Whacked in the face with a live barracuda at 3.30am

"What do you mean, no backbone?"
© Getty Images



A few quick thoughts and numbers arising from the Pakistan v England series (I will do a full review of it in next week's World Cricket Podcast). Some people are outlandishly claiming that the series ended in a 3-0 whitewash of the Universe's Number One-Ranked Cricket Machine by a side that recently was not merely plumbing depths of on-pitch ineptitude and off-pitch naughtiness, but was fitting a basin, bath and power shower in those depths. This story is so far-fetched that it must be discounted. It cannot have happened. It cannot have happened. It simply cannot have happened. I checked the rankings this morning. England are still the Universe's Number One-Ranked Cricket Machine. It must have been a hoax.

Nevertheless, until the hoax is conclusively proved and accepted by the ICC, we must reflect on what allegedly happened. And what allegedly happened was one of the most extraordinary collective batting failures in cricket history, and one of the finest series wins of recent decades. England averaged below 20 runs per wicket for only the second time since Archduke Franz Ferdinand had his clogs controversially and unhelpfully popped, and registered their lowest team series runs-per-wicket figure since shortly after Tchaikovsky premiered his smash-hit ballet Sleeping Beauty, and shortly before the birth of professional French President and eight-time European Nose Of The Year winner Charles de Gaulle (in 1890 – thank you, Wikipedia).

England's numbers 4, 5 and 6 (Pietersen, Bell and Morgan, with one innings at 6 by Prior) averaged 11.94, a figure that, since the First World War, has only been out-ineptituded once in a three-Test series ‒ by a motley collection of Indians against New Zealand in 1969-70.

The people I feel most sorry for, with regard to this historic disintegration of England's stellar batting line-up, are the poor, unfortunate bat sponsors. For the last year they had got their money's worth. In their previous 13 Tests over three series, England bats had been waggled in celebration on 93 occasions – 54 times on reaching 50, 22 times to mark a century, ten times for 150, six times to celebrate double-centuries, and once by Alistair Cook to mark England's first 250 since Gooch clomped India all around Lord's in 1990. These had been unprecedented times for English bat-waggling. But in the three UAE Tests, those same bats remained eerily unwaggly.