“It is tough and it’s only going to get tougher,” said Ireland captain Andrew Balbirnie after Sri Lanka won the first Test by an innings and 280 runs. That seemed a wildly inaccurate assessment at the time – and indeed so it has proven.

Ireland conceded 591-6 in the first Test and after initially responding with 143 all out, quickly found themselves 40-5 when following on. We’re not sure it’s a real confidence-builder when your captain says that Test cricket is only going to get tougher than that.

Imagine how that feels. The opposition was easily on track for 100 runs per wicket and you’ve averaged 12.2 runs per wicket. “Well at least it can’t get much harder than this,” you think.

“It can get harder,” says your captain in all his infinite wisdom. “Not only that, but it will get harder. In fact it will only get harder. This absolute shellacking you’re enduring right now? This is the easiest Test cricket will ever be.”

Fortunately, Balbirnie was completely wrong. Indeed Ireland may even have learned a thing or two from their first Test experience because the second has not been tougher still. Balbirnie himself made 95 when Ireland batted, before Paul Stirling and Curtis Campher hit hundreds. Campher’s was his first ton in any form of professional cricket, so he’s clearly encountered tougher cricket before now.

That Sri Lanka have so far responded strongly is, if not irrelevant, then of limited importance. Ireland’s Test opportunities are so few that it’s tempting to wonder whether it’s even worth bothering when they’re getting beaten in one-off matches against Bangladesh or being utterly outplayed in every facet of the game, as they were in the first Test.

But it is worth bothering – it absolutely is – because they’re only ever a few moments away from something vivid and memorable. This is partly because scarcity of fixtures and lack of history combine to make almost every achievement feel positively monumental. For many teams, 492 in the first innings of a Test match is a small paragraph at the start of yet another chapter. But for Ireland it’s a story in itself. As mentioned above, these were only the third and fourth Test hundreds Ireland batters have ever made and 492 is their highest score in the format by a country mile. (As everyone knows, one country mile equates to 153 runs.)

Whether Ireland win, lose or draw, their matches currently hold huge potential for vivid and memorable events. Things aren’t always going to get tougher, but they probably are going to get more prosaic.

> Having actually fought for it, Ireland seem to comprehend that Test cricket is worth fighting for

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Cricket is a mad and contrary sport. In a Test where he masterminded a successful fourth-innings run-chase with 121 not out, Kane Williamson’s most exciting contribution was to completely bloody miss the ball and run a bye.

For those that don’t know, Williamson faced the scheduled final ball of the first Test between New Zealand and Sri Lanka with the scores level.

Eight wickets down, they couldn’t lose, but the slowly-built anxiety of defeat still being a possibility just one ball earlier hadn’t exactly dissipated.

Asitha Fernando dug it in short and Williamson attempted the kind of jaunty hopping pull shot he would never normally consider.

Even as he was in the process of completely missing the ball, non-striker The Great Neil Wagner, armed with a bulging disc in his back and a torn right hamstring, was already haring uncomfortably down the pitch to try and securing the winning bye.

Honestly, “the winning bye.” What a concept! What a sport!

What we love about this is that fundamental cricket thing of the match situation transforming ordinarily moronic decisions into correct ones.

Ball heading directly to the wicketkeeper’s gloves? Time to set off running!

The timings of everyone’s actions are great. You can see in this next shot that as Niroshan Dickwella threw, Wagner was about to dive for the ground that Williamson was still in the process of leaving.

And this is another marvellous snapshot in time. There’s a bloke on his face on the ground and a fielder visibly lamenting a missed run-out, even as another run-out attempt is at that moment taking place.

Finally, the logical conclusion to such a clear and straightforward passage of play.

Two batters (and one fielder) lie on their faces as the losing team celebrates.

It’s absolutely incredible that New Zealand manage to contrive this kind of a finish to a Test match just a fortnight after this one.

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We’re not sure this feature is really capturing the imagination, but we didn’t get where we are today by allowing complete-lack-of-reader-interest to shape our editorial decisions. If nothing else, picking Marcus Stoinis provides us with an opportunity to remind you how he and Adam Zampa are pissing away the great legacy of David Boon.

Maybe it was the caffeine that fuelled Stoinis today. He emerged with Australia needing 61 from 42 balls and promptly hit 59 not out off 18 to win the game and also significantly improve his team’s net run rate after New Zealand had butchered them in their first match.

Speaking afterwards, he revealed that he had been batting according to a devilish plan he’d hatched.

“Once I got in, the plan was to keep going,” he said.

Bad move, Stoin, letting everyone else in on your secret.

There were six sixes, but we’re picking the one that took him to 50 because it was just horrible cricket all round. Straight sixes are widely considered to be a little more classy than a leg-side wallop, but when it’s a filthy full-bunger and the batter’s defaulting to the long handle, the exact direction the ball travels isn’t going to add a sheen of sophistication.

Even the commentary was dumb; a staccato spew of bland: “Full toss. Stoinis. Stands. Delivers. Six.”

Top slogging, Marcus Stoinis.

Well played, Australia.

T20 is a bit too complicated for us these days, so we’re instead celebrating one of cricket’s oldest and simplest pleasures via our Slog of the Day feature.

If you want to be highly regarded as a wicketkeeper-batter, one of the smartest things you can do is not actually keep wicket in a whole load of Test matches.

At what point do you become a wicketkeeper? How frequently do you have to don pads and gloves and chunter away relentlessly to be considered a proper specialist in that weird squatty role?

There was a spell a few years back when a bunch of people started referring to Ollie Pope as a wicketkeeper – England selectors mainly.

Let’s be clear: Ollie Pope was not and is not a wicketkeeper. Ollie Pope is a batter who has occasionally kept wicket. He may own a pair of gloves, but that is only because he is the kind of posh kid who owns all the equipment for every last thing he is even faintly interested in. Ollie Pope has a snowboard. Ollie Pope has a Gretsch County Gentleman. Ollie Pope has wicketkeeping gloves.

How do we know Ollie Pope is not a wicketkeeper? Because at the time of writing, Ollie Pope still hasn’t stumped anyone in professional cricket. There are many ways to put together your definition of wicketkeeper, but we put it to you that at least one stumping is a prerequisite.

Maybe if it’s your professional debut and you’re keeping wicket in that game, we can give you a bit of leeway. And we suppose stumpings aren’t always that common, so it might take a handful of matches before you got that first one. But if you’re Ollie Pope and you’ve played over 100 matches as a pro and you’ve never stumped anyone, you are not a wicketkeeper. You are a glove owner.

There have been a few players down the years who have progressed from glove ownership to being fully-fledged wicketkeepers and this is where things get a bit tricksy. Where is the line? What other factors are we looking at?

We don’t want to overcomplicate this. We’d argue there are really just two main, overlapping types of genuine wicketkeeper.

1. The player who currently keeps wicket most of the time
2. The player who has done a lot of wicketkeeping

If a player keeps wicket more than half the time, it seems fair to consider them a wicketkeeper. Equally, if a player no longer keeps wicket, but previously did so for several years and has a pretty big body of glovework behind them, we’re happy to consider that person a wicketkeeper too.

That’s not precisely what we’re digging into today though. Today we’re looking at five players who people widely consider to be Test wicketkeepers, who quite often didn’t actually keep wicket.

Jos Buttler – a Test wicketkeeper 65% of the time

37 matches as keeper, 20 as an outfielder

Despite his memorably pioneering work as a specialist number seven batter, Jos Buttler has actually kept wicket for England rather frequently.

He’s mostly been okay too. Certainly better than some would have you believe. Not brilliant. Not 100 per cent reliable. Bit shonky against the spinners. But more okay than he usually gets credit for. The fact he often gets pushed towards the batter-who-keeps pigeonhole is probably more to do with longstanding wicketkeeping tropes than his actual aptitude for the job.

In Tests, Buttler averages 29.60 as wicketkeeper with one hundred, and 35.68 without the gloves, also with one hundred.

Weird closing fact: Buttler has way more professional stumpings to his name than either Ben Foakes or Jonny Bairstow. That’s in large part down to the nature of limited overs cricket, but it’s still the kind of thing you might like to post on Twitter next time you’re having a dumb argument with someone about those three players.

Alec Stewart – a Test wicketkeeper 62% of the time

82 matches as keeper, 51 as an outfielder

Stewart is well-known for being the ‘better batter’ option in the Alec Stewart v Jack Russell 1990s wicketkeeping tussle. He’s also a good example of how keeping can sometimes impact a player’s batting.

> The 1990s-est England Test XI

The Gaffer averaged 34.92 as a wicketkeeper with six hundreds, but 46.70 as a specialist batter with nine hundreds.

For what it’s worth, Russell averaged 27.10 in 54 Tests with two hundreds. We haven’t really investigated this thoroughly, but being as it was the 1990s we know for a fact the various batters who played instead of him definitely didn’t average 39 – which is what was apparently needed to make up the 12 runs the team shed each time it put Stewart on leaping and jabbering duties.

Jonny Bairstow – a Test wicketkeeper 59% of the time

49 matches as keeper, 34 as an outfielder

There are part-time wicketkeepers, occasional wicketkeepers and out-and-out wicketkeepers. And then there’s Jonny Bairstow, for whom being a wicketkeeper is a part of his identity on a level more profound than probably even he understands. England have at times been guilty of not really properly appreciating that fact.

David Bairstow played four Tests for England (which was enough for him to get that all-important stumping). His son has so far kept wicket in 49 Tests.

> Buttler, Bairstow and Foakes – England’s embarrassment of adequacy

Bairstow’s record is currently the reverse of Stewart’s. He has averaged 37.37 when playing as England’s wicketkeeper, with five tons; and 30.45 as a specialist batter, with three tons.

Brendon McCullum – a Test wicketkeeper 51% of the time

52 matches as keeper, 49 as an outfielder

Just as a measure of the inaccuracy of some of our perceptions, you probably think of Brendon McCullum as both a wicketkeeper and a captain – yet he played in 100 Test matches when he wasn’t entrusted with both those roles. Captain-keeper was actually something he did just the once, against England in 2013. (Jonny Bairstow also played in that match, but didn’t keep wicket.)

> Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews: Conjoined Lord Megachiefs of Gold 2014

McCullum was captain in 31 Tests and wicketkeeper in 52. He averaged 34.18 as a stumper (five hundreds) and 42.94 as a batter (seven hundreds).

He also kept wicket in 184 one-day internationals, which gives you a pretty good idea why our perspectives can sometimes end up skewed.

Kumar Sangakkara – a Test wicketkeeper 36% of the time

48 matches as keeper, 86 as an outfielder

Jayawardene kept wicket in more Test matches than Sangakkara. That is a 100 per cent true fact that only becomes believable when we reveal that we are talking about Prasanna Jayawardene.

Even so, a surprisingly large proportion of people just didn’t seem to notice that their all-time favourite wicketkeeper-batter only actually kept wicket in a third of the Test matches he played. Granted, that was still a lot of matches, but it does mean that Sangakkara played more Test matches without the gloves than Ian Chappell, Martin Crowe, Denis Compton, Len Hutton and Michael Vaughan. Steve Smith will catch him pretty soon – but he hasn’t yet.

Sangakkara is a rare player whose reputation has been positively burnished by multitasking. Normally any attempt at all-rounderism only serves to double the criticism you attract and this is especially true for wicketkeepers, who are routinely slaughtered for dropping a catch when they’re batting well or for making a duck when their keeping is slick and polished. Sangakkara, in contrast, is falsely perceived as a man who made dozens of Test hundreds while playing as a wicketkeeper.

Don’t get us wrong – his record is extraordinary. But of his 38 Test hundreds, only seven came in matches when he was wicketkeeping. His impressive batting average as keeper (40.48) also soars to an outright ludicrous 66.78 when he played as a specialist batsman.

People think that the impressive thing about Sangakkara is that he made so many runs when he was a wicketkeeper. The far more incredible feat was just how many he made when he wasn’t.

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It’s common to assume that we accurately value all-rounders as the sum of their parts, but more often than not, we value each part separately and sneer at each of them a bit. Ravindra Jadeja is a pretty good example.

To many people, Jadeja is a fill-in bowler who takes his wickets with round-arm straight ones; a bit of a chancer; a man whose method will pretty soon get found out; not a real spinner really.

58 Tests and 241 wickets into his career, these people probably aren’t going to change their minds about that. The straight one isn’t for the most part an impressive way to dismiss someone. There was that one guy who could make the straight one breath-taking, but that was because of the sharp turn of the deliveries that preceded it and because of the way he was somehow sneaking in a completely different bowling technique without the batter realising.

Jadeja’s approach is more subtle and nuanced. Subtlety and nuance can really get the job done, but they sure as shit aren’t crowd-pleasers.

Then there’s the batting. Everyone knows Jadeja once hit a triple hundred in Indian domestic cricket. Fewer people know he’s the only person to have hit three of them in the Ranji Trophy. There’s still a tendency to see him as ‘maybe good for 50 down the order’ though.

In a sense, fair enough really, because he’s played more innings at number eight than anywhere else and until this week he’d only hit one Test hundred.

> Tail-end tons: Who is the worst batter to have hit exactly one Test hundred?

He’s just added another though – 175 against Sri Lanka in a match in which he also took 9-87. That is, by any stretch, an okay performance – really, really bloody okay – and it comes against a backdrop of increasing batting returns. He’s been averaging 47.76 since the start of 2018.

An overall Test batting average of 36.46 is unspectacular in the grand scheme of things, but it’s beyond handy from an all-rounder, even if it is (for now) tempered by the lack of hundreds. Some might try and diminish that number with the ‘flat Indian pitches’ cliché, but that’s not how we remember Test cricket in India in recent years. There’s pretty good evidence of that in his Test bowling average of 24.28.

There remains of course a home conditions cant to Jadeja’s overall record (35 Tests at home to 23 away and a marked difference in returns) but he’s not a waste of space overseas and appears to be improving. Plus, as we once said about James Anderson, having huge influence in home Tests isn’t negated by less effective performance overseas because half your team’s cricket is at home and that’s a hell of a lot of cricket.

Jadeja isn’t India’s best spinner at the minute. That might feel damning but it wouldn’t in itself exclude him from qualifying for the top ten spinners of all time. We’re not saying that’s where he actually ranks, just that ‘second-best’ isn’t a fixed rating.

Similarly, in a team that features Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and Rishabh Pant, he is also far from being their best batter. Again: tough yardstick. And did anyone think to factor fielding into all of this?

Ravindra Jadeja grows more annoying by the day. Who knows where this will end.

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We’ve half-followed some underwhelming international series that we don’t especially care about before now, so we like to think we know a thing or two about the genre. Sri Lanka’s current tour is shaping up to be a fine example.

Exclusively white ball tours can often be shoulder-shruggers. It’s not so much lack of enthusiasm for the formats themselves so much as that they tend to be sandwiched between far more obviously interesting engagements.

In England, white ball tours generally plug a gap that doesn’t especially need plugging between the first international cricket of the season and the big Test series of the summer. Or sometimes they lead into a big tournament and basically amount to warm-up matches.

England v Sri Lanka comes ahead of a five-Test series against India, a World T20 and an Ashes. These sorts of series can at least normally claim to be the biggest cricket matches taking place in the country at the time – but the T20 leg was basically decided while a World Test Championship final was taking place.

Throw in the fact that the games are taking place on damp evenings in front of crowds stunted by Covid restrictions and it’s really hard to convince yourself that they’re a Big Deal.

But maybe things will pick up now the World Test Championship is receding from view.

But then the next match is a dead rubber. And then we have three matches in a format where the next World Cup is over two years away.

So… um…

Speaking of series that may be passing you by…

The Perth Test episode of the Ridiculous Ashes is now up. You can find it (along with the first two episodes) here. Have a listen – critics are calling it, “a cricket podcast”.

About halfway through this episode, we realised that almost all of our nominations of ridiculous events – from both England and Australia – arose during one 20-minute spell. It was quite the passage of play, to the extent that Tim Bresnan catching Shane Watson for six didn’t even make the cut.

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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Three things, okay?

Thing 1

Just as with Botham’s Ashes, the 2021 Moose Cup Powered by Daraz seems destined to be forever remembered as Root’s Moose Cup Powered by Daraz.

In the first Test, Sri Lanka made 135 and then Joe Root made 228. In the second Test, Root made 186 before Sri Lanka made 126. England’s bowling was effective, but the captain made the runs.

There were other noteworthy performances though and it would be remiss of us not to mention Lasith Embuldeniya who appears to have filled a vacancy.

Sri Lanka generally like to have one guy who’s going to bowl somewhere near half their overs. Murali is the obvious example and then there was Rangana Herath. Now it looks like it might be Embuldeniya.

Embuldeniya took 15 wickets at 27.66 in the series. Sri Lanka’s second most effective bowler was Dilruwan Perera, who took five wickets and then Asitha Fernando, who took two.

In contrast, England had seven wicket-takers. Joe Root took the fewest – also with two.

Thing 2

We’ve always been a big fan of vague yet slightly misleading descriptions of size.

A lot of people get annoyed about “fun size” Mars Bars, moaning that there’s nothing fun about them being smaller. However, the flip side of using terms like “fun-size” to mask inadequacy is that we also get crisps in a “grab bag” which is a magnificently evasive way of saying “geared towards the fat bastard”.

And so to “bite-size” highlights.

If you’re fairly-but-not-massively interested in the Pakistan v South Africa Test series, you may be pleased to hear that Sky Sports are uploading free “bite-size” highlights packages to their YouTube channel after each day’s play.

The day one video is about 11 minutes long and they cram more in than you perhaps think.

Thing 3

After much dicking about last week, we have finally concluded that we don’t actually know how to repost an updated version of an older article so that it goes out in our daily email (despite the fact we do it by accident all the time).

So let us instead tell you here within this shiny new article that the fourth episode of The Ridiculous Ashes Podcast is now available to listen to. You can find all four episodes – all of which focus on the 1997 Ashes – on this page.

The fourth Test is one of the better episodes – our co-presenter Dan Liebke says it’s his favourite so far.

There’s a big philosophical question in this week’s episode: At what point do you become a one cap wonder?

It also features pantomime cow hostility, Australian street hustles and an explanation of how Curtly Ambrose could have been one of Test cricket’s greatest batsmen.

When we talk about how much players want to win a trophy such as the World Cup, what we’re really talking about is how much they want to win the competition for which the World Cup itself just happens to be the prize.

The Moose Cup, on the other hand – or the Moose Cup Powered by Daraz to give it its full name – is a cup that every player would surely want to win purely because they would want the trophy itself.

Behold its antlered majesty!

According to Wikipedia, antlers, “function primarily as objects of sexual attraction and as weapons in fights between males for control of harems,” so that’s a pretty full-on addition to an item of silverware.

The Moose Cup Powered by Daraz is also one of our all-time favourite names for a series, along with the Magellan Ashes (movement rate of all ships is increased by two).

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Joe Root has always been a batsman who’s scored about 40 more runs than you thought he had. Like a man on an e-bike, he glides along far quicker than seems to make sense given the effort he appears to be putting in.

People really didn’t talk about Root all that much during his fourth Test double hundred, against Sri Lanka. He got in, he tried to build a partnership, a wicket fell, and then everyone paid attention to debutant Dan Lawrence for a bit. Next thing you knew, Root was on 90.

Even then, he only really commanded attention for milestones. There was a moment for the hundred, another for the 150 and then maybe half a fraction of a sliver of a moment for making England’s highest individual score in Sri Lanka before suddenly Lawrence was out. After that, we had ‘new batsman’ excitement, then more wickets, before finally arriving at, ‘Oh, what’s this? Root’s got another double.’

Form ebbs and flows (there was no Test hundred in 2020) but Root long ago reached a level where he is just context. Joe Root top-scoring is not newsworthy. In that scenario the second-highest scorer appears in the headline. A Joe Root hundred isn’t really ‘stop the press!’ territory either.

So what is?

For most of that double, Root was ceding centre stage to Lawrence, but at some point the balance shifted. When exactly did his innings move from ‘Root also scored a hundred’ to top billing?

These things vary from innings to innings, but we’d argue that even a ‘daddy hundred‘ (150+) isn’t necessarily enough for people to raise an eyebrow any more – Root’s ninth-highest score is 149 not out, after all.

More than 175 then? More than 180 maybe? They become noteworthy sooner when he starts stringing them together, Test after Test after Test, but for a stand-alone effort, does 200 even feel like much of a thing?

It seems to us that even after suffering relatively fallow periods, Root’s brilliance has become almost entirely unremarkable. We don’t even properly remember his other three doubles.