The blog you've all been waiting for

With the light so glorious for photography and not so much for cricket, Blythe posed when he was supposed to pick up and throw
© Getty Images


Another hectic week in international cricket, albeit one that, I can report first-hand, received little traction in the New York media. Sachin Tendulkar's 100th international hundred was passed over in favour of the altogether less-edifying spectacle of the principal Republican presidential candidates continuing to tear into each other like two lions dressed in zebra costumes, and the frankly alarming sight of the incumbent president of the world's top-ranked superpower taking a half-hour break from his no-doubt extremely hectic schedule to predict how the end of the student basketball season would pan out. Were there not more pressing issues for Mr Obama to address – the Syrian crisis, perhaps, or the continuing global economic blooper fest, or the likelihood of any cricketer scoring a century of international centuries, or England's prospects in overcoming their frailty against spin in their two-Test micro-tour of Sri Lanka? Evidently not.

I have now returned from the Big Apple to cricketing civilisation, slightly relieved, having seen how seriously they take their national sports - that the Americans plumped for baseball rather than cricket as their clouting-a-small-hard-ball-with-a-bit-of-wood sport of choice. If they had taken cricket to their ample sporting bosom when they had the chance (and let us not forget that the USA featured in the first ever international cricket match, against Canada in 1844), then the rest of the cricketing world might as well have taken its stumps home to make an ornamental plant stand. Major League Cricket would have made the IPL look like a home-made jam raffle at a village fete.

More on Tendulkar, Bangladesh, Vernon Philander – he of the Dickensian name and the appropriately 19th-century bowling average ‒ and the latest twists in this fascinating 2011-12 international season, in the new World Cricket Podcast later this week, but now it is time for Part 3 of The Official Confectionery Stall Going Out In A Blaze Of Glory Test XI – The Bowlers. Strap in.