We are so exhausted that we will surely win the Champions Trophy © Getty Images

Well, be honest. Did you see that coming from England? If you are claiming that you did, I want to see written proof, verified by an independent third party.

The latest upward surge in England’s wildly fluctuating 2009 has seen them give two outstanding and dominant performances in three days, including a new England record for sixes in a one-day international – 12 (twelve, honestly, twelve) (I saw them all with my own eyes) (albeit on television, so the possibility remains that the entire match was in fact a hoax).

Let’s put this in perspective. The dozen missiles launched by Shah, Morgan and Collingwood into the Centurion stratosphere on Sunday eclipsed England’s previous ODI record of 10 sixes in Napier two winters ago. Let’s put this in further perspective. England hit just eight sixes in the seven-game series against Australia just completed. And let’s now complete the perspective putting − Shah’s six bombs put him second equal on England’s all-time list for ODI aerial boundary blasts (as they will in due course become known to TV audiences); Morgan’s five place him fifth equal.

Once again, following their ultimately successful Ashes blueprint, England have shown that they are never more dangerous than when they have been playing like a bag of pumpkins (nor, worryingly for the rest of the tournament, are they more vulnerable than when they have been on fire). Expectations had been hovering between low and non-existent, even amongst those England fans who had noticed that the tournament was taking place. However, as in the Ashes, they deserve immense credit for rebounding from performances of rare ineptitude for which they were rightly slammed. What a thoroughly odd team.

England thus reach the semi-finals of an international one-day tournament for only the second time in ten attempts since the 1992 World Cup, whilst South Africa depart another event they had looked well-equipped to win, having conceded well over 300 twice in three rusty games.

For all the high-tech scientific methodologies of 21st-century cricket, England may be establishing a new blueprint for tournament success in the modern hyper-crowded international cricket calendar.

1. Ensure that you begin the tournament with your two most important players out injured.

2. Ensure that the remaining players are completely out of form, freshly demoralised after a massive drubbing.

3. Enter the competition with a batting order that habitually crawls along nervously, ineffectively and unexplosively.

4. Back this up with a bowling attack that has lacked penetration and control.

It will be interesting to see whether other teams have the courage to put this plan into practice with quite the same dedication as England.

It has been an interesting enough tournament so far, although lacking a classic match that has gone to the last over, and missing too many of the world’s leading one-day players through injury. With its simple, condensed format, almost every game has mattered, there is no obviously dominant team and even the pretend West Indies team has performed creditably. The entire tournament will take three fewer days than the England-Australia seven-match jeroboam of tedium. And more than a month less than the 2007 World Cup. If brevity is indeed the soul of wit, then (a) my career is in trouble, and (b) it is also the key ingredient in the recipe for interesting 50-over cricket tournaments.

A word too for Anderson and Collingwood. Anderson was expensive, largely ineffective and apparently exhausted in the Australia series, he has taken 6 for 62 from his 19.3 overs against Sri Lanka and South Africa. Collingwood, as generally happens when people start to prematurely question his value, has been at his decisive best.

Both players appear reinvigorated after being rested during the recent 6-1 clobbering. If any further proof were needed that the world cricket calendar is counter-productively, idiotically overloaded – and the case for the prosecution is already struggling to cram all the existing bits of proof into a giant skip to dump outside the courtroom – this is it. International cricketers should not need to be rested. Doing so devalues the concept of international cricket – how can it claim to be the best that nations can pit against each other, when some of the best are too knackered to crawl out of the pavilion?

The authorities responsible are clearly devotees of the foie-gras school of cricket scheduling – the more matches, series, travel and press conferences they can force-ram down the straining gullet of cricket, the tastier the end product will be. Sadly for them, cricketers are not French geese. This is a slippery slope, and there are few signs that the powers that be have any other intention than to shove cricket into a bobsled with no brakes, and kick it down that slope.

	If England win the Champions Trophy, and it is an ‘if’ so big that it can be seen with the naked eye from space, it will be one of the biggest surprises in world history. © Associated Press

The short-awaited Champions Trophy is underway, and, ominously for the other seven teams involved, South Africa have started as if they mean business. The Proteas have suffered serial disappointments in recent tournaments, often pulling defeat from the jaws of victory like an enthusiastically sadistic medieval dentist (sometimes even having to stretch beyond the jaws, and wrench defeat from victory’s duodenum with special forceps).

Graeme Smith and his men have therefore unleashed a new tactic which is almost guaranteed to win them the tournament – getting their traditional choke out of the way early enough that it doesn’t matter. South Africa’s performance in being hammered by the excellent Sri Lankans suggests that they are hell-bent on ultimate glory, and are rightly unwilling to risk starting the tournament looking like potential winners. They even went so far as to enter the event underprepared and rusty, to minimise their chances of peaking fatally early.

I am mildly excited about the tournament. It is of a size and length that should preclude the possibility of losing interest in all cricket, as often happens during World Cups, and features the six strongest teams in ODI cricket, plus West Indies and England representing the world’s up-and-coming limited-overs nations, and hoping to spring a surprise or two as Ireland did in the last World Cup.

England’s 2009-10 season begins on Friday against Sri Lanka, a pathetic five days after their end of their 2009 season (which in turn had begun just over a month after their 2008-09 ended – it would seem fairer and more honest if the relevant cricketing authorities simply lined up the world’s bowlers on a bench and then walked along it, smacking each one in the kneecaps with a baseball bat).

If England win the Champions Trophy, and it is an ‘if’ so big that it can be seen with the naked eye from space, it will be one of the biggest surprises in world history. I have spent the last 48 hours locked inside a darkened scorebox in my garden attempting to envisage scenarios in which England win the Champions Trophy. I have failed. The closest I came was imagining the earth being destroyed by an asteroid strike on Thursday, leading to the tournament winner being decided by a series of coin tosses by the astronauts on the International Space Station. England lost to India in the semi-final.

After the recently-completed one-day series with Australia, I think most England fans would willingly accept such an eventuality. It should also be pointed out that, contrary to press reports, England actually won the series − their victory in game seven on Sunday gave them the whatever-it’s-called trophy under the ICC’s new ‘Winner Stays On’ rule. This was harsh on Australia, who had played well enough and put on a heroically good show of looking like they found the process stimulating and challenging.

England’s preparation for the Champions Trophy seems to have been based on engendering dangerous levels of complacency in their opponents. I know that professional sportsmen these days are repeatedly indoctrinated with the mantra that you must never underestimate your opposition, but England − entering the tournament with their two most important players absent through injury, and with many of the rest mentally and/or physically knackered after a summer that seemed destined never to end − will surely test the underestimation-avoidance capacity of the other teams in their group like it has never been tested before.

Arguably, slowly building up deep-lying complacency through 15 years of almost unbroken limited-over mediocrity might have been taking this modern-day Trojan Horse tactic a little too far, but such plans need to be adhered to with tenacity and persistence. It is clear that, in the aftermath of England’s excellent but ultimately unsuccessful World Cup campaign in 1992, those in charge of English cricket clandestinely decided that never again would the national team suffer the heartache of failing so close to World Cup glory. To date, they have been spectacularly successful in achieving that goal.

A few final thoughts on the England v Australia one-day series recently consigned to the dustbin of history like the half-eaten rat pastie that it was:

First, and most overwhelmingly: Thank goodness that’s over.

Second: The people running cricket are either idiots, or deliberately concocting the schedules of idiots. In England, not content with scarring this summer’s final weeks with a tortuously anticlimactic monotony masquerading as international cricket, they have penned in similarly uninteresting one-day series for next summer around a ludicrously compressed four-Test series with Pakistan.

I have no doubt that scheduling an international cricket season is tricky – I have trouble enough timetabling occasional showers into my weekly routine. However, if you were served the unappetising mess that passes for an English cricketing summer in a restaurant, you would send (or more likely throw) it straight back to the kitchen with a message advising the chef to look for another job better suited to his skill set.

Third: England should not be judged too harshly on this series, missing as they were key players such as Pietersen, Flintoff, Gough, Tendulkar, Warne and Henry VIII. With the first two fit and firing, they could easily have escaped with a 5-2 mauling instead of a 6-1 annihilation.

Fourth: International cricket is seldom seen at its best when it is a contractual obligation rather than the summit of the game.

Fifth: Some stats...

In one-day internationals between the eight major Test playing nations this decade, England’s batsmen:

• have the lowest batting average;
• have the fifth best batting strike rate;
• have blasted the equal fewest centuries;
• have nurdled the second fewest innings of fifty or more;
• have smote the second fewest fours; and
• have thwacked the second fewest sixes.

England’s bowlers cannot lay claim to such a broad smorgasbord of ineptitude, but can boast the third highest bowling average and third worst economy rate over the same period.

England’s batsmen have now racked up three centuries in the 41 ODIs they have attempted to play in the last two years. Among the current Test playing nations, the next least prolific century makers in that time span are New Zealand and Bangladesh with seven tons each. England have also nudged their way to only 37 half-centuries in those 41 games, giving them an average of less than one 50-plus score per match. Oh dear!

All in all, these numbers suggest that England (a) are not very good at one-day cricket, (b) haven’t been very good at it for a very long time, and (c) are unlikely to get much better at it in the foreseeable future. Never mind. It’s only a game. And we won the Ashes. And Australia lost the Ashes. Those are two beacons of hope to cling to in the dark winter months ahead.

Hello again Confectionery Stallers, and welcome back to the blog after a slightly-earlier-and-longer-than-expected holiday. I signed off the last blog in a flurry of post-Ashes statistical frenzy confidently predicting that I would post the Official Confectionery Stall Ashes Review. I can only apologise for not having done so. A number of things cropped up that prevented me doing so.

1. My wife discovered me having a candlelit dinner in a French restaurant with Statsguru. I tried to convince her that it was perfectly innocent, that I just wanted to thank Statsguru for all the help it has selflessly given me through the summer, but only time will tell whether she swallowed it. If she had heard me giggling coyly at all of Statsguru’s jokes, I would have been in big trouble.

Anyway, on our family holiday, I was not permitted to take even so much as a copy of Wisden with me. I tried to argue that if she was allowed to take two children with her, I was entitled to take two boxes of Wisdens with me. My wife, being a lawyer, won the argument convincingly. Even my offer to read her the match reports of England’s series in India in 1981-82 to help her get to sleep was rejected.

2. An unscheduled cricketing comeback. Having not played for three years, I strapped on what was left of my cricket kit for the first time since I became a father and took the field for the mighty Penshurst Park in a colossal local derby against Chiddingstone in the Kent Village League. Cricket simply does not come any more intense than that.

And what a return for Zaltzman, 34, striding to the wicket with eight overs remaining and Penshurst in need of quick runs, like Odysseus returning from his 20-year war-then-gap-decade extravaganza, surviving the easiest documented missed stumping opportunity on 3, spanking a six over long on that flabbergasted me, my wife, my bat, the ball and those of my team-mates who had seen me bat before, then creaming a cut straight to backward point, deciding the purity of the shot merited at least a single, and being run out by between 12 and 14 yards as the non-striking batsman stared in stationary amazement from comfortably and immovably within his crease.

Thus I was out for 17 mesmeric runs following a dazzling display of strokeplay all round the wicket that brought to mind a young Frank Woolley in his pomp, that proved what Mark Ramprakash might have achieved if given the chance at The Oval, that demonstrated once and for all that, while form is temporary, class (or, in this case, an absence of class) is permanent. Chiddingstone luckily fluked the match by seven wickets with about six overs to spare.

3. I have been unable to sit still for long enough to type more than three words at a time due to the febrile, adrenaline-surging excitement that rampaged through my body whenever I thought about the forthcoming seven-match one-day series.

The Ashes were a tasty if uneven appetite-whetting hors d’oeuvre, but now for the real main-course cricket – a Titanic three-week contest to define once and for all which of the two ancient rivals is the greater cricketing nation. There’s probably a trophy for it as well, although no-one is quite sure. And it might affect the ICC rankings too, although no-one knows how they work or what they mean. And there are crucial psychological points to be scored in the build-up to the 2010-11 and 2013 Ashes. And personal cricketing immortality awaits for any player who can send down ten tidy overs or smack a crucial 30 off 20 balls. England against Australia – cricket at its unquenchable greatest.

As I write, three matches in, the series has yet to fully explode into the shimmering majesty the world had expected.

Some may argue that waiting for this series to erupt is like sitting on top of a small hill in Gloucestershire wearing a heat-proof bodysuit while muttering: “Now for a spot of volcano surfing.” Others may suggest that these seven games represent that crassest example of scheduling in cricketing memory, further proof that those who run the game have no discernible soul. A few might even go so far as to argue that these games, along with the 13 (thirteen) (yes, thirteen) (I’m not joking, thirteen) one-day internationals England will play next summer are a cheeky, underhand scheme to discredit further the already-maligned 50-over format by boring the English cricket watching public into going to watch some crown-green bowling.

But for now, let us cast such cynics aside, and luxuriate in the mellifluous rhythms
and majestic drama of England struggling to hit the ball off the square and Australia playing adequately enough to win easily.

4. The Ashes defied analysis. On reflection, there was nothing much to it. There was no great masterplan cunningly executed, no merciless exploitation of opposition weakness. Both sides played two good matches, and two bad ones. Australia failed to capitalise on one of their two good ones, but probably would have done but for rain.

England showed considerable mental resilience to rebound from their staggering ineptitude at Leeds and play an excellent match at The Oval, but only after showing considerable mental frailty to plumb those depths in the first place and necessitate a subsequent display of mental resilience. Having previously displayed similar frailty at Cardiff and similar resilience at Lord’s.

The pattern of the series suggested that if there had been a sixth Test, Australia would have waltzed it. And if there had then been a seventh, England would have trounced their old enemy and regained the Ashes in a blaze of unexpected glory.

If both sides had played well simultaneously, we could have seen a great Test. If both sides had played badly simultaneously, we could have seen one of the all-time classics.

5. I lost my pen.

6. I’ve been working out some stats about how regularly teams score centuries and half-centuries in one-day internationals. And how regularly they concede them. Don’t tell the missus. Please. More on this later, when she’s out of the house. Okay, since you insist, here’s a little taster: since the 2007 series with India, England have amassed three hundreds in 37 games, comfortably the fewest of any major Test nations (and one per 105 innings played by their batsmen − excluding Pietersen, the rest have scored one century, by Strauss, in 288 innings).

However, England’s bowlers have only conceded five in that time – only South Africa (a measly one) have conceded fewer. So while England might not know how to play entertaining 50-over cricket themselves, but they also know how to stop their opponents doing so. Which possibly explains why that Gloucestershire volcano remains resolutely dormant.