In 2012, we wrote a piece for Cricinfo about Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s patient wait for a West Indies Test team worthy of his contributions. Little did we know he wasn’t just waiting; he was taking active steps.

‘Taking active steps’ is an interesting euphemism because what we’re saying is that Shiv’s son Tagenarine is a really good player. About a year after we wrote that piece, we learned of his existence and (this website being what it is) immediately delighted in his magnificent name.

Tagenarine Chanderpaul opens the batting for the Windies these days and that seems significant.

The unbeaten

Shiv was a batter who did not much enjoy being dismissed and rather went out of his way to avoid experiencing that thing.

In 2002, he went 1,051 balls and 1,523 minutes without being dismissed. Just to contextualise that feat, it’s almost a full day of Test cricket longer than the next best effort, Jacques Kallis’s 1,241 minutes.

Nor was it the only time he batted for absolutely bloody ages without anyone getting him out. Shiv is responsible for no fewer than four of the 10 longest unbeaten streaks. That gives him a pretty strong claim to being cricket’s most immovable batter.

That’s how you get named not just Lord Megachief of Gold, but Grand Lord Megachief of Gold, people. That’s how you get Cricinfo articles written by us when you pass 10,000 runs. That’s how you get called the last great West Indies cricketer upon your retirement. (Last of one era, at any rate.)

The similarly unbeaten

If Tagenarine has inherited even half of his father’s aversion to getting out, the West Indies have a handy cricketer on their hands – and one who may prove useful in a way Shivnarine never really was.

Because if there was one thing that characterised Shiv’s output, it was halting – or at least significantly slowing – batting collapses. Time and again, he’d walk in at 26-3 and finish with 72 not out off 200 balls. Shivnarine Chanderpaul entered disaster zones and mitigated the situation.

Tagenarine Chanderpaul does not enter disaster zones. Tagenarine is an opener. If Tagenarine bats and bats and doesn’t get out, he greatly reduces the chances of a disaster zone materialising in the first place.

Why not go and read The Cult of Digging In, our feature about the psychology of rearguard batting next? What else are you going to do? Your job?

Imagine missing a World Cup because you literally didn’t manage to get on the plane in time. Imagine how you’d feel about that tournament. You could forgive Shimron Hetmyer for perhaps feeling a smidgeon of relief that Ireland absolutely battered the West Indies today, knocking them out of the tournament.

“All right Mrs Hetmyer. Is your Shimron playing out today?”

“No, he’s not. He’s grounded because he keeps missing the flights that the West Indies Cricket Board book for him.”

If you don’t know the story, Hetmyer asked for his flight to Australia for this tournament to be rescheduled due to family reasons.

The WICB found him another flight, two days later, and on the morning of the flight he told West Indies Director of Cricket Jimmy Adams that he wasn’t going to get to the airport in time. The Windies dropped him.

It feels like we’re missing a fair bit of detail in that story, but we can all surely empathise with the position Hetmyer ultimately found himself in. All your team-mates are off to play a World Cup. You thought you were going to be there. What if they win? Imagine missing out on that because you missed your bloody flight.

Fortunately, Ireland took pity on him and annihilated the West Indies, ending their involvement in the tournament.

Leg-spinner Gareth Delany’s 3-16 kept the Windies to 146-5, which didn’t seem anywhere near enough. Paul Stirling, Andrew Balbirnie and Lorcan Tucker then got with the tonking and thwacking and larruping and Ireland eased home with 15 balls unused.

So now the WICB has some more flights to book.

Habitual link to King Cricket email sign-up page unexpectedly withheld to inject an invigorating shot of uncertainty into your life. ‘Whatever next?’ you wonder, adrenaline coursing through your body.

Kyle Mayers really made an entrance. Since then he’s apparently been training with Codemasters. Short of inexplicably setting off for a run while the wicketkeeper stands at the stumps with the ball in his hands, it’s hard to envisage a more Brian Lara Cricket moment than the six he hit against Australia today.

People quite often say, “he’s playing Brian Lara Cricket,” about a passage of play, but they generally get it wrong. What they actually mean is, “he’s playing Stick Cricket.”

Stick Cricket was – indeed still is – the videogame home of relentless six-hitting. Brian Lara Cricket was a little more nuanced.

In this instance ‘nuanced’ pretty much means ‘polarised’ in that you tended to oscillate between playing improbable shots that somehow cleared the ropes and getting clean bowled.

Kyle Mayers’ shot off Cameron Green is perhaps the finest real-life example of the former. He played what really should have been completely the wrong shot but somehow middled it.

It’s all in that magnificent follow-through. It smacks of an on-screen character flawless performing one of its sequences of animation with absolutely no regard for where the ball is. The game engine also has little regard for where the ball is and so it translates Mayers’ completely-wrong-shot into a perfect six.

If you’re wondering how the match went after this, Mayers was clean bowled next ball after being somewhere around two seconds early on a looping ultra-slower-ball bouncer. He tried to play exactly the same back foot lofted drive and held the same pose as it went behind his ankles.

The Windies were ultimately bundled out for 72, only for Australia to collapse to 36 all out in three overs.

After a disastrous first over, David Warner had staged a recovery in the second, but was left stranded on 36 not out off six balls after further carnage in the third.

Sheldron Cottrell was the pick of the bowlers with 10-0. Speaking after the match, Australia captain Aaron Finch conceded his team potentially had a slight weakness against left-armers.

Further reading: Cricket computer game graphics through the ages

Future reading: The King Cricket email

We sent Special Correspondent Dad some footage of Roy Gilchrist this week because we knew he’d played against him once.

If you don’t know Gilchrist, he was summed up in his Guardian obituary as a, “West Indian fast bowler whose temper was even quicker and more fiery than the speed and hostility for which he was rightly feared during his short career.”

Gilchrist’s Test career ended in India after he bowled a heap of beamers in a tour game. The allegation that he pulled a knife on captain Gerry Alexander during that tour may also have played a part in him being sent home.

Gilchrist retained a reputation for deliberately bowling beamers and 18-yard no-balls when he was playing club cricket in the North-West. He’s said to have once hit an opponent in the head with a stump as well.

Dad said that Gilchrist liked to have a few pints before each match and had once explained that this was, “to work up a hate for the batsman.”

It’s questionable whether this was entirely necessary as it seems fair to say that anger management wasn’t a strong point. In 1967 Gilchrist was sentenced to three months’ probation for attacking his wife Novlyn during an argument.

All of this no doubt contributes to his reputation as a rapid and fearsome fast bowler. There’s a possibly apocryphal story that he once hit a sight screen after a single bounce on the pitch.

Gilchrist could certainly put his pace to productive cricket use too though – 57 Test wickets at 26.68 is a pretty tidy return, particularly when you consider that 47 of them came in India and Pakistan.

Here’s the footage we sent Special Correspondent Dad.

We know it’s slow motion, but that arm seems to come through pretty quickly, doesn’t it?

Dad faced Gilchrist when he opened the batting in a Sunday game against “Manchester Colonials” (yes, that was their actual name).

“I remember the delivery stride and his front leg seemed to be so high, almost horizontal,” he recalls.

Dad smacked one of Gilchrist’s deliveries straight back towards him. Gilchrist leaned over and half stopped the ball, which trickled away for a single.

“I was dismissed in the next over by his opening partner so I never faced him again,” said Dad, before seemingly suggesting that this dismissal wasn’t perhaps that unwelcome a development.

“When he batted in the evening I was fielding in the covers. He returned my earlier favour and smacked the ball at me, but I held on to what I have always thought was a pretty decent catch.”

Gilchrist shouted at Dad that it was a “fluke” which is a nonsensically great thing to try and claim about the catching of a cricket ball.

Roy Gilchrist.

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If you needed to sum up England’s latest series defeat in a single quote, you could do a lot worse than Joe Root’s pre-tour comment: “I don’t want this to sound like a development tour at all but…”

A friend of ours tells a story about when he did a few days of temp work in a supermarket distribution centre in our home town.

One day the line stopped and so our mate started flattening boxes or something until it was fixed. After a minute or two, he noticed another worker was still standing at the conveyor belt, completely motionless, clearly with no idea what to do.

“Why don’t you sweep up or something?” suggested our mate and handed him a brush. The guy took this on board and started sweeping.

Our mate was due a break pretty soon after this, so he wandered off and had a sandwich or whatever and when he returned, the line was going again. And this bloke was still brushing the floor.

Joe Root is not a sub-moron but there has frequently been a wisp of this incredible obliviousness to changed circumstances about his captaincy.

The most obvious example was when England spent an entire morning pointlessly bouncing Jasprit Bumrah last summer. It was a bad plan from the start but even if Root didn’t realise that – and clearly he didn’t – he was then handed a growing body of evidence that this was not a good way of going about things. He responded by carrying on until India decided enough was enough and declared.

Those sorts of tail-end partnerships have happened a number of times, including in the latest defeat. England had a big last wicket partnership of their own in this Test, but that felt like more of a one-off whereas the West Indies one was part of what is becoming a big long-running franchise.

Similarly, Root’s often criticised for picking the XI that should have played the previous Test, seemingly unaware that things have moved on. He’s not a bad guy, he’s not the worst captain, but it does always feel like he’s consistently one step behind when you really need your captain to be one step ahead. Two steps feels like a lot to make up after 64 Tests in charge.

This even applies to Root’s desire to continue as captain. When Mike Atherton, Nasser Hussain, Michael Vaughan and Wisden editor Lawrence Booth all think you should go, it’s hard to see how a new coach will be able to kick off their reign by confidently stating you’re the best man for the job. Root is going to get the boot, but he doesn’t seem to have spotted this yet.

It is hard to captain a crap team, but with this West Indies tour in particular it feels like Root has been contributing to the crapness. Offered the chance to show the world his vision of the future, he’s given us second-tier right-arm fast-medium bowlers, a few more air miles for Matt Parkinson and the continued inability to prevent “one bad session” from becoming “one seismically, match-losing session”.

It’s all so shrug-inducing and conservative. If it weren’t for the injury to Mark Wood and the bafflingly protracted unfitness of Ollie Robinson, it’s doubtful Saqib Mahmood would have got a game – and he is arguably the one interesting development from this not-a-development-tour.

In which case what would the soft-binning of Anderson and Broad have achieved? A couple more games for seam bowlers who get games pretty damn regularly anyway. England had used nine pace bowlers in the 12 months of Test matches leading up to this series without even trying. The idea that you have to actively ditch your opening bowlers to create “opportunities” is bollocks.

Nasser Hussain is probably right when he says the decision was more about trying to, “create this atmosphere where they were all mates and all in it together” by selecting “10 yes men.”

If that works out – lovely. But it didn’t work out and so this not-a-development-tour will most likely bring one significant development after all.

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It’s probably best to avoid extrapolating from that England innings in a bid to predict the course of this Test match.

England went to Grenada and were at various points 53-3, 53-6, 114-9 and 204-9. This all added up to one of the weirdest-arsed scorecards you are ever likely to see.

What did the day’s play tell us? What does it mean? There are probably too many variables for it to tell us anything.

Take Zak Crawley’s dismissal, for example.

West Indies won the toss and bowled. Did Crawley simply fail to accept that he could find himself facing medium-pace in the 13th over? Did he forget that you could be caught out by fielders in cricket? Maybe it was the lethal power of Kyle Mayers’ scrambled seam, but he just looked like a batter who’d been incorrectly calibrated.

A pretty even mix of great deliveries and nonsense followed that first dismissal until we quite quickly reached the 10th wicket partnership – and what that passage of play tells us is anyone’s guess. Number 11, Saqib Mahmood, top-scored in the innings with his highest first-class score, while number 10, Jack Leach, was the unbeaten man and second highest scorer.

Impressively, this only barely gets onto the podium of silly Jack Leach innings behind that time he scored 92 opening the batting in the second innings after coming in at 11 in the first and that time he made 1 not out.

Here he played your classic obdurate Leach innings. The lad’s a fighter.

But what was he up against? The great surprise was he didn’t hit his own wicket through dizziness. Jarrod Kimber pointed out that at one point the West Indies had used seven bowlers in 16 overs. This is bowling at 10 and 11 when quite often one bowler is sufficient.

It was fun tail-end cricket. Top shots, drops, byes and liberal use of the verb ‘squirt’ by the commentators – a hallmark of all the great last wicket partnerships.

And now the West Indies will bat and you can be pretty confident it will go differently.

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“I had my plan,” said Kraigg Brathwaite after batting for five minutes short of 16 hours against England in the second Test in Bridgetown. “They bowled well, but I stuck with my plan and it paid off.”

Whatever Brathwaite’s plan is, getting out doesn’t seem to be a major component. He did actually lose his wicket once, but if you bat for 16 hours that probably is going to happen at some point. Sometimes things outside your plan will occur. You can’t control everything.

Ominously, while Brathwaite concedes he could be a bit more attacking, he also said that, “spending time at the crease and batting through three new balls is a great start for us” – so it sounds like he’s pretty much going to stick to shivving his way through every Test innings.

Sometimes you can tell from a celebration that a batsman’s in it for the long haul. In fact in it for more than that because ‘long haul’ still suggests an end point. Sometimes you can tell from a celebration that a batsman’s just in. For good. Just batting as their new form of existence.

When Brathwaite reached 150, he raised his bat not exactly half-heartedly, but with such economy of movement it was clear he had no intention of pissing away a single calorie of energy on anything but bunting the ball for a single again. He raised it because he had to, but the majority of his brain was still devoted to absent-mindedly chewing gum and getting into position for the next delivery. Only 10 more runs followed before his dismissal, but as we discovered, that surprise development was really little more than an intermission in the grand scheme of things.

Pitted against this near-indestructible barricade, Saqib Mahmood somehow emerged from the match with a nascent Test bowling average of 19.75. England have only really had two old ball seamers in the last 20 years – Simon Jones and Mark Wood. It would be pretty helpful if they’ve unearthed another.

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When we think about Jonny Bairstow and how England have used him over the years, it reminds us of a moment in Airplane!

There was a time back in 2019 when England dropped Jonny Bairstow and tried to frame it as a kick up the arse that might potentially drive him to new heights. (Hell of a kick.)

That noble ambition was only slightly undermined by the fact they’d renewed his central contract three days earlier. So it wasn’t really a kick up the arse at all. Not one delivered with any venom anyway.

“He worked particularly hard and earned his way back into this team,” explained Chris Silverwood when Bairstow returned to the England squad for the very next tour having played precisely zero cricket in the interim.

He played one Test on that tour, made 1 and 9, and was promptly rested (not dropped) for the next one.

There’s a complex graphic just begging to be made charting Bairstow’s in-out, wicketkeeper-not-wicketkeeper, batting-at-every-position-from-three-to-eight status throughout the course of his Test career. It would be interesting to see the greatest number of successive matches in one fixed role. (We think it might be when he strung together seven matches as a wicketkeeping number seven in 2017.)

Bairstow is currently playing his third match in a row as a number six batter. He has hit hundreds in two of those games. Things are going pretty damn well. And this is where we think of Airplane!

The bit we think of comes late in the film when Captain Rex Kramer is trying to talk Ted Striker through landing the plane. He’s in the control tower, running things from there, doing everything he can to avert catastrophe.

As Striker nears the runway, one of the air traffic controllers says to Kramer: “Maybe we ought to turn on the searchlights now.”

“No,” replies Kramer, melodramatically. “That’s just what they’ll be expecting us to do.”

This just seems the perfect summary of how England have managed Bairstow over the years. They have always tried to keep him guessing, even when doing so has been utterly self-defeating.

Sure, things are going swimmingly right now and England have a number six knocking out hundreds two matches in three. But there’s no need to get too comfortable. We all know we’re only a strained Foakes hamstring or a Dan Lawrence pair away from mixing things up again.

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England’s tour of the West Indies gets underway on Tuesday with the hotly-anticipated match against TBA. Three Test matches follow during which we may or may not get answers to these five fiendishly difficult questions.

(1) Is this a ‘development tour’ or not?

Development tour? Who said ‘development tour’? Actually, Joe Root did, in classic “We didn’t burn him!” fashion.

“I don’t want this to sound like a development tour at all but…” said England’s captain, before saying a few other things.

England’s repeated inability to see a Test series in the West Indies as a major challenge is pretty impressive when you consider that they’ve only managed to win there once in the last 52 years. (In recent times those two things are of course not unconnected.)

There’s some particularly mad doublethink going on this time around. Root went from explaining how omitting James Anderson and Stuart Broad provided an opportunity to learn about other players and, “strengthen what could be backbone of this team moving forward,” to confidently stating: “You don’t want to look too far ahead. Ultimately, we’ve got to look after what’s right in front of us.”

Which is it, Joe?

The more we think about “planning for life without Broad and Anderson” the less we understand it. Why the big need for planning? You chop and change bowlers literally every single match anyway? You’ve used nine pace bowlers in the last 12 months of Test matches without even trying.

(2) Have England finally found a number three?

After averaging 66 at number four in 2021, Root feels he’s ready to solve England’s problems at number three.

He probably is. Hurray!

(3) Can England find a number four?

How in blazing hot Hell are England going to find a batter who can average anywhere close to 66 at four?

(4) Can Chris Woakes take wickets with a new red Dukes ball?

Because that’s what he’ll be trying to do.

While outlining some of the things England could learn from this series, Root said that, “Guys like Chris Woakes and others will get the opportunity to bowl with a brand new ball in a Test match in away conditions.”

Away conditions, yes – but they use the Dukes ball in the West Indies; the Dukes ball with which Woakes has taken 94 Test wickets in England at 22.63.

Suppose you don’t want to change too many variables when you’re running an experiment.

(5) What is still in the selection room?

This is a real poser. Commenting on the selection meeting in which England decided to soft-bin Anderson and Broad, Root said: “Sometimes we have been slightly too honest and certain things should stay in the room.”

So what is still in that room? Root’s comment implies that in failing to take it with them, they have somehow been dishonest. Have Root, Strauss et al disposed of something?

Is it some kind of littering? Have England’s interim management team embraced littering?

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Here is a bunch of stuff that happened in 2021. It is not an exhaustive list, because an exhaustive list chronicling the activities of multiple people across an entire year would take far longer than a year to read. It is just a selection of striking cricket moments from the year just gone.

There is a bit of an England-focus, because this is a UK website. It would honestly be quite nice if England played a bit less and we could spread our attention wider.

Best Test victory: India over Australia at the Gabba

Australia hadn’t lost at the Gabba for 32 years. India went into the match without Ishant Sharma, Virat Kohli, Mohammed Shami, KL Rahul, Ravindra Jadeja, Hanuma Vihari, Umesh Yadav, Jasprit Bumrah and R Ashwin. Then, halfway through the match Navdeep Saini got injured.

No problem, they said. We’ll just chase 328 to win with who we’ve got left.

Worst five-for: Dom Bess

January brought us a truly incredible Test bowling performance when Dom Bess delivered one of the flukiest five-fors you’re ever likely to see. The CricViz boffins reckoned that Bess’s bowling against Sri Lanka warranted 0.18 wickets and yet he somehow emerged with 5-30.

It’s hard to pick a favourite wicket. Niroshan Dickwella being deceived by the longest of hops was good and Dasun Shanaka caught off Jonny Bairstow’s heel too, but it’s hard to look past PWH de Silva moving out of the path of the ball so that he could play an air reverse sweep.

Pretty soon after this, Bess was demoted to third-choice spinner, a position that very quickly saw him back in the Test team.

Most significant trophy: The Moose Cup powered by Daraz

Who says England are Test no-hopers with a broken domestic structure that no longer produces players of sufficient quality?

They’re holders of the Moose Cup powered by Daraz, for crying out loud!

Most contentious man management policy: England

Squad rotation is A FAILURE. Or at least it’s a failure if you’re already not-that-great at Test cricket. Back in June, New Zealand had the better of England in a drawn first Test, then made six changes so that key players would be fresh for the World Test Championship final. Despite this, they easily won the second Test.

England don’t really have the strength in depth to get away with this kind of thing in Test cricket. Speaking back in March, in the wake of a diminished Test tour of India, Eoin Morgan said that he and fellow England captain Joe Root wouldn’t rush to judge the squad rotation policy. “If you sat both of us down at the end of the year and we won the World Cup or came close, or challenged Australia or came close, the both of us would be very, very happy with the decisions that are made,” he said.

Now that we’ve reached that point, Morgan is presumably happier than Root – although that ain’t saying much, is it? The simple truth is that England need a greater number of really good players if they’re going to continue playing as much as they do.

Eeriest moment: James Anderson’s two near-identical clean-bowleds in one over

England won a Test match in India last year. That sentence has become sufficiently incredible to warrant typing out. It came at the start of February off the back of Joe Root’s third hundred of the year, which also happened to be his second double.

The highlight of the match came from James Anderson though. In India’s second innings, he bowled Shubman Gill with one of the finest clean-bowleds you’re ever likely to see. Then he almost exactly replicated the dismissal – perhaps even improved on it – to dispatch Ajinkya Rahane.

England then lost the next three Tests, delivering successive scores of 134, 164, 112, 81, 205 and 135, so excuse us if we take our joy where we can.

Best wicket celebration: Dom Sibley

There was a moment of excitement in the third Test when England briefly appeared to be fighting back thanks to Joe Root’s finest performance of the year (he took 5-8).

That excitement reached its crescendo when Dom Sibley caught Axar Patel…

Best debut: Kyle Mayers

A quick word for New Zealand’s Devon Conway, who made 200 in his very first Test innings, reached the mark with a six and was then run out – but against the odds, his wasn’t the best Test debut this year.

Back in February, Kyle Mayers made the second-highest individual score in a successful fourth innings run-chase when the West Indies beat Bangladesh. He came in at 59-3 and made 210 not out to deliver the fifth-highest run-chase in Test history.

Worst newspaper column: Michael Vaughan about Jofra Archer

Later in the year, in amongst all the Yorkshire terribleness, former England captain Michael Vaughan was accused of actual, out-and-out, explicit racism. Underpinning the case against him was his long-standing tendency to say some really dumb shit. His March column about some “whispers” he’d supposedly heard about Jofra Archer was a prime example.

The old “natural talent” trope has given rise to a series of false conclusions about Archer. “He makes the game look easy” becomes “he finds the game easy” becomes “he doesn’t need to try” becomes “he doesn’t try”. You probably shouldn’t build a column around whispers if a lot of those whispers are rooted in this sort of thinking and likely to exacerbate it. Vaughan, however, saw fit to go even further than “he doesn’t try” and take it into “he doesn’t care about Test cricket”.

“You simply cannot beat the feeling of winning a Test,” responded Archer.

Biggest fallacy: That every trophy has to be “fair”

New Zealand became Test champions and beaten captain Virat Kohli immediately suggested that the tournament needed to be a lab experiment, measuring and weighing every facet of excellence.

No, it doesn’t, Virat. New Zealand won. Try again next time.

Most satisfying shot: Liam Livingstone’s huge straight six

BOSH!

The definitive “go fetch it” shot. Perfect.

Finest moment in county cricket: Darren Stevens’ special creation

When Kent played Glamorgan, 45-year-old Darren Stevens walked in at 80-5 and hit 15 sixes on his way to 190 off 149 balls. His dismissal ended a partnership with Miguel Cummins that was worth 166. Cummins contributed exactly one run to that partnership.

Next ball, Matthew Quinn walked in and hit a six, which meant that he was instantly outscoring a guy who’d just been one half of a century partnership. It was a magnificently cricket moment and even though he was no longer on the pitch, no-one had contributed more to it than Stevens.

Most interesting scoring innovation: The Hundred

There was much moaning about the more obvious elements of The Hundred (its existence). This overshadowed some of the smaller things, like the use of an intuitive runs v balls scoring system throughout matches.

We truly believe that the concept of the over unnecessarily complicates limited overs scoring. We’d like to see ‘X runs off Y balls’ or ‘X needed off Y balls’ visible throughout every white ball match, whether the innings is due to last 100 balls, 120 balls or 300 balls.

Quote of the Year: Chris Silverwood

“Playing the top two teams in the world, in New Zealand and India, is perfect preparation for us as we continue to improve and progress towards an Ashes series in Australia at the back end of the year.”

An incredible thing to say at the time and a comment that has somehow aged badly too.

Best tourist: R Ashwin

R Ashwin went to Devon.

There is so much we like about this.

Peak duck: The first Test of England’s home series against India

England have broken all sorts of records this year and a large proportion revolve around the making of ducks. This habit arguably peaked on the first day of the India series, when they had four batsmen dismissed without scoring. At that point, it was the third time they’d suffered four ducks in an innings in five Tests.

It wasn’t the last time though.

Best run-out appeal: Rory Burns

Ain’t no run-out appeal like the run-out appeal that comes in the immediate aftermath of a drop.

This vies with the Anderson over as our highlight of the year.

Lowest moment: Five right-arm fast-medium bowlers for an Ashes Test in Australia

England picking four right-arm fast-medium bowlers and a spinner for an Ashes Test Down Under is an actual nightmare that we have. This time around they dispensed with the spinner and selected five.

There were many low moments during the first half of the Ashes, but this was the only time England consciously and deliberately transcended nightmares.

Needless to say, they failed to bowl Australia out in either innings.

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