A never-ending one-day series

The English media have never really warmed to the ongoing seven-ODI series between England and Australia. Ahead of the fourth match, Barney Ronay asks in the Guardian whether the series will ever end. He also writes that England's poor starts so far have been due to their openers' confusion over whether to "go aerial" or to "get the pace of the pitch".

It's often Owais Shah who gets fingered as the real villain here, chiefly because at the crease he wears at all times the tortured facial expression of the final nonspecific bad guy gunned down in the warehouse shoot-out scene in a Mel Gibson cop movie – the one who sweats a lot and fidgets and hides behind an oil drum and eventually gets the drop on Mel, but when the gunshot comes Mel is somehow still standing and instead it's Shah who slumps to the floor because Mel's fatter/older/more ethnic partner has parked the car and come wheezing up in time to solemnly splatter him in the back of the head.