The official Confectionery Stall review of the West Indies v England series. Accept no substitute. This is the real thing.

More than a week has passed since the West Indies series ended in an ill-befitting flurry of excitement, like a retired accountant suddenly regretting the drab conformity of his working life and deciding to jump his mobility scooter over the Grand Canyon whilst dressed in a leopard-print leotard and wielding a tomahawk. Already, aside from Taylor’s flambéing of the England top order in Jamaica, the abiding memory of the series is of Collingwood dabbing Hinds to deep square leg for a comfortable single.

The final day frenzy was somewhat out of keeping with the majority of a series that was, for the most part, rubbish, punctuated only rarely by brief outbreaks of real cricket. In the end, Strauss took a bit of a gamble on the final day, but not enough of one, and England came to regret their first-innings fielding errors (and wasted referrals) in Trinidad, and their needless, thoughtless caution in Antigua. If the captain had taken as many risks as he routinely takes ‘positives’ in his post-match interviews, England would probably not have lost.

West Indies deserved their series win, for producing the one decisive passage of play in the four matches, and for having the requisite doggedness (and a sufficiently high boredom threshold) to play for a draw for 15 consecutive days. Not long ago, holding on for 15 overs would have been considered something of a triumph. Time will tell whether this victory constitutes the waters breaking in the long-awaited rebirth of West Indian cricket, or just a minor early contraction, or even merely an incidental bout of stomach cramp brought about by excessive consumption of gherkin-flavoured ice cream. At least there are strong signs that the decade-long gestation may soon be over, and the cricket world will hopefully soon be able to celebrate the arrival of a beautiful, bouncing new-reborn West Indian cricket.

England deserved their series loss, for producing the one truly dire passage of play in the series, and for failing to take major opportunities twice – their flawed decision-making, crucial dropped catches and damaging caution combined to help them avoid what could have been two excellent wins in unfavourable conditions.

I cannot remember a series in which there has been so much dull and pointless cricket. In the last three Tests, England faced 246 overs from part-time bowlers – that amounts to almost three full days of spine-chillingly vapid cricket, from which England collated 880 runs for 11 wickets at 3.6 per over. Cricket is not supposed to be an endurance sport. Nor is cricket-watching. Both came close in this series.

It says much about Test cricket that, even so, three of the four games had spectacular climaxes. However, if pitches like this are allowed to proliferate, Test cricket will die a slow, painful and deserved death. A few die-hard fans will remain gathered sadly round its bedside urging each other to remember it how it had been in its heyday, and not in its final decline into oblivion when it was but a hollow, spluttering shell of the great game it had once been. Meanwhile, administrators will bicker over who should take custody of its less magnificent but more commercially-minded children, 20-over and 50-over cricket, and who should hold the pillow over Test cricket’s face until the twitching stops.

Nevertheless, looking ahead to the Ashes, England are not, I think, in as bad a state as a series loss to one of world cricket’s weaker teams would suggest. The batsmen, having been in something of a collective slump for a couple of years, have mostly buffed their averages and confidence.

	'Technically, Panesar's appealing arguably has more flaws than his batting and fielding combined. Everything is wrong about it – the vocal tone (too much of a caterwaul), the facial expression (too imploring), the desperate hand-clapping (too much like an out-of-his-depth primary school teacher trying to control a classroom full of naughty children)' © Getty Images

Of the bowlers, Swann was excellent throughout, taking more wickets in three matches than Warne took in the Caribbean in his entire career. (Swann took 19 scalps in 3 matches compared to the great Australian’s 17 in 7 – that is 2.6 times as many wickets per match. If Swann can repeat his wickets-per-match superiority over Warne during the Ashes this summer, he will take 76 wickets in the five tests. That is a stone-cold fact.)

Broad and Anderson emerged with creditable returns, and must be ticking off the days until they are released to bowl on a fair surface. If England can find a new fast bowler and a new number 3 batsman, or at least overhaul, respray and relaunch old ones, and a pair of magic wicket-keeping gloves, they should be competitive. It would help if Australia do the decent, gentlemanly thing, and sustain two or three key niggling injuries before the series. And don’t discover a spinner.

England will have a greater chance of success if they fill the glaring vacancy in their multitudinous non-playing workforce. The team’s support staff has for some time been one of the British government’s principal strategies for keeping unemployment levels in check, and current figures suggest it is the only one still working. However, one crucially important position remains unfilled, arguably the key role in preparing the players and enabling them to extract the maximum benefit from their performances − an appealing coach.

Appealing is one of the most important facets of the modern game, and England are hopeless at it. Panesar, of course, is the worst. Technically, his appealing arguably has more flaws than his batting and fielding combined. Everything is wrong about it – the vocal tone (too much of a caterwaul), the facial expression (too imploring), the desperate hand-clapping (too much like an out-of-his-depth primary school teacher trying to control a classroom full of naughty children), the backwards hopping (it seldom pays to look like you have just trodden on a snake unless you have actually just trodden on a snake).

England must invest some of the ECB’s billions teaching their bowlers how to convince an umpire – personally, I think the two-fingered point from the crouched position is usually effective, possibly accompanied by a gradual arching of the back; and it might be worth trying an old-fashioned barked ‘howzat’ rather than the modern extended eleven-man yowl.

And now for the one-day series. I admit that I struggle motivating myself to watch 50-over cricket, and England continue to look as well-equipped for the purpose as they do for a polar expedition, but it would be nice to see England finish at least one match this winter with a smile on their faces.

Next time: Part 1 of the World Unpredictable XI.

How much of a gambler is Andrew Strauss? The cricket world is about to find out. Will he have the nerve to set West Indies, say, 200 off 70 overs? Will he settle for, say, 240 off 60? Does he truly believe that losing 2-0 is as good (or bad) as losing 1-0? England’s final chips of the series are in the captain’s paw, the roulette wheel is spinning, Strauss is nervously twitching his bow tie, the croupier is looking at him expectantly, and Chris Gayle is puffing on a massive cigar. It has been a grindingly tedious night at the casino, but it could still end in a frenzy of excitement.

Given the state of the pitch, England’s almost Sisyphean struggle to take wickets, the increasing tendency of their best fielders to drop relatively simple catches, and the impressively decreasing tendency of the West Indies to subside at the first available opportunity, Strauss’ decision will probably make little difference – it will require a spell of Taylor-in-Jamaica inspiration from one or more of the English bowlers (most likely Anderson with the new ball, then Panesar with the old), and/or a collective choke of England-in-Jamaica proportions by the West Indian batsmen, as the fishbone of victory lodges in the oesophagus of tangibility. Neither seems likely, but either is possible.

Nevertheless, the skipper’s call will reveal much about his captaincy. Since the Sabina Park capitulation, he has batted admirably and positively, but England have consistently failed to gamble − in their batting order and declaration in Antigua, their selection in Barbados, their field placings (at times), and, arguably, in choosing to bat first in both of the last two tests – perhaps, given the state of the pitch, it could have been worth Strauss’s while to rip the Oval 1998 page from the Arjuna Ranatunga book of captaincy (one of cricket’s jauntier tomes), insert the opposition on a flat pitch, and give his bowlers maximum wicket-taking, limb-resting and conditions-and-umpire-aggravated-frustration-cooling time. Admittedly, England have no Muralitharan, but then again, they also have no Wickremasinghe, so it might have been worth a punt.

Gayle’s claim that West Indies have been trying to win throughout this match must rank as one of international cricket’s most bared-faced fibs, and congratulations to him for managing to make this outlandish statement without breaking down into a giggling fit. It might have been equalled had Douglas Jardine averred at the end of the Bodyline series that he just asked his seamers to hit a tidy line and length, or Ravi Shastri declared in his autobiography that he just wanted to entertain, and damn the consequences. However, it is now more than possible that Gayle and his team, despite doing almost everything in their power to avoid such an eventuality, may find themselves accidentally winning the match (with apologies to the unquenchable fire of Fidel Edwards).

The Confectionery Stall prediction: West Indies to close on 173-6 chasing 224 to win. Roughly. Whatever happens, it will at least give England something to focus on for the rest of the day before noticing that Australia are good again. Really good. And getting better. (And if the two series with South Africa had been counted as one six-match series, it would have been one of the great series of all time.)

	The referral system’s effect has largely been to overturn correct decisions and uphold wrong ones © Getty Images

A potentially nerve-jangling end to this largely drab series will certainly make a refreshing change, if only through having a day’s cricket in which the main talking point will be cricket, not the accursed referral system.

To those uninitiated in the arcane, murky and incomprehensible processes of top-level sporting administration, the referral system appears either to have been myopically conceived, or to have been based on some cast-off pages found in the recycling bin of a special ICC room containing in Dubai an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters attempting to write a three-volume anthology of poems about David Boon.

The system is as confused and incomplete as a dog without a head, its obvious and easily remediable flaws exacerbated by umpiring that might as well have been carried out by the same bonceless pooch.

Daryl Harper has appeared to be umpiring a different game to the one taking place in Trinidad. (In fact, the closest match I have found based on the pattern of his decision-making suggests he has been hallucinating a Test between Australia and India from December 1967 in his hometown of Adelaide, and officiating, quite well, on that instead. When he gave Strauss not out after an edge to Ramdin that was both audible and visible, he thought he was turning down a caught behind appeal from Graham McKenzie against Farokh Engineer (correctly, as it happens – Engineer’s bat brushed the ground and wicketkeeper Barry Jarman only half appealed). Whether or not Harper attended this match, watched it on television, or listened to it on the radio, remains a matter for conjecture, but it clearly lodged in his subconscious and is now seeping out at an awkward time. And the only explanation for Aleem Dar failing to overturn the indecision was that he was understandably distracted by an escaped rhinoceros rampaging around the umpires’ room.)

The referral system’s effect has largely been to overturn correct decisions and uphold wrong ones. Why the predictive element of Hawkeye is not used is, frankly, a baffling piece of cricketing Ludditery. If the technology is trusted to track the ball accurately to the point of impact − the difficult bit, requiring complex and highly advanced equipment – why not allow it to complete the task by then predicting the remainder of a parabola – the scientifically simple part, requiring some a computer or a bendy ruler?

Science, the coquettish little vamp that she is, can predict for us where comets are going to be in 200 years’ time. I think the ICC could unleash science’s smart-arsed power to compute where a cricket ball would almost certainly be six feet from where it last demonstrably was. As it is, the TV umpire is being shown the ball’s path to impact, but then being forced to guess what happens next. In my experience, in matters of science, science will generally take more accurate and better informed guesses than guesswork. Which partially explains why I have never won a Nobel Prize for physics, whereas several physicists have.

There seems no reason why, within a couple of years, a properly managed combination of Hawkeye, Snicko, Hi-Motion and Hot Spot (coincidentally the names Tiffin, Harper, Dar and referee Alan Hurst use when they’re pretending to be a hip-hop group whilst warming up before the start of play) could not be able to produce a close-to-definitive verdict on most appeals within 30 to 40 seconds. Furthermore, with the Strauss non-dismissal yesterday, an elementary psychologist, or parent, could have taken look at the England captain’s face and told the on-field umpire that the batsman was at least 135% out.

At the moment, the half-use of only some of the available technology is tantamount to using the latest electronic medical equipment to diagnose an illness, then asking a child with a pair of scissors and a plastic stethoscope to perform the operation. If I may exaggerate wildly to make a point.

COMING SOON:
The Confectionery Stall Review Of The Series, and, following on from The World’s Dullest XI, the Confectionery Stall World’s Most Unpredictable XI.

And now, for what they are worth in the current context of international cricket, which is slightly less than nothing, here are some thoughts on the now-mercifully-finished Barbados Test.

This was one of the worst cricket matches imaginable, played out on a truly dreadful pitch, of almost nil sporting interest. An alien or American billionaire, or indeed any other fictional character, had chanced upon this travesty of a game, he, she or it would have assumed: either that cricket is an arcane and impenetrable religious ritual designed to reflect the interminable tedium of life and thus assuage the stroppiness of an unusually cantankerous dullness-loving deity; or that this match was a meaningless and complete waste of everyone’s time (except for a few stressed parents who used it to pacify over-sugared children). In either case, cricket would have been safely preserved for us humble earthlings.

This Test was an embarrassment to cricket. There was no punishment for batting error, no reward for good bowling. They could have played until Matt Prior’s second child is born and it would still probably have been a draw.

The dismal pitch was not merely batsman-friendly, it was knocking on the batsman’s hotel room door at midnight brandishing a bottle of champagne and wearing a negligee. Only Shah, Gayle and Hinds were gentlemen enough to politely spurn its advances. Good on them. If the wicket had been loaded any more decisively against the bowlers, the groundstaff would have found themselves in The Hague facing human rights abuse charges, with a tearful Ryan Sidebottom and Daren Powell consoling each other in the witness box. The Americans did not need to resort to waterboarding – if they have made their Guantanamo ‘guests’ bowl on this pitch, they would have confessed to absolutely anything by the time the third new ball was due.

With hindsight, it was fortunate that the inane and inept referral system distracted so much attention from the anti-cricket on display. Perhaps Daryl Harper and his on-field confreres were merely trying to inject some talking-points into the morass of futility before them.

It was the latest in a thoroughly uninspiring glut of run-gluts. During the Barbados game, I started to have vivid recurring dreams about watching a Test match in which both teams are bowled out for under 200 in the first innings on a green-tinged wicket, with momentum swinging wildly one way then the other, in which fast bowlers are restored to a greater role than the ceremonial propulsion of an unresponsive conker onto the middle of a lavishly advertised bat, and in which a half-century requires a display of skill, nerve and courage by a batsman – before waking up to be confronted with the grim reality of Kevin Pietersen blocking half-volleys from Ryan Hinds.

So what did this game prove? That West Indies are tougher than they were, or at least that Sarwan is; that Ramdin can score runs on a dead pitch against exhausted bowlers; that Bopara isn’t useless; that no parent in their right mind should allow their child to take up fast bowling; and that Cook is less vulnerable to the moving ball outside off stump when the ball doesn’t move outside off stump.

Cook is a curious player. He appears both unusually talented and extremely limited, and both mentally strong and psychologically suspect. He is without question bizarrely awkward for a man who has reached 3000 Test runs at a prodigious age – when batting, he generally looks as if he has borrowed someone else’s limbs. He could smash a run-a-ball hundred and still appear to be out of form. In this series, he has succeeded on the deader pitches, but failed on the more difficult one – so what more have England learnt about him? He is clearly a useful Test batsman, but will he prove to be much more than that against stronger opposition (eg. Australia) on trickier surfaces (eg. in England)?

England unquestionably picked the wrong XI for this game – trying to bowl any side out twice on this pitch with three decent fast-medium bowlers and a decent finger spinner revealed optimism levels bordering on the delusional. That said, they could have brought Larwood, Statham, Trueman, Laker and SF Barnes back to life and they would still have struggled to bowl West Indies out. They might have restricted them to around 550, but it is more likely that the late, great quintet would have taken one look at the surface, feigned some thigh strains, and taken the first rocket back to the comfort of the ethereal pavilion in the sky.

Please let the Trinidad Test be a proper one. Like the one in Johannesburg. I am starting to wish that the 2009 Ashes had been played in November and December of 2008. The conditions in England wouldn’t have been ideal for cricket, but Australia are starting to look alarmingly potent.

	Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook were filled with confidence after batting through an entire Test at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium © Getty Images

1. The 2007 World Cup has not finished with cricket yet. It was, on many levels, perhaps the most disappointing sporting tournament since some very hungry lions ate all the Christians on day one of a scheduled 4-week festival of gladiator eating during the later stages of the Roman empire. The idiotic scenes at the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium proved that it retains the capacity to disappoint even two years after it spluttered into its barely merited place in some extremely unimpressed history books.

Building a cricket stadium without a useable cricket pitch anywhere in it, despite prior warnings not to build a cricket stadium there, displayed a similar level of crass-headed ineptitude as opening a restaurant and then shooting anyone who asked to see the menu, or constructing the world’s most advanced chemistry lab and staffing it with ill crocodiles.

2. Confidence is everything. This was proved by:

(a) England’s openers. In Jamaica, neither Andrew Strauss nor Alastair Cook showed many discernible signs of ever having held a bat or strapped on pads. However, suffused with inner belief after batting through an entire Test Match at the Sir Viv Stadium, they attacked the game at the ARG with purpose. When you see Strauss spank an off-drive for four early in his innings, you know that one of three things has happened: 1. You are watching a recording from 2004 or 2005; 2. You have taken a blow to the head and need to seek medical assistance; or 3. He is in prime form. Fortunately for England, it was the last of these.

(b) Allen Stanford. If you have the bare-faced balls to pitch up at Lord’s in a helicopter, you can get away with anything. For a while. Even if it’s not your helicopter.

3. Andrew Strauss reads The Confectionery Stall. The skipper quite clearly marched to the crease with a print-out of this pre-match statistical bleat about England’s failure to score big hundreds wedged inside his jockstrap. He kept it there until he had 169 to his name. Point proved, he then wrung it out and mailed it back to Confectionery Stall head-quarters with a little note saying: “Satisfied? When did you last score a Test 150?” To which the Confectionery Stall will respond: “Never. Yet. But also I have never chucked it away straight after reaching my century in a Test match. So, let’s call it one-all.”

4. Playing cricket against West Indies is like the Soviet Empire – not as terrifying as it used to be. England have faced 184 overs of spin in two Tests this series. That is, according to the Great Omniscient Lord Statsguru, only 48 fewer overs of tweaky stuff than they received from the West Indies during the entire decade of the 1980s. And bear in mind that many of those overs were bowled either to allow the bloodstains on the batting crease to dry out, or to prolong the England innings to give Greenidge and Haynes more of a rest before having to bat again.

5. The location of all Test matches should henceforth be kept secret until two days before the start of play. The ARG, usually the spiritual home of the run-glut, gave cricket a good game with a thrilling conclusion at less than 48 hours’ notice. The Sir Viv Stadium embarrassed a sport, a nation and a cricketing great after a nine-month gestation period in which, far from giving birth to a beautiful bouncing Test wicket, it pulled a bag of sand from under its shirt and said, “Sorry, I was never really pregnant. Someone should have looked at the six-month scan. It was quite clearly just a bag of sand.”

Furthermore, the wicket for the Karachi Test produced an almost entirely pointless match, 100 runs per wicket until Sri Lanka got bored on the last afternoon and tried to lose the game for a laugh. It was almost as if some shady conspiracy was at work to discredit Test cricket and remind cricket fans quite how tedious a five-day game on a meaninglessly dull pitch can be – while Virender Sehwag was blasting his first three balls into the stratosphere in a Twenty20 international. Very suspicious. No-notice Test matches will put an end to such subterfuge.

6. There is a clause in the England team’s central contracts that allows all brains to be disengaged within 20 minutes of the close of play. This is the only logical explanation for the ritualistic sending in Jimmy Anderson as night watchman on day three. It was an entirely thoughtless decision, if one can indeed describe as a “decision” something cannot possibly have been done with even a semblance of a decision-making process.

England, in a position of zero vulnerability, had no need to protect themselves. However, they evidently thought that they would be better safe than safe. Even having taken this ludicrously conservative step, to send in Anderson illustrated a total lack of cranial activity in the dressing room.

If they wanted to protect the front-line batsmen, why not send in Swann or Broad, decent batters and clean hitters with the capacity to attack, or even Harmison, who can give the ball a merry clubbing when the stars are in the correct alignment and who has a sound enough defence to take good stab at blocking out three overs from a partially-interested bowling attack? Anderson’s long but unproductive time at the crease, with a less-than-melodious Cook at the other end, meant that the real batsmen then batted in too much of a hurry.

It might seem a relatively insignificant matter, but it is probable that it cost England the game. In all, it betrayed a team severely lacking confidence in its own ability with bat and ball, and equally severely lacking in flexibility of thought. I know it’s only a game and I’m 34 with better things to worry about and children to feed, but it really annoyed me.

7. The cricket world knows that it still doesn’t know whether it is worth England’s while persevering with Steve Harmison. He bowled well enough through his sickness in Antigua, without showing conclusively whether he is (a) still a potential thoroughbred, (b) an occasional horse-for-a-specifically-bouncy-course, or (c) ripe for retirement to the ECB’s fast bowling stud farm at Old Trafford, to be bred with a special egg containing Harold Larwood’s DNA.

Harmison now possesses a frankly Mohammed-Sami-esque set of statistics dating back two-and-a-half years. From his breakthrough second innings 4-33 against South Africa at The Oval in 2003, to his 11-76 against Pakistan at an alarmingly springy Old Trafford in 2006, he took 146 wickets at 25. Since then, he has pocketed just 47 scalps in 18 Tests at an average of 46, albeit that he has occasionally chipped in with some useful runs. So which Harmison will emerge in Barbados? The bone-jarring destroyer, or the new Derek Pringle?

England urgently need a strike bowler – in their past eight full Tests, they have twice comfortably failed to defend sizeable fourth innings targets, and twice failed to bowl themselves to victory on the back of a vast first innings lead. (Since the end of the 2005 Ashes, 50 bowlers in world cricket have taken 30 or more Test wickets. Of these, only one of the 26 with the best strike-rates is English – Sidebottom, at 17th.) They also urgently need to decide whether that strike bowler will ever again be Harmison.

	“Mmm. These guys are a bit better than we expected, aren’t they? Mmm. What to do?" © AFP

It might seem mildly absurd following England’s supine dismissal for 51 to worry about batsmen making big hundreds. Concentrating on reaching two figures is a more pressing problem for the immediate future. In fact, the capitulation in Jamaica was so abject as to lead to considerable media speculation about a recall for Matthew Hoggard as a specialist batsman.

Andrew Strauss has endured probably the shortest and least romantic honeymoon period in cricket captaincy history, a one-night stay in a flea-infested seaside B&B rather than a three-week snorkelling and canoodling extravaganza in Mauritius.

So what should he say to his team as they strive to put the Jamaica ‘glitch’ behind them?

Here are some options for his consideration:

1. “We’ve got to get back on the horse, boys. And let’s try to make the horse move this time. Let’s not just sit on the horse until it gets bored and tips us off again. Let’s get on the horse, and stay on the horse. Right. Let’s go. Anyone know how to ride a horse?”

2. “Remember, lads, we’re not as bad as we looked in the first Test. Our performances over the last couple of years prove that. So when we go out on that field today, I want you all to remember that we are not a bad cricket side. We are an adequate cricket side. Now let’s go out there and prove that to the watching world.”

3. “Once more unto the breach, dear, er, friends... well, colleagues. Let’s go with ‘dear colleagues’... Once more. And let’s try not to make quite such a pig’s breakfast of the breach this time. And when I say ‘once more’, I acknowledge we are on central contracts and there isn’t exactly a queue of county players banging the selectors’ door down with a battering ram made out of their own averages. So, realistically, it will be ‘several times more unto the breach’. But if you want to be on that plane to South Africa next winter, I suggest you put in at least one or two good performances between now and the end of the Ashes. Or else. And, if I may borrow further from Henry V, Cooky, could you try to stand a bit more like a greyhound in the slips? Good lad. And could you also at least try not to prod tentatively at good-length balls outside your off stump. What was that, Alastair? I’m a hypo-what?”

4. “If the whole of the top six can throw their wickets away irresponsibly for 97 thus letting the rest of the team down, we’ll be in with a chance.”

5. “Belly, I have full confidence in you. I am absolutely sure you’ll be able to get a full tray of drinks out to the middle in an hour’s time without spilling any of it. I know you can do it at this level.”

6. “Mmm. These guys are a bit better than we expected, aren’t they? Mmm. What to do? Right, got it. Hey guys, I want to get rid of the coach. Can someone leak that into the public domain please. Thanks.”

One of the more curious aspects of England’s unimpressive recent cricket is the amount of criticism directed at the one batsman who has risen above the swamp of mediocrity in which the rest of the top order have been paddling their increasingly leaky rubber dinghy. Kevin Pietersen’s tightrope-walk between audacity and idiocy has polarised opinion like a man painting a bear head-to-toe in Tippex, and has, without question, deflected more searching analysis from those who merit it more. Was his miscued first-innings thwack at Suleiman Benn an irresponsible grab at personal glory or a poorly-executed but tactically-justifiable attempt to dominate a dangerous opponent? Or both? Did Pietersen act like a spoilt child hurling himself into a vat of jelly babies, or like the head of a bird welfare charity putting all the takings from a charity food fight on a 10-1 shot in the 2.40 at Chepstow in an effort to secure a better future for some little orphan ducks? Only Pietersen and almighty Zeus may ever know.

It is, however, an unarguable fact that the Pietermaritzburg Pulveriser regularly fails to batter his opponents into quivering pulverised wrecks, as he is clearly capable of doing. And this is despite having what may well be Test cricket’s best conversion rate for turning 50s into 90s – 19 times out of 27, a marginally better ratio even than the voraciously undismissable Bradman. However, KP’s problems begin as soon as he arrives within 10 of his century. And here comes Dr Statistics to prove it. He’s holding a clipboard, he’s brandishing his stethoscope, and he wants you to pay attention.

In Test history, 80 players have scored 90 or more at least 15 times. Taking their average scores in those innings of 90-plus, Pietersen has the 79th-best record of those 80 players, better only than renowned serial century-flunker Michael Slater. Here is Exhibit A.

So while Pietersen generally succeeds in capitalising on good starts, having done so, he fails to capitalise on that initial capitalisation. His 15 centuries have averaged only 137 – only Michael Atherton of the 59 players with as many hundreds as Pietersen averages lower for his centuries (135) – see Exhibit B. There were, of course, mitigating circumstances for the Lancashire limpet. By the time he had staggered across the three-figure threshold, he was usually at a point of total mental and physical exhaustion after a two or three long days of heroic defiance.

By comparison, of Pietersen’s contemporaries, Ponting’s centuries average 175, Sehwag’s 199 (helped by the fact that his last 11 centuries have been over 150), Kallis’ 214 (helped by a suspiciously large number of not-outs), Sangakkara’s 276, and Chanderpaul’s 278 (also a not-out-assisted figure, aided by the rank incompetence of his tail-enders). And if Pietersen wants advice on how to punish opponents when on top, he should knock on the hotel room door of his England coach Andy Flower, tell him to lift his head out of his hands and stop repeatedly muttering “What have I got myself into?” to himself, and demand to know how he contrived to make his 12 centuries for Zimbabwe average a frankly ludicrous 340.

It should be noted that Pietersen’s figures are damaged by the fact that he has never been remained undefeated scoring a century, and has sometimes sacrificed his wicket when batting with the tail in an effort to secure runs for the team rather than red ink for himself. His is not the record of a selfish player. On the occasions when he has perhaps been dismissed trying to stamp his own distinctive supremacy on a match, it is perhaps because he knows that if he does not do so, with Flintoff out of form, there is not another England batsman who either will or can.

However, after England’s Ashes humiliation in 2006-07, Pietersen himself talked passionately about the need for himself and his team-mates to score big hundreds. They have almost totally failed to do so – of their 28 centuries since then, only four have been over 150, and 12 have been under 110. The frustration and fascination of Pietersen as a batsman is his rare mixture of brilliance and vulnerability. His “that’s the way I play” claim essentially suggests that if he removes the latter, he will lose some of the former. But his ascent to true cricketing greatness will wait until he is able to turn his outbursts of stunning virtuosity into match-determining dominance.

The failure to capitalise on centuries is not Pietersen’s failing alone. England as a team have for some time shown little interest in scoring big centuries. Players seem to lose one or more of concentration, motivation or their general mental faculties once the advertising logo on the back of their bats has been waved at the requisite number of cameras (one of the more irritating and distasteful aspects of the modern commercialisation of cricket – a moment of proud personal triumph debased into a glib publicity opportunity, rather like a husband and bride eating Heinz Baked Beans in their wedding photographs, or a priest reciting the slogans of top whisky companies at an alcoholic’s funeral).

Strauss and Cook both have even worse century-inning averages than Pietersen, and Vaughan and Trescothick were only a little better. Since Graham Gooch’s 333 against India in 1990, the highest score by an England player is Pietersen’s 226 against West Indies in 2007 – the 51st highest score in all Test cricket since Gooch trudged back to the Lord’s pavilion burning with a mixture of pride in his achievement and abject disgust and self-loathing at being bowled by Manoj Prabhakar on a flat track.

Quite why England are so unable to score big is a mystery. No doubt some will their finger of blame at: the advent of colour television lowering our national boredom threshold; or a post-colonial unwillingness to assert English dominance; or the end of rationing; or Kolpak players and Tony Greig; or Gordon Brown and the bankers. It is probably a combination of all of these and more.

Gooch’s innings, incidentally, remains the only English score of 250 or more in my lifetime. Which puts England three 250s behind Zimbabwe. In fact, other countries’ players have notched up 42 such scores between them. Also in fact, since the momentous event of my birth, of the eight major Test nations, England have the lowest combined century-innings average, the second worst conversion rate of centuries in 150s (ahead of New Zealand) and the worst conversion rate of centuries into double centuries. England have averaged one double century every 25 Tests – the other nations between them score one on average every 11½ matches. Perhaps my entry into the world was not the turning point for English batsmanship that everyone had hoped it would be.

(Thanks again to Cricinfo’s Statsguru facility for its invaluable assistance in this blog. I am now firmly of the opinion that Statsguru is not only the greatest sporting statistical aid in the world, but also the single greatest invention in the entire history of the universe. Without it, the research for this article would have taken several years and at least one marriage.)

Oops. From an England perspective, that Test match was, at best, a blooper. A joyous occasion for a resurgent West Indies, and thus for world cricket as a whole, but, for England, a 24-carat debacle; a pure, unadulterated fiasco sandwich with lashings of farce. Even the most riotously optimistic England supporter would struggle to find more than the most lukewarm of positives to snuggle up to on these cold winter nights. And as an England fan, it is hard for me to find much humour in a situation so cricketingly bleak, especially when the rest of the cricket world is already laughing its head off.

Two days after the event, English cricket is still stumbling around in a state of catatonic shock, this fresh embarrassment heaped upon its recent upheaval, which possibly explains coach Andy Flower’s almost outlandish suggestion that it is now “best to stay calm and not to have knee-jerk reactions on selection”.

While I accept that it may be necessary after such a humiliation to allow sufficient time for the investigating authorities to bag and label all the evidence, I would argue that neither staying calm nor artificially fixing the selectorial knee in a rigid brace is now a sensible course of action. The selectors’ response to England’s prolonged stagnation over the last two years suggests that the knee in question is monumentally arthritic in any case – any sign that it retains some capacity at least for bending, if not full jerking, would now be welcome. If Owais Shah does not play in the second Test, he would be fully justified in rifling through Ian Bell’s bag to see if Edgy from Edgbaston possesses incriminating photographs of the selectors dressed up like Douglas Jardine and the Nawab of Pataudi at a Bodyline-themed orgy.

I have detailed England’s batsmen’s diminishing returns in previous pieces. In the illusory name of loyalty, England have accepted and indulged adequacy for too long from too many, and their obstinate refusal to contemplate shuffling their batting pack from time to time has left them in the avoidably idiotic position of having a swathe of players in career slumps but no-one with more than fleeting Test experience to replace them.

Bell and Cook have both shown sufficient qualities to suggest that they will be good Test players for some time, but surely both would benefit from a spell ironing out the technical and mental quirks of their games away from the pressure of international cricket, to relearn the art of building an innings in less demanding surroundings (Bell’s 199 at Lord’s against South Africa immediately followed a double century for Warwickshire). The Australian teams of recent vintage suggest that many if not most batsmen peak in their late 20s and early-to-mid 30s. For England to obsessively retain their younger players may even be to their long-term detriment.

	For how much longer can England rely solely on Pietersen, the Hampshire Hammer? © Getty Images

Without nostalgically longing for a return to the breakneck selectorial speed-dating of the 1980s (when attending a Test match had the added frisson that most of the spectators could entertain realistic hopes of playing in the following game), being dropped should not be a cataclysmic event. Ideally, England should reach a situation where they effectively have a squad of 16 or 17 players who can make up the match XI according to form and fitness, rather than according to from whom the ECB feels it needs to its their central contract’s money’s worth.

The two most disturbing aspects of England’s performance were the familiarity of the failings – the visual and statistical evidence is clearly of a team which is not only failing to learn its lessons, but is skiving school altogether – and the increasingly disturbing dependence on Pietersen.

The Hampshire Hammer is the only batsman scoring hundreds regularly (9 in his last 23 Tests, plus two 90s; by comparison, Strauss has 4 centuries in his last 26 matches, Cook 1 in 20, Bell 2 in 22, Collingwood 2 in 18, and Flintoff 1 in 35). He is also currently the only frontline batsman who is both willing and able to attack to the opposition (even Flintoff is striking less than 50 per 100 balls since his return last summer). England urgently need at least one more aggressor – too often a couple of wickets leads to a near-total scoreboard paralysis.

Pietersen’s wicket is therefore now worth too much to both England and their opponents. If Alfred Hitchcock were directing the television coverage of England’s Tests, whenever Pietersen is out in a tight situation, he would cut straight to close-up shots of the widening eyes of the rest of the team, accompanied by three dramatic, discordant violin chords. (One also assumes that Hitchcock would put an end to the irritatingly excessive use of the zoom whilst the ball is in flight between bowler and batsman.)

Nevertheless, from a broader cricketing perspective, this was an inspirational match in many ways, with Benn providing their best slow bowling since Gibbs, and Taylor their best spell of fast bowling since the retirements of Walsh and Ambrose ended the forty-year lineage of great Caribbean pacemen. As new dawns go, this promises to be far less false than any of recent vintage.

England, however, are a team with serious, long-standing problems. So, for my second Ashes prediction, I now confidently revise my previous 2-2 forecast to a disgruntling 3-1 Australian win. The Aussies may be declining, but they can be confident that England are getting worse faster.

I woke this morning with an increasingly unusual feeling in my cricketing belly – one of genuine anticipation. This emotion, of course, has almost been successfully and completely excised from the cricketing calendar by the powers that be, as they pile wodge upon wodge of increasingly indistinguishable contests on top of each other, crammed into the few remaining crannies of time available.

	'Pietersen appears to be in vengeful mood, like Anne Boleyn after her husband had had her head chopped off, only with his head still attached to his central nervous system, and therefore more able to act on his anger than the young church-schisming temptress of Kent and England' © Getty Images

Furthermore, as a die-hard lover of the five-day game, Test matches increasingly seem to me to be tagged on as a regrettable but contractually essential precursor to an interminably tedious one-day series, which would be forgettable were anyone able to take enough notice of it in the first place for its existence to register in their brain before being lost into the swamp of time and the ICC rankings.

However, hearing the words “Sabina Park” on the radio instantly conjured up childhood memories of listening to terrified English commentators describing even more terrified English players in the terrifying heyday of the Caribbean pace attack, and of trying to work out if the resounding clonk I had just heard was leather on bat (unlikely), leather on stump (likely), or leather on nose (probable).

This is a series that possesses that rarest of cricketing commodities – rarity. It is only the second time in the last 11 years that West Indies have hosted England in a Test series. (Admittedly, when the two sides reconvene for a hastily-arranged two-match series in England in May, minutes after concluding business in the Caribbean, and seconds after some of the players have returned from briefly adorning the non-business end of the IPL, it will be the third time in five years that the two have met in England, it will begin almost before the and looks set to smash all records for Least Eagerly Awaited Test Series Of All Time.)

There are other factors adding to the excitement. Under their new captain Strauss, England are entering a new dawn, albeit with the same players who have boldly woken up on its last few new dawns, stretched, pulled back the new curtains, calculated the minimum allowable performance to avoid being dropped, hit the snooze button and settled down for a well-deserved lie-in, whilst Owais Shah sits alone in the breakfast room, picking at his corn flakes with an increasingly irritable spoon.

England should win, although, hopefully, not quite as easily as in recent series between the two, if only because of the height of their bowlers – the most successful bowlers in the Caribbean recently include Harmison, Nel, Clark and Shabbir Ahmed – and because deposed skipper Pietersen appears to be in vengeful mood, like Anne Boleyn after her husband had had her head chopped off, only with his head still attached to his central nervous system, and therefore more able to act on his anger than the young church-schisming temptress of Kent and England. This is all dependent on someone concocting a method of dismissing Chanderpaul, who is arguably now the single most important player in world cricket, as well as the oddest.

A few statistical pointers:

The Lara Effect

Chanderpaul averaged 44 before Lara retired at the end of 2006, but a Bradman-embarrassing 104 since then. The team’s next best two batsmen have also posted more impressive numbers since the great Trindadian swished his spectacular bat for the final time. Both Sarwan and Gayle averaged 38 before his retirement; they average 45 and 44 respectively since.

Fast Bowlers

In their last 16 Tests, Steve Harmison averages 47, Fidel Edwards 32, and Jerome Taylor 31. Harmison does however average 24 in 12 Tests against West Indies.

Spin Bowlers

Since 1980, England’s specialist spinners in the West Indies have taken 53 wickets in 6 series at an average of 49.70.

England’s stagnant batsmen

Excluding Pietersen (50) and Flintoff (32), five of England’s current top 7 have career averages in the low 40s. However, their recent form is less impressive.

Cook: career average 42. Last 19 Tests: 36. First 17 Tests: 48.
Strauss: career average 42. Last 24 Tests 37. First 31 Tests: 46.
Bell: career average 41. Last 21 Tests: 36. First 24 Tests: 45.
Pietersen: career average 50. Last 20 Tests: 45. First 25 Tests: 54.
Collingwood: career average 42. Last 24 Tests: 37. First 17 Tests: 48.
Flintoff: career average 32. Last 12 Tests: 24. First 60 Tests: 33.
Prior: career average 40, but excluding century-spanking debut, has averaged 33 over 11 Tests.

(And not forgetting Vaughan: career average 41. Last 22 Tests: 33. First 60 Tests: 44.)

The statistics speak for themselves. Exactly what they are trying to say is not clear, and the selectors almost certainly are sticking their fingers in their ears and humming the Test Match Special theme tune to themselves, but they are certainly speaking.

Possible interpretations of their utterances include:

• “These boys have been operating in the comfort zone of undroppability for too long.”
• “Moores was really, really adequate.”
• “They still haven’t got over the 5th day at Adelaide in 2006.”
• “If at least two or three of you don’t swing your career curves upwards again, you could lose this series.”

Finally, an apology. To Jack Russell. I have lain awake over the last few nights tormented by feelings of guilt and anguish that I have perpetrated a grave injustice by including the Gloucestershire genius in my World’s Dullest XI. His sublime glovework alone should have rendered him beyond consideration, let alone selection, and his batting provided far too fascinating an insight into the curious psyche of a tatty-hat-wearing painter-cricketer. Selectors often make mistakes – I am prepared to be the first in history to admit my error in public.