My day was going OK until a share-trading platform asked me to update a survey “As required by the MiFID Directive” AARGH FML

Menn with Venn. Don’t worry, I see what you did there, Sam.

Indeed, Sam, that well known form of diagram, the SMV Venn.

Absolutely, APW.

It is in part a strategy born of confidence – i.e. you believe you have a good enough team to win more often than you lose even if you take risks to engineer the odds away from the draw.

Engineering the odds away from the draw is not the same thing as reducing the game to a coin toss – that is one of the beauties of first class cricket; the draw remains an integral part of the game. Today’s game very nearly ended as a draw, but what aa terrifically exciting draw it would have been compared with the bore draw that seemed on the cards when Pindi revealed itself to be a road.

My bugbear with England as a test side for some years has been the wastage of talent – we have very good players – many of whom were contributing to England being at or near the top in white ball formats – who were delivering less than the sum of their parts as a test team for several years.

This fresh approach has turned that bugbear situation around – England as a test team now looks considerably more than the sum of its parts – players are delivering superb performances in extremely challenging conditions and circumstances.

There is evidence to suggest that risking, say, a 50% chance of losing to gain a 50% chance of winning would seem to be a negative strategy in the long run, at least psychologically. Psychological studies suggest the pain of losing something is felt roughly twice as much as gaining something of the same value would be, so by that metric drawing every game against an evenly-matched opponent (where a win is ‘worth’ roughly the same as a loss) would be far preferable to winning half and losing half.

I am guessing that when McCullum and Stokes talk about ‘risking losing to win’, though, they don’t mean ‘reducing every game to the equivalent of a coin toss’, they mean ‘taking more risks than England have tended to in the past and playing the game in a way that suits the team’.

Imagine a diagram illustrating the points at which a certain TMS commentator’s analyses intersect.

A Simon Menn Venn, perhaps?

Think I’d vote for a jabberwocky of Haydens, Bert

Are you saying that Ireland has relocated to the Southern Hemisphere? That really would be quite a move.

Good point, KC.

Also Ireland.

https://youtu.be/2Y4X7dFM0a0

The one mis-spaking therein which really riled me was the suggestion that England is the only test playing location in the Northern Hemisphere. I suspect that Thompson is not geographically challenged and that he meant to say, “the only location where tests are played in the Northern Hemisphere summer”…but that’s not what he said.

Unfortunately, pedants like me place a discount on everything else such a chap says after misplacing the entire Indian subcontinent, the Arabian peninsula and the Caribbean in the wrong hemisphere.

Just as Simon Mann is now on my grammar offenders register for the terrible error reported by Sam above. I do hope, Sam, that you can recover your passion for whatever it was you were doing when the offence took place.