Who’s up for the contest then? No? Got somewhere else to be, have you?

We don’t know if you’ve ever seen the highly violent Indonesian martial arts ballet, The Raid, but there’s a character in that who’s really, really, very much up for a fight.

He’s called Mad Dog, so there’s a clue there. Late in the film, the lead character, Rama, finds Mad Dog beating his brother, Andi, who is chained up. Rather than fight Rama while Andi is trapped – which would be the sensible way of going about things – Mad Dog instead steps away and allows him to be be released so that he can fight both men at the same time. That’s psychopaths for you, we suppose.

Rama obviously isn’t delighted about his brother getting tortured and Andi’s a tad peeved about it too, so it’s pretty obvious it isn’t going to be Marquess of Queensbury rules. Mad Dog’s okay with that. They fight.

Rama, Andi and Mad Dog fight quite brutally for really rather a long time. Towards the end, everyone has broken everything and somehow they’re still fighting. Even when Mad Dog has a strip light sticking out of his neck, he carries on fighting.

What we’re saying is that Mad Dog was definitely up for that contest. And what we’re equally saying is that England very obviously aren’t up for touring Bangladesh for three T20 internationals and three one-day internationals (ODIs) next month.

If the home team had themselves down as Rama and Andy, they’re actually Inigo Montoya.

Some place else to be

It’s not that any of the England players are citing security concerns, as they sometimes have in the past. It’s just that quite a lot of them seem to have other cricket matches they’d rather play instead. And that rather diminishes the tour’s status as a supposedly major international engagement.

Cricinfo’s Vithushan Ehantharajah reports that Sam Billings, Liam Dawson and James Vince are all likely to join Alex Hales in playing in the Pakistan Super League instead. T20 players Richard Gleeson and Tymal Mills may skip the shortest form leg for the same reason.

While you could watch an England white ball match lacking those players without particularly noticing their absence, there’s greater erosion afoot. Board-sanctioned erosion. Erosion that is a direct consequence of the ECB’s decisions in fact.

The first ODI will be played on March 1. The second and final Test in New Zealand is scheduled to finish on February 28. Even in a leap year, that would be a bit of an ask.

That scheduling means that none of Joe Root, Harry Brook, Ben Duckett, Olly Stone or Will Jacks will be available either. ODIs may technically be a distinct format, but it’s more the overlap in a Venn diagram. Running separate red and white ball squads doesn’t solve this. If you take all of the Test players out of a one-day game and also most of the T20 players, what are you honestly left with?

Inconclusions

We’re not necessarily bemoaning this situation. (Okay, we’re bemoaning it quite a bit – but that’s not really our point today.) What we’re wondering is how we should try and view what we’ve ended up with?

Series like these are where the competing pressures of high level cricket are felt most acutely because, to put it bluntly, these are the matches that are losing. These are the games where if there’s a choice, people are choosing the other thing.

Writing earlier this week, when laying out the 2023 King Cricket Essentials calendar, we said there were a lot of international matches that we kind of wish weren’t being played. Now that we look at a pretty perfect example, we have to ask ourself: is that actually true?

Because it’s always going to be the Bangladesh tours, isn’t it? And we do fundamentally like the idea of Bangladesh playing international cricket. If everyone decides to bin off playing Bangladesh because the matches are always diminished by absences then Bangladesh cease to be an international cricket team.

Viewed in that light, wilfully ignoring these series because they’re “meaningless” seems unhelpful. Except they are meaningless. So where does that leave us?

We don’t really have an answer. The whole situation feels massively out of anyone’s hands.

Is the best that we can hope for that Bangladesh trounce England and then trounce them on their next tour and then keep on trouncing them until there’s such a massive desire for retribution that Bangladesh v England finally becomes A Big Deal and everyone wants to play?

What made Mad Dog mad?

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We previewed the Boxing Day Tests. We may as well take a look at what happened in them.

Australia v South Africa

Signs of an upturn for South Africa, who finally passed 200 for the first time in many attempts. Their second innings 204 all out was enough to secure defeat by an innings and 182 runs.

Top scorer for the Aussies was David Warner, who made his first hundred in almost three years and then made another one in the very same innings. He then squeezed in both a retired hurt and a dismissal without adding any further runs.

Speaking afterwards, Warner added to the rich tradition of batters talking up the bowling on days when they’ve made a ton by describing an Anrich Nortje spell as the fastest he’s ever faced.

To be fair to Warner, there were some stats about saying it was somewhere up there, so it wasn’t a total self-aggrandising fiction. He also said a few more specifically nice things about Nortje and the effort he always seems to put in. Even so, it’s funny how bowlers always seem to be at their most incredible when they don’t actually get the batter out. “You won’t believe how incredible that bowling that wasn’t good enough to dismiss me was,” is the message.

The third and final Test starts next week. Suffering South Africa fans might like to ponder the nature of an Ashes tour where there would still be three Tests’ worth of unravelling still to come. Three Tests may seem tough, but there’s only really time for mild fraying.

Pakistan v New Zealand

New Zealand’s first Test back in Pakistan moved rather more conventionally than England’s, even if the weight of scoring was similar.

Responding to Pakistan’s 438, the tourists made 612-9. It did however take them 163 overs to reach 500 where England reached that mark in 75.

That comparison is not to do New Zealand down in the slightest. This match was at a different ground for a start. It’s just an attempt to contextualise the rather bonkers thing that Ben Stokes’ men did a few weeks ago.

Bangladesh v India

We included this when previewing the Boxing Day Tests but it didn’t actually make it that far in the end. It was however the best match of the three, India staggering their way to a target of 145 for the loss of seven wickets.

They only got there thanks to an unbeaten 71-run partnership between Shreyas Iyer and R Ashwin.

Of course Ashwin was there. Just of course. Immune to the pressure again. As we keep saying, R Ashwin is not like other people.

A few days after the match finished, Rishabh Pant apparently fell asleep at the wheel and totalled his car which then burst into flames. He had been travelling at “a lot of speed” according to the bus driver who helped drag him out. Pant has a few injuries but thankfully seems broadly okay.

Don’t drive tired, kids. Don’t drive quickly, kids. In fact don’t drive at all kids – wait until you’re adults and then take lessons and pass your test and all that.

The King Cricket email is a handy way of finding out the site has been updated during those periods when it’s all been a bit quiet because the writer has been otherwise engaged eating too much stilton.

“Hey, Moeen. You’re not going to believe this. We’ve found another one. We’ve been digging and digging and digging to try and find one and we’d pretty much given up hope. We didn’t think there was anything left. But there was. And we’ve found it. We’ve found another one. We’ve found another cricket job for you to do.”

Doing random cricket jobs has long been Moeen Ali’s thing. England have generally employed him as a sort of batting/bowling Polyfilla to fill all manner of cracks, chasms and rawl plug holes.

Like a switch-hitting back foot T20 specialist, this treatment has cut both ways. It’s surely diminished Moeen’s chances of getting to grips with one particular role, but it’s also given him many more opportunities to play international cricket than he’d otherwise have got.

You can pontificate about what might have been if you like, but we’d rather celebrate what was.

Indeed what still is. Because Moeen’s latest job is ‘opening bowler’ – and he seems to be pretty good at it.

Against the West Indies, he bowled four of the first seven overs and took 2-17.

He then bowled three of the first five against Bangladesh and took what we’re choosing to call ‘half of a double hat-trick’ in the middle one.

Maybe T20 opening bowler was Moeen’s true calling all along. Or maybe he’s just shed a load of fatigue and is approaching this tournament with a freshness he’s rarely ever felt.

You can’t get fit without also getting tired. The trick is to rest just enough that the latter subsides without the former ebbing away too.

Moeen has long been worn down by international cricket. He’s played for England over 200 times since his first appearance in 2014. That’s quite the workload even before you factor in all the travelling. There have been various periods of unavailability in there, but these only really advertise how fundamentally unsustainable his workload has been.

Always another game. Always another flight. You’d struggle to maintain 100 per cent enthusiasm.

But life is simpler now. Limited overs cricket builds to its two respective World Cups. This is one of them. Moeen seems pretty up for it.

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It may have passed you by, but they made a Jesus Quintana film a year or so ago. It isn’t very good. That’s a shame but it doesn’t really matter because sometimes an entrance is all you need.

If you haven’t seen The Big Lebowski, the Jesus Quintana scene – and really, there’s only one – is quite the thing.

The first we see is a purple knee and a hand sporting a weird-arsed bowling glove contraption. The camera pans down to show this man tying his shoelaces. He has huge chunky rings on three fingers. The Gipsy Kings’ cover version of Hotel California plays.

As well as his purple trousers, we see that the man is also wearing purple socks and purple shoes. His little fingernail is long and painted red.

He dries his hands, picks up his bowling ball, lines up his bowl and then kisses his ball.

Then he does this.

It’s not a solitary lick. It’s a protracted fluttery tickle.

Then we see him move in to bowl and the camera picks out a name embroidered on his shirt. The name is ‘Jesus’.

Jesus bowls and this is his finishing position.

Inevitably, it is a strike. He turns round and as Hotel California really kicks in, he dances a celebratory jig.

Then he does this.

The man he is pointing at is our favourite part of this whole scene.

The man he is pointing at is Liam.

This is Liam.

Liam doesn’t have a single line in the film, which somehow makes him even better.

He is just Liam, an entirely nondescript man who likes bowling. He looks like he works in B&Q or somewhere and yet somehow – somehow – he is Jesus Quintana’s bowling partner. The relationship between Liam and Jesus is a thing of eternal wonder and intrigue for us.

After bowling his strike and doing his celebratory jig and pointing at Liam, Jesus swaggers back to the seating area, eyeballing The Dude, Donnie and Walter and blowing them a kiss.

At this point, for no real reason at all, he emphasises the drama of a strike in a practice game in a mundane bowling alley by raising his fist.

“Fucking Quintana – the creep can roll, man,” says The Dude.

Walter then reveals that Jesus is a sex offender and did six months for exposing himself to an eight-year-old.

Next thing we see, Jesus is swaggering over to trash talk, Liam sidling alongside him with all the presence and aggression of an A-level economics teacher.

Just look at Liam.

“Are you ready to be fucked, man?” asks Jesus in his thick Cuban accent. “I see you roll your way into the semis. Dios mio, man. Liam and me, we’re gonna fuck you up.”

And then The Dude delivers the greatest witty comeback in the history of cinema.

“Yeah? Well, you know, that’s just like, er, your opinion, man.”

The scene climaxes with Jesus promising Walter that if he pulls any crazy shit with a ‘piece’, “I’ll take it away from you and stick it up your ass and pull the fucking trigger til it goes ‘click’.”

“Jesus,” exclaims The Dude.

“You said it, man,” says Jesus. “Nobody fucks with the Jesus.”

And then he sashays off.

All of this happens within three minutes and he barely appears again in the rest of the film. He doesn’t need to. That appearance – that entrance – is enough that you’re not going to forget him.

In February 2021, Kyle Mayers made the second-highest individual score in a successful fourth innings run-chase. He made 210 not out as the West Indies completed the fifth-highest run-chase in Test history.

It was his debut.

Even if the rest of Kyle Mayers’ career is a Jesus Rolls-style dud, he needn’t feel too distraught. No-one’s going to forget him after that.

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Babar Azam was 14 when Test cricket exited Pakistan and headed for the UAE. While the nation’s not against picking players who are (supposedly) that age, he didn’t play first-class cricket until he was a wisened old 16-year-old.

That isn’t to say he doesn’t know how Test matches played in Pakistan are supposed to go however.

Test matches played in Pakistan are to a great extent about painfully relentless run-scoring by frighteningly good middle-order batsmen. Inzamam-ul-Haq averaged 53 at home. Younus Khan averaged 59. Javed Miandad averaged 61.

Mohammad Yousuf – who really doesn’t get talked about anywhere near as much as he should – averaged 65.

This is just the way things are. You play a Test series in Pakistan and some bloke in a green hat is going to be hitting cricket balls for quite a large proportion of it.

When Test cricket returned to Pakistan in December, no-one in the middle order had much of a record. There was Azhar Ali and Asad Shafiq whose records are solid and there was Babar Azam, whose Test returns up until that point would accurately be categorised as ‘promising’.

In three Tests since, against Sri Lanka and now Bangladesh, Babar has made 102 not out, 60, 100 not out and, at the time of writing, 143 not out.

Babar Azam is averaging 405 in Pakistan.

Babar Azam knows the rules.

The Cricket World Cup is insanely long. Cycling’s ‘grand tours’ are considered epic feats of endurance but the World Cup started in May, halfway through the Giro d’Italia, and finished in July, halfway through the Tour de France.

(Here’s a recap of the first week of this year’s Tour and here’s where you can get the next two weekly recaps emailed to you.)

The World Cup is simply too big to hold in your brain. Here are some of the things that happened.

1. The 82% amazing Ben Stokes catch

Airborne blind backhand catches anyone?

2. Sri Lanka have four goes at stopping the ball and fail

Why fail to stop the ball once when you could fail to stop it four times?

3. Jason Roy decking umpire Joel Wilson and umpire Joel Wilson not being at all happy about it

Flooring an umpire while securing your hundred is maybe 50 per cent funny. Joel Wilson’s face in response to Jason Roy’s apology for said flooring was about 96 per cent funny.

4. Faf du Plessis having to explain everything

Being South Africa captain at a Cricket World Cup is a very rubbish job.

5. Glenn Maxwell’s 10-ball knock against Bangladesh

And people say he had a bad tournament.

6. Lasith Malinga paunching England to death

They’ll never, ever master facing him.

7. Carlos Brathwaite runs out of magic

It seemed like he could do anything. But he couldn’t.

8. Chris Gayle’s diving stop

Timberrrrrr.

9. Richard Kettleborough’s face when MS Dhoni was run out

The run-out was pretty memorable. But the face. It was all in the face.

10. Usman Khawaja ramping the ball into his own stumps

Shot!

11. Steve Smith getting run out through his legs

Contrast with the Ben Stokes deflecto-non-run-out in the final.

12. Jason Roy v Umpires Part II

Poor Umpire Dhamasena.

13. Sky letting Channel 4 broadcast the final

Hats off, because they didn’t have to. (There’s a petition to get more international cricket on free-to-air TV, by the way.)

Assuming no major developments before August 1, Now TV will probably be your best option for watching the Ashes, with highlights (at a civilised hour) on Channel 5.

2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 26, Australia v Bangladesh

In this world, there are people who like new things and there are people who do not. There are people who seek out new food in new places and there are people who go to McDonald’s when they’re on holiday because at least you know what you’re getting. There are people who gave that last series of Twin Peaks a go and found certain elements very powerful despite the series as a whole being quite hard work and there are people who watch Eastenders every night. There are people who like Glenn Maxwell and there are people who do not.

Maxwell is the physical manifestation of creativity. You have to try things to be creative and not everything you try will work. But some things do work. Some things work so, so well, and all that other rubbish stuff that doesn’t work is a price worth paying for that.

Glenn Maxwell played a 10-ball innings against Bangladesh that was basically a highlights package.

But which ball was the best ball?

Glenn Maxwell’s top ten (in chronological order)

Ball 1. Two runs through midwicket. Not actually all that exciting.

Ball 2. Single to long-on. Again, not actually all that exciting. He’s giving you a chance to notice he’s in and to start paying attention.

Ball 3. Wide yorker sliced for four. Very fun.

Ball 4. A strong contender. Here’s a blurry image of Glenn Maxwell hitting a 100 per cent perfectly normal six.

You can’t buy that kind of feline elegance and balance. The ball also landed on the boundary toblerone, so extra points for precision.

Ball 5. A wide yorker, so Maxwell turns towards the leg-side, arcs his body into a reverse-C shape and smears it almost behind him through cover for four.

Absolute nonsense of a shot.

Ball 6. Beasted halfway into the stand over square leg via a surprisingly normal human shot.

Ball 7. Dot ball to cover, which, to be honest, given the way things had been going, felt pretty weird and unusual.

Ball 8. A giant three.

Ball 9. Another titanic pull shot.

Ball 10. Run out, which is always the most entertaining way to be dismissed. It was better than that though.

For a start, this is the shot that he played.

The ball went straight to a fielder. Maxwell got halfway down the pitch and then turned round when he realised that Usman Khawaja wasn’t mad-keen on being run-out.

After the ball hit the stumps, this is the look he gave Khawaja.

Exemplary stuff.

Conclusion: For the combination of pointlessly otherworldly stroke, comical run-out and angry look, Ball 10 was the best ball out of Glenn Maxwell’s magnificent 10-ball innings.

2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 23, Bangladesh v West Indies

The moment when Bangladesh passed 150 in their enormous-yet-somehow-also-easy chase of 322 summed things up. Andre Russell banged one in at 91mph, Litton Das saw it coming and pulled it for four and then Russell lay down on his back and looked unutterably miserable.

It wasn’t the four that hurt. It was his knees. It’s always his knees.

It really doesn’t feel like the Windies have paced themselves correctly. They came tearing out of the blocks against Pakistan, but their adrenaline-fuelled bounce-the-shit-out-of-everyone-and-then-hit-a-load-of-sixes approach just doesn’t seem sustainable. Not only is everyone wise to their bowling strategy, it’s also hard to play at a higher intensity than the opposition when two of your eleven men can barely walk.

Chris Gayle is an obelisk in a purple hat these days, while Russell must surely be bowling himself into intensive care. He took two wickets in three overs in that first match and it’s hard to imagine he could have maintained even that light workload throughout the whole tournament.

You know that bit at the end of Aliens when Bishop saves Newt even though he’s literally been torn in half and macaroni and bechamel sauce are spilling from his torso? That’s Russell in this tournament; a man contributing despite a severe shortage of working body parts. We reckon he’s one match away from rupturing his pancreas handing his jumper to the umpire before his spell.

For Bangladesh, it was Shakib Al Hasan again. As it so often is. He is the best cricketer in the world, after all. (Having working body parts is a pretty key part of that, by the way. Andre Russell would agree.)

Shakib took his usual 2-54 and then he made another hundred. 6,000 one-day runs and 250 wickets and still no-one knows who he is. Even the people who’ve heard of him mostly just express amazement that he’s *still* playing. Shakib Al Hasan is 32.

2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 12, Bangladesh v England

When Jason Roy reached his hundred against Bangladesh, he celebrated by ploughing into umpire Joel Wilson and knocking him flat on his arse.

This bout of slapstick almost certainly constitutes the all-time greatest World Cup hundred celebration. We know this for one simple reason: it was quite funny and we can’t immediately think of any other funny hundred celebrations at the World Cup and funny things are better than unfunny things.

Here’s a bit more detail on why it was funny (and therefore great).

1. After knocking Wilson over, it briefly looked like Roy was doing a Mortal Kombat style ‘flawless victory’ pose over Wilson’s prone body

2. After that, Roy went in for the hug

3. After the hug, Roy apologised and Wilson did the finest ‘your apology is not really accepted’ face that we’ve ever seen

The last one’s our favourite.

So, yes, undeniably a very funny incident, but if you for some inexplicable reason take issue with our conclusion and claim it wasn’t actually all that funny an incident at all, we can instantly disprove that.

Just look what Jason Roy’s collision with Joel Wilson managed to do.

Jason Roy’s hundred celebration made Trevor Bayliss move his face!

Trevor Bayliss did a recognisable facial expression!

(Eoin Morgan, who is very much learning the art of facial immobility from Bayliss at the minute, also did a face. Or possibly a yawn.)

2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 9, Bangladesh v New Zealand

Who is Ross Taylor? If you had to allocate a chair to Ross Taylor and you wanted to write out a card representing his status in cricket so that he knew where to sit, what would you put?

Sure, you could just put ‘Ross Taylor’ or ‘Luteru Ross Poutoa Lote Taylor’ if you wanted to go belt and braces. But imagine it’s a big event for all the big people in cricket and everyone’s got a little job description on there as well (or, as our old abbreviation-addicted boss would have it “a job descrip”).

What would you put for Ross Taylor?

Kane Williamson is New Zealand’s best batsman. He’s also their captain. Ross Taylor used to be both of those things. Taylor currently holds a bunch of New Zealand batting records, but these days everyone assumes that he’s only keeping hold of them until Williamson’s old enough to be entrusted with them.

Ross Taylor is also one of the greatest one-day batsmen of all time, only no-one’s quite sure what that means right now. This year he is averaging 75. Last year he averaged 91. The year before that he averaged 60. And no-one really talks about this.

Taylor doesn’t score his runs as dramatically as Jos Buttler, he doesn’t score as many hundreds as Rohit Sharma, he fails to actually be Virat Kohli – which is something that would definitely help his profile considerably. Ross Taylor lacks a niche.

Ross Taylor is the guy who scored hundreds when he couldn’t actually see very well and who then had surgery on his actual eyeball to have something removed. Ross Taylor is the guy who was deposed as captain in a way that still feels a little uncomfortable even now, seven years later. Ross Taylor is a guy who loves fried chicken. Ross Taylor sticks his tongue out when he hits a ton.

These are just fragments. They don’t really make a whole. We have no idea where Ross Taylor is supposed to sit.