The Long Handle

Today I want to talk to you about leaks.

About time, you might think. Ghastly vegetables that think they're onions but turn out to be mostly leaf. When you manage to hack off enough of the greenery to get them into a cookable state, you find that after a little light braising they take on the texture and taste of warmed-up slivers of recently pasted wallpaper.

Sadly, those of you who didn't read too closely will be disappointed. This blog will not be a savage and frankly long-overdue indictment of this particularly noxious bit of green-grocery. Vegetable satire is beyond my remit.

Test matches are all very well, but they do drag on, so on Thursday, it was nice to see the return of some exciting cricket. Pune's international debut also gave us a rare sighting of the Lesser Spotted Rahane in full international plumage. Despite being widely considered one of the more successful of its species, the precocious Rahane is only usually seen after dark, attracted by the floodlights and crowds of T20.

On the whole, apprenticeships are a good thing. Take plumbing. You wouldn't want some teenager who's only just learned how to tie his shoelaces messing around with your boiler. Carpenters, ship-builders, camel-trainers, Royal moustache-comb bearers; all have to practice until they have perfected their craft. Even Napoleon had to wait until he'd racked up enough dead bodies before he got to be dictator.

But the International Cricket Apprenticeship Scheme that Rahane has signed up for is starting to look a bit dubious. Yuvraj, Rohit, Raina, Pujara, Yuvraj again and even Jadeja have all been given a go ahead of him. Jadeja is a fine young man. He has curly hair, he can do a bit of everything and he plays for Chennai. But when it comes to dispatching the little leather ball with the long willowy thing, Rahane is surely better.

What's the secret of good management? The ability to sack 23 people by text whilst perusing the wine list on your executive jet? Being fluent in all the key languages of the modern business world from Jargonese to Gibberish? A wardrobe full of sharp ties? A really convincing cross face?

No. It's communication. The ability to get your message across first time without having to follow it up two days later with an email clarifying what it was you thought you'd said and how it differed from what other people thought you'd said and how you hoped everyone could now move on from the whole sorry business.

Bad communication has been the downfall of many a cunning plan. During the Crimean War, a perfectly sensible order (ride as fast you can towards those Russian guns) was let down by the failure to specify precisely which guns. At the battle of Waterloo, Marshall Grouchy mistook Napoleon's command: "Don't let the Prussians out of your sight" for "Don't forget to pick up some Camembert tonight." When Grouchy returned with the cheese and a cheeky little Beaujolais he'd come across at a wine merchant's in Wavre, he found the battle was over and so were his chances of that big promotion.

Ask a random citizen at the bus stop if they're following the BBL and you'll get a variety of responses: embarrassed shoe-gazing, irritated bafflement or even mild alarm, as though you might be trying to sell them a new religion.

The internet doesn't rate it either. Pop B, B and L into your favourite search engine and this feast of Aussie cricket fun turns up halfway down page seven, below the British Basketball League; the Baltic Basketball League; the Balgzand Bacton Line; Basingstoke Boilers Limited; Big Birthday Llamas of Bolivar Boulevard, Lima, and Barry's Bargain Lawnmowers (end of season sale now on, hurry while stocks last!)

Of course, you could type "Big Bash League" and get there straight away. But we 21st-century types barely have time to eat our breakfast, let alone waste energy on superfluous vowels and consonants. When people wish to communicate on the subject of India's foremost annual Twenty20 competition, do they laboriously elucidate the full title? No. Tap out I, P and L and you are in franchise land in about 0.03 seconds.

Extracts from this year's bestseller The Book Of Excuses (continued)

75. ….and as we all know, with the moon in the ascendant, a Leo like Steven Finn is almost unplayable.

76. Like all stars, the Indian players love an audience. The media blackout in this series means that there are fewer people looking at pictures of Indian batsmen scoring centuries or taking lots of wickets. This is entirely down to a plot amongst Western media outlets, who conspired together in order not to pay the very reasonable fees charged by the BCCI, thus denying our players the opportunity to inspire their global audience. Crestfallen by their lack of media exposure, it is no surprise they are playing badly.

Only three men with the noble surname of Hughes have ever played Test cricket, and all of them have been Australian. You might ask why the Hughes name is so popular in a former penal colony, but we Hugheses are a much misunderstood and sometimes wrongly convicted people.

The shelves of the talent supermarket are full of regular options: vanilla flavoured Clarkes, low-fat Lyons, diet-Watsons. But the Australian selectors, unlike their English equivalents, know that if they reach into the cabinet marked Hughes, they're going to pull out something a bit special.

Kim Hughes was a jealousy magnet, an artist with a full palette of shots, and some of the crinkliest hair ever seen on a cricket field. Mervyn Hughes was a zoological curiosity, combining the moustache of an Edwardian walrus, the midriff of a hippopotamus, and the attitude of a cranky baboon who has just woken up to find the galah from across the river has moved his favourite banana.

Perhaps by way of compensation for having lately prevented anyone from pointing a camera at Indian cricket, the BCCI this week granted ESPNcricinfo exclusive access to the big cheese himself, Mr Narayanaswami "Gorgonzola" Srinivasan. In a wide-ranging interview conducted in the presidential suite of his underwater lair (anchored, for tax purposes, off the coast of an unspecified continent) Grand Admiral Srinivasan issued his latest decrees.

On the subject of the DRS, he was resolute. The BCCI do not believe in it. Not in a Richard Dawkins way; they believe that it exists. They just don't believe that it works.

"If you want to use technology, it must be perfect."

Like the burnout of the high-profile under-pressure volcano Vesuvius, Andy Flower's burnout had been much prophesised (since 2009) and this week he was officially diagnosed with laptop fever. This is a debilitating condition brought on in his case by staring at training and nutrition optimisation spreadsheets for so long that the little numbers begin to blur together and form themselves into line-dancing leprechauns.

On Wednesday Ashley Giles was announced as the new next Andy Flower and tomorrow we can expect the first journalistic speculation that the King of Spain may also be in danger of burnout given the demands of his dual role as Twenty20 supremo and Fifty50 big cheese.

So what gives? We all like play at pin-the-blame-on-the-schedule, but that's not it. The amount of cricket isn't the problem. It's that everyone's so obsessed with winning.

Whilst Alastair Cook and chums are gallivanting around India in the sunshine, enjoying all the hospitable spin-bowling and complimentary batting collapses laid on for them by their generous hosts, the rest of us are sloshing about up to our ankles in the wet stuff.

Some bits are soggier than others. It will surprise almost no one to learn that New Road, Worcester has been transformed from sleepy picturesque amphitheatre of cricket dreams into an enormous muddy puddle and that the native species of wading bird known as "Solanki's Duck" has returned, splashing about in the covers and making its nest out of bits of sightscreen, discarded batting gloves and copies of the club accounts.

At least there's no danger of New Road losing the title of England's Prettiest Temporary Sports-Ground Situated Underwater Feature; a competition in which it consistently outscores the marshes of Old Trafford and the intricate network of puddles that appears whenever someone leaves the tap running in the gents at the Banks' Stadium, Walsall.

From time to time, I like to take a financial interest in a cricket match. Not in a Giles Clarke, or a Salman Butt way; my financial interest in a cricket match doesn't mean stopping other people from watching the cricket match, or knowing in advance what's going to happen in the cricket match.

It's just that some cricket matches - the long ones - the ones that go on all week, can be, well, ever so slightly mind-numbing. If it weren't for the outside chance of scooping a fat sum, those five-day bat-a-thons in Bangladesh or Bangalore would be as unappealing as back-to-back performances of Der Ring des Nibelungen in Klingon.

People say that T20 is for the youth with their goldfish attention spans, and Test matches are for us grown-ups. This is wrong. Before I was bitter, cynical and addicted to doughnuts, I was also young. In my summer holidays, I'd run out of stupid things to do outside by the second week of August, so I'd dump my bike, crash on the sofa, and tune out for a few hours to the somnolent ramblings of Tony Lewis and Jack Bannister.