Andy Zaltzman's Blog, page 13

The elegant and the ineffective

Chris Lewis: explosive, athletic, bereft of good sense
© Getty Images



As the cricket world digests the big cricket news of the cricket week − that Alastair Cook still has some work to do to earn inclusion in ESPNcricinfo's all-time XI; that Australia remain very poor at forcing wins in games that are completely washed out (a shortcoming England, as holders, will be looking to exploit in the Ashes); and that Michael Clarke not only thinks that Ricky Ponting should captain Australia in the Ashes, but said so out loud in an interview, thus proving it − the time seems right for another Confectionery Stall XI.

This is the first Confectionery Stall XI for some time, and as the highly enjoyable season of ESPNcricinfo XIs draws to a close (taking with it the even more enjoyable season of readers' reactions to ESPNcricinfo XIs), I felt it was time to jump on the XI-selecting bandwagon before it is driven off to the ESPN scrapyard and the pieces sold off to another website.

I particularly enjoyed Suresh Menon's Elegant XI − a useful team, without question, but heavily biased in favour of all-time greats of the game. I feel this is deeply unfair to the stylish underachievers of cricket history, players who have looked great in action but less great in the scorebook. I therefore submit the Confectionery Stall Elegant But (Relatively) Ineffective XI, a team of the not-so-great-but-nonetheless-pleasing-on-the-eye who have intermittently entranced but more often frustrated the international-cricket-watching universe.

It should be remembered that elegance is not always a reliable hallmark of quality. When I was at school, there was a seam bowler who used to flow into the wickets with the ease of a thoroughbred racehorse, then bowl with perfect rhythm and an easy athleticism, reminiscent of a slow-motion Michael Holding. The last time I saw him play, he was bowling quite well in the West Kent Village League. He had a prettier action than Curtly Ambrose but was, by other conventionally accepted measures of bowling quality, not as good.

In my own village team I used to open with a player who was, in almost every aspect of batsmanship, useless. He struggled to keep good balls out. He struggled to keep bad balls out. He struggled. But every now and again – perhaps twice or three times a summer – he would unfurl an extra-cover drive so majestically perfect that it seemed as if Viv Richards had momentarily invaded his body, as if Wally Hammond's handkerchief should have been fluttering from his trouser pocket. Next ball he would play down the line of leg stump and see his off peg splattered, or attempt a pull shot and spoon-plonk it to extra cover, or be trapped lbw trying to square-cut a full-toss. But those cover drives were worth a whole summer of single-figure failures.

Perhaps the most elegant English batsman of recent years has been no-Test wonder Vikram Solanki, whose contribution to international cricket comprised 51 ODIs and three Twenty20 matches, in which he averaged in the mid-20s. The first of his two hundreds for England was a magical innings against Pollock, Ntini, Kallis et al at The Oval in 2003. The Wisden verdict: "Solanki finally arrived as an international batsman... few players can demand drooling admiration for an innings. Solanki is one of them."

His England career, however, generated a disappointingly small pool of drool. He passed 10 once in his next eight innings, was dropped, and departed international cricket three sporadic years later as the latest in an illustrious cavalcade of What-Might-Have-Beens of modern English cricket.

But how good was Solanki? Because he could play shots from the cricketing heavens, there is a tendency to think he underachieved. Paul Collingwood, by contrast, is often regarded as an overachiever who has made the most of his relatively limited talents. His batting has the flourish of an egg sandwich and the elegance of a steamrollered hedgehog. But his fielding reveals phenomenal hand-eye co-ordination and athleticism, and his timing is often extraordinary. But because he nudges the ball for four rather than strokes it, he generates no drool. Plenty of admiration, but none of it drooling. The only drool Collingwood prompts slowly dribbles from the snoozing mouths of opposing fans whilst he is compiling one of his famous match-saving rearguards.

Here, then, is the Confectionery Stall Elegant But Ineffective XI – a personal selection of players in my cricket-watching life (1981 to the present day) who have played the game with style, panache, flamboyance, and above all, limited top-level success. Qualification: must have played Test cricket. Maximum batting average: 38. Minimum bowling average: 30.

What connects Jimmy Anderson, Murray Bennett and Julius Caesar?

Note cricket-playing Roman emperor top left, initials JC
© Getty Images



The major cricketing news in England of late has been the fact that Jimmy Anderson may or may not be struggling to be fit for the first Ashes Test, after he may or may not have cracked a rib whilst being possibly punched or hypothetically not punched by someone who either was or was not a team-mate, in what may or may not have been a boxing match, on what may have been an extremely important team bonding camp in Germany or may alternatively have been grown men mucking around in a wood because they don't really have proper jobs. The camp may or may not prove to have been either "great fun, and the main reason we won the Ashes", or "a miserable, pointless, and knackering exercise and the principal cause of our humiliating 5-0 defeat". Or neither. The details remain sketchy. The England team seems to have been firmly bonded anyway, even without yomping through some fields or toasting Ricky-Ponting-shaped marshmallows round a campfire whilst singing rude songs about Peter Siddle.

Whatever proves to be the case, it is safe to say that Anderson's injury only happened because of the invention of air travel. If England had had to take a six-week boat trip to Australia, we can assume that the bonding camp would have been rendered redundant, and Anderson would not have been injured trying to recreate the Rumble In The Jungle. He might have been eaten by a whale instead, but the long voyage would have given him ample time to recover.

I heard Matt Prior interviewed on the radio about the team jaunt, and when asked what happened, he claimed that he is not allowed to give details of exactly what the squad were doing. It is hard to imagine why the ECB felt compelled to commit the players to silence on the issue. Perhaps it is a straightforward administrative issue – perhaps no one in government has ever found the time to downgrade the level of secrecy required for any British operation in Germany since the early-to-mid 1940s.

Perhaps the activities might reveal points of weakness the Australians could exploit in the Ashes – "Right, boys, we know Alistair Cook turned out to be very good at abseiling, so let's keep a tight off-stump line for the first 10 overs and hope he gets bored and tries to abseil down something." Perhaps the skills learnt could prove crucial at important stages of the series – "... and, Richie, it looks like Strauss is asking Finn for one final effort to break this partnership, and the young Middlesex paceman looks confident"; "Of course he does, Bill, let's not forget Finn now knows how to light a fire by rubbing sticks together and how to kill a reindeer with his bare hands. Marcus North can hold no fears for him now."

Many in the press have criticised the ECB for sending the players on the camp, and for making them punch each other's lights out whilst on it (could they not have hired a couple of Doug Bollinger impersonators instead?), but, in mitigation, who knows what injury Anderson could have suffered had he been tucked up safely at home. He could have been run over by an escaped steamroller in Lancashire, or fallen into a vat of custard whilst visiting a local food factory, or tumbled out of a window whilst playing all-in caged Scrabble. It is best that England players' injuries are administered centrally these days. There are rumoured to be plans to take the squad on a DIY course next week, in the hope that someone will hit Kevin Pietersen round the head with a plank of wood and concuss him back into form.

Of course, there are other things happening in the world of cricket than minor injuries to England players several weeks before the Ashes begin. Bangladesh's impressive ODI series clattering of New Zealand was welcome and auspicious. As Oscar Wilde once famously wrote, "To win one ODI against a major cricket nation may be regarded as fortune, to win two looks like signs of genuine improvement, and to spank a decent New Zealand side 4-0, without your best batsman, whilst three times defending chaseable totals, suggests that, come World Cup time, with home advantage potentially all way to the semi-final, Bangladesh could be a real threat to anyone."

Good luck to Darren Sammy as the new West Indies captain, a role that seems in recent years to have mostly involved administering contractual squabbles and occasional outbreaks of cricket. Sammy wrote on his Twitter feed that he will face the challenge "with God at his side", although even the Almighty would struggle to turn the current team into world beaters (whilst, even at his Biblical best, God would have been lucky even to get a place in the starting XI in the 1980s).

Here, as promised, following on from last week's blog about Tendulkar's impossible struggle to overtake John Traicos and Dave Nourse in the Fewest Tests Missed In A Career Lasting Longer Than 20 Years Challenge, here is a table of the 20-year-career Test players and the percentage of possible matches that they played in.

Dave Nourse: 45 out of 45 Tests between 1902-1924 (100%)
John Traicos: 7 out of 7 Tests between 1970-1993 (100%)
Garry Sobers: 93 out of 100 Tests between 1954-1974 (93.0%)
Sachin Tendulkar: 171 out of 185 Tests between 1989-2010 (92.4%)
Syd Gregory: 8 out of 75 Tests between 1890-1912 (77.3%)
Mushtaq Mohammad 57 out of 76 Tests between 1959-1979 (75.0%)
Jack Hobbs: 61 out of 91 Tests between 1908-1930 (67.0%)
Imran Khan: 88 out of 139 Tests between 1971-1992 (63.3%)
Colin Cowdrey: 114 out of 195 Tests between 1954-1975 (58.5%)
Frank Woolley: 64 out of 110 Tests between 1909-1934 (58.2%)
George Headley: 22 out of 45 Tests between 1930-1954 (48.9%)
Wilfred Rhodes: 58 out of 120 Tests between 1899-1930 (48.3%)
Bob Simpson: 62 out of 149 Tests between 1957-1978 (41.6%)
Freddie Brown: 22 out of 113 Tests between 1931-1953 (19.5%)
George Gunn: 15 out of 87 Tests between 1907-1930 (17.2%)
Brian Close: 22 out of 245 Tests 1949-1976 (9.0%)

Traicos trumps Tendulkar

Pretender: with a mere 8032 Test runs, Garry Sobers is well short of having proved himself a true great
© Getty Images



All cricket fans cherish moments when they first see a player, and think to themselves: "This lad is something extraordinary." They cherish them even more when they turn out to be correct. Few would boast that when they saw Paras Mhambrey bowl for the first time, they just knew deep down that he would go on to take 400 Test wickets; or that they happened to catch a glimpse of Blair Hartland's debut Test innings whilst on holiday in New Zealand in 1992, and instantly wrote a series of postcards home telling their parents that Wally Hammond himself had been reborn as a Kiwi opener.

Many will have thought it during Cheteshwar Pujara's mesmeric, match-sealing fourth-innings 72 on debut in Bangalore, for his timing, his decisiveness and precision of shot, and his ethereal stillness at the crease. Time will tell. Time is often a bit of miserable sod in these matters. When Phil Hughes added to his debut 75 with two stunning centuries in his second Test, against Steyn, Morkel, Ntini and Kallis (and Paul Harris), who would have thought that he would be dropped just three Tests later? Not me, and probably not Phil Hughes. And almost certainly not the then bits-and-pieces allrounder Shane Watson, who replaced him and has since reached 50 in 12 of his 26 innings, the highest ratio of fifties-per-innings of any baggy green opener with 10 or more half-centuries.

Debuts, the deceitful little minxes that they are, have made many false promises. Particularly with legspinners. Narendra Hirwani took 16 for 136, Warne took 1 for 150. Kumble returned an inauspicious 3 for 170. Ian Salisbury twirled his web around Pakistan to take 5 for 122. Where did his 600 other Test wickets go? And maybe England should have stuck with Chris Schofield a little longer. Warne's debut gave perhaps the falsest and cruellest promise of all to England fans – that Australia had unearthed yet another cannon-fodder legspinner to be marmaladed by England's batsmen. That little reverie took one ball to shatter. It was sweet while it lasted.

I remember when I first realised that Sachin Tendulkar could turn out to be the truly special player that he had been rumoured to be by the world's cricketing press. It was when he reached 10,000 Test runs. It was clear at that point – in his 122nd Test, with an average of 57 − that the young man was destined for greatness. (Others had suspected it before then, but I like to reserve judgement on players until I am absolutely 100% sure about them, and the 10,000-Test-run barrier seems as fair a benchmark as any. Bradman, Sobers, Richards, Lara and Ken Rutherford I remain to be convinced about. The logic is simple: you can easily score fewer than 10,000 Test runs without being a particularly good batsman. But only good players reach 10,000. I therefore acknowledge that Tendulkar is a useful bat. Very useful, in fact – 95 international centuries constitutes a solid effort.)

Bangalore was one of the great highlights of his statistics-boggling career, a display of complete technical and tactical mastery that first transformed the game and then completed it, played with a vigour that suggests he may have several more good years left in him. Once he has ticked off 50 Test centuries and 15,000 runs, perhaps Wilfred Rhodes' 31-year Test span will be the next major record in his sights.

Tendulkar's continuing resurgence has been the highlight of a compelling microseries that again highlighted the desirability of macroseries. India finished looking like the world's top side, playing three days of majestic cricket to seal the series, and Australia ended as a team with more question marks than a transcript of an unusually urgent police interrogation of a hard-of-hearing and inquisitive suspect.

Ponting's captaincy on Wednesday attracted widespread criticism. To my layman's eyes it seemed intended to distract the Indian batsmen through sheer bafflement. As they tried to figure out Ponting's extremely well-concealed masterplan, they could easily have becoming distracted and perturbed, and smashed their own stumps down in confusion. Not really trying to take wickets when he needed to really try to take wickets was an obtuse approach. I have heard rumours that every night Ponting goes back to his hotel room, makes little papier-maché dolls of Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, says to them: "Right, Glenn, you bowl from the bathroom end, and Shane, you take the bed end. I'm going for a snooze, and when I wake up I expect you to have bowled the opposition out. Night night." Admittedly those rumours are ones that I have made up and said to myself, but still, no smoke without fire. There has to be some truth in them.

Back to Tendulkar, officially the world's best batsman again for the first time in eight years. Tendulkar's Test career is about to celebrate its 21st birthday, and is now the 11th longest of all time, and the fourth-longest not to have been interrupted by a world war. The three players ahead of him on that little list are Syd Gregory (58 Tests from 1890 to 1912; his longevity can be ascribed to an undroppably assertive moustache), Brian Close (England's youngest and oldest post-War Test player, his 22 Tests splattered over almost 27 years, dropped six times in his first seven matches spanning three different decades, and proud owner of the most sporadic career in Test history), and dual-nation legend John Traicos, more of whom below.

Why Laxman's career proves England are better than Australia

Australia struggle against Laxman. Laxman struggles against England. Therefore, Australia will struggle against England
© Camerawork/Live Images


Lancashire's VVS Laxman set England on course to win the Ashes with a match-winning and potentially series-turning innings for India against Australia in Mohali, a performance of classically Lancastrio-English cricketing resolve, fit to set alongside this nation's great Ashes-triumphing performances of recent times, such as Pietersen's 158 at The Oval in 2005, Botham's 1981 mega-heroics, Australia's top-order batting in 1985, and Kerry Packer running World Series Cricket at the same time as the 1978-79 series.

Laxman, alongside Ishant Sharma (who must now surely have inked himself into England's line-up for Brisbane on November 25), saw Indiland home in a breath-taking late rearguard after Australia's useless, impotent and morally inept seam bowlers had fortuitously scythed through the Englian top order.

The Baggy Greens, despite being only 1-0 down in the seven-match series, have now surely proved that they will never win a relevant cricket match again – any half-decent team would have appealed more convincingly for leg-before against Pragyan Ojha when just six more runs were needed to lose, and only a fracturing side staring into an abyss of imminent nothingness would have allowed their substitute fielder to narrowly miss the subsequent run-out attempt. Ricky Ponting's best hope now is to avoid a 7-0 whitewash, and attempt to resign with his dignity and batting average still at least partially intact.

From an environmental point of view, it is a deeply regrettable shame that the obvious formality of England retaining the Ashes for the third series in a row after their triumphs in 2005 and 2009 will have to proceed to satisfy advertisers and spectators, at a cost to the planet of innumerable pointless aeroplane flights, when a ceremonial handing over of the Ashes to England captain Mahandrew Singh Strauss on the steps of Buckingham Palace would surely be more appropriate.

I'm confused.

The losing XI (and back-up)

"Come on Morgs, this yellow stand thingy can totally be my Jason hockey mask"
© PA Photos



Having sought the assistance of Big Mama Stats to prove why England will definitely, decisively and unarguably win the Ashes, I will now ask her to prove that Andrew Strauss and his men are heading for a definite, decisive and unarguable pulping.

(Please do not read this piece in isolation – I realise that, without the context of Part One, this might look like gratuitous numerical hatchet job on a highly successful team. But still, numbers are numbers, and they deserve their say as much as the other great tools of sports punditry, such as experience, perception, gut feeling, rampant jingoism, selective memory, blind optimism and/or pessimism, and, above all, guesswork.)

THE ASHES-LOSING ENGLAND XI, 2010-11

Strauss
Deceptively inconsistent throughout his Test career, for one who is outwardly as unflappable as a granite pterodactyl's wing. Strauss seems to have a bizarre and inexplicable fixation with averaging between 24 and 26 in series of longer than three Tests – he has done so in five of England's last seven such rubbers.

These include the last two major series, in South Africa and at home against Pakistan (in which his highest score in eight matches was 54), and his previous tour of Australia, on the supposed 2006-07 Ashes, when he allegedly averaged 24 if Australia claims are to be believed. He has not scored a century for 13 Tests, and only one in his last 17.

As a captain, he masterminded England's 2009 Ashes triumph by sitting in the pavilion in Cardiff quietly wetting himself whilst Anderson and Panesar held on for a draw, then skilfully led his team to a drawn series in South Africa by doing the same thing twice more.

Cook
Too often bats as if he is trying to befriend the slip cordon, his legs, arms and bat moving like frantic passengers at a busy station all heading for different trains. Averages just 26 in 10 Ashes Tests, and, since the start of the last Ashes tour, in 36 Tests against the top-seven ranked Test nations (i.e. excluding Bangladesh and West Indies), he averages just 33.

Trott
The Cape Town Compulsive Twitcher averaged just 29 in his only previous winter of overseas Test cricket, as his game melted down like a dead zebra's ice cream on his return to the country of his birth.

Pietersen
Here's a question for you: What do Andrew Strauss and Kevin Pietersen have in common? Is it: (a) they were both born in South Africa; (b) when they eat a fishfinger, they both nibble the top corners off first to make it look like a fish cricket bat; (c) neither of them has read War And Peace, start to finish, in the original Russian; (d) they were both shortlisted for the role of Tim Curtis in the forthcoming Hollywood blockbuster The Savage Blade, the $150-million biopic of the former Worcestershire and England opening batsman (in the end, the part of three-Test wonder Curtis was given to Vin Diesel, with Kiefer Sutherland as county team-mate Stuart Lampitt, and Scarlett Johannson as England chairman of selectors Petra May); or (e) they have both averaged under 26 in England's last two major series?

It was a trick question. The answer is of course: all of the above. In his last six series, over 16 Tests, Pietersen has averaged 35, with no centuries, and has plinked only five sixes from his once explosive bat. He is far from the dominator he once was. He hit 32 sixes in his first 18 Tests, but has crossed the ropes just 21 times in 48 matches since then, whilst his scoring rate has dropped by 20%. Pietersen needs to regrow his successful, almost unstoppable 2005 badger hair. It was a source of strength and inspiration for him, and fear and confusion for the Australians.

Collingwood
The glue holding England's batting together has been decidedly unsticky of late – he has posted six single-figure scores in his last eight Test innings. In his last 17 Tests, he has scored just one century and averaged a sedate 37. In the eight Ashes Tests since his Adelaide masterwork ("The Sistine Chapel ceiling of Durhamite batsmanship" – The Durham Weekly Sprout), Collingwood averages a Brearley-esque 23.

Bell
The Flamethrower Of Eternal Justice averages a piddling 25 against Australia in 13 Tests, dreamy cover drive or no dreamy cover drive. The latter, in most of his Ashes innings – Eternal Justice has trousered a scarcely believable 14 single-figure scores in just 25 Ashes innings.

Could be vulnerable to verbal attack. On his last tour of Baggygreenland, the Australians, masters of psychological intimidation that they are, sledged him using techniques they had clearly learnt from CIA terrorist interrogators – they teased him about looking a bit like someone from a film. "What works in Guantanamo, works at the MCG," explained captain Ricky Ponting, as he scuttled off to try and put an orange jumpsuit on Alastair Cook.

Prior
As a wicketkeeper, his handling skills were once compared to those of a baby-hating midwife. This is not true, but the point stands. As a batsman, in his 14 Tests against the three highest-ranked teams of recent years (Australia, India, and South Africa), Prior averages 26, with no centuries.

More pressingly, Prior, about to make his first trip to Australia, will be fretting bucketloads about his future career prospects. England have changed their wicketkeeper in four of their last five Ashes tours. The last five keepers to don the gloves for England in Australia for the first time have never played Test cricket again after the end of that series – Rhodes in 1994-95, Hegg in 1998-99, Foster in 2002-03, and Jones and Read in 2006-07.

Alec Stewart in 1990-91 is the last England gloveman whose career was not ended by his first Ashes tour, and that series was also the last England jaunt to Australia that did not signal the total annihilation of a wicketkeeper's Test existence. Even then, established first-choice Jack Russell was jettisoned after three Tests, and was in and out of the team for the rest of his battered-hat-festooned career. Furthermore, in 1986-87, Jack Richards kept wicket in all five Tests as England triumphed. He was promptly dropped for the first Test of the following summer, played only three more times, and never passed double figures again.

Since Alan Knott, England's wicketkeepers in Australia have averaged 20.66 in 45 Tests, with one century and five fifties, all whilst crawling along at a fraction over two runs per over. In summary, Australia is a bad place for English wicketkeepers.

Swann
Is Graeme Swann: (a) the world's most valuable all-round cricketer who holds the key to England's Ashes hopes; or (b) a fortuitous chancer who has buffed up his bowling average against some of Test history's most inept batting line-ups? It's another trick question. The answer is (a), with a bit of (b) thrown in. Swann averaged 40 with the ball in his previous Ashes series, and, against the higher-ranked Test nations, averages close to 36. He averages just 15 with the bat in his last 11 Tests, with a highest score of 32.

Broad
The man who puts the "petulant" into "often needlessly petulant" has seldom produced for England overseas – he averages 37 with the ball and just 14 with the bat in away Tests (compared to 32 and 39 at home). He has not taken five wickets in an innings since that Ashes-winning apparent breakthrough at The Oval in 2009, and has never averaged more than four wickets per game in a series.

Anderson
Could win the Ashes single-handedly. If they were being played in cloudy conditions in England, with Pakistan's batsmen playing for Australia. Sadly, that is a big "if". Perhaps the biggest "if" since Rudyard Kipling started projecting the titles of his poems onto the skies above Gotham City. The Ashes will not be held in England with Pakistani batsman. Not this year. Anderson has taken just 17 wickets in eight Tests against Australia, at an average of 56. Over his whole career, in overseas Tests, he has taken 52 wickets at an average of almost 44.

Finn
Struggled to take wickets in his two previous overseas Tests, against Bangladesh, and tends to leak runs – his economy rate is 3.77 in Tests, 3.61 in first-class cricket. Finn is tall. Martin McCague was tall. He once bowled one of the worst opening spells in Ashes history. Logically, therefore, Finn will definitely do the same.

Finn has taken fewer Ashes wickets than, amongst others, Len Hutton, Uzman Afzaal, Ranjitsinhji, and Alan Igglesden (and I guarantee that is the first time in human history that those four names have appeared in the same sentence). Finn can play the "lack-of-opportunity" card as hard as he likes, but the fact remains that he has taken the same number of Australian Test wickets as actress Julie Christie, controversial former professional pope Pope Pius XII, my wife, Diego Maradona and 1997 England one-cap left-armer Mike Smith.

England's squad to win and/or lose the Ashes - Part 1

Alastair Cook: from the rare species of English batsmen who make housewives gush instead of groan
© AFP



England announced their squad to ruthlessly demolish the quivering Australians amidst some razzmatazz last week, whilst the all-but-already-defeated Ricky Ponting and his about-to-be-thrashed bundle of inferior cricketing specimens were warming up for their warm-up series in India, desperately trying to enjoy a few days of nice, friendly cricket before their ritual humiliation inevitably begins in Brisbane late in November.

Sorry, let me rephrase that. England announced their squad to be ruthlessly exposed yet again in Australian conditions, as Ricky Ponting and his vengeance-hungry troops prepare to pull their baggy-green caps especially determinedly down over their wrinkly green foreheads, and reassert their traditional superiority over their old enemy and greatest adversary – India, in what promises to be an intense if stupidly brief series. They will then head home to exert home advantage over an England side, none of whose players have ever not lost a Test in Australia.

Or it might be a closely matched series between two decent but flawed teams. At least, it will be the first time since I was still a boy that England have sailed off to an Ashes series without expecting to be beaten like a naughty egg white, and without the summit of their hopes being the partial retention of their cricketing dignity. (Do they still sail to the Ashes? I'm a little bit out of the loop on that one.)

On paper – by which I mean, on the bit of paper on which I've written down some statistics − these are two very closely matched teams. In the ICC Test rankings, for what they are worth, Australia are officially the fourth best Test team in the solar system, and England the fifth best, with respective ranking points of 113 and 112. If you add up the individual rankings of the likely starting XIs, there is almost no difference between the two teams' batting (England 5517, Australia 5466) or pace bowling (England 1878, Australia 1906). Only in Swann's superiority over Hauritz (858-498) does one side have a clear advantage.

Nevertheless, the English press have been bullish about the team's prospects – in some cases, as bullish as the streets of Pamplona during idiot season. (And that, readers, I believe to be perhaps the first running-of-the-bulls joke in a cricket blog).

Since the end of the last Ashes in Australia in 2006-07 (I forget what happened in that series, the last thing I can remember of it is Collingwood and Pietersen smashing the Aussies all over the Adelaide Oval, so I assume it all worked out fine), the new, post-Warne-and-McGrath-and-the-rest-of-that-annoyingly-brilliant-side Australia have won 20 Tests and lost nine (with seven draws). The gradually-and-belatedly-emerging-into-the-post-2005-era England have won 20 and lost 10 (with 16 draws).

There now follows a two-part statistical run-down, now, of the England team. Firstly, a look at the England team that will definitely, without any question, and barely even having to break sweat, spank Australia into the cricketing stratosphere. On Thursday, I will post a statistical run-down of the England team that obviously will be swept aside by the rampant Aussies in a fug of all-too-familiar English ineptitude. And when the Australians have finished their two-Test series in India, I will have a similar crack at their statistics. And then we can all kick back, relax, and get on with the rest of our lives.

An outbreak of excellent cricket

"Watch closely children, this is how you manufacture an allegation out of thin air"
© AFP

Finally, after weeks catching snippets of cricket on highlights programmes, intermittent blasts of radio commentary, morsels of Cricinfo's text commentaries, and infinitely more news bulletins than would have been ideal, I actually sat down to watch a cricket match, live, on a television. During that accursed cricketless time, I have conclusively proved that work and family commitments can seriousl...

The startling amnesia of Giles Clarke

Giles Clarke: clearly a stranger to the concept of irony
© Getty Images

Hello Confectionery Stallers. I have been tied up for the last few weeks attempting to entertain the masses at the Edinburgh Fringe festival (if you will excuse a numerically inappropriate use of the word "masses"), and latterly with unexpected family commitments, and to be honest I could not have chosen a better time in which to be almost fully distracted from cricket.Cricket has itself been fully distracted from c...

Cook does a Michelangelo

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 ...

Pakistan and the art of ineptitude

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 sum...