give Sri Lanka an unfair advantage. But we could get round that problem by having the players design their own team flags, thus rewarding the hitherto overlooked cricket skills of needlepoint and cross-stitch. (I understand, for example, that Roelof van der Merwe’s embroidery is the cause of some jealousy in the South African dressing room).

If that’s not your cup of char, we could instead institute Commentary Bingo in which a miked-up Ravi Shastri would stand in the centre of the pitch commentating on highlights of a game replayed on the big screen. Captains would be given little cards on which would be printed a range of well known and loved phrases, such as “Bang!” and “That’s gone!” and “This one could go down to the wire!” The first captain to fill up their bingo card would leap out of his deckchair and shout, “Cliché!”

But if you prefer that the issue be decided in a more athletic fashion, I have come up with the definitive tournament tiebreaker. The deadlocked teams could line up in a relay race over an obstacle course filled with wacky pitfalls. For example, players might have to carry large rubber banknotes across a tank of mud and place them in the pocket of an enormous inflatable tax inspector, or kayak their way across a lake full of custard whilst a man in a Ray Price costume hurls foam swear words at them.

Now that, as chief executives like to say, is cricketainment.