The big news ahead of Sunday's final one-day fling in Fatullah was Tamim's tummy. Officially, he had a stomach strain, but the internet was full of conspiracy theories.

Some said he had pulled a belly muscle reaching for a third slice of Black Cap Gateau at the series-clinching tea, cake and gloating party in Mirpur. One theory suggested that a crack team of Special Services operatives from the Sports Sabotage Unit at the New Zealand High Commission had infiltrated the Bangladeshi team hotel and downloaded every episode of How I Met Your Mother onto his hard drive, leading to mirth-induced abdominal tearing. It sounded pretty implausible.

Whatever the reason, there was a Tamim-sized hole at the top of the order, and when his replacement, Ziaur Rahman, came out to bat with Shamsur Rahman, the intrepid twosome were staring up at a big pile of runs, on top of which was sitting a particularly smug-looking kiwi. So how do you defeat a metaphorical flightless bird that has the high ground?

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Danny Morrison! Boom!

Bangladesh did well to beat New Zealand, but the star of the day sat in the commentary box

Andrew Hughes

02-Nov-2013

The art of commentary has changed a good deal in recent decades. Here, for example, is Richie Benaud describing a six in 1981:

"Don't bother looking for that, let alone chasing it. It's gone straight into the confectionery stall and out again."

And here is a commentator describing a six in Mirpur on Thursday:

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Things that we know will happen in Nagpur

Four things that we know will take place in the sixth ODI

Andrew Hughes

30-Oct-2013

Events in the fourth and fifth one-day internationals have reminded us that India and Australia won't have things all their own way in these games. After a flawless display of dampness in Cuttack, the series is now level at Australia 2, Weather 2, India 1.

I expect a few people turned it off when they saw the rain, which is, I'm afraid, typical of the modern cricket watcher, who is obsessed with "entertainment" and "events", who lacks the mental fortitude to spend hours on end watching rain fall onto grass, and who fails to appreciate the subtle pleasures involved in observing puddles becoming pools, pools swelling to ponds and ponds evolving into reservoirs. As Ravi Shastri put it, this was an awesome display of precipitation that had the stands rocking and leaking.

Harsha Bhogle described it as the most impressive downpour he had seen in many a long year, indeed I believe he went so far as to call it the Sachin Tendulkar of deluges, although there was a rare note of tension in the box when Siva disagreed, saying it was roughly the tenth-best rainfall he'd seen in his career, behind the nine he had witnessed in Madras in the 1970s. "It's all about opinions, isn't it," said Harsha, through gritted teeth.

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Can aliens understand cricket?

If they ever met the chaps who run Cricket Australia, they may reconsider any plans of invading our planet

Andrew Hughes

26-Oct-2013

How would you explain cricket to an alien? You'd have to start with the basics (sledging, spot-fixing, ball-tampering) and gradually build up to more contentious subjects, such as the profound literary contribution that cricketers have made to world literature, and the vital role that rockets, tracer bullets and other high-calibre munitions play in cricket commentary.

Once they had mastered the basics, they would probably be keen to broadcast their findings back home, and given that aliens are fairly brainy coves, they might even have a few ideas:

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Spare a thought for the 'death' bowler

Actually any phrase containing the word "death" is bad news

Andrew Hughes

23-Oct-2013

The fast-medium and medium-fast men of two great cricket nations have assembled in the subcontinent for a three-week orgy of runs, and as you might expect halfway through an orgy, some of the participants are beginning to look a little ragged.

The details of the carnage are enough to make the ghost of SF Barnes weep: 2267 runs at nearly seven an over. Ball has clattered into advertising boards 224 times and on 62 occasions have the commentators had occasion to declare, "Outta here!" or "He's really got hold of that one!" or "My word, Harsha, doesn't the trajectory of that particular shot remind you of the elliptical orbit of the moon Titan about the planet Saturn," or "Pow!"

Faced with this onslaught of biffery, the two teams have each developed a distinctive fielding strategy. Australia's plan is to bowl the ball halfway down the pitch. Like the modus operandi of the angler fish, which waits at the bottom of the sea with its mouth open, it is a somewhat predictable plan, but it seems to work because just as shrimps seem incapable of evolving an awareness of the difference between small caves and large fish with their mouths open, so each new generation of Indian batsmen seem bewitched by bouncers.

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The good, the sad, and the ugly

In other words, just another week on Planet Cricket

Andrew Hughes

19-Oct-2013

It has been an eventful few days on Planet Cricket, the events of which can be divided into four categories: the eye-boggling, the run-crazy, the sad, and the ugly.

First, the news that Pakistan beat South Africa in a Test match. This was a big upset, not perhaps as big an upset as the day when little Attila the Hun threw a seven-hour spear-throwing, slave-murdering tantrum because his cousin, Drusilla the Hun, had trodden on his favourite dolly, but still, it was a big upset.

And, strictly speaking, a completely different use of the word upset.

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Finch channels his inner Henry VIII

And adds a touch of Brendon McCullum to the mix

Andrew Hughes

16-Oct-2013

Batsmen are like miners. A professional like Aaron Finch can hack away for weeks in grim isolation without luck. No matter how correctly he positions his feet or hones his pick-wielding technique, he has nothing to show for it but blistery fingers and empty pockets. Then one day, he turns up feeling a bit lazy, gives the rock a cursory one-handed tap, and is promptly showered in diamonds, coal, oil and doubloons. Well, Aaron has hit a rich seam of runs lately and has been busy stuffing as many as he can into his average.

He's part Henry VIII and part Brendon McCullum. The swagger and the apprentice beard have the makings of a full Henry, but the style is all McCullum. His sawn-off shots look a little ungainly, presumably because he is trying to manoeuvre a blade as heavy as those medieval broadswords they show you when you visit a museum, the kind that, if you tried to lift, would first sprain your wrists, then break your toes.

On Sunday he was at it again, offering us some mighty on-side cuffing, and some politely restrained cuts, all of which eluded the Indian fielders. As one sweetly struck shot sent the ball skittering through backward point, Siva optimistically shouted, "Ishant Sharma!" Television viewers stared intently at the screen, waiting for his arrival, but all they could see was lush pasture. The ball popped over the rope, rolled a bit, then came to a halt. The umpire gave his signal. The electronic scoreboard operator pressed the relevant buttons. The official scorer scribbled "four" in his book. The crowd resumed their seats. And then Ishant trotted into frame. "Can't get there," confirmed Siva.

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India's dangerous customers

Anyone who has worked in retail will understand Australia's plight at Rajkot

Andrew Hughes

12-Oct-2013

Numbers don't matter so much in other sports like football or rugby: there aren't so many of them. But in cricket, stats are the very game itself, and the clues from which you can deduce how a match went. For example, if Jonathan Trott scores 25 at a strike rate of 20.01 you know he was throwing the bat in a reckless pursuit of quick runs. If Chris Gayle scores 250 at a strike rate of 450.01, well that was just another Test match.

So on the day that the Goliath of cricket statistics, the man dragging around more statistical monuments than a statistical monument seller on his way to the statistical monument festival, announced his retirement, it was fitting that India won a T20 in which runs flowed like water.

For a long time, though, the outcome was uncertain. Australia were bashing along biffingly. Finch was the star. His style is brutal, but with a hint of genteel restraint, like a bull in a china shop wearing a bow tie. In his rampaging 89, he managed several rough-edged moments of beauty, most notably the cuffed four that passed equidistant between two fielders, appreciated by cricket fans and geometry teachers alike.

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Rhapsody in blue

Never before was one colour seared into our eyeballs as on the night of the Champions League final

Andrew Hughes

09-Oct-2013

On Sunday, three weeks of bewildering intercontinental T20 tussling came to an appropriately Indian end. The non-IPL participants had been ejected from the party and the Blues took on the other Blues for the right to call themselves Champions of Everything.

Not since that episode of The Smurfs in which the little blue chaps had to transport a cargo of blueberries across the Pacific Ocean on the back of a blue whale had I seen so much of a certain colour on the screen at once. It was bluer than Muddy Waters strumming his guitar in the rain while waiting for a bus on a miserable Monday morning.

But although it was blue, it was not blue-collar. In fact, collars were the only way you could tell the teams apart. Rajasthan had gone for a daring streak of glitter ascending from the v-neck of their jersey, but Mumbai had gold lamé sewn onto the inside of theirs, so when anyone turned up a collar, onlookers were dazzled by the tailored bling.

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