Others, such as 1617, 1508 and 1296 had a thrilling existence; they lived fast and died young. A few, like 302, 498, 905 and 1535 even achieved greatness.

But most Test matches are not that memorable. They start off with high hopes, experience a few life-affirming moments, then subside into dull middle age. The Oval Test appeared to be going the same way. By the afternoon of the second day, it had joined the Young Conservatives, passed its accountancy exams, married, settled down in an obscure suburb, taken out a Daily Telegraph subscription, and bought a set of golf clubs.

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Rambles up Hypocrisy Mountain

One of the side effects of back-to-back Ashes is back-to-back Ashes hype, a continuous feedback loop of witless trash talk

Andrew Hughes

24-Aug-2013

Stuart Broad cheated at Trent Bridge. It doesn't matter that cheating is de rigeur, or that WG Grace used to distract bowlers by sticking out his tongue and making raspberry noises, or that Yorkshire children are beaten with sticks of rhubarb if they walk in a school game.

If you know you're out according to the laws of the game - in this case Law 32 - but you remain at the crease, then you are acting dishonestly to gain an advantage, or to put it another way, you are indulging in behaviour not unadjacent to cheating.

In my brief cricket career, cheating was usually not an option. When a man's stumps are lying in a splintered heap, it is pushing credibility to take the Fifth Amendment and wait for the umpire to incline his digit. I was a walker. I walked frequently, cheerfully, and without hesitation; the pavilion being a place of cake and refreshment, as opposed to the pitch, which was generally frequented by meanies and bullies.

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The secret to T20 success

Want to build a successful franchise? Then get your team name right

Andrew Hughes

21-Aug-2013

I've often thought about writing a cricket book. More accurately, I've often thought about having already written a cricket book; signing copies at Lord's for queues of fawning, grateful MCC members; being asked by Jonathan Agnew whether I wanted more cake, and what I thought of the situation in the Middle East; collecting my award from an adoring Nobel prize committee - that sort of thing. I'd be fine with all that.

The business of repeatedly arranging words on a page to form paragraphs, chapters, and so on, would be the tricky part. You might think that this is down to a complete ignorance of the game, its history and its rules, combined with a crippling absence of talent. Not so. Neither ignorance nor lack of writing ability is a bar to a career as a published writer, as the literary efforts of Mr Jeremy Clarkson will attest.

Idleness, on the other hand, is a problem.

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The maths-friendly space age

An enchanting way to give limited-over matches context while keeping the five-day snobs happy

Andrew Hughes

17-Aug-2013

At first glance the format for the women's Ashes series looks odd, peculiar, dangerous. It seems the sort of idea that might crop up in the fevered dreams of a marketing wonk as he fights off a bout of malaria; a nightmarish cricket obstacle course. First there's a Test match, then some one-day internationals to negotiate, a scattering of T20, an egg-and-spoon race, a fancy-dress contest, once round the car park, and last one back loses the Ashes.

I'm no conservative, but I came over a bit Daily Mail when I first read about this subversive tampering with god's natural fixture order. I like my cricket set out the traditional way: Test matches here, the other stuff over there, but none of it in any way related. I can just about keep count of the score when it's best of five, but six points for a Test match and two for a one-day game? Sounds dangerously like maths to me.

But my failure to appreciate the potential of this format at first glance merely demonstrates once again that first glances, whilst useful to meerkats on lookout duty, and to perfectly matched couples spotting one another across a crowded battlefield, are no good at all when it comes to considering the important things in life, like cricket-fixture strategy.

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The Ashes that's not on your TV sets

Ah for women's cricket, where the TV coverage is dreadful but the action enthralling

Andrew Hughes

14-Aug-2013

The male Australian batting collective hangs together as robustly as those early-20th-century balsa-wood flying machines.

There they go, lurching forward valiantly, with a patched-up propeller, a wing and a prayer, heading for the edge of the cliff, surging into the air, wobbling, dipping, straining aloft; then, just when you think they've cracked it and you can feel the cheer rising in your throat, the whole contrivance turns rudder over strut and ends up in a sad-looking heap of debris and despondency.

Australia's women, on the other hand, can bat for long periods of time without suffering a collective panic attack, as Raf Nicholson reminded us recently.

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Is this being taped?

There's something sinisterly fun about using silicone strips on bats. At least more fun than talking about England

Andrew Hughes

10-Aug-2013

So now a humble roll of silicone-based tape can be added to the other exhibits at the Museum of Cricket Naughtiness, which include a pocketful of compost, a bag of centrally contracted Ashes-winning boiled sweets, a sprinkling of angry jelly beans, a badly damaged bottle top, and a fragment of one of Shahid Afridi's incisors.

This episode of silicone-based silliness has also given us a glimpse into the strange, Alice-in-Wonderland realm that is professional cricket, the inhabitants of which maintain a joyfully idiosyncratic approach to matters of ethics.

Here, for instance, is Michael Vaughan's reaction to Siliconegate:

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Rain stops hype

Watching desperate cricketers watching the rain with a prayer on their lips is always moving

Andrew Hughes

07-Aug-2013

Is that it? One close match, a walkover and a washout? The build-up to this series had been going on for as long as anyone could remember (in fact, archaeologists recently unearthed a clay tablet on which an Assyrian writer had chiselled a cuneiform preview of the Ashes, which concluded that, in his opinion, this was the worst Australian Test team since the invention of the wheel), but three weeks in and we're already switching over to check the football news.

As the humdrum Lancashire drizzle settled in over the soggy Lancashire sod, the tension in this Ashes series escaped like hot air out of a collapsing-balloon analogy, leaving us with the flappy, deflated remnant of a once mighty dirigible lying limply on the calendar. Out of politeness, we have to pretend to be interested in staring at it for a while longer, until it's time for the bin men to take it to the metaphorical balloon canvas recycling facility, where it will be patched up ready to be re-inflated with hype later in the year.

You have to feel sorry for Michael Clarke. Once the blond D'Artagnan of the Antipodean Musketeers, fate has now cast him as nursemaid to a collection of screw-ups, pin-ups, no-hopers and crocks. And he's got a bad back. And now it's raining. With every misfortune, pit-fall and cowpat life leaves in his way, he more closely resembles that other heroic Michael, who had to soldier on with a dodgy back and a batting order that must have made him weep into his hotel pillow. Who to open with next? Should it be Watto? Should it be Davo? Does it matter?

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The Umpire Didn't Really See system

It will take more than the DRS and an infra-red camera to persuade us to ditch our cherished human errors

Andrew Hughes

03-Aug-2013

Like volcanoes, earthquakes, bird-eating spiders, smallpox, and reality television, cricket's famous DRS was created by a benevolent, omnipotent intelligence. It was given unto us so that we might be free of our grubby human errors, free to enjoy our cricket decision-making in a spirit of perfect rationality.

Well, Dean Jones to that. We didn't get where we are today without being both stubborn and stupid, and it will take more than three capital letters and an infra-red camera to persuade us to ditch our cherished human errors. As Captain Kirk would no doubt have observed: making dumb, inexplicable, facepalm-worthy decisions at crucial junctures is what makes us human, so deal with it, big ears.

The creators of Didn't Really See, having created a system to eliminate human error, made the mistake of allowing human beings to operate it. Naturally, we've not only failed to get rid of the old errors, but we've also discovered some new ones. Step forward Umpire Dharmasena, whose logic-fail on Thursday was broadcast to a global audience, every member of which spent several open-mouthed seconds staring at the television.

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The ECB's villainous stunts

Why is the England board screaming for us to rise?

Andrew Hughes

31-Jul-2013

Compared to the pantomime bad guys at the BCCI, the ECB chaps are not super villains. They're a cut-price, low-fat, sugar-free kind of evil. Their underwater lair is only half the size of that of their Indian counterparts, their inter-continental death ray is solar-powered, and their raison d'etre is not to ensnare the free cricket world in the choking tentacles of their terrible wrath but to extract as much money as possible from every situation.

Giles Clarke is more Jabba the Hut than Darth Vader; he's the Sheriff of Nottingham, not King John; Fagin rather than Bill Sykes. It's not that he doesn't like the idea of world domination; it's just that he could never quite pull it off. You have to know your limitations, after all. Had the Joker found himself tricked into doing a deal with a Texan fraudster, he too might have considered early retirement from the super-villain game.

The Stanford farrago is old news, and the ECB would quite like us to move on, so obviously it's important to bring it up as often as possible. Lest we forget, five years ago this summer, Clarke agreed to lease out the English cricket team to the Harry Houdini of international finance, allowing him to use it to advertise his successful ponzi scheme, and, as a bonus, to spend quality time with the wives of prominent England players.

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