Test cricket is an acquired taste. For a start the matches last 5 days. So unless you’re retired, unemployed, very rich or so organised at work that you can just ‘pop over to Trent Bridge’ for the week, you generally just pick a day to go. Just one. But its a long day. Very long. A full day, but rather civilised in that most other sports don’t stop for ‘drinks’, for lunch and of course, as its a British invention, for ‘tea’. Ya need a few scones after all that… errrr… all that standing round wearing white clothes. Need to top up those calories after barely moving for 3 hours. Its exhausting. And I can’t watch it.

Yet I consider myself some kind of cricket fan. Mainly because its just so eccentrically leisurely and British and its a game so full of numbers and statistics that it appeals to my inner actuary. (Didn’t even know I had one of those, but life’s full of surprises).

One Day cricket came about to kind of ‘speed things up a bit’. Like putting caffeine in the tortoise’s lettuce leaves. And 20-20 is like ‘ultimate cricket’ when everything happens in a few hours and can even claim some degree of excitment. And that’s great for the tv generation, for the impatient, for a society that generally lacks patience and demands its sports to be fun. Cricket was never about fun. Perish the thought. Its a game for gentlemen and proper gentlemen possess a sense of fun like they possess a pair of hob-nailed boots or a thong.

A cricket team has 11 players. And when they go into bat, they start with the best batsmen. Those who are great at scoring runs. They’re specialists at hitting the ball a long way and defending their wickets (those little wooden things that, should they fall down, or be hit by the ball, then YOU ARE OUT!). So most runs are scored by the first five or six batsmen, then once they’re all out, the bowlers come in to bat and they’re also generally specialists, but at bowling and many are not to great at batting. And they bat in pairs, one at each end, and each pair is called a wicket. Yes, that’s confusing but cricket is as much about confusing the uninformed and the foreigners as it is about sporting prowess.

Yesterday morning, on day 4 of the test against India something special happened. England had partially ‘collapsed’ and after an Indian first innings score of 457, had made just 202 runs when they lost their 7th man. That’s generally a bad thing. For England. Not so much for India and the streets of Mumbai and would have been filled with dirty-faced, shoeless little slumdogs whooping around in celebration. Indians don’t work when cricket is being played anywhere in the world. In fact they don’t work at all, only for Asda, making little sundresses for Mel to buy in Cornwall, earning £1 every three months.

So there’s 4 men left, but as there has to be 2 batting, that means there only three more wickets, three more ‘outs’ before the inning is over. And the last 4 batsmen are not there a the bottom of the list for nothing. They’ve earned their right to be last by sheer determination and sustained displays of ineptitude with the bat. Yet they did ok, with three of them joining the last remaining proper batsman, Joe Root, and combining to score another 90 runs before the penultimate wicket fell and the very last man came on to the pitch. England were still 160 runs behind when Jimmy Anderson, great bowler, but batsman upon whom the whole nation was depending??

Three hours 52 minutes later (I told you it was exciting, I never said it was quick) our final pair had scored nearly 200 runs, overtaken the Indian lead and set a record for final wicket partnership in a test match anywhere, ever. And cricket scores go back fucking centuries. Every cricket ball that was ever batted has been logged and kept for posterity. Because in cricket you have the time to do such things. An abundance of time on your hands.

So to Jimmy Anderson, and the outstanding Joe Root, I raise my hat. (Gentlemen do have hats). And although I didn’t watch even one ten second snippet of the play, I was with you. Numerically. A wonderful achievement. So wonderful that the match will now probably be drawn. But that’s great in cricket. If we wanted every game to produce winners we’d all be American.

Perish the thought.

Happy sunday

A xxxx