'It's a bloody tough wicket to bat on but I could do it on one leg' © Getty Images

It’s always a pleasure to listen to the modern Australian commentators and by “a pleasure”, I mean “aural torture of a particularly gruelling kind”. I comfort myself with the thought that we are nearer the end than the beginning of the Australian season and that only a few one-day games with West Indies lie between me and a respite from the output of Tubs, Slats and Heals.
Australian sportsmen appear to be bound by a code of machismo, which prevents them from uttering any word or phrase that might contain anything a viewer could possibly construe as a) poetic or b) a bit girlie.

The word ‘beautiful’ only gets a look in because they mangle the vowels to such an extent that it is no longer recognisable to the human ear. During Sunday’s game, Tubs did venture off-piste with the phrase, ‘a windy woof’, but it was a bloke’s ‘windy woof’, more of a bark than a woof and anyway, it is essentially gibberish and gibberish is firmly bloke territory. Even helium-voiced guest star Gilly, only the second Australian man ever to cry, was keeping it strictly manly.

In the midst of this tight-lipped, hairy-chested working men’s club, in which jargon like Gees (G-Force) and Kays (Kilometres) is the only concession to verbal inventiveness, it is left to dear old Mark Nicholas to fly the flag for showbiz. So I was dismayed to hear this Noel Coward of cricket commentators at one point describing Australia as ‘almost rampant’. Almost? I guarantee, if he had been safely back in old Blighty, there would have been no adverb involved and the ‘r’ of rampant would have rolled on for several seconds. Don’t let the testosterone get to you, Mark, be loud and be proud!

As well as getting in touch with my masculine side, I’ve been reacquainted this winter with that famous Aussie objectivity. Tubs, who can remember a time when Australia were pants, is the most generous. Heals, forever on the verge of launching into ‘Under The Southern Cross I Stand’, offers his praise of the opposition through gritted teeth. There is nothing particularly malicious here and in many ways it is heart-warmingly familiar, like visiting your bigoted but good-natured old uncle. But things are so one-eyed in that commentary booth, it could be mistaken for a pirate convention.

Take, for example, the pitch. We’ve all heard of drop-in pitches. Well, at the WACA, they have developed the rotating pitch. Early on, the track was mercilessly flat and only the sheer brilliance of the frighteningly muscular Ryan Harris and Morrissey look-alike Clint McKay enabled them to winkle out a Pakistani wicket or seven. But at the interval, the groundsman flicked a switch, the pitch flipped 180 degrees and Australia were compelled to chase on a minefield. Thank goodness then that Australian batsmen are so brilliant or they might not have succeeded.

As for Mr Afridi’s oral adventures, little more need be said. The sight of the Pakistani captain attempting to swallow a cricket ball whole, like a python dislocating its jaw to consume an ostrich egg, will be played continuously across the cricket globe, to the great amusement of everyone (go on, Pakistan fans, I bet you chuckled, just a little). And you could hear the admiration of the Slats-Heals-Tubs axis of manliness. This was proper ball-tampering. None of that delicate seam-picking, no furtive pocketfuls of compost, no bottle tops, ointments or boiled sweets, just a virile, red-blooded cricketer standing up proudly and taking a healthy bite of leather, cork and soil.

Good on yer, Shahid.

	Siddle: refreshingly toxic © Getty Images

Cricket is like a soap opera and if you don’t watch every episode, you’ll find yourself failing to recognise some of the characters. For instance if you were one of those heathens who put your hands over your ears, closed your eyes and made “La la la la!” noises during the Champions League, you will find yourself at something of a disadvantage during the current 50-over bash in India.

Of course, some of the old characters that you know and love are still around. There’s grizzled old Punter, who is always grumbling but secretly has a heart of gold; saintly Uncle Sachin, who listens to everyone’s problems without ever complaining; and the villainous Bhaji, who is pretending to have turned over a new leaf, but who everyone knows is bound to do something despicable any day now.

But now that our Australian chums are starting to come apart like badly assembled action figures (these plastic Paines, Clarkes and Lees might look sexy but they just don’t have the staying power of those clunky old Aussies you got in the seventies), the selectors are being forced to reach deeper into the back of the domestic-cricket fridge, past the leftovers and those on the turn, to see if there’s anything they can use. As a result, for the casual non-Australian cricket watcher, parts of the scorecard might as well be written in Klingon. Henriques? Bollinger? McKay?

But here’s where the Champions League comes in. Those of us who watched (nearly) every twist and turn of that pilot show are fully up to speed on these new characters and are able to avoid some embarrassing faux pas when discussing the current series with taxi drivers, undercover vice-squad officers or members of Parliament.

We know, for example, that Clint McKay is not the cheroot-chomping, Stetson-wearing sidekick of cowboy Jesse Ryder. Moises Henriques is not the dictator of a small island off the Mozambique coast with a solid gold throne and a personal bodyguard of Amazonian mercenaries. And Doug Bollinger is not a cartoon character devised to help sell champagne to the Australian market.

In fact, these three have something else in common. They all come from the shelf marked, “medium”. We can quibble about which is medium-fast or which is fast-medium, but essentially, they all fall into that large grey area on the bowling speed dial between “Collingwood” and “Steyn”.

Now I have to say that this is one plot development that I have my doubts about. There is always room for one trundler in an Australian side. But it goes somewhat against the laws of cricket nature to see so many yellow-shirted warriors whose game plan is not the reassuringly savage “hit ‘em in the face and make ‘em bleed” but the rather English “kind of put it on a length and wobble it about a bit”.

Thank goodness, then, for Peter Siddle. If he'd been born in Todmorden rather than Traralgon, he'd probably be saddled with some nursery-rhyme nickname like Siddley or Siddles. Instead, he goes by the name of Vicious. He used to tear down trees with his bare hands (probably) and now he hurts batsmen for a living. He is Merv Hughes with a razor and access to a treadmill. Good on yer, Siddley.

	Dino alert: Ishant does his thing © Getty Images

After the sweaty, rustic charm of the Champions League, the resumption of international festivities has brought about a welcome elevation of tone. Wednesday’s clash of continents was full of good things, and whilst Sunday belonged to Australia, India struck back to stir the sediment of our jaded imaginations with the enlivening possibility of a genuinely suspenseful series. Dhoni, of course, was immense but it was the reinvigorated Ishant Sharma whom I most enjoyed watching, his angular, bent-forward lope to the crease putting me in mind of a velociraptor, ball perched between claws, intent on savaging the batsman’s knuckles (battered and swollen metacarpals being the tell-tale sign of an Ishant attack).

And with two of the game’s greatest batsmen on the same field of play, it was an ideal opportunity for the collector of cricket images to acquire more pieces for the memory. The batting displays in the Tendulkar and Ponting wings of my mind’s museum are already pretty crowded, so during the current series I have been on the look out for cameos, intriguing Tendlya or Punter-related items of sentimental or curiosity value.

A good collector has to be patient and wait for the right moment. On Wednesday it came in the 62nd over, when Lord Sachin was called upon to take human form and intervene at square leg. His stooping, tumbling dive was the everything-falling-out-of-pockets scramble across the platform of a portly businessman whose briefcase has become trapped in the door of a departing train. Yet he reached the ball. Returning the offending item to his captain with underarm disdain, he dusted down his suit and reassembled his composure. It was Tendulkar encapsulated: successful yet free of swagger; whole-hearted yet dignified.

Perhaps the same could also be said of the one-day format, still packing them in after forty years. Fifteen overs into the second innings, with the Aussie run-chase beginning to sigh like a yellow dinghy with a slow puncture, the atmosphere had eased from febrile raucousness to contented hubbub. But the double-tiered Vidarbha Cricket Stadium, an immense bowl of light, remained packed throughout. This summer’s Natwest Series, another 50-over bash assailed from all quarters as a motion-going-through exercise was also played out, under autumnal skies, to full houses.

It seems counter-intuitive then, that when cuts in the Future Tours Programme are being contemplated, so many people in the game seem to favour the end of a format that has remained so popular with the public. But then there has always been a perverse streak of anti-populism in our game, going right back to the 19th century. Those Victorian gentlemen of the MCC who reluctantly organised the county championship preferred sparsely attended three-day mid-week cricket to the popular weekend matches of the northern leagues. And a hundred years on, the English cricket establishment looked down its nose at the spectators who flocked to the Gillette Cup and the John Player League. The aristocratic distaste for making a profit may be long gone but the high-handed tendency to overlook the preferences of paying spectators lingers.