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Andy Zaltzman: cricket, satire, whimsy

August 21, 2010

Cook does a Michelangelo

Posted by Andy Zaltzman 2 weeks ago

Kamran Akmal wonders if his baby-eel pals have become tonight's dinner © Getty Images

Pity me, Confectionery Stallers, for I have been locked away in Edinburgh at the Festival with no internet access in my flat. And no internet access means no Statsguru. It is incredible to think, in this day and age, that a man can be forced to live without Statsguru for more than 24 hours without the law or the human rights brigade intervening and righting this obvious wrong, but such is the life I have been leading. A life devoid of purpose, hope, meaning and, above all, statistics.

My one-man show in Edinburgh runs from 4.20pm to 5.40pm, roughly, and has more than once coincided with major flurries of wickets. At my show yesterday, a minute in, I received one of the oddest but most informative heckles of my stand-up comedy career, when an audience member, unprompted shouted out: “Alistair Cook has made a hundred.” As a comedian, I am well used to being heckled with personal abuse, or brusquely phrased criticisms of my act. Being furnished with a point of cricketing information was a rare treat. On went the show, during the course of which six England wickets fell. The show went well – if the game is still active at 4:20pm today, I may deliberately do the worst show possible, just to see if that makes England play better.

This has been a brilliant Test match, garlanded with outstanding play, intriguing subplots and tidal fluctuations, the kind of game that makes you want to fly a light aeroplane around your neighbourhood trailing a banner reading “I Love Cricket”.

The series had previously contained passages of brilliance, but the drama that is generated by bowler-dominated Test cricket was undercut by the knowledge of Pakistan’s dismal vulnerability with the bat. Werewolf films would be less scary if you knew in advance that the beast suffered from a fatal congenital heart defect.

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August 3, 2010

Pakistan and the art of ineptitude

Posted by Andy Zaltzman on 08/03/2010

James Anderson: top class and toothless by turns © Getty Images

The evidence of the last two Pakistan Tests would seem to suggest, incontrovertibly, that England will win this winter’s Ashes by at least 10 matches to nil. Pakistan beat Australia; England beat Pakistan; that is a two-win per Test difference between England and Australia.

Of course, cricket does not always pan out as statistics suggest it should, and trying to divine what might happen in the forthcoming Ashes from this summer’s two series involving Pakistan is a task as futile as trying to predict whether a champion boxer will win his next fight based on how many wasps he swats at a picnic.

England played a good, decisive match, but scored the bulk of their important runs in each innings against some fairly dismal back-up bowling, and were aided by fielding that was borderline appalling (and that borderline was not between appalling and acceptable, but between appalling and catastrophic). Strauss’ team bowled well and caught magnificently, but against a batting line-up that looked as confident in their technique against swing bowling as their ability to play Beethoven’s piano sonatas on an ironing board.

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July 30, 2010

The world's luckiest players, and its favourite

Posted by Andy Zaltzman on 07/30/2010

Lady Luck has huge crushes on these two © AFP

A new Test batting star emerged for England yesterday, to go with the new one-day batting star and new Twenty20 batting star, who also emerged over the last year. Eoin Morgan’s highly attractive three-for-the-price-of-one offer has added to the growing competition for places in a Test side that should soon start to impact even on the seemingly undroppable.

The calmness, timing and variety of run-scoring capabilities that Morgan displayed in his excellent and stylish performance bode well for his and England’s future, but his innings also illustrated the BruceReidically slender margins that separate the vintage champagne of success from the budget processed grape juice of failure.

A better wicketkeeper than Kamran Akmal (any volunteers? – no previous experience required; candidates should ideally possess their own gloves and, preferably, a willingness either to watch the ball all the way into the those gloves, or to move their feet, preferably both; apply to PCB by next Thursday) would probably have been standing in the right place to catch an edge when Morgan, on 5, played away from his body to another good ball by the brilliant Aamer. He later survived what appeared to be a fairly conclusive lbw appeal when missing a sweep off Shoaib Malik on 35.

Hawk-Eye suggested the ball would have hit the inside of leg stump, but, to compound the umpiring error, Pakistan had blown their two referrals trying to get rid of Kevin Pietersen, who seemed to be busy trying to get rid of himself anyway, as Kamran expanded the range of known methods of wicketkeeping ineptitude by demanding a referral for a rejected caught-behind appeal after a ball that had barely passed within conversational distance of the bat.

Had Morgan been caught on 5, questions would have been asked about his Test-match technique and his footwork against the swinging ball. Had he been given lbw, he would have failed to convert three consecutive 30-plus scores into half-centuries. Instead of proving his Test credentials, he would have raised further questions about them. Instead of delivering under pressure, he would have failed under pressure. Instead of a “magical maiden ton”. He capitalised brilliantly on his luck, and some low-grade spin bowling, to kickstart his Test career in spectacular style. Pietersen had plenty of good fortune in his innings, but looked like a man who doesn’t play much cricket these days, and did not capitalise.

Luck has always been and will always be a fundamental, and fascinating, part of sport, particularly in batting, where a batsman’s bad luck is final (how many centuries would I have scored in my career if I hadn’t been unlucky in 99% of all my innings?), and a batsman’s good luck can make the different between an unremarkable failure and a career-defining success.

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July 21, 2010

The Jimi Hendrix of offspin

Posted by Andy Zaltzman on 07/21/2010

Muttiah Muralitharan is fifth on the all-time list of Sri Lankan Test match six-hitters © Getty Images

Muttiah Muralitharan’s incredible Test career is almost at an end, and, as I write, he is in the process of attempting to become the first and last man to take 800 Test wickets.

Given the nature of modern international cricket, I think I can predict that no one else will reach 800 with a similar level of confidence as someone announcing that John Wilkes Booth will always retain the world record for Most Assassinations Of Abraham Lincoln, or that 1924 Olympic sprint champion Harold Abrahams will never again break his own personal best for the 100 metres. Murali’s mark will stand for all time. Unless Sajid Mahmood discovers both the elixir of eternal youth and the DNA of Freddie Trueman lurking in his garden shed behind a tin of creosote and a broken lawnmower.

Murali, the Jimi Hendrix of offspin, and surely Peter Such’s only serious rival as the greatest spin bowler of the late 20th century, has just two more days before he joins the ranks of former cricketers, alongside Grace, Bradman, Sobers, Warne, Capel, Igglesden and the rest. Seven more Indian scalps lie between him and a final statistical cherry on his cherry-laden multi-layered career cake. He already has Tendulkar in the bag for the eighth time, the Mumbai Master presumably weakened by spraying litres of his magic blood all over copies of his biography.

Disappointingly, Murali’s first innings of his final Test was brief and contained no sixes. One of the lesser-trumpeted stats emerging from his 18 years of Test cricket, but one worth a quick brassy toot nonetheless, is that he stands fifth on the all-time list of Sri Lankan Test match six-hitters, with 29, behind Jayasuriya, Aravinda de Silva, Jayawardene and Ranatunga, and some considerable way ahead of the likes of 83-Test interest void Hashan Tillakaratne, and 1980s teenage one-Test-wonder Sanjeewa Weerasinghe, who has hit the same number of Test sixes as I have.

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July 14, 2010

A brushing of elbows, and debutants on the trot

Posted by Andy Zaltzman on 07/14/2010

2 Ricky Ponting and Mohammad Aamer attempt to break into a Scottish dance routine © AFP

After a painstaking 98-year reassessment study following the botched triangular series experiment of 1912, neutral Test match cricket returned to England yesterday. It was, according to those who were lucky enough to see both Syd Gregory’s Australia play South Africa almost a century ago, and their modern-day baggy-green descendants take on Pakistan, much improved from its previous incarnation.

It was a compelling opening to the series, with everything you could want from a Test match – some good batting, some bad batting, some outstanding swing bowling, a bit of decent legspin, a bit of less decent legspin, a couple of influential umpiring bloopers, a couple of rampantly irritating bouts of going off for bad light, and perhaps the most minor piece of argy bargy in the history of all sport, as Ricky Ponting and Mohammad Aamer lightly brushed elbows.

To the untrained eye, this could easily have signified the beginning of an outbreak of Scottish dancing, but fortunately the umpires were on hand to ensure a full-blown ceilidh did not break out – there is simply no place for it in Test match cricket. Ponting, an inveterate dancer, was understandably irritated, and left the field visibly chuntering his displeasure to the umpire that his trademark Strip The Willow had been cut off in its prime.

Aamer’s opening spell was prodigious. He could have had all of the top three Australian batsmen out lbw, but ended up with none. Katich should have been given out, Ponting could have been given out, and Watson was being given out but escaped because he had the good sense to deflect the ball into his stumps and be out bowled instead (thus depriving Umpire Gould, the first English umpire to stand in a Lord’s Test since umpires were deemed to have become so universally and flagrantly patriotic as to be utterly untrustworthy, of his moment of finger-raising glory).

Katich escaped for no discernible reason – Gould claimed to have heard and/or seen an inside edge, in which case Katich’s bat must have invisible wings stretching a good eight inches beyond the visible wood. The only other conceivable explanation why the umpire did not despatch the self-proclaimed Elvis Presley Of Stepping Across To Cover Off Stump And Deflecting The Ball Into The Leg Side, after his extremely Australian leg interrupted a delivery that was heading towards the middle of the middle of the middle bit of middle stump, was that Gould had been playing with a ouija board before the start of play, and had been told that the ghost of Gubby Allen would pop out from under the Lord’s turf and headbutt the ball away before it hit the wicket. Thus the benefit of the doubt was given to the batsman.

I can, without jealousy or hyperbole, state definitively that Aamer is a better bowler than I was at his age (notwithstanding my then career-best spell of 2 for 35 off four overs of occasionally reachable legspin). His mesmeric opening spell was later supported by a hypnotic burst of platinum-quality trundle by Asif, a masterfully skilful and crafty onslaught of 80mph dobblers that broke both ends of the Katich-Clarke partnership, almost dismissed North three times in three balls, and thus exposed Australia’s untested middle order.

Paine and Smith, in their first Tests, were doomed to failure – not by the excellent bowling nor the helpful conditions nor the pressure of their own expectations, but by the sheer weight of statistical history. This was the first time Australia had picked debutants at both 7 and 8 since their first Test against Sri Lanka in 1982-83, when Roger Woolley and Tom Hogan proudly donned their baggy greens for the first time, and then collectively failed to trouble the scorers. Largely, in fairness, because Australia declared on 514 for 4. This however, merely spared them from inevitable actual failure.

Fourteen times since their first Test in 1876-77, Australia have sent out a brand new 7 and a previously unseen 8 in the same Test, and between them, in their debut innings, they have now scored a not especially grand total of 318 runs in 26 innings at a piddling average of 13.25. The top score of these was Clarence “Nip” Pellew’s immortal, unforgettable, era-defining 36 in the first post-Great-War Ashes Test of 1920-21. (Feel free to use this fact in your next attempted seduction. I cannot guarantee it will lead to success, but it will certainly elicit a reaction of some kind.)

Australia’s coaching staff has clearly not been checking their statistics. If they had, they would surely have split the two debutants, sandwiching them around a more experienced player to divert the unstoppable hand of cricketing inevitability from slapping them both back to the pavilion.

Assuming they bat according to the listed scorecard, Pakistan will also launch two players into their debut Tests back to back in the batting order. Umar Amin and Azhar Ali are listed to bat 3 and 4, making this already historic match even more historic – it is the first time Pakistan have had their numbers 3 and 4 making their debuts together since the entire Pakistan team made their Pakistan debuts in Pakistan’s debut Test against India, in Delhi in 1952-53. So this is the first time they have chosen to play a Test with an uncapped 3 and 4.

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July 2, 2010

England’s World Cup chances, and a cathartic confession

Posted by Andy Zaltzman on 07/02/2010

2 Shaun Tait: that's Mr Grumpy to you © Getty Images

England have chosen a very good time to register a convincing win over Australia. It has dovetailed extremely neatly with the hydraulically hyped football team exploring hitherto uncharted territories of incompetence in a World Cup humiliation that is being widely viewed as the nation’s biggest embarrassment since King Harold was tricked by the Normans into a game of Catch The Arrow With Your Eye. (In relative terms, watching England’s World Cup unfold was the footballing equivalent of sitting in a darkened cellar, watching Steve Harmison’s first ball of the 2006-07 Ashes on a continuous loop for two weeks.)

The one-day series triumph has also coincided with the government’s jovially portentous forecasts of continuing economic gloom. So by playing to their potential, and by offering genuine promise for the future, Strauss’s team have surely thrust cricket back to the top of English children’s favourite-hobbies lists, ahead of football and macroeconomics.

Congratulations are due to England not only for the all-round excellence of their play in the first two-and-nine-tenths matches, but also for cleverly raising then crushing Australian hopes by collapsing spectacularly to the point of defeat in the final one-tenth of match three, and then convincingly losing match four in order to maintain public interest in the build-up to the Ashes. If the whitewash that was obviously inevitable had been allowed to happen, who would have bothered tuning in to see Ponting’s men ritually humiliated yet again this winter? Only true sadists with no love of a genuine sporting contest.

Perhaps I read too much into it. But England have now played well enough often enough in recent limited-overs matches to suggest that their current run is not an uncharacteristic blip in a long era of carefully nurtured underachievement.

This five-match effective whitewash spread over a mere 12 days will sadly be of little value when the World Cup comes around next year. The tournament will be a test of psychological endurance as much as cricketing ability, as it crawls slowly onwards like the asthmatic brontosaurus it is. In fact, the gaps between games are mostly long enough to allow teams to commute to and from home to minimise the chances of homesickness.

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June 22, 2010

Wonderful pointlessness, and the dullest Twenty20 team of all time

Posted by Andy Zaltzman on 06/22/2010

Two separate Chris Tavare references in this blog, you lucky, lucky things © Getty Images

England and Australia renew a rivalry older than time itself today in a bizarrely scheduled and/or financially advantageous series of one-day internationals, perhaps the least eagerly anticipated England-Australia showdown since the Sydney and London offices of accountancy firm Scraghound, Flude & Prink met for an Ashes year-end ledger-off in 1984.

Nevertheless, with the national football team concocting some brilliantly inventive ways of embarrassing itself, and with the government about to announce an emergency budget that could involve selling all first-born children to the highest overseas bidder in an effort to balance the Treasury’s trembling books, Andrew Strauss’s team has the chance to provide the country with some light relief.

Besides, we can categorically predict that the winner of this series will gain such an insurmountable psychological advantage that they will absolutely certainly win this winter’s Ashes (and do not believe any Australians who try to hoodwink you into believing that the Ashes are taking place “this summer” – the run from late November to early January, which is, in my experience, definitely winter).

It will be a good test of England’s recent improvement in limited-overs form, selection, tactics and recruitment, which all point to them successfully avoiding a repeat of their 2007 World Cup tactics, which seemed to be based on attempting to trick the opposition into thinking they were playing a Test match by trying to score 35 for 1 off the first 15 overs, then praying for rain and hoping the patriotic Duckworth-Lewis method would finish the job.

Having won last year’s Ashes and defeated the Australians in the World Twenty20 final, if England can prevail in this one-day series, they will complete a clean sweep of their oldest cricketing enemy, and therefore, under international law, be entitled to force Australia to become a colony again.

In the Caribbean, another entry in the Encyclopaedia of Pointless Test Matches is being painstakingly inscribed, as West Indies, in a revolutionary inversion of traditional tactics, first pushed for a possible win, before then consolidating to make sure they could not lose. Habitually, teams tend to go through this process the other way round, but one down in a three-match series, and having reached 400 for 4 at a fraction under 4 runs per over, West Indies then took 61 overs (regrettably, that is not a misprint) to score their next 100. In terms of not finishing a job well started, it was eerily reminiscent of when Shakespeare, writing the first draft of Hamlet, fired off three sensational acts of drama, before scrawling, “Acts 4 and 5. Blah blah blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda, bit of a fight, euurghhh, The End.” Before nipping to the tavern to see if Christopher Marlowe had left any manuscripts lying around.

Chanderpaul must have set a new all-time record for slowest progress from 150 to 166 (95 balls, after his previous 100 runs had come off 148, a perhaps unique case of having his eye in, then carefully playing his eye out), whilst Bravo, one of the more stylish batsmen in world cricket, stodged 53 off 215 to register the fourth-slowest recorded innings of 50-plus by a West Indian in Test history.

The only rational explanations for Bravo’s innings are:

(A) Bravo and the traditionally cautious Brendan Nash (114 off 148 balls) had their bodies secretly swapped by a rogue scientist before going out to bat; or

(B) Bravo’s was a tribute innings, part of the official worldwide celebrations to mark the 30th anniversary of Chris Tavare’s landmark five-hour 42 at Lord’s against West Indies. I imagine Tavare would prefer to have faced Bravo’s 119 balls from Paul Harris than the 202 hurled at him by Roberts, Holding, Garner and Croft. (And maybe a few from Viv Richards by way of humanitarian respite.) The 30th-anniversary festivities continue in Covent Garden today with a three-day non-stop ballet based on the career of Tavare, and a gala dinner at which surviving members of the Lord’s crowd from 1980 tearfully share their reminiscences of watching the innings unfold.

Here, as promised, are some more Answers to your Questions. Well, three Answers to three Questions, because I got a bit carried away with the first one and now it’s past my bedtime.

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June 17, 2010

Well done, Dwayne

Posted by Andy Zaltzman on 06/17/2010

Benn, Gayle and Co realise how funny their achievement is © AFP

In the first Test in Trinidad, which followed to 100% accuracy an unofficial ICC computer-generated ball-by-ball prediction of what would happen, Chris Gayle’s West Indies came within one Dwayne Bravo delivery of history. Until Bravo dismissed Boucher to conclude South Africa’s first innings – a grave tactical error, as it transpired, which served only to unleash Steyn and Morkel onto a poor, defenceless batting line-up – all nine wickets had been taken by spinners.

Benn, Shillingford and Gayle himself had tweaked themselves to the brink of obscure statistical immortality. One more wicket would have resulted in them becoming just the third West Indian spin attack to dismiss an entire team, and the first to do so without containing both Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine (the former must be close to a recall, at the age of 81, as the West Indies seek greater penetration in their bowling; even the latter, some years after his death, might be worth a squad place).

They would also have become the first spin team to take all 10 wickets in a Test innings outside Asia since Warne and May thoroughly bammed England’s collective boozle at Edgbaston in 1993, and, by my and Statsguru’s reckoning, the first all-fingerspin attack to bowl out an entire side since 1968. Sleep well, Bravo. You have denied Shane Shillingford his slice of immortality.

As it was, it was the most profitable return by West Indies slow bowlers for nearly 40 years. How times have changed. West Indian spinners took more wickets in this single hypothetically five-day Test than the combined might of Caribbean tweakery managed in five years between March 1979 and March 1984. This statistic comes from no less a source that the all-knowing, all-seeing Statsguru herself (although, the great goddess who knows all does classify Viv Richards as “mixture/unknown” rather than “spin bowler”) (but the point basically stands) (and it completely stands if you chuck the word “specialist” in as the third word of the second sentence of this paragraph, before the word “spinner”).

This was also the second time in little over a year that the West Indies opening bowlers took no wickets in a Test match. The previous occasion, last February in North Sound, Antigua, was more excusable, as the match lasted just 10 balls, due to the minor inconvenience of the entire playing area having been constructed entirely out of sand.

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June 11, 2010

England’s Ashes chances, and a salute to Basil Butcher

Posted by Andy Zaltzman on 06/11/2010

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).

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June 2, 2010

Ten wickets with a stick of French bread

Posted by Andy Zaltzman on 06/02/2010


Mudassar Nazar: master of the fearsome blitztrundle © Getty Images
 

England has reaffirmed its status as the greatest nation in the history of the world with its third consecutive intermittently-unconvincing-but-ultimately-comfortable victory over Bangladesh. It was a good, competitive Test match. Whilst Bangladesh were batting. When they were bowling, it was another pointless exercise in zero-intensity average-inflating net practice for England’s batsmen, although only Jonathan Trott and Andrew Strauss took full advantage.

Trott took the opportunity to bump his Test average up from 37 to 53, mutating from a Neil McKenzie to a Virender Sehwag over five days of ruthless accumulation. It would take six consecutive ducks for Trott to re-McKenzify his average. Ian Bell’s average remains 2.5 runs better off five years after helping himself to 227 unbeaten runs in the two-Test series of 2005. Word is he still sends Tapash Baisya and Anwar Hossain Monir a box of chocolates every Christmas.

Bangladesh’s bowling “attack” currently poses the offensive threat of a broken toy zebra in a lion enclosure. They average over 60 runs per wicket this year, and it is traditionally difficult to win Tests when you are conceding 600-plus per innings. Not impossible, admittedly, but reliant on the presence in your dressing room of a high-quality hypnotist to hoodwink the opposition captain into two rogue declarations.

The Tigers, for all their recent improvement, continue to lack both penetrative bowlers and, more importantly, top-notch hypnotists. Until one or both of these understandable problems is resolved, they will continue to strive for draws rather than victories.

Nevertheless, their excellent top-order batting confirmed that they have now improved sufficiently to officially become a team that is not ritually humiliated in every Test it plays. Progress towards becoming a team that has an ice-lolly’s chance in a volcano-surfing competition of actually winning a Test remains negligible, however: Bangladesh’s bowlers remained as incisive as baguette. And, just as you can’t perform an appendectomy with a stick of French bread, so you cannot win a Test without taking wickets.

Their batsmen, however, provided another good examination for England’s bowlers, which only Steven Finn passed. Bangladesh extended their record run without an innings defeat to 10 Tests, and have now scored over 200 in 16 consecutive Test innings since January 2009. They had been skittled for less than 200 in 15 of their previous 25 innings, and 61 of their first 116 since an elevation to Test status that was not so much premature as before conception.

To maintain these sequences at Old Trafford on a potentially bouncy pitch, they will need more from their middle order, which failed to support Tamim, Imrul and Junaid’s respectively dazzling, determined, and also determined efforts.

Tamim Iqbal again showed himself to be a rampant entertainer of rare brilliance, whose willingness to intersperse his vibrant strokeplay with failed attempted smears over midwicket gladdens the heart of all village players, who can aspire to match at least the latter part of his repertoire. How appropriate that Tamim should have illuminated the old ground so close to the 20th anniversary of another immortal Lord’s innings by a visiting player, back in 1990 – I refer of course to New Zealand opener Trevor Franklin’s almost-equally iridescent 101, which Tamim eclipsed by two runs from 210 fewer balls over four and a half fewer hours.

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Andy Zaltzman

Andy Zaltzman was born in obscurity in 1974. He has been a sporadically-acclaimed stand-up comedian since 1999, and has appeared regularly on BBC Radio 4. He is currently one half of TimesOnline’s hit satirical podcast The Bugle, alongside John Oliver (The Daily Show with John Stewart). He also writes for The Times newspaper, and is the author of Does Anything Eat Bankers? (And 53 Other Indispensable Questions For The Credit Crunched).

Zaltzman’s love of cricket outshone his aptitude for the game by a humiliating margin. He once scored 6 in 75 minutes in an Under-15 match, and failed to hit a six between the ages of 9 and 23. He would have been ideally suited to Tests, had not a congenital defect left him unable to play the game to anything above genuine village standard. Aged 21, when fielding at deep midwicket, he dropped the same batsman three times in fifteen minutes, and has not been selected by England before or since