Writing off old man Langer

It seems a batsman scoring 182 runs in a Test match is not enough for some critics. Ben Dorries in The Courier Mail writes that Justin Langer must retire at the end of the Ashes series for the greater good of the Australia team.

If Langer won't willingly walk the plank, chairman of selectors Andrew Hilditch must have the courage to push him. Ask yourself a simple question: do we really want a 37-year-old opening batsman taking block against Sri Lanka and India next summer? He's not going to get any better and he's keeping out a bold new wave of openers like Phil Jaques and the underrated Chris Rogers from Western Australia. If Langer keeps taking block, the extraordinary talents of the generation-next openers could be lost completely.

But Langer needn’t be worried about his ageing reflexes leaving him vulnerable to a short-pitched attack from Steve Harmison, according to Martin Johnson in The Daily Telegraph.

Even if Harmison manages to locate both his rhythm and the pitch, Bodyline could not conceivably be re-enacted in modern-day Australia. The first delivery to pass by a batsman's nostrils would immediately result in the game being called off by the Australian Ministry of Health, Safety and Nannying – a department thought to have even more employees than the figure arrived at by multiplying the annual number of visitors to Ayers Rock by the South Australian kangaroo population. This is a country which knows what's best for its citizens, and it can only be a matter of time before capital punishment is brought back for offences ranging from smoking to eating your peas off a knife. The Fun Police had their hands full at the Test in Brisbane, ejecting 200 people for various crimes, which included playing the trumpet and shouting "Aussie Aussie Aussie, oi oi oi," or, in one instance, requiring a spectator to leave his seat and not come back until he'd stopped sneezing.