It’s quite possible you didn’t. He only scored nine of them in 82 balls after all.

You have options in Test cricket. You can choose how you go about things. We would argue that England’s hare approach to batting at the minute is actually a lot more interesting for being pitted against Australia’s tortoise method. Contrast is important. Even the three founders of Freebass made sure they used different parts of the fretboard.

If both teams take the helter skelter shotmaking route, the game becomes hare v hare, best hare wins. That to us is less of a thing than an inter-species race which allows you to compare methodology as well as ability. Who cares which hare’s faster. Show us some different animals!

So it was that Australia – whether deliberately or because of some sort of inactivity virus sweeping through the camp – set about putting overs into the English bowlers’ legs.

Earlier this series, Mark Butcher made a comment about how many wickets Stuart Broad had “in his legs”. Up until this point we had no idea a bowler’s legs also contained wickets. We had always understood them to be purely receptacles for overs. Given the absence of Moeen Ali and the age and records of the various members of England’s attack, Australia’s method made sense. There simply can’t be much room for many more overs in those English seamers’ legs.

So it was that Marnus Labuschagne batted like a delivery sponge, passively absorbing ball after ball, looking for all the world like a man who didn’t know where he was or why.

If anything, it brought to mind one of those late era freediving MS Dhoni innings where he’d take a one-day innings ever deeper but never actually feel moved to make an attempt to surface again.

There was the time he stalked England and never actually pounced. There was the time he stood around and watched his batting partners beat Australia without ever quite feeling moved to step in and help. And there was the time he forgot to blink when the required run rate got away from him against New Zealand in the World Cup.

Marnus blinked when Stuart Broad swapped his bails round, edging the next delivery to where Joe Root’s hand would somehow eventually be.

Further reading: Is Stuart Broad the most annoying cricketer there’s ever been?

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2 minute read

Pakistan are playing Australia at the minute and there is a scoreline and eventually there will be a result, but all that really matters is the catch and the run-out.

Let’s start with the run-out because that happened most recently.

Azhar Ali edged through gully and the ball ran towards the rope but not to the rope. Azhar Ali and Asad Shafiq didn’t pick up on this subtlety and rather than running, they stood in the middle of the pitch doing a fist bump like a pair of unaware bell-ends.

The two men may have started to suspect that something was awry as they watched Tim Paine whip the bails off.

Unbelievable… #PAKvAUS pic.twitter.com/SuiAXbDg01

— cricket.com.au (@cricketcomau) October 18, 2018

The catch happened earlier in the match. It was taken by Marnus Labuschagne, a human man whose first name is Marnus and whose second name is Labuschagne.

Labuschagne was fielding at short leg and Mohammad Hafeez middled the ball straight into what Cricinfo called his ‘inner thigh’, what Labuschagne himself called ‘sort of in my groin’ and what we’d call ‘his bollocks’ (we are 100 per cent confident he was wearing protective equipment because he was not hospitalised).

Labuschagne opted to fall over using a spiralling method, almost as if he were trying to corkscrew himself into the ground where he’d be safe. As he spun round, the ball ricocheted off his right thigh and rattled around between his legs before eventually coming to rest between his knees as he lay on his back.

“All of a sudden I saw it sit like a little diamond,” he recalled. (Who stores diamonds between their knees?)

It was a very fine catch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEJVc51cT8Q