One of the greatest scientific breakthroughs known to man © Cricinfo Ltd.

The Duckworth-Lewis method is rightly regarded as one of humankind’s greatest scientific breakthroughs, fit to set alongside Archimedes hopping into his bath and splashing water all over his new carpet, Fleming not bothering to wash up his petri-dishes, and whoever first discovered the sliceability of bread.

Before Professors D and L intervened, the received wisdom of the ages had been that the intervention of rain or bad light would forever skew the natural axis of limited-over cricketing justice. Previous attempts to solve this ageless conundrum had ranged from incomplete to idiotic. However, after years of secretive testing of their formula on teams of cricket-playing laboratory mice dressed in garish little pyjamas, Duckworth and Lewis unleashed their ingenious system on the cricket world and instantly catapulted themselves onto the Nobel Prize waiting list. Many still do not understand the method, but it is one of those things that the public needs to trust rather than comprehend. Like air travel, the workings of the digestive system...and Tony Blair.

The slight powerplay-related glitch revealed in the fourth India-England ODI will no doubt soon be ironed out (indeed, all significant developments in scientific history have had their teething troubles – when Newton was demonstrating gravity to then king Charles II by lobbing fruit in the air and letting it land on his head, he hurled a grapefruit upwards which never came down).

However, Duckworth-Lewis’ one seemingly irredeemable failing is its inability to adjudicate matches which fail to reach the minimum length, or are completely cancelled, leaving the disappointed spectator either with a no-result or a bowl-out (a deeply unfair resolution heavily loaded in favour of teams whose bowlers habitually drift onto middle-and-leg, thus rewarding sloppy bowling).

D/L must therefore return to their laboratory to develop special brain-scanning helmets to analyse the mental states of players, and thus predict which team would have performed better on the day – based on their confidence levels, intensity of will-to-win, homesickness, and extent of distraction caused by external media and financial issues.

The winning team could thus be fairly adjudicated, and the paying spectator would return home happy that justice had been served. (Whilst inevitable technical teething troubles are overcome, it may also be necessary for the ICC to back up the results of the scanner helmet by spying on the teams to gain the deepest possible insight into the psychological states of the players – the authorities would have to start bugging team meetings and hotel rooms, and conducting elaborate tabloid-style sting operations to trick the players into revealing whether, deep down, they genuinely believe they can win, or are just saying so in press conferences out of contractual obligation.)

In time, it may prove that the helmet-scanner system provides a far more fair and accurate means of deciding cricket matches that cricket itself. Result of games are often determined by moments of unnatural luck, skill or umpiring – science could remove such quirks, and ensure that by removing cricket from cricket matches, the team that deserves to win always emerges triumphant.

The prospect of the final three one-day internationals between England and India has, like accountancy and competitive grouting, failed to capture the public imagination in Britain. Over the last couple of days, The Confectionery Stall has not overheard a single conversation in which two old women on a bench have argued over whether Ian Bell should open the batting, slide down to the middle order, or drop out of the team to spend more time with his family and front-foot defensive technique. Nor have excited school children huddled furtively around their collective radio at the back of a physics class waiting for the latest expert predictions on whether England can defy the odds to win or nearly win at least one of the remaining matches (and thus, surely, emerge from the series as moral victors).

Even meaningful one-day cricket can have a tendency to feel meaningless, so these essentially irrelevant games are perhaps a less-than-tantalising curtain-raiser for what should be a more closely-fought and intriguing Test series – if it is indeed mathematically possible to have a series of two things. Only the ICC believes in the two-thing series. A senior ICC executive was recently overheard boasting to colleagues of having eaten “a series of sticky toffee puddings”. Further investigation revealed the feast to have consisted of one individual-sized dessert and a couple of sneaky bites of his wife’s whilst she went to fetch the cream.

England have been gradually chipping away at India’s superiority as the series has progressed, albeit with the gentle chiselling of an overcautious sculptor. It is hard to see what they could do to hack bigger and fatter chips off this metaphorical marble megaslab. Only a few weeks ago, the same players were demolishing South Africa, and just over a year ago, they were defeating India and Sri Lanka in quick succession. And county cricket is hardly replete with players hammering the selectors’ door down with unanswerable statistical battering rams.

However, the England leadership should now use the remaining games to try to unearth some of the beloved ‘positives’ that sports people love to mine from even the most demoralising defeats. The Confectionery Stall would like to see Kevin Pietersen attempt to solve his team’s perennial struggles to find a dominating opening batsman by leaping into that Trescothick-shaped void himself. The captain’s own relative decline as an attacking force in the limited-overs game may be rectified by such a move – he averaged 65 at a strike-rate of 98 runs per 100 balls in his first 30 ODIs, compared with 35 at a strike-rate of 78 in his last 30. He has talked of England’s need to score hundreds. He should give his team’s best batsman, himself, the best opportunity to lead the way. At least England might overcome their irrational fear of hitting boundaries during the first powerplay.

The Confectionery Stall has long been a champion of faster over-rates, ever since its very first blog five days ago. Here is my first suggestion for how to remedy this scourge on the modern game, which should be applied in addition to more obvious and simple cures. These include players and umpires moving a bit faster between balls and overs, batsmen hitting fours instead of sixes - and captains having the confidence to move fine-leg three yards squarer without having to consult the bowler, a representative panel of wicketkeeper and fielders, his horoscope, his wife, the entrails of a recently run-over squirrel from a local road, and Mike Brearley’s The Art Of Captaincy.

The current alleged Test-match minimum of 15 overs per hour seems a reasonable target at which to aim (although if a pre-war Lord’s Test had been played at 15 overs per hour, the matter would have been raised in Parliament, the monarch may well have had to issue a statement to calm national panic that a war was about to start, and MCC members would probably have burnt down the pavilion).

My suggestion is that, in each hour of cricket, for each over that the fielding side falls behind the required rate, they should forfeit a fielder for the next five overs. This would give a genuine in-game incentive to stop dawdling around and give the paying public what they paid for, when they paid for it. So, if a team kicked off a Test by trundling through 12 overs in the first hour, they would be a man short in the field until the lunch break.

Clearly, there are complications – injury breaks, the third-umpire taking six minutes to rule whether a fielder’s shoelace grazed the boundary rope, a batsman nearing a century realising that he has forgotten to stick his sponsor’s stickers on the back of his bat. So time-keeping would need to be independently monitored.

The fourth umpire should be given a special ICC stopwatch and entrusted with this duty, to add to his current onerous burdens, which include:

• Maintaining a 24-hour armed guard over the box of replacement balls
• Pizza ordering
• Warming the toilet seats in the umpires’ dressing room like a 19th century public school fag (for ten minutes before each interval and the close of play)
• Checking the progress of any eBay auctions in which the two main umpires are bidding (there is a rumour that an ICC Elite Panel umpire once shoved a pair of bails down the throat of a young fourth umpire who had failed to continue bidding for a porcelain David Constant figurine when the price went beyond £4000)
• Working on developing a new signal for ‘5 runs’ to be used when the ball hits a helmet behind the wicketkeeper, or a single leads to four overthrows, or Monty Panesar has to chase a ball from mid-on to the long-on boundary at the MCG
• Writing supportive poems to boost the confidence of a tearful on-field umpire who has just mistakenly given four leg byes, then seen on the TV replay screen that the ball actually feathered the bat before deflecting off the thigh-pad to the boundary
• Autographing copies of Mark Benson’s Missing Leg?, the MCC’s smash-hit new umpiring simulation game for the Playstation. Starting at club level, you must work your way up through the cricketing pyramid – aim to reach county 2nd XI standard within three seasons, the full first-class list in five, and be on the ICC elite panel in 10. But beware – a dubious lbw decision at a crucial stage of your first one-day international could either ruin or make your career, depending on who is batting.

Adding time-keeping to this range of duties would also help raise the fragile self-esteem of fourth umpires, who, as a species, are known to question the need for their own existence. Most have a tendency to curl up in a ball when asked what it is that they actually do, before gently murmuring the latest ICC match regulations to soothe and reassure themselves.

Indeed, there is increasing evidence that fourth umpires are habitually and mercilessly teased by their more senior colleagues, as part of the official ICC initiation to ensure they have the mental fortitude for Test cricket.

Your responses to this suggestion will be gratefully received.

	'Howwwwwizzzzaaaaaaat?' © Getty Images

The second match between India and England was noteworthy for two things. Firstly, confirmation that one half-arsed warm-up game is insufficient preparation for taking on one of the world’s strongest teams on unfamiliar pitches. And secondly, for one of the greatest appeals in the history of cricket.

When Stuart Broad rent the skies of Indore with a caterwauled ‘Howwwwwizzzzaaaaaaat?’ after a well-bowled cutter trapped Rohit Sharma in front of his stumps, he did so with such assurance and certainty that a raised umpirical finger seemed a certainty. The only weakness in Broad’s appeal was the inconvenient truth that the ball had hit Sharma’s bat. And nothing else.

One can only imagine the mental processes that must have coursed through umpire Russell Tiffen’s brain at that moment. Marginal bat-pad appeals are what the professional umpire lives for, why he has spent years incarcerated within the ICC’s secret umpire training and indoctrination facility (rumoured to be in the basement of Wormwood Scrubs prison in London).

But this was not a questionable bat-pad or pad-bat incident. Sharma hit the ball with his bat, whilst his legs were still some distance away. And presumably Tiffen, elite umpire that he is, saw Sharma hit the ball with his bat whilst his legs were still some distance away. And yet Broad appealed with the confidence of a mathematics graduate asserting to an innumerate friend that 3 plus 3 equals 6.

Tiffen must have been momentarily overcome with feelings of confusion and doubt, a fear that his eyesight and/or sanity were failing him, that the cruel Gods of cricket were punishing him for poor decision in a previous match. The ball hit the bat, and the bat hit the ball, and yet there was the bowler leaping up and down, arms and head akimbo, as if the batsman himself had signed an admission of his own lbw guilt. No-one could have blamed Tiffen, in the circumstances, if he had raised the finger of doom out of pure discombobulation. It took a display of quite monumental calmness and self-assurance to give Sharma not out.

For Broad’s part, the appeal was so far-fetched and genuine that there can be no suggestion that this was a devious scheme to hoodwink the official and finesse a wicket from thin air. One can therefore ascribe his behaviour to a mixture of youthful excitement in the middle of an outstanding spell, the effects of the heat; perhaps an unfamiliarity with certain aspects of the lbw law, or the fact that Sharma’s bat might look a bit like a leg from certain angles. And to the England seamer’s new one-man campaign to balance the increasing dominance of bat over ball by trying to persuade the ICC that, on flat batting pitches, bowlers should be credited with a wicket for a nice piece of bowling.

	'No slower human movement has ever been officially recorded than that of two umpires sludging towards each other to confer over the light' © Getty Images

The Ricky Ponting over-rate controversy has been one of the more baffling episodes of recent times, but is something of a breakthrough for those who see slow play as one of the most inexcusable and avoidable blights on the game, a tedious tactic indulged for too long by the authorities.

Cricket has found some spectacular means of worsening its own product in recent times – the current craze for building stadiums which are inaccessible to those unable to paraglide, for example, or pitches as dead as WG Grace, or the rebranding of Bad Light to Mild Murk. Slow over-rates are proud members of this hall of shame, and it is curious that the fitter and more athletic players have become, the less able they have been to average one delivery every 40 seconds.

In my next blog, I will suggest some means of ensuring that over rates are crisp enough to prevent Gubby Allen spinning too dizzyingly in his grave. In the meantime, is it too much to ask for umpires to start setting a brisker example?

No slower human movement has ever been officially recorded than that of two umpires sludging towards each other to confer over the light, like a pair of amorous teenage tortoises unsure of whether to make the first move, or two unhappy commuters trying to miss the same train.

This is sometimes equalled by the funereal dawdle to co-examine the roundness of an allegedly-misshapen ball, as if this responsibility is a holy, god-given ritual as old as time itself, and the ball is a precious relic whose molecules must not be woken.

Such sloth might have been understandable in the olden days of cricket, when umpires were only allowed to stand when they had attained a sufficient age to guarantee that their eyesight had failed. Now, however, the game is officiated by primed, thrusting superathletes (or at least by fit and mostly youngish men who probably have gym memberships). And yet, at stages of matches when they might be expected to scurry urgently in the hope of providing an expectant crowd with maximum value for their considerable money, they seem to move as if they are adjusting tentatively to a brand new spinal cord. Chivvy along, gentlemen.

	The humiliation of Antigua © Getty Images

As I write, England and India have just embarked on a seven-match marathon of one-day internationals, as a prelude to an embarrassingly short two-match travesty of a Test series. England are struggling to restrain the Indian batsmen and emerge from their post-Stanford fug, and the mesmeric Virender Sehwag is again making it seem that there must be more than 360 degrees on his compass, and reminding the world how small a cricket ground can appear with the right man standing in the middle of it.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this series will be the two sides’ respective reactions to their recent performances. Will India be energised or satiated by their demolition of Australian invincibility? Will England be distracted and disjointed by their Stanford failure, or united and refocused?

England’s efforts in Antigua might be charitably described as pallid. From an English cricket supporter’s perspective, it is hard to see any discernible benefit from the Stanford extravaganza, unless you particularly enjoy seeing something you love thoroughly debased and humiliated. The Ashes are looming, and the next six weeks will play a major part in deciding whether England and their supporters begin the series with hope or confidence. At least fear should be off the menu in the post-Warne-McGrath-Gilchrist-Langer-and-Martyn era.

Welcome to The Confectionery Stall, my new blog about the world of cricket as it progresses through the barmiest phase in its illustrious history. No-one knows how the sport will look in ten years. It may have mistaken itself for a golden goose, and cooked and eaten itself. It may have turned out actually to be a golden goose, and be living in a golden coop with its golden goslings whilst eating golden goose biscuits. Or it may be largely the same as it is now.

These are curious times for cricket. Following fifteen years which have witnessed some of the most exciting, adventurous Test cricket of all time played by a collection of irreplaceable greats of the game, Test matches around the world are regularly played in front of paltry crowds. Meanwhile, one-day cricket has sunk ever deeper into a mire of formulaic repetition, its showcase tournaments have been festivals of predictability and cack-headed maladministration, yet the spectators return and the tournaments proliferate.

And for pessimistic Test match lovers, Twenty20 looms over the game like the bacon industry over a lovable baby pig.