'If you went to a day’s play in a Test that featured 320 runs, eight wickets and a couple of dazzling catches, would it bother you that “only” 80 overs were served up for your delectation?' © Getty Images

Cricket loves numbers in much the same way as plants adore sunshine. Without the one, the other cannot exist. But while most statistics reveal something of value, the one that arouses the greatest controversy, namely over-rates, strikes me as largely irrelevant.

While commentating on yesterday’s play at Trent Bridge, Nasser Hussain and Mike Atherton both put forward the case for irrelevance, and not merely to justify their own captaincy tactics. Hussain explained India’s sluggish rate by listing all the causes of delay, from the need to sawdust the run-ups and footholds to the remarkably greater incidence of left-handed batsmen in the modern game (up from 17% in the Fifties to 30%) and the consequent impact on field adjustments. Atherton simply declared that Test cricket was more exciting than it had ever been, so why complain about something so pitifully petty?

Behind the objections lies what many regard as a sinister subtext. Suggesting that the West Indies of the 1980s were alone in their purported crimes against the maintenance of an acceptable tempo will always attract charges of racial bias, simply because they were so far from alone.

In India during England’s 1981-82 tour, which produced quite possibly the least thrilling Test series of all time, the hourly average was 13 overs. Sunil Gavaskar admitted that he deliberately slowed the rate on the first day in Delhi - where India’s rate of 12.79 was curiously tardy given that they had but one bowler, Kapil Dev, who propelled the ball at above medium-pace – in order to limit his side’s batting time. At one juncture, Gavaskar oversaw a rate of barely nine an hour.

Peter Moores felt obliged to justify England’s rate after last week’s Lord’s Test, insisting it takes time to get the fields right and that any resulting deceleration was a small price to pay. Len Hutton offered a similar defence after the 1954-55 Ashes series, during which, attested John Woodcock, England’s rate was “awful”. The captain believed his young fast bowlers “need my help in placing the field”.

Fast-forward a decade, to the Caribbean in 1968. With rain deducting one hour and 40 minutes’ play, four of the five Tests were drawn, England won in Trinidad with minutes to spare and the final chapter lasted until the sixth evening. The labours per Test were as follows: 425.5 overs, 391.2, 377, 391.2 and 500.2. In other words, roughly 80 per day. According to Brian Close, the man who displaced him as England captain, Colin Cowdrey, trimmed the rate “so ostentatiously that it is the only time I have ever seen Gary Sobers really angry”.

Indeed, it has been claimed that Sobers’s surprising – and fatal - declaration in Port-of-Spain was a statement against negative play, incited by the West Indies skipper’s dismay at Cowdrey’s tactics. It also bears pointing out that Close was sacked by the selectors precisely because he was alleged to have slowed Yorkshire’s over-rate against Warwickshire, though this was almost certainly a pretext for getting shot of the lower-class Yorkshireman in favour of the upper-crust Kentishman.

Which is why Christopher Martin-Jenkins’s recent lament about over-rates during the annual Cowdrey Lecture at Lord’s struck such a jarringly ironic chord. My companion that night could barely contain his spluttering. Did anyone really give a damn, he whispered angrily, about over-rates?

I doubt many do. If you went to a day’s play in a Test that featured 320 runs, eight wickets and a couple of dazzling catches, would it bother you that “only” 80 overs were served up for your delectation? I seriously doubt your eyes would alight on that area of the scoreboard overmuch.

So long as nobody is taking the pee, does it really matter whether a side sends down 15 overs an hour (a not unreasonable expectation) or 14? So long as spectators aren’t cheated of their ration and time is made up, the prolonging of the drama is surely to be welcomed.

Besides, as my Lord’s companion remarked, extending play until 7.30 in the evening in England makes sense anyway, given that trying to get out of a city centre any earlier can be a nightmare of Elm Street proportions.

	Dhoni takes the catch. Or does he? © Getty Images

Thank-you, MS Dhoni, from the bottom of my heart. Had you not claimed that “catch” off Kevin Pietersen at Lord’s today, the Walking Lobby might have continued imagining it had half a leg to stand on.

The Walking Lobby never goes away. Every so often, it dons a suit and tie and bursts into the room, jabbing the air with a big fat cigar (Cuban preferably), wailing about declining ethical standards and professional liars, urging batsmen to get the game’s values back to where they once belonged. And, just as often, some slapping-down is necessary.

On the basis that taking issue with fellow toilers in my scruffy vineyard is impolite, names will not be named. Suffice to say that two colleagues for whom I hold nothing but the utmost respect have dredged up that stalest of old potatoes this week by clamouring for a return to walking. To which the only response is a respectful raspberry.

Much is made of professionalism being the source of all skulduggery, that the amateur occupies loftier moral terrain, but this is purest balderdash. Have you ever watched a game of golf or tennis between a pair of club hacks? Are Sunday morning soccer games on Hackney Marshes any less filthy than the Premiership shenanigans down the road at White Hart Lane? One member of the Walking Lobby expressed the view that the pursuit of money – in individual and collective terms - lies at the heart of the dishonesty that underpins the philosophy of the Non-Walkers. But could not the same be said of any journalist who declines to credit his or her sources and instead presents facts and quotes obtained by others as their own handiwork? I’ll willingly hold my hand up to that one.

Once upon a time, or so Derek Birley related in his myth-busting book, The Willow Wand, walking evolved as a symbol of the class divide, a means by which a batsman asserted his social and moral superiority over umpires and bowlers alike, both of whom almost invariably hailed from less privileged stock. Bowlers served; umpires gave batsmen the benefit of any doubt. To give oneself out was the sign of a gentleman, not a player.

As if this weren’t objectionable enough, the cracks in the custom were soon apparent. If a batsman had made 100, he was a good deal more likely to walk than if he had struggled to 10. Some manipulated the system, walking just often enough to acquire a reputation for integrity and thus sowing more than sufficient seeds of doubt among umpires, and hence derive the benefit whenever they chose not to walk. How blissfully ironic that one of the Walking Lobby’s latest attempts at persuasion should take place during Monday’s annual Cowdrey Lecture at Lord’s: Colin Cowdrey, after all, was notorious for having it both ways.

	Ken Barrington walks off. Or pretends to... © Getty Images

The Walking Lobby had its biggest field day in Cape Town at the turn of 1965. In the third Test, infuriated by the refusal of Eddie Barlow to do what he and his colleagues believed to be the decent thing, that proudest and most patriotic of Poms, Ken Barrington, walked on 49 when he knew his apparent glance to the keeper might have eluded umpire Warner. To make a point. Not so much, perhaps, that walking was morally correct, more that, even if the opposition were rotters, an Englishman knew how to do the right thing.

Which brings us back to Dhoni. Gone, inevitably, are the days when batsmen took fielders at their word. Why should they? Libel laws probably mean that I cannot describe the catch Steve Waugh claimed off Brian Lara at the start of the dynasty-ending 1995 Worrell Trophy series – replays left viewers in no doubt whatsoever that the ball had bounced first – in the manner I would ideally like. On the other hand, it would be naïve to propose that this was endemic of a new, cancerous strain of cynicism. So long as fielders have been permitted to appeal, there has been a desire to persuade by dishonest means. As Mike Atherton astutely noted from the Lord’s commentary booth, Pietersen’s edge flew into the upper part of Dhoni’s horizontal glove – a sure sign to any experienced keeper that it had kissed the turf first.

That Adam Gilchrist walked in the 2003 World Cup semi-final was profoundly admirable, no two ways about it. But it was an act of protest – at global perceptions of allegedly over-competitive, under-scrupulous Australians - that stemmed from a secure base. There was plenty of batting to come and his side were the world’s best by a mile or three. Had Sri Lanka won that day, it is hard not to wonder whether he would have copped some flak from his bemused teammates. It bears remembering that Glenn Hoddle, then England soccer manager and born-again Christian, castigated Robbie Fowler after the striker confessed to having dived to win a penalty for Liverpool, then purposely fluffed the resultant spot-kick.

A letter published in Thursday’s Times proffered the obverse side of the coin: if walking becomes de rigeur, does that mean that the batsman has every right to refuse to venture pavilion-wards if he disagrees with the umpire’s decision, which is supposed, is it not, to be the final word?

Lest we forget, those men in white coats are paid a pretty penny these days to dispense such wisdom. Recent statistics, moreover, revealed that, at Test level, they get decisions right comfortably more than 90% of the time. So let them get on with it. They get more than enough help as it is.

	'Murali is patience personified, a genial genie' © Getty Images

Last Friday evening, I was at the Ford Sport and Social Club in Newbury Park, east London, primarily to see Nasser Hussain conduct a coaching session for the Sky Sports cameras with the girls and boys of Three Caps CC, recipients of this season’s Adopt-a-Club scheme run by The Wisden Cricketer. A splendid time was had by all, yet still a sour taste lingered.

Falling into conversation with the magazine’s deputy editor, Ed Craig, and a representative of the Essex County Board, we pondered whether Muttiah Muralitharan should be classified as a finger-spinner or a wrist-spinner. There was a decent case for either, we agreed. I mentioned that I had just written a piece for a Test programme putting him, for the sake of argument, into the former category, though I was not convinced. Cue an all-too familiar line from the Essex man, one I had fondly if naively hoped I would never hear again: “Of course, you should hear the pros talk about his chucking. They changed the law for his benefit, didn’t they?”

Containing my anger, I suggested it was a generational thing. I’ve certainly never heard an under-30 utter the c- word in this context. Look at Sachin Vaja, the Three Caps offspinning stalwart newly contracted to the county club. Murali is his idol. He would not have developed that wristy mode of delivery otherwise, much less out-bowl Saqlain Mushtaq when Essex 2nd XI met their Sussex counterparts last month. And nobody has batted an eyelid at him.

It struck me, not for the first time, that there is probably nothing, sadly, that can be done about these divergent perceptions. To some Murali is a cheat, a wickedly-grinning cad to match Terry-Thomas at his most bounderish. To others, he is cricket’s greatest matchwinner, and certainly its most heartwarming success story of modern times. Nobody, not even George Headley, has done more to inspire his team. Nobody, I would also contend, has ever had to clamber further or scrap harder to reach any sporting summit. From the parched fields of Kandy to becoming the only Tamil in the Sri Lanka dressing room; from trial-and-ridicule by Australian umpires whose impartiality roused doubt to trial-by-ICC with arm in sling. Every hoop has been jumped through, every dart met by a disarmingly toothy smile. A Murali tantrum? Rarer than a kind on-field word or modest media declamation from Glenn McGrath. Yet still the darts fly.

It is tempting, as ever, to cite racism as a root cause: to some, the idea of a Sri Lankan being the most prolific bowler in the game’s history is quite intolerable. In which case an instructive parallel can be drawn between Murali and his pursuit of Shane Warne’s 708 Test victims, and Barry Bonds, the African-American slugger currently bearing down on Hank Aaron’s Major League-record 755 home runs.

Bonds has been accused of cheating too, his perceived crime being the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Though nothing has been proven - even if it was, he would scarcely have been his sport’s only such offender – an indelible stain has attached itself.

The fact that batting, in baseball as in cricket, is a good deal more about timing than brute force, is almost invariably glossed over. Bonds’s cranium may have expanded alarmingly – and there seems to be a better than even chance that drugs are indeed the source – but what sets him apart is his ability to make productive connection with the ball more consistently than virtually any other big bopper in baseball annals. So far as I am aware, no drug has yet been invented that enhances hand-eye coordination while improving concentration. And yes, almost inevitably, the divide between the Barry lovers and the Bonds-bashers is largely along racial lines.

There are, however, a couple of distinct differences between Barry and Murali. For one thing, the former earns more money in a month than the latter will do in his lifetime. Throughout his 20-year career, Bonds, the son of an alcoholic major leaguer whose career coincided with the uncomfortable initial flowering of African-Americans in American sport, has tended to treat the media as the avowed enemy, multiplying the Bonds-bashers tenfold. Murali is patience personified, a genial genie.

What unites them further, however, is what they attract. Envy, jealousy, the green-eyed monster – whatever you want to call it, they arouse it, in forebears as well as peers. Which is why, when Jeff Perlman set off in search of former teammates and opponents prepared to discredit Bonds for his recent book Love Me, Hate Me – Barry Bonds and the making of an antihero, he was not short of takers. And why Murali’s fellow cricketers still whisper sour nothings.

Racism and jealousy: does it really matter which comes first? In the realms of the Seven Deadliest Sins, they’re as destructive as each other.

	Strike power: Malcolm Marshall was a man for all occasions © Getty Images

“If he’d played in a sandpit, he’d have got wickets.” Thus proclaimed Jimmy Adams during a documentary on Malcolm Marshall screened by Sky Sports on Saturday. It was an occasion for awe: Sir Garry and Sir Viv, Mikey, Curtly, Desi and Lance all queued up to pay homage to the man all agreed was the brainiest fast bowler they’d ever known, the finest bowler ever to pull on the maroon cap. Sir Ian chimed in too. It was also a tale of shock – that shockingly premature death from cancer. You could see the lump in Viv’s throat, the tears in Curtly’s eyes.

Marshall was a walking mockery of virtually every rule in the textbook. Here was a fast bowler of 5ft 10in with an open-chested action who nevertheless contrived to swing the ball both ways and bowl bouncers at nerve-shredding pace. Name another world-beating sportsman who has defied orthodoxy so conspicuously.

Which is why, if nobody ever strutted a cricket field quite like Sir Viv, no one swaggered across one quite like Marshall. Not for him the celebratory whoop or the finger-pointing send-off; all you saw, virtually without exception, was the smile of a man reasonably satisfied by the inevitable outcome of sound strategy and bottomless self-belief.

Received wisdom has it that he and Dennis Lillee are the all-time greatest of their breed, the very best in show. And the fact that the latter never played in India, had one abysmal Test in the Caribbean and three largely fruitless ones in Pakistan leaves him lagging as a handful in all conditions. Which begs a question: where does that leave Waqar Younis?

Only six men with more than 100 Test wickets have recorded a higher career strike rate than Marshall’s 46.77. Of those, four - George Lohmann (34.12), Colin Blythe (44.38), Johnny Briggs (45.19) and the purported nonpareil SF Barnes (41.66) - plied their trade before the first world war, on pitches renowned as batsman-spiteful. Of the other two, both are modern Pakistanis, Waqar (43.50) and Shoaib Akhtar (44.71), while Allan Donald (47.03) is only a smidge behind Marshall.

Waqar, in fact, is Marshall’s sole superior in terms of consistent success over time, having taken three wickets fewer (373 to 376) in six more Tests (87 to 81) off 230 fewer overs, with the same number of five-wicket hauls (22) and one more of 10 or more (5 to 4). Of the other five leading strike-raters, only Barnes (189) managed half as many scalps.

(Intriguingly, if we lower the qualification to 50 victims, the man immediately above Marshall is Jermaine Lawson, who lies 14th at 46.35. The bottom quarter of the Top 20, meanwhile, includes James Franklin, Lasith Malinga and Simon Jones, which is a few more in the eye for those adamant that this is a bronze age for quicks.)

The one time Marshall and Waqar crossed catapults in a Test series, in Pakistan in late 1990, the unofficial world heavyweight crown was on the line and they were at opposite ends of the experience graph: when hostilities commenced in Karachi, Marshall was winning his 69th cap, Waqar his 10th. The first words all went to the young pretender (though neither term seemed all that apposite, given that a) nobody was quite sure exactly how young he was and b) he was certainly not pretending to be as good as he was). Waqar grabbed 14-166 in his first three innings of the series, putting Pakistan one-up. And those were the days when turnarounds in three-match rubbers were about as common as watchable TV programmes starring Mr Blobby and/or Noel Edmonds.

In Faisalabad, Pakistan were 145 for four, 120 ahead in helpful bowling conditions, whereupon Marshall, whose previous 37 overs in the rubber had yielded just two wickets, broke through four times in 13 balls. The last six went for the addition of nine runs, West Indies strolled home on day three by seven wickets (Waqar 0-41) and only Imran Khan’s obduracy with the bat prevented a come-from-behind clincher in Lahore. The old Superman still knew how to change into his talismanic cape.

Crunch the numbers and the waters get murkier. Marshall had more middle-order victims (Nos 4-7, a whopping 40.40%), Waqar more from top and tail (35.4% and 29.20% respectively). Waqar had the superior strike-rate when Pakistan bowled first, Marshall the better when West Indies bowled second. Armed with probably the best inswinging yorker the game has ever seen, Waqar clean-bowled close to half as many opponents again (27.3% to 19.4%) and had almost 50% more lbw victims (29.5% to 20.2%; among those with 100 wickets, only Terry Alderman, 34.12%, has had a greater share). The movement Marshall generated may readily be gleaned from his ratio of catches – 38.30%.

All of which leaves us – where, precisely? Marshall as the more versatile? Yes. Waqar as the more lethal solo act? Indubitably. Who’s better? I like the look of that fence. Not allowed? Well, where their paths most obviously and tellingly diverge is in adaptability. Waqar wasn’t fond of Australia (strike rate 81.43) or Australians (62.77), or Indians for that matter (80.25). Marshall’s strike rate against all-comers deviated almost imperceptibly – ranging from 44.34 (v Pakistan) to 49.83 (v Australia). Only in New Zealand (where he played just three Tests) did it exceed 55. Pick an opponent, pick a country, pick a day: he was your man, THE man. And that, for many, is where the bottom line lies.

What was that? Did someone mention averages? Well, for the record, Marshall has the edge, 20.95 to 23.56, but whether this supplements the above and adds to our appreciation, tells us something we really need to know or enables us to make a definitive judgment, is doubtful.

Strike rates tell us how often a bowler achieves his aim; averages tell us the price he has to pay for every success. Put it this way, when we assess a painter’s worth, do we wonder how many hours he spent at the easel, or the price of paint and brushes? Do we fret about the zillion overdubs required to complete a record such as Good Vibrations? Does it bother us how many 55th takes it took for Marilyn Monroe to get her lines right in Some Like It Hot?

Conventional averages tell us plenty about a batsman, considerably less about a bowler. Friends, Romans, Bearded Wonders - lend me your ears: let’s give strike rates their due.

	'Quite the ugliest top-class batsman I have ever seen' © Chico Khan

Ain’t no bout a doubt it, as those fabled funksters Graham Central Station so eloquently put it. On today’s evidence at Edgbaston, Shivnarine Chanderpaul is the closest the art of batsmanship has yet come to a perfect Jekyll-and-Hyde fusion.

In Tests he is as patient as an extremely laid-back saint. In ODIs he is a creative, flamboyant, Vegas-type hustler, always seeking the angles nobody else has thought to cover. Here, surely, is living, breathing proof that mastering the two formats should always be within the compass of those prepared to learn and adapt.

More crucially, for those with an unnatural compulsion to appreciate the less fine things in life, it is my hard-held conviction that Chanderpaul, stylistically speaking – if one can employ such a word in reference to such a profound non-stylist - is quite the ugliest top-class batsman I have ever seen. Peter Willey, John Emburey, John Carr – you guys took a hell of a beating. Crabby, ungainly, pawky, a bit dog-eared, a flagrant betrayal of his Guyanese childhood, his Indian antecedents and the complexion of his skin. Black cricketers, after all, simply don’t do uncool. And don’t get me started on those sponsored eyebags.

Boyhood memories of John Edrich ripple with visions of sumptuous inelegance. The same applies to Allan Border, and Chris Tavare, albeit strictly in Test mode. Steve Waugh seduced me during his latter years, recalling the stiffness of another marvellously aesthetically-displeasing Aussie, Ken Eastwood, the oak-tall Victorian baldy who at Sydney in 1971 opened with such wickedly ill-deserved lack of reward in the game’s only Seventh Test.

There was a welcome gift for the Appreciators of Awkwardness Society at Edgbaston today in the presence of not one but two members of the Ugly Squad. Michael Yardy is the latest and possibly greatest heir to that fine, upstanding English tradition for non-beauty, tucking balls away with wholly unsuspected stealth as he shifts awkwardly across his stumps. None, though, can match the boy Chanders. It’s the nerve of the bloke that gets me: this is what we whiteys do best.

The point, at bottom, is that Chanderpaul seems oblivious to it all, disdainful of such niceties, and, crucially, wholly un-self-conscious. Self-awareness can be the least forgiving of curses: looking in mirrors is only truly helpful if the glass is metaphorical. And the best team players are almost invariably those who subsume the self.

At a time when Caribbean cricket is about as united as Glasgow on Old Firm day, the West Indies need the slim survivor from Unity Village like jam needs butter. His hometown may be Demerara, but he’s the one who counters all that sugary froth with the saltiness of prolonged exposure, to disappointment, to pain, to ridicule. All hail the anti-Lara.

'Do we really need TWO slower versions when the original remains much the most satisfying?' © Getty Images

Seldom has it been such a delight to concoct a sentence containing the words “double”, “wicket” and “maiden”. The sight of an absorbing if decidedly unelectrifying match revolving around the efforts of Anderson, Fidel Edwards and Stuart Broad, three young quicks no less, was a blessed one for jaded palates. After a fortnight of non-stop Twenty20 (a form wherein Dmitri Mascarenhas’s career haul of four maidens in more than four seasons apparently leads all-comers), it was something of a relief to get back to the comparative sobriety and even-handedness of the 50-over version, albeit only something. After all, the outcome was set in stone less than halfway through the West Indies’ innings.

To Sky’s estimable David Lloyd, the commentator who to these ears best treads that fine line straddling authority, fairness, irreverence and levity, England’s innings was “tedious”. This may have been the understandable response of a sensibility bruised by successive evenings of breathless audience-rousing (“Please take it seriously, just not too seriously”), but it might also testify to a deeper truth. Given that man can no more subsist on a strict Twenty20 diet than on a lobster-and-champagne regime, do we really need TWO slower versions when the original remains much the most satisfying. Put it another way: was the planet really that much worse off when technical hitches halted ball-by-ball broadcasts of this afternoon’s “events” in Belfast?

Test matches have more than enough scenes and acts for close finishes not to be a prerequisite. A prolonged scoreless tussle between bowler and batsman, each preying on the other’s reserves of skill, guile and patience, waiting to see who cracks first, can decide a series, let alone a game. Limited by overs and options, the junior partner only breathes when both runners are in contention over the final furlongs.

Yet including today’s Anglo-Irish doubleheader, in the 436 ODIs between individual nations since June 1, 2004 where the contest has not been scotched as an edifying spectacle by the weather, a paltry 39 could be portrayed as having gone to the wire – three ties, 20 one- or two-wicket margins, and 16 of fewer than 10 runs. In other words, roughly 9% of the product can be said to have been dramatic. Which is pretty poor going even for something so often characterised as theatre. Especially since this has been a period rife with regulatory jiggery-pokery.

By contrast, in 15 bonafide Twenty20 internationals (one was heavily rain-reduced), we have already had a brace of two-run margins and a tie. Of the remainder, moreover, two were still in the balance in the final over. Which gives us a drama ratio of 33%. Which is only to be expected, given that brevity enhances the prospects of close-run affairs, and is still not good enough, but at least it’s over quickly and fairly painlessly.

One of the most endearing aspects of sport is that it is the one branch of the entertainment industry where plots cannot (barring the strenuous efforts of Hansie Cronje et al) be scripted, where flaws and/or unsatisfactory outcomes cannot be remixed or edited. The last business to attempt to flog its wares at three speeds was music. Tempting as it is, however, it would be inaccurate to liken our three formats to the three speeds at which we once played records (pre-CD thingy beloved by fiftysomethings).

Sure, Test matches can be linked to albums - 33-and-a-third revolutions per minute, widescreen and serious; a qualified snob might just as easily bracket 50-over games with singles - 45rpm, faster, dinkier and eminently disposable. The metaphor loses credibility when you remember that the fastest, the 78, came first and in aesthetic terms lay somewhere in between. And was duly sent scurrying into retirement by the so-called LP. If we must persist with this comparison (I must, I must), Twenty20 is the new 45 and Fifty50 the new 78.

For all that they brook few if any arguments, the ICC’s latest tinkerings have resulted in just one change, the belated extension of minimum boundary distances, that addresses the multiple Achilles heels of the 50-over brand. It achieved an inch when a mile – two innings per side - was wanted. All today’s antics achieved, for this less than dispassionate observer, was to underline why this town ain’t big enough for two necessary evils.