There aren’t many things in cricket more entertaining than a duck. A batter slowly walks out to try and make some runs and then slowly walks back again having failed to do so. It’s a miniature tragedy.

Great ducks come in many different flavours. There’s the duck you were expecting and the sheer delight (or frustration) of having that expectation met. At the opposite end of the scale, there’s the duck that comes when you were anticipating anything but a duck. The unexpected finality of such a moment provides an adrenal shock, like when a massive star is killed off in the opening scene of a film. Donald Bradman’s final innings is probably the best cricket example. (The Rock and Samuel L Jackson failing to last 15 minutes in The Other Guys is our favourite film example, even if it probably doesn’t exactly qualify.)

Between those extremes, you’ve got all manner of quirky ducks that can be elevated by the context or the manner in which they were achieved. A couple of examples: in 2021, Jasprit Bumrah was run out without facing a ball against England, and in 1999 Shahid Afridi made two golden ducks on the bounce, one against India and one against Sri Lanka. Afridi’s was by no means a unique feat, but it was very on-brand.

For this article, we’ve picked out eight players for their sterling contributions in the field of duck-scoring.

1. Muttiah Muralitharan, Sri Lanka

Murali has famously taken more Test wickets than anyone else. 14 golden ducks in 164 innings also means he’s the golden duckiest Test batter there’s ever been.

As Test duck-makers go, Murali wasn’t blessed with the same lack-of-skill as some of his rivals. His number 11 superpower was teaming the batting incompetence he had with absolutely zero judgement about what he should or shouldn’t have a ruddy great heave at. This pretty much mindless approach and his refusal to temper it even slightly, even after 400 international matches meant that for a good long while Murali was our favourite batter.

• Remembering Murali at the Oval in 98: The match when a true one-off revealed the awe-inspiring extent of his powers

Another player worthy of mention in the field of golden duck scoring is Sam Curran, who at the time of writing has managed six in 38 innings. This means that Curran, who generally tries to pass himself off as an all-rounder, has been out first ball a colossal 15.79% of the time.

2. Courtney Walsh, West Indies

If we’re talking plain old, take your time, no rush ducks, Courtney Walsh is of course the king with no fewer than 43 in 185 innings.

That is a hell of a lot of being dismissed without scoring.

3. Stuart Broad, England

Not far behind Walsh and still with a chance of passing him is Stuart Broad with 39 ducks in 232 innings. Broad earns special mention not just for having taken Murali’s approach to batting and built on it to become the greatest batter of all time, but for securing the most ducks while also having at least one hundred to your name.

• Is Stuart Broad the most annoying cricketer there’s ever been?

4. Chris Martin, New Zealand

For sheer duck density, it’s hard to look past Chris Martin who managed 36 in 104 innings, including a world record seven pairs. (No-one else has managed more than four.)

Martin was such an unutterably bad batter than he appeared in our list of Test cricketers who were the biggest burdens to their sides despite being an extremely good bowler.

Those who saw him bat may in fact wonder how he managed to avoid making a duck in the other 68 Test innings. Well, there were 28 nought not outs for a start. We were also struck by the suspiciously large number of four not outs (nine) which seem to suggest the edge down to third man was his most productive scoring shot.

5. Mervyn Dillon, West Indies

Brace yourself here, but the West Indies’ Mervyn Dillon was actually dismissed for a duck even more reliably than Chris Martin. He managed 26 in 68 innings.

There was however one pretty major difference between Dillon and Martin. Once Dillon got in – which is to say on the occasions when he wasn’t dismissed for exactly bugger all – he had a surprising tendency to go big.

By ‘go big’, we mean that on 14 occasions he made 19 runs or more. (We’d normally have a 20-run threshold here, but we were struck that Dillon made 19 on three occasions and 19 seemed a sizeable enough knock to qualify as ‘big’ in the context of an article about ducks.)  

6. Wavell Hinds, West Indies

One of Dillon’s golden ducks came in the 2000 Boxing Day Test against Australia and it wasn’t even close to being the worst innings of the match.

In the West Indies’ first innings, Wavell Hinds, batting at number three, was dismissed for a 10-ball duck. Nothing too remarkable about that, except that he was also dropped twice. We’re sure there have been other occasions when that’s happened to a batter, but given his batting position and the occasion, Hinds’ effort must surely rank pretty high on a list of the worst Test innings of all time.

7. Marvan Atapattu, Sri Lanka

A duck from a batter is so much more powerful than one from a number 11. So let’s move on to Marvan Atapattu, who made 22 ducks in 156 innings and also 16 hundreds, six of which were doubles.  

Steve Waugh actually made the same number of ducks, but it took him 260 innings. Waugh also didn’t deliver them with anywhere near as much panache.

Because if there’s one fact everyone should know about Marvan Atapattu, it’s how he began his Test career.

Atapattu made his debut against India in 1990 and began with a pair. In his next Test innings, against Australia in 1992, he made a third duck – a golden one to be precise. While a single in the second innings of that match must have been a weight off his mind, he nevertheless served up another pair in his third Test, against India in 1994.

Six innings into his Test career, Atapattu – a specialist batter – had five ducks and a 1 to his name.

(Irrelevant fact, but Atapattu is also one of only two players to have retired out in a Test match, along with Mahela Jayawardene, who did it in the same Test against Bangladesh in 2001.)

Ajit Agarkar, India

Ajit Agarkar – one of the worst batters ever to have hit a Test ton – once made five ducks in a row. While Atapattu’s effort is funnier because (a) he was a batter and (b) this was how he began a long and successful Test career in which he made over 5,000 runs at an average of almost 40, Agarkar does get a good few points for managing four golden ducks in a row to kick off that sequence.

You know you’re going some when a two-ball duck is an improvement on all of your previous four innings.

Agarkar’s incredible run of form only really came to an end because he left Australia and got to play against someone else. Incredibly, the next time he faced the Aussies, a year later, he made a pair.

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There have been 28 occasions in the last 25 years when a bowler has taken eight wickets or more in a Test innings. Some of these were weirder than others.

At what point does a bowling performance become really, truly, freakishly remarkable? We’d say at the seventh wicket.

Five-fors are pretty commonplace, while a six-for can be a good day at the office with the new ball, a bit of luck for a third wicket and then running through some rank tail-enders. But if you’ve taken seven wickets, you’ve done something really special, haven’t you?

All the same, seven wicket hauls happen more often than you think. There have been over 30 Test seven-fors in the last 10 years. Marchant de Lange has one (against Sri Lanka in Durban); Mark Craig has one (against Pakistan in Sharjah); and most recently Zimbabwe’s Sikandar Raza got one (against Sri Lanka in Harare).

R Ashwin has taken five of the things on his own.

Put it like that and you start thinking that maybe seven-fors sometimes leave the earth unshattered.

But eight-fors? Come on. An eight-for is nuts. You can’t take an eight-for without bowling exceptionally well or at least pretty damn solidly while the rest of the bowling attack goes completely AWOL.

The eight-for

As we’ve already established, there have been 28 Test eight-fors in the past quarter century. None of these were anything other than completely weird because the taking of eight wickets out of a possible ten is always fully outrageous.

There’s a bit in The Other Guys where some golfers take down a helicopter. “We’re cops. Hit the chopper,” shouts Will Ferrell’s character and a load of people at a driving range just start wellying balls at it. A few of these balls hit someone or something important and the helicopter crashes.

On some level a Test innings is a bit like this. Yes, there’s a huge amount of skill in the taking of wickets, but it’s still a number game. You try and consistently put balls in the right sort of area and a certain proportion of them will get you a wicket. For a whole bowling attack to be attempting this with only one of them having any real success is unlikely.

Even so, some bowlers are more likely to end up with eight wickets than others. Muttiah Muralitharan took three eight-wicket hauls and two nine-wicket hauls because (a) he did an insanely large proportion of Sri Lanka’s bowling during his career, and (b) he was magic. (Obviously these two things are not unconnected.)

Similarly, Glenn McGrath took two eight-fors because he was a great bowler who tended to do a fair proportion of his team’s bowling within a four-man attack. (Somewhat surprisingly, Shane Warne only took one eight-for, which is fewer than Craig McDermott.)

Spinners are also a bit more likely to take an eight-for because they tend to have fewer team-mates who are suited to exploiting the same conditions as them.

What we’re saying is that all eight-fors are weird, but some are weirder than others.

Here are six really weird occasions from the last 25 years when a bowler took eight wickets or more in a Test innings.

Lance Klusener 8-64 v India, Eden Gardens 1996

Let’s say you paid a visit to Rekall Incorporated and they wiped your memory of all eight-fors but left you with all of the rest of your knowledge about famous cricketers. How long would you be guessing eight-wicket-hauliers before you got to Lance Klusener?

Klusener is primarily remembered for the run-out that decided the 1999 World Cup semi-final and secondarily remembered for the annihilatory late innings batting that got South Africa into that semi-final.

He also bowled.

He’s generally thought of as a one-day cricketer for the reasons above, but Klusener also played 49 Tests. During this time, he took just one five wicket haul – 8-64 against India at Eden Gardens on what was not exactly a seam bowler friendly pitch.

South Africa had made 428 in the first innings and India responded with 329, including a 74-ball hundred from Mohammad Azharuddin. Klusener opened the bowling and returned the uninspiring-to-troubling figures of 0-75 off 14 overs.

South Africa then made 367-3, so at this point it’s not exactly a minefield – particularly when you consider that one of those three wickets was a run-out.

All in all, things didn’t look too promising for South Africa’s bowlers – particularly given Allan Donald was off the field with a severely bruised left heel. Klusener then rollocked in and bowled India out for 137.

Oh, and by the way – it was his debut.

Muttiah Muralitharan 9-65 v England, The Oval 1998

Over time, a Muttiah Muralitharan five-for came to feel like almost an inevitability. Opponents’ aspirations tended to centre on how many runs he would concede for the taking of those wickets – or even just how many overs he would have to bowl – rather than on actually getting the better of him.

But before he became an unstoppable warlock, Murali was just a man with a weird bowling action. Arriving at the Oval in 1998 for a one-off Test, he had 187 Test wickets to his name at the respectable but unspectacular average of 28.03.

Then he took seven wickets.

Then he took nine more.

We’ve done the whole Murali at the Oval thing in a lot more detail already, but it’s worth emphasising a few elements to underline why his 9-65 was so weird.

Despite his seven wickets in the first innings, this pitch was not a bowl of dust. Our man had to bowl 59.3 overs to take those wickets. This meant England had got a pretty good look at him and it also meant that he’d moved beyond ‘well grooved’ to ‘fairly tired’.

The pitch was good enough that Sri Lanka had just made 591. Murali then bowled another 54.2 overs and took 9-65.

The other wicket was a run-out.

Anil Kumble 10-74 v Pakistan, Delhi 1999

Only two bowlers have claimed all ten wickets in a Test innings, so this is unequivocally weird.

There have been many memorable performances by Indian cricketers over the years, but this, for us, is the big one. All 10 wickets in an innings – and against Pakistan at that.

Then consider how it played out.

Chasing 420 to win, Pakistan were 101 for no loss and then Anil Kumble took all of the wickets.

Sorry, that glosses over a few of the details, but that’s really the full weirdness in a nutshell: one guy took all of the wickets while the other guys combined took none of the wickets.

Pakistan were all out for 207.

Jason Krejza 8-215 v India, Nagpur 2008

Jason Krejza suffered a bruising Test debut in which he took eight wickets in an innings. That is a very hard statement to get your head around.

Everything about this performance was weird really – right up to the fact that Krejza was even playing in the first place.

Krejza was named in the Australia squad to tour India despite a first-class average of 50.09. It is safe to say he was not well known. The warm-up matches then went terribly.

Australia picked him anyway.

“I think we will go after him,” warned Virender Sehwag, ominously.

In Krejza’s first over, Sehwag duly walloped him back over his head for four and then six and after three overs the off-spinner had conceded 32.

Then he got Rahul Dravid for a duck on his way to 8-215 off 43.5 technicolour overs, during which he also saw Sachin Tendulkar dropped twice off his bowling.

Krejza’s other wickets in the innings included Sehwag, VVS Laxman, Sourav Ganguly and MS Dhoni. (The Laxman one in particular was a ruddy beauty.)

In the second innings he took 4-143 off 31. Australia lost, obviously.

A month later, Krejza played his second Test, this time in South Africa. He took 1-102 off 25 overs in the first innings and 0-102 off 24 in the second and never got picked again.

Stuart Broad 8-15 v Australia, Trent Bridge 2015

The first and last overs of this famous Stuart Broad spell were terrible. In the first he averaged 3.00, and in the last he averaged 4.00.

Those sound pretty good as bowling averages – and in most situations they are – but in his other eight overs, he averaged 1.00.

That’s why Broad’s performance was so remarkable. These other eight-wicket entries are weird, but Broad’s was economically weird-beyond-weird. Runs scored off the bat really should be more than twice as likely as wickets when measured across an entire innings.

You could bowl at a team of 11 Chris Martins and legitimately expect to emerge with worse figures than this.

Roston Chase 8-60 v England, Bridgetown 2019

Roston Chase is the kind of batsman who gets picked because he can bowl, but also the kind of bowler who gets picked because he can bat. ‘Bits and pieces’ is overly damning for a man with five Test hundreds, but it is also fair to say that he probably wouldn’t have played much international cricket as a specialist.

Bowling is Chase’s secondary skill. He is a spinner who does a job and that job is ‘wazzing it in without really giving it much of a rip and with no enormous expectation of taking a wicket’.

However, at Bridgetown in 2019, he took eight of them – his figures all the more remarkable given that Jason Holder and Shane Dowrich had just put on near enough 300 for the West Indies’ seventh wicket before a declaration.

Looking back, it’s quite the cocktail. As well as a few batsmen playing for non-existent turn, Jos Buttler and Ben Foakes were dismissed slamming the ball in the vague direction of glue-handed close leg-side fielders; Moeen Ali tried to glide one into the hands of slip and succeeded; Adil Rashid fell victim to a juggling boundary catch at cow corner; and Sam Curran was stumped after failing to lay bat on a wide leg-side delivery.

This perhaps explains why Chase’s record of running through a side is not more extensive. He has only two other Test five-fors to his name: 5-121 against India and 5-172, also against England.

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In 1998 Muttiah Muralitharan took 16 wickets in a Test match against England at the Oval. But honestly that isn’t even the half of it.

Only one person has taken 800 Test wickets and it’s easy to think that’s what makes Muttiah Muralitharan unique. 

But we need to take a step back and view him anew from afar, because really the 800 Test wickets is just a tiny, tiny part of the reason why Murali is so magical.

To explain this a little better, we’re now going to tell you a story about a Scottish cyclist.

Old Faithful

In the early Nineties, Graeme Obree’s bike frame building business went bust and he concluded that the simplest way out of his financial problems was to break the hardest record in cycling – the hour record.

The hour record is a straightforward thing. It’s how far you can ride your bike in an hour. At the time, the record (51.151 km) had been held for almost a decade by Francesco Moser and people had pretty much given up on trying to break it.

Moser had taken the record off Eddy Merckx, you see, who is cycling’s Don Bradman, if Don Bradman had also been a hell of a bowler.

Moser had to employ all manner of engineers, data scientists and aerodynamicists to achieve the feat.

Obree embarked on the quest alone and the very first thing he did was invent a new kind of bicycle.

That bike, Old Faithful, cost him £70 to make.

He used the bearings out of his washing machine.

In July 1993, Obree booked the Vikingskipet velodrome in Norway for 24 hours and made an hour record attempt. He failed by almost a kilometre.

He had the velodrome for a day though, so he told everyone that he’d try again in the morning.

It wasn’t just bike building where Obree had his own way of doing things – it was athletically and nutritionally too. (Our favourite story is of him standing by the side of the road before a time trial, eating jam out of the jar with a spanner.)

To keep from seizing up overnight, Obree he use of what he called “the bladder alarm.”

Writing in his autobiography, he said:

“I knew that I could not sleep long before my muscles really stiffened up, but I did not want to set an alarm because it wakes you from a deep sleep with such a start that the overall effect would be exhaustion by the morning.

“Instead, I used the ‘bladder alarm’, which is a technique of drinking loads of water before going to bed. It would only be an hour or two before I would waken in need of the toilet, but before going back to bed, I would do five or ten minutes of deep stretching, have a small bowl of cornflakes for carbohydrate, and another load of water. And so the cycle went, five or six times during the night.”

In the morning, Obree woke from his last bladder cycle, had another bowl of cornflakes, rocked up at the velodrome and broke the hour record.

It is not often that someone comes up with a whole new way of doing something and conquers the world with it. Anyone who does that is very, very special indeed.

Off-wrist-spin

A few people are famous for inventing – or for being the first to perfect – a particular delivery. Flippers, doosras, even reverse swing – someone came up with them all.

Bernard Bosanquet is remembered for inventing the googly, for example. Bosanquet played seven Test matches and took 25 wickets and he will be remembered forever.

Murali did more than this. He invented a whole bowling style; a whole new way of spinning the ball – off-wrist-spin, you might call it. Murali came up with this method and then he used it to become the top Test wicket-taker of all time.

But that doesn’t really capture why he was such a one-off. You also have to throw in the fact that not everybody could ride Murali’s bike. It was built for him and him alone. His method wasn’t a new path for cricket to travel down. It was a quite majestic cul de sac.

The reason for this is simple: only the tiniest proportion of people on Earth are physically capable of moving their body in a way that makes off-wrist-spin possible.

The long and short of it is that because of his mad shoulder, Murali could basically deliver the ball backhand.

Where your palms point inwards when you stand with your hands by your side, Murali’s point forwards. There’s plenty of wiggle room in that shoulder too.

Still images don’t really do it justice. You can probably get your arm into some of the positions seen during Murali’s bowling action. The question is whether you can get into those positions from where the arm was a nanosecond before. The answer is almost certainly not.

Throw in a wrist that flaps around like washing on the line during a hurricane and you’ve got quite the mix.

Channel 4 did a good thing on his technique back in the day. Sky have done one too. (The Channel 4 one features one of our all-time favourite quotes: “With this brace on, I can still spin the doosra quite amazingly.” Murali’s ability was so extraordinary that even he was amazed by it.)

Side-on footage of Murali’s top-spinner gives you a good sense of what he was capable of. (Find a private place before you try and copy this or you’ll look like a mental.)

Step one: Arm back, hand pointing upwards.

Step two: Arm halfway up, hand pointing inwards.

Step three: Release, hand pointing backwards, wrist flicking ferociously.

Murali had several different deliveries, but the top spinner gives you the clearest idea how it all worked. That’s the basic freakish mechanism underpinning it all. That’s how you bowl wrist-off-spin in the highly unlikely event you are blessed with the necessary shoulder and wrist.

To recap: Muttiah Muralitharan invented a whole new bowling style that only he can utilise and then he used it to take more wickets than anyone ever.

Oh, and there was also the sheer theatre of it.

This is what Murali looked like every single time he bowled a cricket ball.

He should be considered a great for that look alone.

Anyway, the Oval in 1998…

The one-off Test

In 1996, Sri Lanka won the World Cup. In 1998, they toured England and were granted… one Test match.

Even at the time, a lot of people felt this warranted a place in the pantheon of piss-takes. Now that we know how the game panned out, it seems even more ludicrous.

Sri Lanka felt slighted. However, concluding that actions would speak louder than words, they set themselves to winning the match.

They prepared well, playing five matches against counties in the lead-up. Come the Test, they won the toss and Arjuna Ranatunga decided to bowl.

It’s worth reflecting on what Murali’s record was at this point. For a man who took more wickets than anyone, he was a surprisingly slow starter (relatively speaking). Before the Test, he had 187 wickets in 41 matches at an average of 28.03.

He would go on to take another 613 at 21.10.

Nevertheless, Ranatunga knew what he had. He knew that Murali was the only way Sri Lanka would win the match and that they could only win the match if they put on a colossal first innings.

So he bowled first. The plan was that Sri Lanka would bowl England out for whatever, bat past them and then unleash their primary weapon.

Speaking to Cricket Monthly, coach Roy Dias explained: “If our batsmen scored heavily in the first innings, we wanted to give Murali some time to rest in between innings, rather than worry about imposing a follow-on.”

Talk about commitment to a goal.

So the important thing to remember here is that Murali bowled in the first innings of the match. That is not generally considered a great time to be bowling spin.

And you know what? It wasn’t. England made 445.

“Nobody could take many wickets because in the first innings the pitch was so flat,” remembered the man himself. “I was bowling at one end and getting a few wickets here and there. It was not that successful a first innings, even though I got seven wickets.”

Sorry, what? Can we have that again?

“It was not that successful a first innings, even though I got seven wickets.”

It’s safe to say Murali has his own standards.

It is however worth pointing out that those seven wickets took him 59.3 overs (357 deliveries). This is another aspect of Murali’s brilliance that is often overlooked. The man could not merely shoulder a workload, but continue to threaten throughout.

By the end of his career, Murali had bowled over 50 overs in an innings on 31 occasions. The next highest number is 19 by the West Indies’ Lance Gibbs. These weren’t innings when he was getting flogged. He took 123 wickets. This was putting a shift in and getting the job done. This was work.

Murali took 7-155 in that first innings, Graeme Hick and John Crawley both made hundreds and Sri Lanka finally got to bat deep into day two.

England’s spinner for this match was Ian Salisbury. Our favourite comment on his selection is this brutally matter-of-fact quote from Darren Gough: “Because of the state of our spin options, we knew the seamers had to knock them over.”

England’s seamers did not knock them over.

Sanath Jayasuriya went nuts. He made 213 off 278 balls, while Aravinda de Silva hit fours wherever he damn well pleased and made 152.

Sri Lanka were eventually all out for 591 and even Murali got runs.

“Murali’s quick 30 was the final nail,” said Gough. “I found Murali frustrating. He never used to fancy batting against me, because I bowled the ball at a decent pace, but he’d always back away and middle it.”

Murali was a fine batsman.

The second innings

Now it was time for business. And the pressure was on.

It’s easy to think these things come naturally to the greats; that they are by definition people who cope with expectations easily.

Not so.

“Just before we’d field he’d sometimes go to the bathroom to throw up, he was that nervous,” Kumar Sangakkara told Wisden. “And that was after he’d taken 700 wickets.”

On this occasion, Sri Lanka were fighting for more than just a Test win. They were fighting for respect, for a viable future as a Test nation. And it was all down to Murali. He probably had a quick look at the porcelain before he headed out.

There’s a certain rewriting of history that somehow the Oval was an absolute raging turner for that match, but as Murali said himself, “if you score 445 and 590, how can it be spin-friendly?”

It’s clear that the pitch hadn’t completely crumbled when you see that Gough would go on to make a ball hundred, surviving for 133 balls.

But Murali was just relentless. Epically relentless. He took 9-65 in 54.2 overs.

The other wicket was a run out.

It was pure brilliance. You can watch the wickets here.

Sri Lanka made 37 runs in five overs and secured their first away win against England.

To put all of this in context, Murali’s first innings effort was right up there among the very best epic 50-over-plus bowling performances of all time. He then followed it up with an even better one – the second best, in fact, after Jim Laker’s 10-for.

It wasn’t just that he took 16 wickets. It was that he bowled over 100 overs to take 16 wickets having been given just one chance to stick it to England – and he did it using his own homemade technique that no-one else will ever be able to copy, grinning his damn head off throughout.

“Suddenly next time we visited England, we were getting three-Test series,” he said.

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< 1 minute readWe could write about Mitchell Johnson’s Test retirement. We could write about some actual cricket. Or we could publish some tweets in which Sourav Ganguly looks frighteningly sickly.

Hey Sourav, do an impression of a zombie.

Top drawer.

Now do an impression of a ghost.

Not bad.

Note Murali’s T-shirt as well. Murali loves cricket so bloody much, he’s actually gone and got the T-shirt.

Murali’s the best.

(We’ll do something on Johnson tomorrow.)

Pics taken from Virender Sehwag’s Twitter account.

2 minute readToday we’re going to direct you towards two pieces of ours which appeared outside the kingdom.

First up, our latest King of Cricket is Murali. Don’t worry, it ain’t all numbers. It’s about the joints, the graft and the batting really.

Secondly, last week’s Cricinfo piece, entitled English cricket rocked by non-Cook related incident. As an added bonus, that one contains a little bit of Nick Knight.

Almost inevitably, Cook is in the news again today. Paul Downton has given another interview, which basically means Cook’s relationship with the public has dropped another few notches through no fault of his own.

Downtown has an incredible knack for alienating people. When he speaks, what you’re left with is a strong sense that someone has wagged their finger at you and told you they know best.

Apparently he sits in on selection meetings these days. He says he is happy with the selectors he employs (his words) and happy with the decision to continue with Cook as captain, but that the selectors will meet to discuss everything on Friday. Presumably they won’t be jumping at the chance to make their boss unhappy.

Asked about Cook’s form, Downton said: “Yes, he’s in miserable form. But form can change. I’d suggest he’s ‘due’ – wouldn’t you?”

We’ve covered this before, haven’t we?

Another highlight is: “He’s the natural leader of that group of players.”

A natural leader in the sense of being a great orator? A natural leader based on the fact he’s getting great results? What is a natural leader? Is that how leaders are identified; by their nature? Do the ECB do a DNA test? What chromosomes are they looking for?

The ECB really are beyond parody now.

Downton finished by saying: “I want to enfranchise everybody and I want them to be part of what’s happening in English cricket.”

Remember kids, if you’ve been enfranchised by a stockbroker, you should inform a parent, teacher or policeman immediately. It’s not your fault.

2 minute readYounus Khan’s just made his third Test hundred on the bounce. We mentioned that he was underrated after the first one. Let’s revisit that.

We all know Younus averages some way north of 50 and that he’s now made Test hundreds against every nation, but let’s dig a little deeper. Last time we mentioned that only 19 of his 93 Tests have been played truly at home and that hints at what’s so great about him. He’s adaptable.

The first of this trio of hundreds saw him construct non-scoring foundations for his innings. Since then, he’s become ever-more expansive. This third hundred came off 128 balls.

But it’s conditions as well. Not only has Younus scored a hundred against every Test-playing nation, he’s also scored one in every country bar Australia, where he’s only played three matches. Only in South Africa and the West Indies does he average less than 40 and only in the Windies does he average less than 30. There are always gaps and that’s some CV.

Attack!

Midway through our Cricinfo piece about how Pakistan and Australia have prepared for this Test, we poked fun at Australia’s tendency to believe that their success is directly linked to how attacking they are. It was therefore quite amusing to see that they’d tweaked their team and brought Glenn Maxwell in to bat at number three.

Maybe it’ll work.

Murali’s balls

YouTube can make wasters of us all, but every now and again a long shift is justified when you catch a glimpse of what must rank as being one of the all-time great cricket banners.

< 1 minute readWe wrote about the various World Cup storylines during the quarter-finals. The stories of Tendulkar and Murali, two ageing greats, seem to be the strongest now, but that’s mostly due to hindsight.

All the same, it makes for a good narrative. There’s also a minor subplot that no-one will care about: it’s Lancashire v Yorkshire!

We’re pretty keen for Tendulkar to win the World Cup in his home city, because that really would be a good story. Then again, he did play 16 matches for Yorkshire almost 20 years ago. Still not forgiven him for that.

Murali, by contrast, is an honorary Lancastrian having represented the county a bucketload of times. He too is one of our favourite cricketers and we’d love to see him win the World Cup in his final international match, if only to see just how much one man can smile.

Either way, it’s a lose-lose situation – that’s how we’re viewing it with our famously boundless optimism.

< 1 minute readWe don’t get it. It was only Pragyan Ojha. What’s the big deal?

If we’d taken 800 Test wickets, we wouldn’t be jumping up and down about getting Pragyan Ojha out. We’d have been more worked up about dismissing better batsmen, like Ian Salisbury or Chris Lewis.

< 1 minute readWe’re certainly intending to do a proper Muralitharan retirement post – possibly after his last match – but for now, we can’t be bothered. These are the things that immediately came to mind when we heard he was retiring:

1. Muttiah Muralitharan might just surpass Steve Harmison in our estimation as the finest batsman of his generation. Here’s why.
2. Murali’s bowling technique: you try it if it’s so advantageous.
3. The following Andrew Flintoff story.

Flintoff walked back into the Lancashire dressing room after getting out and everyone was staying out of his way because he was furious. Except for Murali.

Murali said: “What’s the matter, Freddie? Another crap shot, was it?”

He smiled when he said it and he got away with it. Murali and Flintoff are friends. You can’t teach good-natured cheek like that and only the tiniest fraction of the population can pull it off.

< 1 minute readMurali’s always had a certain approach to batting.

• Have a ruddy great swing at the ball
• Miss
• Have an even bigger swing at the next one

Usually this method fails for reasons that are fairly clear even to Murali. Occasionally it doesn’t and he hits 33 off 16 balls to win a match, as happened yesterday against Bangladesh.

It’s perversely heart-warming that after 447 international matches, no-one has managed to coach even the slightest bit of batting caution or batting reason into the man. It’s even more heart-warming that he can, on occasion, be entirely vindicated in his approach, even if it’s only once every 200-or-so matches.