Sometimes you switch on a cricket match and you’re pretty sure Manchester are playing, but Aiden Markram’s batting with Tim Seifert, and Saqib Mahmood’s bowling, and you don’t know what clothes the teams wear any more, and you don’t know what the teams are called any more, and you suddenly realise you are a cricket writer who doesn’t even know which team’s which.

You dimly remember that Manchester are the Super Giants and Aiden Markram’s team seems to have a picture of an elephant next to it. Elephants are big. Maybe that’s Manchester?

That would make the other team… who exactly? What is that other symbol?

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? (It’s a phoenix. It’s Birmingham Phoenix.)

We are not anti-Hundred, but there are hurdles here and, at this time of year, when the schools break up and there’s all sorts of other stuff going on anyway, we simply do not have the jumping in us to clear even a single one of them.

Had we approached the same match from another direction, we’d have seen a scorecard saying MSG v BP. We’d recognise the individual players, but to our eyes they’d have been combined in weird and unexpected ways.

We are not good at unravelling uncommon abbreviations at the best of times. We do not follow transer news. None of these things helps us.

> The Hundred’s having a player auction so that it can be even more like a watered-down version of the IPL

The upshot is that we wouldn’t write anything. But of course England aren’t playing either at the moment, so we don’t write about them either. Before we know it, days are passing and the website is stagnating.

Some years we’ve tried to force it, but we’ve recognised this is becoming a regular thing and honestly, we’re sort of starting to embrace it. We all need downtime. It’s a bit odd that ours seems to arrive in the middle of the cricket season, but there you go.

So apologies for the intermittent service of late, but we assure you our energy is better conserved for later deployment and we promise that time will come.

You can always buy and read our book while you wait for us. (It’s ideal holiday reading! No, really – even from an unbiased point of view!) You can also sign up for email, which saves having to check the site for updates.

The Hundred sales: What do these billionaires honestly hope to get out of their investment?

Garry Sobers was made for cricket. More specifically, having been born with six fingers on each hand, he was made to be an umpire. It was odd then that he should spurn the world of ball counting, jumper carrying and light meter wielding in favour of mastering pretty much every other aspect of the game.

A good few of you know that this website got its name from the first feature we ran at the start of January 2006. There wasn’t much cricket going on at that time, so we did a countdown of the 10 most ludicrously excellent and colourful active players and crowned our winner ‘King Cricket’ – which we felt was a sufficiently overblown title that no-one would ever mistake it for anything other than a joke.

We put Brian Lara at Number 1 – we’re still in love with that backlift – but a week later that post had scrolled off the front page and, to our ongoing anguish, confused readers began calling us King Cricket – a name no-one would self-apply where we come from. By the time we moved to this domain a year and a bit later, we’d given up arguing – we were, alas, King Cricket.

Except we weren’t, because a few years later we discovered that not only had the name already been deployed, Cy Grant had written a whole damn song.

It’s an okay song – perhaps a bit too catchy, to the extent we worry you’ll unsubscribe from our email once it’s lodged in your brain for unwitting, reflexive retrieval.

It’s better and more complimentary than any songs that’ll get written about you though. Clearly Garry Sobers impressed people.

One of the final pieces we published on the old domain was the old Don Bradman v Garry Sobers thought experiment. Our not-too-subtle point was that Sobers was a way better cricketer because cricket does actually involve bowling. A team comprising only Don Bradmans would spend an awful long time in the field.

You can also run this sort of made-up match against other all-rounders. While there are certainly circumstances where other players might be able to win a (most likely timeless) Test against Sobers, it’s impossible to imagine he wouldn’t come out on top overall were you to continue playing matches across all the various conditions that are thrown up in the longest format.

For example, while Imran Khan and early Botham were superior bowlers, they were inferior batters and certain conditions could really neuter their bowling. It’s a lot tougher to corner Sobers that way.

It’s a cliché to talk about how an all-rounder allows you to balance the side, but Sobers delivered so much more than viable batting and bowling. We used to joke about Moeen Ali’s willingness to plug almost any gap for England, but the Sobers sealant was way, way, way more thorough than that.

Left-arm bowlers are hugely desirable. Simply through offering a different angle, they become more valuable than a right-arm bowler of similar skill. Sobers was first picked for the West Indies to bowl left-arm finger spin. If you can do that pretty reliably and also make a few runs, you can often carve yourself quite a lengthy Test career.

But there was more. A little while after that, he started bowling capable wrist spin as well. Left-arm wrist spin is the most unusual form of bowling there is. Just about nobody has done it for any length of time in Test cricket. Sobers did it well enough that he could wheel it out whenever it seemed helpful to do so and fall back on the finger spin the rest of the time.

That is already a pretty handy secondary bowling skill, but then, a mere decade into his Test career, he began opening the bowling.

That is just madness. Sobers had been bowling a bit of medium-pace for a while and apparently swung the ball both ways, but plenty of people said he could really get it through as well when he wanted to; that he had a pretty mean bouncer. At a certain point, the West Indies assessed Sobers tertiary bowling style and concluded that he should probably take the new ball ahead of Charlie Griffith.

Let’s pick a Left-Handed All-Time Greats XI

Now think about the downstream ramifications of all this. Sobers wasn’t an all-rounder who was asked to bowl only when conditions were in his favour – which is how the likes of Jacques Kallis kept their bowling averages down – he was an all-rounder who was called upon at every stage of the innings, on every pitch, in all conditions. In fact the harder things got, the more appealing he’d surely become. “Let’s try a bit of left-arm wrist spin” kind of thing.

Not every player who’s labelled an all-rounder shoulders the same workload. Jarrod Kimber happened on a magnificent fact last week, which is that Sobers bowled the same volume of overs each match as Kallis and Ben Stokes combined.

If a bowler like that could average, say, 30 in Test cricket, he’d have a strong case to be considered the most useful cricketer of all time, but Garfield Sobers was also – just by the by – one of the greatest batters there’s ever been.

For almost a decade, he remained the heaviest run-scorer in Test history, while his average of 57.78 is still right up there, beyond any current player who’s played anything more than a handful of games.

But against all odds, that’s still not the full story, is it? Because there are different ways of scoring runs. Teams need slightly different things from their batters at different times and here too Sobers’ talent was almost laughably broad.

Could he go big? Mmyeah. His first Test hundred broke a record that had stood for 20 years and that 365 not out would remain the highest Test score for 30-odd years afterwards.

Could he score quickly when necessary? Well… yeah… You’d think an extra finger on each hand would be a guy’s most obvious association with the number six – but no, it’s not even close.

“My goodness, it’s gone way down to Swansea!”

Every team wants a left-arm opening bowler with a wicked bouncer who can swing it both ways with new ball or old.

Left-arm spinners are valuable too. Wrist spinners doubly so.

Batters who can hit triple hundreds? Handy.

Hitters who can launch every single ball of an over for six? Even in this day and age when people are specifically training to do precisely that, those sorts of players aren’t exactly ten a penny.

Imagine having every single one of those roles covered in your team. And then imagine that you can still pick another 10 players after that.

Oh, and he was an incredibly decent fielder too.

The whole point of ‘King Cricket’ was that it was supposed to be a ridiculous, overblown title; a silly joke label that no cricketer could ever possibly justify.

“King Cricket, King Cricket – Garfield Sobers is his name. King Cricket, King Cricket – Sobers is his name.”

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If we were going to sack an England Test coach, we wouldn’t announce it in the middle of an England Test match. Sorry, let us rephrase that. If we were going to ‘invoke the notice period’ of an England Test coach, we wouldn’t announce it in the middle of an England Test match.

It’s not like it’s tough to find a window when England’s women aren’t playing Test cricket. Their last home game before the Lord’s one was in 2023 and each match only lasts four days.

But the ECB couldn’t wait – just could not wait – to tell people that it had invoked Brendon McCullum’s notice period as Test coach, so it announced that decision right in the middle of an ongoing Test match. Hope you enjoyed your two-and-a-bit days in the limelight, ladies, but now we’ve got some BREAKING NEWS.

The press release announcing McCullum’s departure was light on a few significant details, such as the specific reason why the decision had been made. ECB CEO Richard Gould therefore reluctantly put himself up for a punishing grilling on Sky Sports where Nick Knight pummelled him with questions on a park bench in his bid to extract THE TRUTH.

As the two men spoke, Tammy Beaumont walked out in the literal background for her final Test innings.

Gould started out by making a big point of specifying that they’d ‘invoked the notice period’ for this part of McCullum’s role. Presumably that contractual wording sounds more like you’re in control of things and still making reasoned long-term decisions, rather than having belatedly diagnosed ‘clusterfuck’ the other day when the captain walked out.

According to Gould, McCullum continuing with the white ball sides is “a great bonus” because he’s such a wonderful coach. It also means that now a new Test coach can come in and “complement” that so that the whole setup can become more than the sum of its parts. This is much better than the current scenario where all the parts are kept loose in a giant bin in the cargo hold of a Jawa sandcrawler.

Well would you spend £1m to not have Brendon McCullum as England coach?

After much waffling about McCullum’s contribution these last four years, Gould eventually informed us that the notice period was invoked due to, “results not having gone the way we would have wanted to see them go.”

So turns out it wasn’t cultural issues or lack of preparation or any of the other details people have been talking about. This is just as well really, because those are what you might call ‘transferable failings’ that might also come to affect the two formats for which the New Zealander remains in charge. Gould was clear that notice period invocation was purely down to results and of course the coach has to carry the can for results because he’s in charge of all the stuff that shapes them – stuff that encompasses any number of Test-specific elements that are in no way related to culture or preparation.

With Beaumont by now in the middle and the match on the brink of restarting, Gould concluded the interview by talking up the ECB’s commitment to women’s cricket. “We’re going to be relentless and we’re going to keep going with women’s cricket because it’s the future,” he informed us.

If only it were also the present.

Holiday reading!

Going away? Need something to read by the pool, on the beach, in bed, or at the airport when you’re massively delayed?

You could do an awful lot worse than getting hold of a copy of The 50 Most Ridiculous Moments by Alex Bowden and Dan Liebke (or by Dan Liebke and Alex Bowden if you believe the cover).

It’s available for £12-19 from Amazon, Bookshop.org and pretty much everywhere else.

Daisy writes…

King Cricket commissioned me to analyse the crowd at the recent women’s Test match at Lord’s.

The null hypothesis: that the proportion of the crowd who are knobheads is the same at women’s Test matches and men’s Test matches.

The alternative hypothesis: that proportionally far fewer knobheads attend a women’s Test match than a men’s Test match.

KC requested anthropological research with hard facts and statistics. 

“Good luck with that,” said Ged. 

Our previous experience of women’s Test cricket was at Shenley in August 2003, when there was no crowd to speak of, apart from ourselves. Knobhead percentage 0.000000%.

Lord’s in July 2026, with around 10,000 in the crowd, would be a different matter altogether.

I decided to work mostly with pictures, taking advantage of our elevated status as member and member’s guest to visit several parts of the ground.

First up, death row on the pavilion terrace, where I interviewed our friend, Jim Dixon.

Jim felt that knobheads in Lord’s terms comprise parvenues and arrivistes, not just the Champagne Charlies of my worst nightmares. 

“Are there parvenues and arrivistes on display today,” I asked. 

“Just one or two. No names, no pack-drill,” said Jim in a quasi-colonial, quasi-military tone. 

I couldn’t quite tell whether Jim was joking or serious. Quintessentially Jim.

Onwards and upwards to the pavilion sun deck.

There Ged took some more pictures and ran into friends Sid and Claire.

I observed just one example of a further category; a ‘red-faced slaphead,’ angrily berating some youngsters for moving around inappropriately during play.

But the pavilion on a ‘relaxed dress code and young visitors allowed’ day is not an ideal comparator.

Ged and I retired to the Warner Stand. It was sparsely populated – almost completely devoid of the Champagne Charlies who normally hang out there for major matches.

We spotted some ECB officials near the boundary boards, who were presumably churning some data for a similar research programme.

We observed the joyous family-friendly atmosphere in the Grandstand. It looked almost totally knobhead-free from our viewpoint.

Ged asked me to show him a knobhead face for the pictorial element of the research paper.

We then both sported Ged’s latest wheeze – the closest garment he can find to the traditional MCC pillbox hat, which was all the rage in the 1850s and 1860s.

This failed to attract a swarm of people to observe, so we decided to go home.

In numbers, Ged informs me that the results are crystal clear.

Knobhead percentage at men’s Test matches: 0.006267 (just under two thirds of one per cent). N=30,000. Knobhead percentage at women’s Test matches: 0.001239 (just under one eighth of one per cent). N =10,000. We can be 99.99999993% confident that there are proportionally fewer knobheads at women’s Test matches than at men’s ones. QED.

We don’t believe you can draw meaningful conclusions from players’ cricket grounds’ debuts – but we report on them anyway.

Lord’s hosted its first (women’s) Test match today. How did it shape up?

Lord’s somewhat grandiosely styles itself The Home of Real Tennis, but it does actually have a cricket facility attached too. It wouldn’t be your first choice Test ground – and indeed it hasn’t been: England have already played Test cricket at no fewer than 19 other home venues.

Why is this? Well, the pitch is typically two-paced at best, more frequently low and slow, and the playing area itself isn’t even level. The ground’s also gained an unwelcome reputation for attracting an inattentive crowd that rarely seems capable of rousing itself above a distracted murmur or hum. 

On the rare occasions fans have become more animated, there have been documented instances of lairy, loutish, abusive behaviour targeting visiting players.

Despite these failings, Lord’s has been deemed suitable for international cricket by the England and Wales Cricket Board, which is, coincidentally, based there.

Its first day as a proper Test venue can probably go down as a qualified success.

Attendance seemed… okay. It looked acceptable enough when the cameras were pointing in the right directions, but there were great expanses of white seating when the ball went out towards the square boundaries.

Decent attendance seems to be on the cards for the weekend, but the ground needs to aim a bit higher than that. It’s all well and good selling a good load of tickets when you’ve got perfect July weather for a Test centred on the weekend. Grounds are rarely treated so well though. A more important question is how many people it might attract for a gloomy Test in May, with a Wednesday start, against less marketable opposition.

It’s a challenge, but one we imagine can easily be overcome.

In England, Test attendances remain strong when fans know what to expect. From our own perspective, a large group of our friends routinely went to Day 3 of the Old Trafford Test back when we knew such a thing was going to occur on a summer Saturday each year.

However, as time wore on, Day 3 moved from those summer Saturdays to summer Fridays or summer Sundays. Sometimes Day 3 of the Old Trafford Test would happen in spring, and then multiple years it simply wouldn’t happen at all. Each time that original tradition changed shape, a few more of us lost the appetite to spend £85 on a ticket or just plain forgot that this had once been an annual social event.

Lord’s needs to guard against such a fate. If it can secure itself a guaranteed Test match each summer – or even better two – then it should be able to build and retain an audience that returns year after year. That would be the best defence against accusations that there’s no point hosting Test matches at the ground because quite often they don’t sell out.

It would be an absolute tragedy if people were able to make that argument and consequently conclude that almost all future Test matches ought to take place at Taunton or Wormsley.

Cricket’s a broad, sprawling sport, open to anyone who can lay their hands on a bat and ball. It has no home. If it did have a home (which it doesn’t) and that home was in England (which it isn’t) then you can be pretty sure the England women’s Test team would have been allowed to play there before 2026.

So it is that they head to England’s 20th Test venue, Lord’s Cricket Ground, the Home of Turgid Pitches, this week – a mere three years after their last home Test, at Trent Bridge in the 2023 Ashes.

England have of course already played at Lord’s within the last few days, in the T20 World Cup final. That didn’t go so well. But it was against Australia, who remain a different sort of team to everyone else.

Cricinfo made reference to a “1,225-day World Cup drought” in one headline. You’re not a bad side when people are measuring the gaps between your world titles in days. It’s actually impossible to avoid a drought of that length in some sports – even when you win back-to-back titles. But this is cricket and Australia have only had one longer, drier spell – 1,693 days between their 2014 and 2018 T20 World Cup wins.

They won that Trent Bridge Ashes Test too. Tammy Beaumont – who has just announced that she’s going to retire from international cricket after this match – scored 208 and Sophie Ecclestone took 10 wickets, only for Ashleigh Gardner to take 12.

It is no disrespect to India to say they’ll present a lesser challenge. England’s last Test was an innings defeat to Australia at the start of 2025. India’s was a 10-wicket defeat to Australia four months ago. The visitors are therefore arguably the form team on the basis of both results and actually having played the format within the last year.

The game starts at 11am on Friday, unless they change their minds and decide to ban women again.

We started watching the T20 World Cup semi final halfway through England’s innings and Nat Sciver-Brunt and Heather Knight kept doing this mad thing where they’d deliberately hit the ball where the fielders weren’t. Utterly bizarre. It’ll never catch on.

The other day, during England’s last-day-of-term Test against New Zealand (“We’ve been allowed to bring in games!”), Nasser Hussain was talking on commentary about how he used to struggle against bowlers who released the ball from wide on the crease. This reminded us that for all the other stuff we spend our time talking about, cricket is, at heart, a game of spatial relationships; of gaps and angles and objects moving at different speeds. 

So often in T20 cricket, play is overwhelmingly shaped by the largest and most inviting gap – the one above and beyond the boundary fielders – and the best way to put the ball there is by giving it a bit of welly. The exact direction in which you welly is almost moot. The onus is overwhelmingly on oomph, with more oomph being better, right up to the point where you would commit that most heinous of batting crimes: “trying to overhit it”.

Similarly, even when looking to hit a four, a batter can achieve a great deal by absolutely crashing it in the vague direction of a gap. After all, the faster the ball travels, the less accurate the shot has to be. In fact, if you can hit the ball within a metre of a fielder and still get it past them, you’ll almost certainly be applauded for it. Clichés like ‘tracer bullet’ may even get an airing.

For the most part, Sciver-Brunt and Knight were not doing this against South Africa. More times than we can count, they’d hit a single or a quick two out towards a boundary fielder and then as we watched the ball roll, it would dawn on us that it was actually going to be a four because the shot had perfectly bisected two fielders.

Commentators often used to talk about bisecting fielders – it was about the only time we ever heard the word used – but it feels anachronistic now. It was therefore rather joyous to revisit this aspect of the game.

Sciver-Brunt’s and Knight’s were more geometric innings. You could watch the replays and marvel at the exquisite calibration of each shot, as an in-fielder running one way didn’t quite get to the ball before an out-fielder running the opposite way was similarly narrowly evaded.

The slow-rollers are the best. You watch the ball as it makes its unhurried way through the outfield and you ponder whether there’s enough on it. Could it gently kiss the boundary, or will it come to an agonising standstill, tantalisingly out of reach of its Toblerone-shaped lover?

Looks like this one will make it. Just. But only if neither of those two fielders converging on it intervenes first…

It’s a slow motion race. It’s going to be close…

The ball wins by a single layer of lacquer. Four runs to the total.

Late on in this game, you wondered whether England had even the faintest awareness of what was going on with their opponents – not just the things that were going well for them; the things that might be worth copying, but also all of the things that were very much not going the tourists’ way and which should have left them vulnerable. 

England fought back impressively well after conceding that colossal head start, but New Zealand then fought back from that fightback. Maybe that was the game’s full allotment of backfighting. England certainly looked broken by the end, but New Zealand must have only been hanging by a thread.

Two long weeks ago, the Kiwis lost the best batter they’ve ever had to retirement. That’s a bit of a blow when you’re 1-0 down with two Tests to play. 

They levelled the series anyway, but then lost the guy who’d just taken 11 wickets in the match and also the guy who’d hit a first innings hundred. At this point, they concluded they would also have to rest their other opening bowler due to workload concerns. Those are pretty big follow-up blows.

Not too long into the third Test, they lost one of their replacement quicks to concussion, and then two more suffered debilitating finger injuries to their bowling hands. Who’d be a New Zealand bowler in 2026? Presumably everyone by the end of the year at this rate of attrition.

It begs the querstion, how many blows can one team take? About as many as Daryl Mitchell took in the second innings, apparently.

Last time Mitchell came to England, he made three hundreds and two fifties in six innings. He played brilliantly and New Zealand lost every match. This time he only reached three figures once and quite often looked dreadful in doing so – but New Zealand won.

Oh sure, Daryl Mitchell and Jonny Bairstow are batting really well right now, but…

Mitchell’s 100 not out off 241 balls was by any measure a gruelling effort. Ball hit batter more frequently than batter hit ball. It took him 170 balls to reach 50 and as well as countless body blows, we’re pretty sure he went through at least three helmets. 

Until a salvo of late blows with the tail, it was hideous stuff really. Was this his best hundred, or his worst hundred, or his best hundred because it was his worst hundred? 

And do England even realise that it happened?

Voids get filled. The England Test team therefore has an awful lot of new stuff on the way later this summer – chiefly in these three main areas.

Captaincy 

If Ben Stokes isn’t England captain then the two most obvious replacements are Joe “Craptain” Root and Harry “Dingbatter” Brook.

Clearly we’d all greatly prefer it if Root was permitted to keep his whole focus on batting. Similarly, Harry Brook’s peak performance seems to hinge on batting like a complete dingbat. We can’t tell you how much we worry that the responsibility of captaincy might dampen his enthusiasm for playing that way. Actually, that’s not true – we can. We wrote 1,500 words on exactly that topic and reference the article regularly.

Are we already watching peak Harry Brook?

Furthermore, whoever takes over, are they honestly likely to wheel out mad captaincy gambits like asking an attack entirely devoid of fast bowlers to deliver 98% short balls for 51 overs in a row? (That is an actual thing that Ben Stokes actually did, not some wild rhetoric.)

All-roundering

England are going to stop picking spinners while saying “balance the side” a lot, aren’t they? We can be pretty damn sure of this because they did it last week.

While he can’t actually seem to make any runs at the moment, Stokes does still carry the reputation of being a batter as well as a bowler. This means that whenever he’s been available, England haven’t immediately felt obliged to dick about sacrificing whole aspects of the game (spin bowling) in the name of ‘balance’.

Sometimes they’ve gone down that grim road anyway. Just imagine how often it’ll happen without a cricketer they can pass off as both a proper batter and a proper quick bowler.

Nonsense

Most strikingly of all, it’s hard to imagine that the on- and off-field nonsense voids created by the absence of Stokes can possibly be filled any time soon.

We don’t even need to think back too far to appreciate the alacrity with which he ticks both boxes. Stokes is basically retiring because he stayed out past his bedtime and when that decision was made public ahead of the 11th over of a bowling spell, he took a wicket with his very next ball. That would be top level on- and off-field nonsense for most players, but in his case it’s just a couple of things he’s done this week.

Extend the timeframe to months and years and Stokes’ historic nonsense mushrooms to frankly unmanageable levels.

Ben Stokes.

From the 2019 Ashes to two World Cup finals – which of Ben Stokes’ big three high pressure run-chase innings was the most ridiculous?

This website was born in the drab age of “chief executives’ pitches” where runs were plentiful and the game inched along like a tardy slug. We hated it – but fortunately the world moves on. We now find that in an era of two-day Tests, it’s actually quite interesting to watch a team spend almost an entire day going pretty much nowhere.

Sometimes Tour de France riders warm up on stationary bikes before a stage. This seems like an entirely mad thing to do when you’re about to ride a couple of hundred kilometres and scale multiple mountain passes. Save your strength, lads! The reason they do it is that quite often the fastest part of the day’s ride comes right at the beginning and they need to be ready to go ‘full gas’ from the off.

What even the keenest Tour riders most definitely don’t do, however, is pedal on the spot for five long hours before finally moving that first competitive millimetre. This is basically what England did today. 

Are you sitting comfortably?

As a fielding side, opening partnerships are the worst, and first innings opening partnerships are the very worst of the worst. This is because until you take that first wicket, you haven’t actually meaningfully got going in the game. 

Tom Latham and Devon Conway got going. They didn’t set off at a sprint or anything, but they began moving immediately. They then quickly settled on a pace they felt they could maintain. 

Devon Conway in particular isn’t a man who takes good form for granted. The best batters can get complacent and overly ambitious, but when you’re on such intimate terms with awkward scratchiness, you take those good days in a boa constrictor embrace and ensure you make full use of them.

So New Zealand started well and they kept on moving. In contrast, England didn’t roll out of the neutral zone until their opponents were already 317 runs into their day. 

This wasn’t just allowing the opposition a head start. It wasn’t merely doing nothing and falling a long way behind. It was far worse than that. It was working hard to go nowhere. It was five hours of effort to get exactly where you were five hours ago, resolutely joe-rooted to the spot.

It’s an interesting measure of a team to see what they do in a situation like that and 4-44 from a weary, standing start represents quite a surge. 

No-one really talks about how Ben Stokes makes things happen these days. It must have become such a big and obvious cliché that even cricket can’t bear to maintain it any more. Making the breakthrough was making things happen though – albeit only after making that gargantuan head start exist first via his captaincy over the preceding hours. 

What did we learn about anyone else? The three other wickets were shared between three other bowlers – if you can call Joe Root a bowler – which means it’s hard to pick out some standout hard-head who refused to buckle to circumstance. 

The great thing with chief exec pitches though is that there’s always likely to be another day of toil from which to explore the players’ characters and draw your conclusions. Warm up for day two.