Shahid Afridi has taken unpredictability to and beyond its logical extremes © AFP

After much deliberation, and the resignation of half of the selection panel (the nought-year-old Zaltzman junior), here is the remainder of the post-1980 World Unpredictable Test XI.

6. Shahid Afridi (Pakistan) (honorary captain)

The first name on the team sheet. Gives this team excellent balance, as he can be devastating with both bat and ball. To both his opponents and his own team. On and off the pitch.

Afridi – “the maddest of Mad Maxes” according to his Cricinfo profile – has taken unpredictability to and beyond its logical extremes, to the extent that the most unpredictable thing he could possibly do in the rest of his career (other than claiming that Asif Mujtaba was his role model and inspiration) is nail down a place in the Pakistan Test team and string together a steady run of solid performances.

Thus far, he has had a genuinely baffling Test career. Despite batting and bowling averages of 37 and 34 respectively, and despite scoring more centuries in his first 22 Tests than any of Ponting, Tendulkar, Lara, Inzamam, Dravid, Gooch, Yousuf, Gower, Kallis, Jayawardene, both Waughs, Saeed Anwar, Sangakkara or Hayden, Afridi has played fewer than one in three of his country’s Tests over the course of his career.

His average Test innings lasts for the same length of time as Jimmy Anderson’s, but contains more runs than Hussain’s, Cronje’s or Ranatunga’s. And with the ball, he dismissed Tendulkar three times in two Tests in 2005, which is as many times as Warne managed to snare the Mumbai Maestro in his entire career.

Afridi arguably had the potential to be Pakistan’s Sehwag and Kumble rolled into one explosive package, but it has proved impossible to predict whether he will blast an incredible hundred, swipe a less-than-incredible nought, spin out the world’s best batsman, get smashed about by Matthew Hoggard, retire, unretire, almost hit a spectator with a ball, almost hit a spectator with a bat, or audition for a part in the PCB’s annual charity ballet by pirouetting in the middle of the pitch.

Afridi therefore is honorary captain of this team. This XI would need little captaincy, if only because even attempting to mould it into a coherent, focused unit would be an act of wilful futility.

7. Kamran Akmal (Pakistan) (wicketkeeper)

In his short career to date, Kamran has veered from being a top-class keeper but underachieving batsman, to being the new Gilchrist with the bat and the new Coco The Clown with the gloves. After scoring five brilliant centuries in two months in 2005-06 (three in Tests, two in ODIs), he sunk into a fallow period in which his ineptitude with the bat often matched his seismically shaky wicketkeeping, in which he remained flawless apart from his glovework, footwork and headwork. At times, he has not so much been ham-fisted, as appeared to be keeping wicket with two live pigs strapped to ends of his arms.

His recent re-emergence suggests that he could have a long career of wildly undulating form, and cement a reputation for being both breathtakingly brilliant and utterly useless.

Kamran sneaks in to the team because MS Dhoni, who appeared to have the unpredictability world at his mercy, has disappointingly used the responsibilities of captaincy as an excuse to become disturbingly consistent and reliable, and ahead of Brendon McCullum – how did it take such an obviously extravagant talent with the bat four years and 35 matches to score a century against a major Test nation?

8. Craig White (England)

White was a curious cricketer. For the first six years of his sporadic Test career, he appeared to have been selected by mistake, or as one of the Australian double-agent players which the ACB intermittently plants in county cricket to undermine the England team. Then he emerged as an occasional master of reverse swing and a occasional player of brilliant innings.

He took 14 wickets in his first 10 tests, then back-to-back five-fors, then, after four more in his next test, took no more than two in an innings for 14 tests, before wrapping up his career with 12 in three innings in Australia. With the bat, he twice put together impressively inept sequences of eight single-figure scores in nine innings, but also played masterfully on turning wickets in Asia. By the end, it was hard to work out if he had overachieved or underachieved with both bat and ball. Or done exactly as well as he should.

9. Shoaib Akhtar

The man who puts the ‘liability’ into ‘unreliability’.There is a wealth of out-and-out pacemen from which to choose – Devon Malcolm, Patrick Patterson, Fidel Edwards, Lasith Malinga to start with – but the Rawalpindi Roller-Coaster is out on his own for both performance and behaviour.

On form, Shoaib has been the most spectacular sight in world cricket. At Colombo in 2002, he blasted out Ponting and the two Waughs in four balls, then Gilchrist and Warne in the next two overs – five legends of the game blasted out without requiring the assistance of a fielder in perhaps the greatest fifteen-ball spell in Test history.

With 178 wickets at 25, and a strike rate of 45, Shoaib clearly could have been one of the greats, if only his mood had not swung further, faster and more consistently than his yorker. The three Fs – form, fitness and focus – have been intermittent and reluctant travelling companions on his madcap journey through cricket, and he has played fewer than half of Pakistan’s Tests since his debut. He has not – how should I put this? – always taken a fast bowler’s tummy with him onto the field of play, and has broken down on the field more often than a cheapskate farmer’s home-made tractor.

He faced allegations of throwing, before his action was cleared due to natural hyperextension of the elbow. He has, however, been found repeatedly guilty of throwing tantrums, due to unnatural hyperextension of the ego.

Occasionally, amidst the controversies, injuries, bans, strops, drops, comebacks and court cases, there have been outbreaks of cricket. Against England in late 2005, Shoaib was a controlled, mature, focused match-winner, seeming to presage a vintage autumn to a turbulent career – since then, he has taken just 17 wickets at 34 in seven Tests. And tested positive for nandrolone, hit a team-mate with a bat, and faced a legal action from the chairman of his own country’s cricket board, amongst other escapades. He does not drink in Last Chance Saloon. He lives in it, has repainted it in his favourite colours, and is about to buy out the management and rename it after himself.

As Irving Berlin once said, “There’s no business like Shoaib business.”

10. Steve Harmison (England)

It is often said that England never know which Steve Harmison will turn up – the one who almost took Langer’s, Hayden’s and Ponting’s heads off on the first Ashes morning of 2005, or the one who almost took second slip’s kneecaps off with his first ball of the 2006-07 rematch with a delivery that challenged humanity’s assumptions about the laws of physics? Or the one who nibbles it about in the low-80s mph, trying to keep an end tight until Collingwood comes on to try to force a breakthrough?

Statistically, the Durham Dilemma’s career divides up into three distinct phases – not very good (28 wickets at 39 in his first 10½ Tests), very good (146 at 25 from his breakthrough second innings at the Oval in 2003 to his last triumph against a terrified Pakistan at a bouncy Old Trafford in 2006), and not very good again (47 at 46 in 18 Tests since then).

But even in his good phase, the wrong Harmison would pop up with alarming regularity (especially in South Africa in 2004-05), and in the midst of his struggles, there have been moments when he has looked a skull-shuddering world-beater once more (notably at the Oval last year). As the England selectors gaze lovingly at the fading, sepia-tinted photographs of the Australian captain dripping blood, and of a Jamaica scoreboard emblazoned with the figures 7 for 12, will they give this difficult marriage one last go?

11. Stuart MacGill (Australia)

This team has to have a front-line leg-spinner – until Warne spoilt the reputation of leggies by being persistently brilliant for almost his entire 15-year career, wrist-spinners had unpredictability written into their contracts. MacGill seemed like a throwback leggie, veering between unplayable and flayable, mixing genius with garbage like a drunken Einstein.

He failed to live up to his brief, brilliant early period of Warne supremacy – excluding relatively facile wickets against Bangladesh and in the so-called ‘Test’ against the ICC XI, he averaged 44 in his final 17 Tests with only one five-wicket innings − but remained one of cricket’s most compelling variables, with a fuse as short as some of his long-hops, and a glare as devilish as his googly.

MacGill narrowly edges out Abdul Qadir, who at one point followed up a spell of two wickets for 300 over five Tests by whirling out 40 victims at 16 in his next four matches. He then took only one more (expensive) five-wicket haul in the remaining three years of his career. Qadir’s Test average unsuccessfully tried to escape from both ends of the 30s throughout his career (excluding a one-match breakout to 29.64, after which it was recaptured and sedated back up to the mid-30s), but MacGill takes the main spinner’s spot in the team because the look on his face always suggested that something was about to explode, whether it was a fizzing leg break out of the rough, or, more likely, his own temper.

This then, is the full line-up:

1. Virender Sehwag (IND)
2. Marvan Atapattu (SL)
3. Aravinda de Silva (SL)
4. Kevin Pietersen (ENG)
5. Carl Hooper (WI)
6. *Shahid Afridi (PAK)
7. †Kamran Akmal (NZ)
8. Craig White (ENG)
9. Shoaib Akhtar (PAK )
10. Steve Harmison (ENG)
11. Stuart MacGill (AUS)

That is a team that I guarantee could win or lose any match by an innings and 400.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find a place for a South African – for all Herschelle Gibbs’ mercurial efforts, unpredictability does not seem to be in the their South African players’ cricketing soul (was this the real reason for Pietersen’s defection?).

Perhaps in selecting three England players, I am guilty of national bias, of wishing that English cricket was more flamboyant and exciting than it really is, but the application of personal bias is historically one of the perks of being a selector.

Having promised the World Unpredictable XI a couple of blogs ago (the ‘blog’ now being the only unit of time I officially recognise), I have since found myself in prolonged and agonising internal selectorial discussions. So many players from the last 30 years have thrust themselves into contention through capricious form, majestic peaks and incompetent troughs, or a simple refusal to embrace the warm, comforting slippers of consistency. What, the selectors (The Confectionery Stall and his three-month-old son) debated long into the night, constitutes genuine unpredictability? My Dull World XI could be backed up with simple statistics, but how can one measure unpredictability?

True unpredictability must include considerable amounts of both success and failure. One-off out-of-the-blue triumphs are not sufficient – Ajit Agarkar, for example, played 26 Tests, scored one century but no other 50s, and took more than three wickets in only one innings – a match winning 6-41 against Australia in Adelaide. Aside from these flashes in an otherwise inept pan, Agarkar was almost entirely predictable.

Andy Caddick was often dubbed an unpredictable talent, but, after a nightmare first series, he was, statistically at least, a steady performer whose failures and success broke down simply into whether it was the first innings (average 37) or second innings (average 20) of a match. (Darren Gough by comparison averaged respectively 29 and 26.) Overall Caddick was Manoj Prabhakar at the start of games, and Malcolm Marshall at the end, a curious combination which possibly explains Nasser Hussain’s hairline.

What about Brian Lara? Probably the most vulnerable and flawed of all batting’s certified greats, Lara caused the selectors more headaches than any other player.
He compiled many of modern cricket’s greatest innings and series, yet failed amazingly often – he played 26 series of three or more Tests, and averaged 33 or lower in 10 of them (including 5 out of 11 series of five or six matches). Lara narrowly misses out on the final XI. Much of his failure can be attributed to one of cricket’s most notable career slumps. For a five-year period between the ages of 27 and 32, when many batsmen are at their peak, Lara averaged 40. Either side of this, his average was 60.

In essence, the truly unpredictable player must generate the feeling that, as he takes guard or stands at the end of his run-up, no-one in the stadium knows what will happen, least of all himself.

In all, I have set myself an almost impossible task selecting an Unpredictable XI from my Test-watching lifetime (1981 onwards), and one which I am unlikely to fulfil without contradicting some of my own unpredictability criteria, but here, nonetheless, it is. (And, just as I resisted the temptation to pick 11 New Zealanders for the Dull XI, so I have rejected the opportunity to choose 11 unfulfilled Pakistani geniuses and be done with it.)

Part 1: Batsmen

Virender Sehwag (India).

A frankly ludicrous, almost surreal, player with an approach to batting that, according to all received cricketing wisdom, ought to give him a Test average of around 30 at best, but whose shameless brilliance has turned him into a modern great. Sehwag only sneaks into the team. He is, essentially, predictably unpredictable. Everyone knows what he will attempt to do, and how he will attempt to do it. The only question is whether or not he will succeed (1 in 10 innings he passes 150), or fail (in half of his innings he fails to pass 25). Either way, he goes down, or up, in a blaze of glory.

Marvan Atapattu (Sri Lanka)

Not the classic epitome of daredevil unpredictability, Atapattu defied his orthodox technique to become one of the most statistically unpredictable players of his generation. Bouncing back from amassing one run in the first six and a half years of his Test career for a less-than-Bradmanic average of 0.16, intermittently-marvellous Marvan scored six double-hundreds (fourth equal on the all-time list) yet still heroically managed to keep his career average below 40.

Atapattu endured more slumps than a champion narcoleptic on a very comfortable sofa. He passed 50 only once in 26 innings between 1998 and 2000, but that once was an unbeaten double-hundred. Shortly afterwards, he followed knocks of 59 and 207 not out against Pakistan, and 54 and 120 against South Africa, with a run of just 270 runs in 14 innings, including six ducks – and 207 of those runs came in one undefeated innings against England. The game of an orthodox grinder, the statistics of a temperamental, bat-hurling, tortured, tantrum-throwing genius.

Aravinda de Silva (Sri Lanka)

At Lord’s in 1991, the Colombo Curiosity marched out to bat with half an hour remaining of the day’s play. He marched off 30 balls later having flayed 42 unstoppably perfect runs to his name, before marching back out the next morning, getting out, and marching back off. In the second innings, he stodged 18 off 91 balls.

In 1997, he emerged from a three-year slump to hit seven centuries in 12 innings. Capable of coming in at 1 for 2 in a World Cup semi-final against India in Calcutta and blasting 66 off 47, but also of scoring 27 in nearly four hours in a Test against Zimbabwe. In Tests, he averaged 25 between 1984 and 1988, 53 between 1989 and 1993, 20 between 1994 and March 1997 (in which time he won Sri Lanka the World Cup with one of the greatest innings in cricket history), 74 between April 1997 and February 2000, and 36 between March 2000 and the end of his career in 2002. A properly odd career.

Kevin Pietersen (England)

Swerving between the slalom gates of success and failure like a drunken Olympic skier, Pietersen has had one bad series in the 14 he has played, but, arguably, not a single great one. Between the last Ashes and the start of the recent West Indies series, Pietersen scored nine centuries in 22 Tests, but still averaged only just over 50, alternating between the golden underpants of triumph and the dank jockstrap of failure with no apparent link to current form.

Increasingly capable of painstakingly over-careful accumulation, or tub-thumpingly reckless aggression, Pietersen has at times demolished Warne and Muralitharan, but is vulnerable to club-standard finger spin. As captain, he even managed to coax an outburst of baffling unpredictability from the stolid old ECB. Anything seems possible with Pietersen. Would it really be a surprise if he came out to bat dressed as Elvis or scored a 60-ball hundred whilst batting with a dead ferret instead of a bat?

Carl Hooper (West Indies)

Depending on mood, or form, or prevailing winds, or horoscopes, or the will of the fickle cricketing gods, Hooper could look like an undisputable all-time great or a total novice, sometimes in consecutive balls. At his best, he could stroke a ball over a far distant clump of trees whilst appearing hardly even to move his bat. At his worst he could hit any bowler in the world straight to cover point for no apparent reason. Enchanting and frustrating, the ultimate in unpredictability. Let himself down with antiflamboyantly steady off-spin.

Those, then, are the batsmen. So many players have been unlucky to miss out, from Srikkanth to Ashraful, from Astle to Cullinan. Maybe Ross Taylor and Phil Hughes will demand selection in a few years’ time. Your reactions and rival selections are, as ever, welcome and appreciated.

Next time: Shahid Afridi, and the other five members of the team.

Confectionery Stallers, the waiting is at an end. Here is the remainder of the post-1981 World’s Dullest XI. (Part 1 | Part 1 appendix)

The selection process has become no easier. Finding bowlers of the requisite level of tedium is not simple – to be a truly dull bowler, you first have to be a good bowler, in order to have the capacity to drive the game into a near-vegetative state. First, however, the wicketkeeper...

7. Jack Russell (England)

	Jack Russell: the slow man's slow © Cricinfo Ltd

I include Russell with a heavy heart (and only after foolishly including Tillakaratne as a special batsman), as he was a favourite player of mine, and his batty quirkiness as a cricketer and hat-wearer transcend the boundaries of statistical dullness. Russell’s minimalist scoring rate was, objectively, unimpeachably tedious, so I have tried to view this from the perspective of non-English cricket-watchers, for whom enduring the Gloucestershire Gremlin as he poked, prodded and persevered must have been inexorably irritating.

Other glovemen made strong applications – including every single pre-Dhoni Indian since Kirmani – but few have bored over a sufficiently elongated career, and none has played an innings remotely in the negativity class of Russell’s great masterpiece – 29 not out off 235 balls in almost 5 hours as he saved the Johannesburg Test with a comparatively explosive Atherton in 1995-96. This was the slowest recorded Test innings of over 20, and, had it been played 500 years earlier, videos of it would have been used by the Spanish Inquisition to extract confessions from even the most blameless cricket watchers.

Career Highlight: Johannesburg 1995-96.

Some South African cricket watchers still curl up into a ball and start crying whenever they see a small man with a moustache. Of the traumatised bowlers, Meyrick Pringle could never bring himself to play Test cricket again, and Clive Eksteen took almost five years off, played one more wicketless Test, and promptly disappeared.

8. John Emburey (England)

Choosing a partner for the great Shastri in the spin-bowling defence was one of the toughest tasks facing the selection panel (namely, me and my 6-week-old son). Many will press the case of Ashley Giles in the most vocal and febrile terms available, particularly those who saw him ‘bowl’ in India in 2001-02, whilst Kumar Dharmasena (who has already created more excitement in his one-match international umpiring career than he did as a player merely by signalling a leg-bye) bowled as if he thought that displaying a semblance of either flight or turn would give him an incurable lifelong ear infection, and also plinked a few useful runs at a pitifully morose rate.

In the end, however, I have been swayed by statistics. Tauseef Ahmed’s numbers are impressive, but his moustache was quite exciting, and Emburey just has the edge, or lack of it, to nail down the spinner’s spot. He had a pleasing, classical off-spinner’s action, but the highest strike rate of any specialist bowler with more than 50 Test wickets in the 1981-to-now period (a wicket every 108 balls), and the third best economy rate, at 2.24. If he had ever bowled unchanged at both ends through a full day of Test cricket, the close of play score would have been a stadium-clearing 200 for 5.

The Middlesex Miser also adds valuable depth and immovability to the lower middle order – he used the least flamboyant batting technique ever developed in the history of the British Isles to jab his often critical runs away at just 35 per 100 balls.

Career Highlight: The entire Test summer of 1987. Bowled through 4 entire Tests without taking a wicket. whilst constricting the Pakistan batsmen to just 2 runs per over. His 0 for 222 off 107 overs series figures showed the control of a tantric Casanova, but the penetration of an inebriated eunuch.

9. Craig Matthews (South Africa)

Of all the South African seamers who have sent down over after over 18 inches outside the batsman’s off stump waiting for their adversary to chase one out of sheer boredom or smack their own stumps to pieces just to make something happen, Matthews was the dullest. Tediously effective from the tip of librarian’s haircut to the hooves of his workhorse feet, the Cape Constrictor ran to the wicket as if he was about to photocopy directions to a municipal rubbish dump for a public safety inspection officer, eyes set firmly on the maintenance of his career 2.26 economy rate.

Career Highlight: Debut v India, Johannesburg, 1992-93. Match figures of 4 for 64 off 49 overs of unmitigated nagging. Admittedly aided by an Indian batting line-up featuring Shastri, Jadeja, Amre, Manjrekar, Prabhakar and More – all of whom spanked it around at fewer than 40 runs per 100 balls over their Test careers.

10. Ewen Chatfield (New Zealand)

Again, it has been hard to narrow it down to one New Zealander from a veritable Pacific Ocean of possibles. How can one ignore the claims of Martin Snedden, for example, who not only bowled the least exciting medium pacers of all time but also once scored a three-day duck with the bat? But the perennially tidy Chatfield was the most economical seamer of the relevant period (2.23 per over). A tearaway fast bowler in the sense that spectators wanted to tear their eyeballs away from their sockets whilst he was in the middle of a long spell, the Manawatu Mogadon took a wicket roughly every two hours of bowling, yet still averaged only 32. Rumour has it that, when facing Chatfield, batsmen would smash themselves on the toes with their bats so that the pain would keep them awake at the crease.

Career Highlight: 1988-89 Wellington Test v Pakistan. A 53-over marathon of probe which yielded 82 runs and 1 wicket. A 1950s spinner trapped in the body of a fast bowler.

11. Alan Mullally (England)

Comically inept batting cannot outweigh his tireless pounding of the corridor of unreachability. The Leicestershire Lolloper gave his captain some control by refusing to aim anywhere near the batsman, let alone the stumps (which he hit approximately once every 70 overs of bowling), and enabled spectators to take regular toilet, refreshment or snooze breaks without fear of missing anything resembling action. Also made groundsmen feel that it had after all been worthwhile mowing the edges of the pitch. They gave Mullally the facilities. He used them. To a fault.

Career Highlight: Any time he heard a commentator utter the words ‘Alan Mullally’ without immediately adding the words ‘wasted the new ball by giving the batsmen too many balls they could comfortably leave alone’.

12th man: Asif Mujtaba (Pakistan)

	Asif Mujtaba: a fine 12th man © John Dawson

Statistically, the dullest middle-order batsman of the modern era, with a strike rate of 28 runs per 100 balls over a barely-believable 25 Tests in which he averaged 24. After his promotion from the surprisingly intensive job of being Pakistan’s specialist substitute fielder, Mujtaba found the boundary boards with the regularity of a derailed Antarctican train ploughing into a queue of polar bears. Whilst it would be harsh to lay all the blame for the paltry attendances at Tests in Pakistan at his unspringy bat, it is scientifically provable that he did absolutely nothing to reverse the trend.

Career Highlight: 1992 series in England. The only time the Sind Sedative (a) did anything remotely useful against a major Test team in his 11-year career, or (b) scored at more than 2 per over in a series. His 33.55 strike rate constituted a positively Gilchistian onslaught by Mujtabatic standards.

So, the final post-1981 Dull XI is:

B.A.Edgar
G.R.Marsh
G.Kirsten
C.J.Tavare (honorary captain)
R.J.Shastri
H.P.Tillakaratne
R.C.Russell (wicket-keeper)
J.E.Emburey
C.R.Matthews
E.J.Chatfield
A.D.Mullally

12th Man: Asif Mujtaba

I look forward to your personal world and national Dull XIs. Congratulations to all those selected, and commiserations to the many grinders and trundlers who can feel rightly aggrieved to have missed out (of whom Sanjay Manjrekar, as many of you have forcefully pointed out, is probably the most unfortunate).

This is a team of players who have proven themselves dull over long and often distinguished Test careers. Anyone can achieve momentary dullness – Aravinda da Silva, a certified magician described by this very site as “one of the games’ best entertainers” and “an unrepentant attacker”, once clobbered 27 off 191 balls against a mighty Zimbabwe attack consisting of Streak, Rennie, Guy Whittall, Jarvis and Peall. It takes a steely force of personality to accumulate an entire career of almost unbroken inertia, and I defy any person to concoct any team that could force either a win or a defeat on a flat track against this agglomeration of the adhesive, this procession of the prudent, prosaic and parsimonious.

Tomorrow (here it is, Ed.) will bring the long-awaited announcement of numbers 7 to 11 in the Confectionery Stall Post-1981 All-Time Dullest World XI, putting tedious cricketers and lovers of tedious cricket out of their misery at last.

In the meantime, this is clearly an issue that has stoked the fires of Confectionery Stallers throughout the universe. Many thanks for your responses to this most emotive of topics, and I fully understand the uproar generated by the omission of some of the most negative players of the modern era: men who have driven you to hair-rending, eye-poking frustration with their refusal to countenance the idea of a full follow-through.

Here, therefore, are explanations for the exclusion from the Dull XI batting line-up of some of those you have nominated.

Geoffrey Boycott: excluded purely because this is a 1981-Ashes-and-after team. Boycott therefore only had the final few months of his Test career in which to press his claims. And press them he did, grinding along merrily at 34 runs per hundred balls. Were this a 1964-1981 team, he would be the first, second and third names on the teamsheet.

	'A soporific scoring rate is not sufficient in itself to qualify for selection'. Even for Dravid... © Getty Images

Rahul Dravid, Sir Michael Atherton, Jacques Kallis: too classically orthodox and stylish for this team of the awkward, inelegant and pokey. Although each has had innumerable moments of spectacular unspectacularity – Dravid’s 61-ball 3 against England in Bangalore in 2001-02; Atherton’s 11 off 90 against New Zealand in 1999; Kallis’s six-hour unbeaten 85 as South Africa powered towards a declaration against England in 1999-2000, to pick just three especially turgid cherries from a smorgasbord of strokelessness – a soporific scoring rate is not sufficient in itself to qualify for selection. You must be fundamentally unwatchable on every level, even when making your rare sorties into attack. If Kirsten had ever scored a 130-ball double century, it would still have felt like you had taken cricketing Mogadon.

Shivnarine Chanderpaul: too quirky and too good. Disqualified for scoring a 69-ball century against Australia. Reinstated for 11-hour 136 against India. But redisqualified for ethereal timing and heroic defiance of the orthodox.

Jimmy Adams: too influenced by injury. A man who had the patience, nerve and sheer unadulterated rudeness to score a 370-ball century against Zimbabwe (let me confirm that: against Zimbabwe) would appear to be a shoo-in, but it should be remembered that, before having his cheekbone squished by an Andre van Troost bouncer in 1995, Adams rattled along at a relatively jaunty 45 per 100 balls in Tests. After his appalling injury, he squirreled out his runs at a joyless 31 per 100 (and his average sunk from 62 to 29).

Wasim Jaffer: Test strike rate of 48 per 100 balls. Cut the guy some slack.

	Kepler Wessels: exciting when he was semi-Australian, less so as a Protea. Quite a lot less so, in fact © Getty Images

Kepler Wessels: unarguable contender on grounds of his sub-zero-frills style, but tonked it around at 50 per 100 in his Australian incarnation, before returning home to South Africa, and winding himself back down to an acceptably Protean 40. What does this reveal about the cricketing cultures of the two nations? Everything.

Mudassar Nazar, Shoaib Mohammad, Mark Richardson: selectorial whim. Formidable candidates, but there is no shame missing out to grinders of the dullness of Edgar, Marsh, Kirsten, Tavare, Shastri and Tillakaratne.

Grant Flower: up against Shastri. Could have done little more to convince the selectors with his unthreatening but tidy left-arm spin and unthreatening but tidy right-handed batting, but up against Shastri.

Brendon Kuruppu: possible flash-in-the-pan. One innings of unimpeachable dull greatness – a 777-minute double-hundred on debut – cannot compete with the years and years and years and years and years of creasebound inactivity which the members of this very special XI have demonstrated. Kuruppu also spanked England around Lords for an hour in 1988, raising doubts about his true grinding status.

I hope this has quelled the seething resentment that your own particular least favourite blockers and nudgers have not received the recognition they deserve. Being a selector is a difficult job at the best of times. When honing down a team of world-class snooze-inducers, with so many outstanding candidates to choose from, it becomes impossible to please everyone.

The wicketkeeper, bowlers and twelfth man will be unveiled tomorrow.

The ICC’s much-maligned Best-Ever Test Match ratings, which have provoked typhoons of outrage and howls of misunderstanding across the cricketing universe, have fired the millennia-old debate about how best to assess a cricketer’s quality. Even the mathematically ingenious Babylonians and the wise old Ancient Greeks were unable to concoct a definitive equation for this deeply important matter, hindered as they were by an unfamiliarity with cricket. It is therefore unsurprising that the ICC (who often seem to suffer the same hindrance) have also failed.

In many ways, such rankings are, theoretically at least, a more reliable indicator of a player’s current standing than career averages, being more reactive to form, opposition, era, conditions and the other variables that can skew a players average so beguilingly. Perhaps an average of a player’s ranking after each Test he played would give a clearer measure of the overall magnificence, adequacy or rubbishness of his career, and return Matthew Hayden to his rightful place in the all-time batting pantheon – in other words, in that pantheon, but not eating at top table whilst Tendulkar, Lara, Headley, Compton and Boeta Dippenaar look on enviously, picking at their food and muttering, “I was better than him,” before four of them add, “Boeta, what are you doing here? Have you stolen Graeme Pollock’s membership card again? Leave, Boeta. Just leave.”

However, cricketing achievement is only one measure of a player’s contribution to the game. Another is dullness. Dull cricketers have played just an important part in the development of our beloved sport as exciting ones – whose genius and flamboyance is only noticed by comparison with the porridge-like drudgery of their less gifted colleagues.

To many in this Twenty-20 era, dullness is not a quality to be prized. The Confectionery Stall’s first exposure to cricket, however, was in the summer of 1981, famous principally for Ian Botham’s ludicrous feats of swashbuckling heroism, but equally noteworthy for some grindingly turgid batting by both sides (no bowler who played more than two matches in the series conceded more than 3 runs per over).

Botham’s 118 off 102 balls at Old Trafford may have shocked and intimidated the Australians (particularly after he had scored 3 from the first 30 balls he faced), but it was Chris Tavare’s 78 off 289 in 7 hours that broke their spirits, obliterated their love of cricket, and crushed their will to live, rendering defeat inevitable. It also inspired the young Zaltzman to strive for great feats of elongated scorelessness in his cricket career – my greatest achievements including playing the dominant role in an opening partnership of 1 in 10 overs in an under-11 match, and being out for 17 in the 31st over a 40-over West Kent Village League game for the mighty Penshurst Park CC.

Tragically, there are no official dullness rankings for fully appreciating the game’s less exuberant performers, so the Confectionery Stall would hereby like to honour the unsung heroes such as Tavare – the Behemoths of Boredom, the Titans of Tedium, the Grand-Masters of Grind – by announcing its post-1981 Dullest World XI.

This hypothetical team of dullards to take on the proverbial Alien XI would be required not merely to play for a draw from ball one, but also to put the invading extraterrestrials off cricket for good, leaving the sport unsullied in its rightful home – Planet Earth.

Dullness as a cricketer is of course somewhat subjective, and is not measurable purely by statistics. Batsmen must not only score slowly, but do so with a lack of style that renders them unwatchable to all but their closest family and most dedicated team-mates. They must also be aggravatingly good enough to stay at the crease sufficiently long to send spectators into a deep coma. Bowlers must be skilled and patient enough to contain and restrict, without threatening the excitement of a wicket by any other means than a mental capitulation by the batsman, brought on by overwhelming frustration and an uncontrollable consideration for the paying spectator. Thus, we are looking for the crabby, awkward stubbornness with the bat, and trundling negativity with the ball.

The obvious temptation is simply to pick 11 New Zealanders at random – a team of Edgar, Franklin, Wright (capt), Richardson, J. Crowe, Coney, Blain (w-k), Bracewell, Snedden, Chatfield and Watson would challenge the enthusiasm of even the most ardent cricket lover (and if Jacob Oram could bat like Chris Martin, he would walk into the team as a specialist bowler). But that temptation must be resisted, if only because other nations must be rightly recognised for their contributions to tedious cricket.

Here, then, is The Confectionery Stall's Post-1981 Dullest World XI.

Part 1: Batsmen

1. Bruce Edgar (New Zealand)

Just one of a seemingly endless production line of sleep-inducing Kiwi openers (Wright-Franklin-Hartland-Pocock-Young-Twose-Horne-Bell-Richardson-Papps-Cumming-Redmond-McIntosh, the list goes on, and will continue to go on as long as cricket is played in the land of the long white cloud). With a strike rate and average of 31, Edgar batted like the professional accountant he is.

Career Highlight: Wellington Test v Australia, 1981-82. After his team were put into bat, Edgar batted until well into the fifth and final day of the match. For 55 runs. Admittedly, rain had intervened, and intervened a lot, so Edgar faced a mere 259 balls and had clubbed an average of one boundary per day, but a five-day half-century is not to be sniffed at.

2. Geoff Marsh (Australia)

	Geoff Marsh dulls himself to sleep © Getty Images

Perhaps the closest Australia have come to replacing Alec Bannerman since his retirement in 1893, Marsh scored at more than a run every other ball in only 7 of his 93 Test innings (and only once in his first 35 Test Matches). Dogged it out with the flamboyance of a road cone, making partner Mark Taylor look like Adam Gilchrist.

Career Highlight: Bicentennial Test v England, 1987-88. Contributed to the joyous celebrations and party atmosphere of his nation’s 200th anniversary by blasting his way to 5 off 49 balls in the first innings, then thrashing a 215-ball 56 in the second.

3. Gary Kirsten (South Africa)

An intensely personal selection. Kirsten has haunted my every cricketing nightmare since I took a week’s holiday to go to the England v South Africa Old Trafford Test in 1998. Kirsten spent the first 11 accursed hours of this match grinding out 210 grindingly ground-out runs in a manner that rendered previously sane cricket watchers insensible with boredom. Even his team-mates and blood relatives must have been drinking fearsomely aggressive espresso coffees every half hour to endure the vigil. Not wishing to waste a moment of my precious holiday time, I dedicatedly sat through every single ball of that innings. I have suffered flashbacks ever since, the deep psychological scars have seriously affected my family relationships, and I have never quite been able to see the sunny side of life as I had before. I survived the ordeal, but have never truly been the same cricket fan again. There have been statistically duller batsmen, but figures alone cannot express the anti-joy of watching Kirsten bat.

Career Highlight: Entire career. But especially Old Trafford 1998.

4. Chris Tavare (England)

See above. Outshone Boycott in 1981, averaged a boundary every 51 minutes of Ashes batting over his career, a strokelessness record that probably will and certainly should surely never be broken by a front-line batsman. The Bradman of Block.

Career Highlight: Perth Test, 1982-83. Backed up an 8-hour first innings 89 with his stonewalling masterwork – an incurably constipated 9 in 127 minutes.

5. Ravi Shastri (India)

A genuine dullness all-rounder. Scored and conceded runs at little more than 2 per over. If he could have bowled at himself, cricket would have died.

Batting Career Highlight: South Africa v India series, 1992-93. On the momentous occasion of South Africa’s first home Test since readmission, and the first ever Test between the nations, Shastri showed South Africa what they had been missing by clobbering 14 off 81 in his first innings of the series – and then slowing down in his subsequent efforts. In all, faced 412 balls in the 3-match series. For others, this might have been sufficient for a healthy 250-plus runs. Shastri bludgeoned just 59, at an average of 11.8 and a scoring rate of less than one run per over. Heroically dull.

Bowling Career Highlight: India v England, 1984-85. Sent down more than 1100 balls in the series, 7 of which took wickets, whilst England flayed him for 2.1 per over.

6. Hashan Tillakaratne (Sri Lanka)

Featureless accumulator, the very antithesis of Sri Lankan batsmanship, it was often impossible to believe he was from the same planet as Jayasuriya and de Silva, let alone the same country. Rumour has it that even Tillakaratne himself cannot remember any of his innings.

Career Highlight: Asian Test Championship Final v Pakistan, 2001-2002. Bounding to the crease in Sri Lanka’s first innings with his team strongly poised at 447 for 5, more than 200 ahead with 5 wickets in hand, having scored at almost 4.5 per over to that point, Tillakaratne rammed home the advantage by plundering 19 not out in almost 3 hours. Still, red ink is red ink.

It appears I have got a little carried away with this blog, so, in the interests of domestic harmony in the Zaltzman household, as well as of my other professional commitments, the announcement of the uninteresting wicketkeeper, stultifying bowlers and yawnsome 12th man will be delayed until the next blog. Who will join the Wellington Wall, the Perth Plug, the Cape Town Clogger, the Orpington Obstacle, the Bombay Blockage and the Colombo Crawl in this union of the unspectacular?

Time permitting, I will also suggest Dull XIs for all the Test teams, for which your nominations are welcome. Until then, let us remember the words of Sir Geoffrey Boycott, the Sultan Of Stodge himself: “You can’t score runs in the pavilion.”