We’re late on this one, but please bear with us because there’s one particular element (a face, if you’re wondering) which should not be overlooked.

Yesterday morning, King Cricket reader Ritesh drew attention to a wonky caption to a Getty photo he’d spotted. “Kohli celebrates after hitting the winning runs,” it read. And there was Virat Kohli celebrating in all his batting gear immediately after the winning runs against Pakistan were hit.

Except Kohli didn’t hit them, did he?

It’s one of those moments that sort of feels true, because Kohli played the decisive innings in that match and he was not out at the end. So in that respect it’s a small thing – true enough, you might even argue, in that it’s true to the narrative of that match.

But then a cricket match – and to a greater extent a world cup – is a rich, interwoven web of all sorts of narrative strands and if you start splattering Kohli-coloured dye all over the place, you will unavoidably discolour some of the other stories.

Because while Kohli is cool in a run chase, it takes a particular type of person to come into bat with two needed off the final delivery and retain the self control to actually leave the ball.

R Ashwin is not like other people. If you’ve heard him talk about his bowling, you know that. If you’ve seen him mankad Jos Butttler, you know that. If you’ve seen him read and appreciate an information board about East Devon’s Jurassic Coast, you know that. He once spoke about how he’d been doing “a bit of archaelogy” in his time off.

R Ashwin is a singular cricketer and a singular man and he honestly deserves better than to have his ice-blooded leave and chipped winning runs overshadowed by what was, admittedly, a pretty damn special Virat Kohli innings.

But despite winning more Test matches for India than anyone else in the last decade and repeatedly delivering magic moments like this, R Ashwin is by now quite used to being overshadowed by Kohli. Given that this overshadowing was for a long period fuelled by Kohli not picking him for Test matches outside India, you wonder whether somewhere deep inside that inquisitive, calculating mind, there might just be the merest soupcon of resentment.

So Slog of the Day…

Ashwin was bowling to South Africa’s Aiden Markram, who jumped down the pitch and slogged so hard he actually became momentarily airborne.

There are a lot of slogs in modern cricket and there is kind of an art to disguising them. As long as you keep some sort of form, you can pass most off as ‘controlled power hitting targetting a particular part of the ground’.

If you become airborne, your shot is not controlled. Also, if you hit it straight at a fielder, it is probably not that targetted (although Markram would of course argue that he was aiming over Virat Kohli).

Next came the fun bit.

Virat Kohli got himself into a really good position to take the catch.

And then completely failed to take the catch.

Virat Kohli then had a second go at taking the catch, this time from a highly awful position.

And again completely failed to take the catch.

You know, chances go down. That’s a thing that happens. We’re quite forgiving about it because cricketers actually drop a lot more than people think they do. But that doesn’t meant it isn’t still a striking and dramatic thing whenever it happens.

In the immediate aftermath, it’s very tempting to read things into people’s body language that probably aren’t really there.

You know the kind of thing that we mean. The chance has gone down, the ball is already on its way back and yet the bowler still looks like this…

And then this…

Probably that’s just plain old astonishment laced with disappointment. But it’s hard not to think about how unusually protracted the look is and whether there were any deeper emotions fuelling its extended lifespan. And who did he turn towards as well? What was that look all about?

Then again, if we’re looking for enmity, envy or jealousy, this is a man so focused on the fine detail of cricket matches that he didn’t notice 90,000 fans roaring when he came into bat for the decisive ball of the biggest match of all. It’s very hard to imagine R Ashwin giving a flying full toss about anything so mundane as ‘what other people think’.

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.

We were already fond of Haris Rauf’s look and disrespect for physics. Now we’re a fan of his batting too after he followed up a huge six against India with three almighty air swishes, the third of which netted Pakistan another two runs.

Going purely on slog aesthetics, the first yahoo was the best; a great big technique-free full body mow. All power, no finesse, zero contact with the ball.

Understandably proud of it, Haris repeated the effort to the next delivery, which is also quite a thing in its own way. You have to admire his decision-making.

‘I’m onto a winner here,’ he apparently concluded after that one and duly completed his slog-and-miss hat trick off the next ball, which also happened to be the last of the innings.

Haris Rauf is a smart man and he knows you always run off the last ball of a limited overs match, no matter where it goes. India’s wicketkeeper Dinesh Karthik had a ping at the stumps and missed. Bowler Bhuvneshwar Kumar then gathered and had a pop at the other set. He missed too and the batters ran a second bye.

Wild tail-ender hacks, no-one hitting what they’re aiming at, overthrows. Elite cricket at its best in the biggest match of the year.

Top slog, Haris Rauf.

Well played, Pakistan.

A little later, Virat Kohli swished and got bowled. And then ran three.

Top slogging, Virat.

Well played, India.

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.

Fast bowlers aren’t often captains. They’re more likely to get injured. They’re more likely to be tired and bad-tempered in the field. There’s always the temptation to over- or under-bowl themselves. But these things aren’t insurmountable.

Whenever a Test captaincy vacancy opens up, the discussion begins. Who are the options? Top players are required for so much international cricket these days that usually there’s no obvious standout candidate with extensive first-class captaincy experience.

So the TV pundits go through the team’s inked-in senior pros and weigh up all of their credentials. And whenever they come to a fast bowler, they pretty much just say that they don’t have a case because they’re a fast bowler.

Most of these pundits are former captains and most former captains are batters because these same discussions have already happened many times before.

James Anderson knows the rules as well as anyone.

“I think more bowlers should be captain,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald. “There’s lots of arguments why it would suit to have a bowler as captain, but it’s just not the done thing is it? Captains like to look good at first slip and look like they’re making all the field-position changes and doing all the good stuff. But I’m all for it.”

A few examples

Do you know the best way to become captain if you’re a fast bowler? Trick people into thinking that you’re a batter. A decent proportion of Test bowling captains have been all-rounders.

Imran Khan is an obvious example. Imran really ramped up the batting while he was in charge, hitting five of his six Test hundreds and averaging 52.34. He also averaged 20.26 with the ball during this time, so it’s hard to argue he was weighed down by the responsibility. (Imagine if Pakistan had stuck to the ‘your captain has to be a batter’ script and never put him in charge. That is a super-weird parallel universe to try and wrap your head around.)

India had Kapil Dev as captain; South Africa had Shaun Pollock; West Indies had Daren Sammy and now have Jason Holder. England have given Ian Botham, Tony Greig and Andrew Flintoff a go.

When Ben Stokes led England in a Test in 2020, we tried to work out which England all-rounder has the worst record as captain. We concluded it was Flintoff on the basis that he basically ruined his own playing career by bowling himself for 68 overs in one Test.

We’d argue that this is one of the legitimate challenges of being a bowling captain: those times when it’s all on the line and you need a breakthrough and you want to lead from the front… and then you don’t immediately get that breakthrough and the desperately-needing-a-breakthrough situation remains unchanged. A good 25 off Flintoff’s 51 second innings overs in that match were ‘just one more over’.

There have been a few non-all-rounder Test captains too.

Bob Willis captained England. Courtney Walsh led the West Indies once they were convinced of his absolute indestructibility. Pakistan got confused by the Imran thing and gave both Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis the job in the mistaken belief that you’re supposed to have your best fast bowler as captain (although Wasim did hit three hundreds, including a double, so maybe that helped (reverse) swing it for him.)

Going into the 2021/22 Ashes, Australia decided that Pat Cummins would be their captain.

Tactician or strategist?

We have always been very bad at identifying captains. We remember thinking that Michael Vaughan’s relaxed approach would undo all of the progress England had made under Nasser Hussain’s ferocious micro-management – but turned out he was a great choice for that side.

Then we were pretty sure that Kevin Pietersen would be a better option than Andrew Strauss after that. Wrong again.

It’s worth explaining why we thought that though.

One of the best and worst cricket nicknames of all time was when Kevin Pietersen was called Dumb Slog Millionaire after getting a big IPL contract. It was brilliant because it was timely, a great play on words and it played into all the sneering and snobbishness about the shortest format and the IPL in particular. It was also terrible because it totally mischaracterised KP’s batting.

Pietersen was not a dumb batter. He was a smart, calculating batter – a proactive batter. Rather than simply ‘playing each ball on its merits,’ he approached each phase of play as a problem for which he would have to come up with a solution. His batting wasn’t necessarily about minimising risk for each and every delivery; it was about manipulating the broader situation in the hope of minimising risk for himself in the longer-term. Fielders were threats. Gaps in the field were to be exploited – often innovatively. The ‘slogs’ stick in the mind because they often seemed so rash given the immediate circumstances.

All of this amounts to tactics. This is what people tend to mean when they say someone has, “a great cricket brain.” They mean that person can evaluate batting danger and either combat or exploit that, depending on whether they’re batting themselves or in the field. Pietersen has a good cricket brain. What we saw with his England captaincy were failures in strategy and man management.

These, we’d argue, are far more important aspects of captaincy and they’re elements that can quite comfortably be undertaken by a fast bowler.

On the field

Upon taking the Australia job, Cummins said that he and his vice captain Steve Smith were going to take a collaborative approach and that on-field tactics would be one area where he’d be looking to cede control a lot of the time.

“There’s going to be times where I’m out in the middle, it’s a hot day, I’m in the middle of a spell and I need to turn to people for advice, for tactics, for experience and that’s the main reason – one of the big reasons – why I wanted Steve to be vice-captain,” he said.

“How that looks? I think it potentially could look differently to [how] you’ve seen partnerships work in the past. I think that will remain pretty fluid.

“A 22-degree day might look differently to a 40-degree day. There will be times on the field where I’ll throw to Steve and you’ll see Steve move fielders around – maybe doing bowling changes, taking a bit more of an elevated vice-captaincy role – and that’s what I really want.”

A lot of people think that setting the field is the main element of captaincy, but a lot of bowlers set their own fields anyway. Why shouldn’t a captain delegate to an even greater extent and intervene only when he thinks it necessary?

Off the field

Virat Kohli is a so-so tactician, but he has developed India’s Test team significantly since taking over from MS Dhoni.

Dhoni was a good captain too, but his approach was clearly geared towards the formats where you can win without taking wickets. In contrast, Kohli wants his Test teams to go after the opposition. If he is blessed with the bowling tools to do this, he has also consistently fielded stronger bowling attacks at the expense of the team’s batting in pursuit of his goal. This demonstrates a commitment to that way of playing in a way that merely saying ‘we want to be aggressive’ does not.

The constituent parts of Kohli’s Test sides may change – often quite considerably – but his philosophy doesn’t and he has managed to imbue this into his teams. His is a culture of fitness, self-improvement, refusal to take a backwards step and inexplicable bubbling anger at all times.

He has pushed for a will to win to supersede a fear of failure and he has done so successfully enough that the team now operates perfectly well even in his absence.

And he is absent quite a lot.

Because this is the current cricket world, isn’t it? People say that a fast bowler can’t be captain because it’s so much more likely they’ll get injured and miss games – but who doesn’t miss games in this day and age? Between injuries, paternity leave and sitting out entire tours in a bid to postpone burnout, the average all-format batter will miss plenty of matches. Someone who plays for their country in all three formats is not a ‘safe’ pick if you want your captain on the field all the time.

If you’re captain of England, India or Australia, in particular, being captain is simply too big a job for you to do on your own. If you’re not playing, you’re planning or travelling. And if you’re not planning or travelling, you’re being briefed for media appearances in which you’ll be asked a bunch of tricky questions about some political hot potato or other that’s not really anything to do with hitting a ball with a cricket bat. Or maybe it’s a photo shoot today. Or maybe – who knows – maybe you’ve got a chance to go into the nets and practise.

Something has to give. Plenty of things have to give, in fact. The only question is what those things should be. Maybe bowling changes and field settings are some of the easiest things to hand over to someone else. Maybe actually playing in the matches has become an optional aspect of Test captaincy.

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James Anderson took two wickets in his 11th over of the first Test: Cheteshwar Pujara for 4 and Virat Kohli for 0. Both are great and significant batsmen and if our maths is correct – and no guarantees on this one, people – there is only a four-run difference between those two scores. Yet the two wickets were celebrated rather differently.

We know what you’re immediately thinking. You’re thinking this is a Virat Kohli thing. And to a great extent, you’re correct.

Virat Kohli is a very passionate cricketer. He is also a man who is not averse to a bit of friction with the opposition. Throw in the fact that he’s India’s captain and the upshot is that bowlers tend to experience just a little bit more joy when they dismiss him.

But it is not just that. Because these reactions are VERY different.

Here’s Jimmy Anderson after he got Pujara out.

You’re wondering if we’ve got the right moment there, but honestly, we have.

Jimmy Anderson celebrated dismissing India’s number three by looking like a man who’s just walked out of his house and closed his front door behind him only to immediately wonder, “Wait, did I actually remember to pick up my keys?”

That is quite a weird wicket celebration and definitely not a big one.

Now here’s Anderson after he got Kohli out.

So basically almost in tears, wailing with delight.

It was really full-on. In fact it’s worth including another shot from quarter of a second later to underline that.

‘Why God, why? Why have you blessed me with this unbearable level of emotion?’

To be completely clear, this happened exactly one ball and around two minutes later.

So, a question…

What’s the most significant element underpinning this contrast?

• James Anderson?
• Virat Kohli?
• Cheteshwar Pujara?
• Context?

For sure, it’s all of them (and it’s interesting to think about what that says about Pujara), but context is the one we haven’t yet mentioned.

A wicket is always a surprise. It is a jolt of adrenaline for the bowler that takes them from weary to elated in an instant. But there is only so far you can go.

Okay, Jimmy only went from grumpy-weary to, placid-weary for the Pujara wicket and that is not much of a leap at all, but we’re pretty sure it would not be possible for a man of his age and seen-it-all-beforeness to go from grumpy-weary to quasi-religious delirium in the space of one delivery.

To get that second state, he needed a teaser. Pujara was that teaser.

With his senses heightened and a few beats-per-minute added to his heart-rate, Jimmy experienced a near-immediate supplementary jolt with the Kohli dismissal. He was primed this time and the impact was therefore enormous.

This is why what precedes a wicket is so important.

This is why hat-tricks are so great.

This wasn’t even a hat-trick. But it was Virat Kohli.

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If Virat Kohli has a defining quality, it is faintly-unnerving intensity. Remember that time he was basically livid about beating Australia? Or all of those very many times when he celebrated a hundred with incandescent rage?

We’re if not quite numb to these displays by now, then at least acclimatised to them. The moments that really strike us are therefore generally quirkier ones from the margins of the game.

This week Kohli’s Royal Challengers Bangalore beat Kolkata Knight Riders by 38 runs. Kohli was out in the second over and, as is so often the case when he’s failed himself, he made doubly certain to be ostentatiously satisfied with his team-mates’ success from then on.

When Glenn Maxwell reached 50, Kohli clapped him.

Only he clapped him really weirdly. Thrusting his hands out from beneath an IPL parasol, he went with an elevated, overarm, top-hand-downwards clap.

That is not how a human being claps.

Human beings clap horizontally. You can see his team-mates executing textbook human claps in the image above. (One of them is literally open-mouthed with incredulity at Kohli’s technique.)

Kohli’s top hand then rhythmically clapped the bottom hand downwards in what appears to have been a gravity-assisted battle for supremacy.

The image above is roughly where he bottomed out and he just persisted with his up-down clapping in that bent-over, arms-out position.

At no point did his facial expression make any kind of sense.

His eyes appeared focused on something actually inside Maxwell and we can only presume that his mouth remained open because he was slowly and invisibly inhaling his team-mate’s essence, like the ghostly vampire from Soul Reaver on the PlayStation.

Virat Kohli is a man who struggles to come to terms with being bowled.

We assumed we’d already seen Kohli’s finest “I’ve just been bowled” face. And maybe, for a pure, single facial expression conveying sheer bafflement that such a thing could possibly have happened, the face he produced after Adil Rashid hit his stumps is still the best.

But when Kohli was clean bowled for a duck by Moeen Ali? Well that was a whole big thing all of its own. That was a thing we’re going to have to take a detailed look at right now.

This was the sequence of events.

The first thing that happened was that Moeen Ali clean bowled Virat Kohli through the gate with a fiendish delivery.

After being clean bowled through the gate by Moeen Ali, Kohli made this face in response.

There was a distinct note of “wow” about Kohli’s face when he was bowled by Adil Rashid that previous time. On that occasion you’d say the look was disbelief with an undercurrent of shock.

This time around disbelief tussled with confusion for supremacy – “wow” didn’t get a look in.

“Did that… happen?” he asked the umpire and Rohit Sharma, using body language alone.

Then, still visibly grappling to accept what had happened, he asked them much the same thing using words.

Then he turned round and checked his stumps.

Then he checked with Rohit again.

“Really?”

Kohli looked like a man who’s just watched that bit in Lost Highway where the character played by Bill Pullman goes to bed and then wakes up as an entirely different character played by Balthazar Getty.

“Did that happen? Did that ball really just bowl me?” he asked the cosmos.

“No,” he eventually concluded. “No, that did not happen.”

And so he stood there.

After trying to hit the ball, failing to hit the ball and then the ball hitting his stumps, Virat Kohli decided that the most appropriate course of action was to stay exactly where he was.

So he did. He stood there. And waited. And he stayed standing there for quite some time with his stumps spread behind him.

That is quite the move. You need quite a bit about you to see reality unfold, weigh up your response and then say “no” to it – just flat-out “no”.

So after being very obviously clean bowled by Moeen Ali, Kohli stood around and made everyone watch a replay of him being very obviously clean bowled by Moeen Ali.

Only then – only once the word “out” had been shown on a massive great big digital board in the ground – did India’s captain reluctantly accept reality and walk off the field.

Virat Kohli.

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It’s hard not to feel that the role of ‘ambassador’ has been somewhat devalued in recent years by the marketing industry.

It used to be a high-ranking diplomat. But now…

“I am very excited to be a part of Team Himalaya and be the ambassador for their Men’s Face Wash range,” said Virat Kohli about his involvement in this quite magnificent ad alongside Rishabh Pant.

When we wrote about what it’s like to be Virat Kohli a couple of years back, we highlighted how Indian notions of coolness had evolved rapidly in recent years; how previously a cool person was just someone wearing a leather jacket and a pair of sunglasses on a motorbike whereas now it’s something a little more refined.

This ad is maybe a sign that the nation is still capable of the occasional false step.

As everyone knows, the definitive manual for coolness was produced by Marzipan in Kiri and Lou.

To summarise:

“Don’t be silly or pretend. Don’t fall about. Don’t sing and shout. Don’t play the fool.”

To Marzipan’s instructions we’ll add this: Under no circumstances make reference to, ‘walking like a dude, feeling all cool’.

Now, ‘Dude’ – that’s a name no one would self-apply where we come from. You might argue that Virat’s referring to “you” when he says that, but it definitely feels like the kind of “you” where he actually means himself.

So, all-in-all, a dreadful and incredibly fun ad. But before you get too great a superiority complex from laughing at it, we need to knock you down a peg or two.

First of all, please take a moment to imagine an American (any American) pronouncing a foreign place name (any foreign place name).

It’s horrible, isn’t it? Whatever it is you’re imagining, they’re guaranteed to say it so massively, irresponsibly, unrecognisably wrong, that it’s almost beyond offensive.

Now watch this ad again and ponder just how wrong you’ve been pronouncing “Himalaya” for your entire life.

The story of Virat Kohli in this year’s IPL is the story of a man having an uncharacteristically terrible time and having to somehow come to terms with that.

We wrote that story for Cricket 365 by asking: Did you see… Virat Kohli get bowled through the gate?

4 minute read

When Jonny Bairstow made his first test ton, he celebrated in such a way that no-one was left in any doubt that this was the Test hundred that his late father, David, never made.

If you know the story of Jonny and David Bairstow – and an article like this one is honestly no place to go into it – then you’ll understand that it was a very, very, very emotional thing.

We assumed that was a one-off – a unique moment that Bairstow’s whole life had built up to – but when he made sixth Test hundred, against Sri Lanka, it was again a very, very, very emotional thing.

It’s pretty clear that the moment meant a lot to the Yorkshireman. He’d been left out of the side for the previous Test and had also lost the wicketkeeping gloves.

It was kind of like he was making a point to his detractors, although we’d like to highlight two things:

1. You could argue that he was inspired by being dropped, so England should probably drop him again in the future
2. He’s still not wicketkeeper, so maybe he should continue not being wicketkeeper

Bairstow did prove one thing though: he proved that he is a very angry celebrator.

Now, as we all know, Virat Kohli sets the benchmark for angry celebrations. He can even celebrate angrily from the sidelines.

So who is the angrier celebrator of hundreds? Let’s take a look and let’s give them a score out of 100 as well so that it looks like science.

Jonny Bairstow’s hundred celebration

Bairstow moves swiftly and decisively to anger even before completing the run that secures his hundred.

Thank God that helmet grill’s there to protect us all from his gnashing teeth.

With the hundred secured, Bairstow removes the helmet and unleashes the full bestial roar.

This is very impressive and wholehearted. What you can’t see in a still photo is that his head was actually vibrating at this point.

Have you ever been so angry that your head vibrated? We have not and we’d hazard that the scoring of a Test hundred probably wouldn’t make us angry enough that this would happen.

Post-scream, Bairstow’s anger persists and he delivers ‘a look’.

Measured on the “imagine this bloke is walking directly towards you in a pub” scale, this look scores precisely one million – which is the maximum amount.

But then, after that, there’s just the very, very faintest note of vulnerability.

Bairstow’s mouth is still very, very angry at this point but look at the eyes as the tension ebbs away from his brow. There’s something else there. We’re not sure what it is, but it’s something. Maybe tiredness, maybe self-awareness, maybe even very slight tearfulness.

We’re not sure what it is, but in revealing this Bairstow has betrayed the fact that he was not quite feeling 100 per cent anger.

Jonny Bairstow’s angry celebration score: 99/100

Virat Kohli’s hundred celebration

When Virat Kohli scored a very good hundred against England at Lord’s, this is what he did to “celebrate”.

That, to us, would appear to be an extremely angry reaction indeed.

Shortly after this, he did some smiling and you’ll say, ‘hey, you looked at Jonny Bairstow’s reaction over a longer timespan – why aren’t you doing the same for Kohli?’

To that, we would answer: we don’t need to.

Look at Kohli’s face. Look, in particular, at how he’s hidden the ends of his eyebrows somewhere inside the bridge of his nose. Now scroll up and look at the angriest of the Bairstow pics again and tell us he doesn’t now look like a guy who’s trapped his foreskin in his fly.

Virat Kohli has just redefined your understanding of anger.

While relatively brief in comparison, Virat Kohli’s hundred celebration is nevertheless borne of pure, undilute, anger.

Virat Kohli’s angry hundred celebration score: 100/100

Virat Kohli celebrates hundreds slightly more angrily.

4 minute readThere’s basically nothing left as an England fan other than to become a connoisseur of missed catches. Keaton Jennings failing to make meaningful use of his own hands when Virat Kohli edged the ball to him on 93 was one of the greatest misses we’ve ever seen.

There are three main reasons why. We’ll expand on these in a second.

1. Because Jimmy Anderson was bowling
2. Because of where the ball was going
3. Because of what the ball made contact with

Because Jimmy Anderson was bowling

The context is key. Jimmy Anderson has been bowling brilliantly this summer and while he’s been rewarded with plenty of wickets, he’s also been repeatedly slapped in the metaphorical face by countless drops. (He’s been hit in the literal face by his own golf ball too, but that’s wholly unrelated.)

Jimmy has been particularly keen to dismiss Virat Kohli and has beaten or found the edge of the India captain’s bat – ooh, it’s hard to say exactly, but it must be somewhere around 6,000 times.

Precisely none of these deliveries have resulted in a dismissal.

This is why when he again found the edge and the ball again went straight at a fielder and it again didn’t result in a dismissal, Jimmy did this.

While he was still doing this – still bent over, head in hands – he suddenly went all tense and his whole body shook as he unleashed a bestial roar.

This is a 100 per cent correct reaction and Jimmy has our every sympathy.

Because of where the ball was going

On first viewing we reckoned that Keaton Jennings would have needed to move his hands by about three inches to have successfully taken the catch. We were wrong.

Look at this.

And then look at this.

There are no deflections there. Virat Kohli edged the ball directly at Keaton Jennings’ cupped hands. Had Joe Root been armed with a blowpipe and shot a paralysis dart into his opener’s neck to instantly freeze him, there is a reasonable chance the catch would have been taken.

However, this is not what happened. What happened in reality is far more entertaining. What happened was that Keaton Jennings ducked his hands down a few inches to actively evade the ball.

(Look, this all happened in a billionth of a second and we know that the poor guy’s got to instantly pick up trajectory, speed and angle and honestly, in many ways it’s a miracle any catch is taken, but there is still something fundamentally hilarious about a bad-catching side failing to take a catch because one of the fielders moved his hands out of the way of the ball.)

Because of what the ball made contact with

The ball made contact with absolutely nothing. Look at those images above and try and envisage a scenario where ball doesn’t strike hand, arm, knee or testicle.

It’s almost impossible, isn’t it? But this is what happened next.

It was as if Jennings were some kind of formless sprite, unable to interact with solid objects within this earthly realm.

The ball approached and then it just continued on its way at exactly the same speed having passed directly through him.

Summary

We saw a thing the other day where they said that in terms of accuracy, bowling a couple of feet fuller or shorter is like the difference between a darts player hitting the top or bottom of the bullseye.

Darts players release their projectile from in front of their eyes having adopted a firm, stationary position. Jimmy Anderson releases the ball from some way above his head, having sprinted in and done a weird twisting jump; he does it with fingertip precision so that the ball swings; and he does it time and time and time again, even when he’s absolutely knackered.

Most of the time nothing whatsoever comes of this effort – but sometimes it does. Sometimes the ball catches the edge of the bat, travels in the air and in the direction of a fielder.

At this point, Jimmy Anderson has done all he can. The outcome of this delivery is now wholly down to someone else’s involvement and he just has to hope that they catch it.

Imagine that the above happens. Imagine that the umpire signals four runs.

Take another look at Jimmy Anderson screaming into his palms.