Dan Liebke’s anonymous former Australian cricketer has this Australia team down as a two-stroke pull-start Victa Commando lawnmower – “an absolute weapon of a thing” but also “an absolute shit of a thing to start”. Presumably that makes Bangladesh some sort of battery-powered Flymo. Halfway through a Test series, their opponents will be hoping the tourists are already out of charge.

The great thing about Australia’s defeat over the weekend is that the one guy they were almost certainly dropping at the point when they’d basically lost was the guy who then made a hundred before they’d actually lost.

Stellar stuff from Cameron Green: an exquisite blend of futility and self-preservation that wouldn’t have looked out of place from a 1990s England cricketer. There is no higher praise.

Somewhat bizarrely, Green’s Test batting average (33.69) moved above Ian Botham’s (33.54) with that second innings hundred. His bowling average is a little way off though. His 39 wickets at 39.82 in fact put him fractionally behind Allan Border with 39 wickets at 39.1. (A return that was sufficiently well calibrated to earn AB a mention in our feature on the best part-time bowlers in the history of Test cricket.)

Still though, Green’s surely ducked under the axe once more (no mean feat for a man of his stature). So who will that lethal blade strike instead?

The queue to not play Test cricket for Australia is an increasingly busy one, but we’d guess it’s currently headed by Marnus Labuschagne and Jake Weatherald. We’re not sure in which order.

Marnus? We know where we are with Marnus. The man’s turned just-about-playing-for-Australia into an art form over the last three years.

Weatherald though is another matter. He looked just horrible in the Ashes and this seems to have led him to reinvent his technique entirely. The end result is that he still looks just horrible, but now in a quite radically different way.

On top of this, there’s also zero chance Australia’s first-choice bowling attack is going to make it through the 20 (or 21) Tests scheduled over the next 12 months. If we’re honest, the fact they’ve got through one in a row is newsworthy, but you’d anticipate a far more meaningful brand of attrition than mere niggles and rest periods in the year ahead – Pat Cummins is the young scamp of the group at 33.

All in all, Australia are going to have to find some new players. Fortunately for them, they aren’t exactly short of Tests in which to trial them.

You can tell Joe Root’s done this before. When you’re entirely new to the job, it’s a tall order to get through a 25-minute interview without saying anything. That’s pretty much what he managed speaking to Mike Atherton earlier this week though.

Root says he’s not going to make the same mistakes as last time. He’s gained a whole different perspective over the last four years. He’s not going to rip things up; he’s going to fine-tune and build on what’s gone before.

This is the nature of things at this point though; when it’s all good intentions and theory. Root’s second coming as England Test captain is all nebulous and abstract right now, which means his answers can be too. Pressed on specifics from the past, he was inclined to fire up his smoke machine before inviting us to squint into a decidedly hard to decipher future.

None of this tells us much. But what else were we likely to get? It would be pretty wild to say you had every intention of repeating your previous mistakes. He was never going to criticise his friend and predecessor. Joe Root doesn’t make drop too many media clunkers – that’s why he’s in the job.

England’s freshly microwaved leader has made one decision though and he explained it perfectly.

Mandatory bedtime’s been put to bed. Because it doesn’t achieve anything.

“If you want guys to take responsibility on the field, they’ve got to feel like they can be grown adults off it,” was how Root put it.

“If you are afraid to trust, you will lose,” is the Rayden version.

Same-same.

What is a curfew but preemptive punishment for crimes not yet committed? In the continuing absence of ECB precogs, it’s also a frag grenade countermeasure where plenty of bystanders get peppered with shrapnel.

If you were Joe Root, with an almost entirely unblemished track record of making fully adult decisions for the entire duration of your incredibly long international career, you’d probably feel a bit put out if one day your boss said he was going to have to take control of your bedtime.

‘Why? Because I apparently can’t be trusted? Hmm, I think I might be immediately reversing this one as soon as I’m back in charge,’ you’d think.

Being a middle-aged batter does not automatically imbue a person with the tactical, strategic, psychological and empathetic qualities that make for a good Test cricket captain. Yet this is still for the most part how we pick them.

Don’t get us wrong, we love Joe Root. We love him as a batter and a bloke. If anything, we admire him even more for being willing to return to a job that makes his life unutterably miserable and for which he is demonstrably unqualified, simply because someone else feels that’s the best thing to do right now. 

We didn’t think much of Joe Root’s first stint as captain. He did the job for a long time and if anything only seemed to get worse at it as time wore on. 

There is a big and legitimate covid asterisk to that. Much of what he had to shoulder was irregular and he was also frequently hamstrung by Eoin Morgan’s limited overs teams getting first dibs on many of England’s best players. 

But he also – and there’s enough evidence to state this plainly – wasn’t any good. He was a wispy, ethereal leader, blown about by forces outside his control; a well-meaning ghost, who everyone liked, blighted by a fundamental incorporeality that prevented him from having any meaningful impact.

Unable to move on

Ghosts famously tend to be tethered to our earthly plane by unfinished business of course, so perhaps that’s what we’re dealing with here.

It would be quite lovely if Root could make use of everything he’s learned since that first stint as captain and write over some of those memories with better ones. Our issue is that we find it very, very hard to see that happening.

People can get better at things – that’s undeniable – but starting points matter. An ageing village cricketer isn’t going to become international standard given an extra net session or two each week – the gap to make up is just too great. He can improve, sure; he can learn things; but he won’t suddenly unearth the one central quality he truly lacks, which is any kind of natural aptitude for the job. 

We have no doubt Root will do things differently this time around. He won’t make some of the mistakes he made in the past. It’s just that quite often these mistakes he’s learned from will be mistakes that other captains would never have made in the first place.

Aptitude

As a batter, Joe Root soaks up experiences and processes them brilliantly. He has an incredible ability to work things out.

Why does Joe Root always seem to work it out and no-one else does?

For whatever reason, this preternatural ability does not extend – has never extended – to captaincy, where he routinely seems to lag three steps adrift, devoid of any abiding throughline which might shape his decision-making.

This was most apparent when Ben Stokes took over and everyone immediately started talking about how much fun they were having. The unavoidable implication of that was that everything before – playing under Root – had been dreadful.

The players feeling a bit better was only half of it though. England also starting winning almost every game in incredible style despite picking much the same guys who had previously been losing almost every game.

One aspect of that change was that the players suddenly felt wanted, supported and secure. Unlike Root, Stokes just very obviously had a feel for this side of the job. He didn’t say he thought a player was great before leaving them out of the next game. As much as possible, he picked guys and stuck with them. He embiggened Broad and Anderson; he backed Jack Leach and spin bowling more generally; he nursed Rehan Ahmed to success on his debut and he performed some kind of pig-headed magic trick with Tom Hartley.

Obviously, you can’t continue relentlessly backing people forever – players get old, players lose form – but you could see how empathy underpinned the way Stokes approached these things. It helped him get more out of people. England weren’t great, but Stokes’s captaincy made them a lot better.

Root just doesn’t seem to have these qualities. Or, more accurately, he lacks them in the context of leading his team-mates in cricket matches.

It’s often said Root has a strong sense of team-mates’ moods – the things that might be bothering them; what they might be worrying about. Maybe being the boss negates this somehow. Or perhaps the issue is that his default reaction is plain, straightforward sympathy rather than finding a way to address those feelings (or prevent them in the first place).

Being captain is perhaps more about shaping mental states than responding to them. Root has some black marks against him on this one. He is the captain who waged a campaign of unnecessary omissions to undermine Jack Leach until there was nothing much left of him, and he is also the man who said, “I think there are certain spells where he can just unleash a little bit more,” about a fast bowler whose bones he at that point seemed hell-bent on stress fracturing.

Root just doesn’t instinctively get this stuff. Nor much of the rest of it really. Only a few weeks ago, he showed he was still perfectly happy to spend a long hour failing to bounce out the lower order.

We love Joe Root. He really is a great guy. He is a man who doesn’t know anything other that to try his hardest and do his best and that is admirable. We doubt it’s occurred to him that by taking on the England Test captaincy and failing to force a different choice, he’s almost certainly making things worse.

But, you know – good luck to him. Hopefully Stephen Fleming and the other players can help him find peace.

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So Joe Root’s England Test captain again. That, perhaps, is a topic for next week. More immediately, we’ve been given a sighter as to what this next Joe Root England team might look like and the first one has Dan Lawrence in it – which is exciting and depressing and interesting and also maybe not that important actually.

For seasoned Joe Root captaincy watchers, the immediate assumption here is that we’re immediately going back to late era Root, where frontline spinners were spurned in favour of as many right-arm fast-medium bowlers as he could muster, garnished with a couple of part-time spinners to provide the faintest mist of variety.

Root and Silverwood have the Jack Leach that they created

Dan Lawrence certainly fits the bill as a shallow-Rooted spin option. All three of his Test wickets so far have come under the Yorkshireman.

He also bowls a fair bit for Surrey, who seem to have provided the template for how England ‘balance’ their team these days – which is to say, with no spinner.

If you’ll excuse us quoting ourself here: we have endless time for Dan Lawrence’s bowling, but that doesn’t make him a bowler. If anything, a very large part of the appeal lies in all the ways in which he isn’t.

The three best parts of Dan Lawrence’s bowling action in escalating order of greatness

England say Lawrence will bat at six in the first Test against Pakistan and that Jordan Cox will sub in for Jacob Bethell at three. That means the only real question is which four bowlers they’ll pick, but clearly they’ll pick four seamers.

But then just when we were preparing ourselves for an era of all-rounderism that would be fudged in a dull and predictable way, selector Marcus North threw in a zooter: “Sam Curran is certainly a player of interest for us.”

North went on to say that because Curran has some niggles, he wasn’t considered for the first two Tests, but the hope was he would ‘become an option’ for the third Test.

The way we read that is that Curran is in fact the first choice and Lawrence is the stand-in.

If Curran’s in the first XI, this next incarnation of the England team could look very different to the one that takes the field in the first Test, because Curran was a load bearing strut during the early era of Captain Root, when he also brought us Total Bits and Pieces Cricket.

Back then, with no great confidence in anyone’s batting or bowling, England stocked their side with maybes: cricketers who could bat a bit and bowl a bit and who might do a job in the right circumstances. This resulted in seven different bowling options and most styles of bowling available to call on.

Total Bits and Pieces Cricket: Is England’s current approach the future or simply the best way for them to do things at the minute?

With better specialists available at the minute, they won’t go to those extremes again, but even so, as a left-arm medium-pacer who’s probably a number seven batter, Curran does encourage more interesting downstream selections than Lawrence.

Lawrence passes as half a spinner in the same way Will Jacks did. Even though two half-spinners only in reality equal two half-spinners and not a whole one, England still cling to their wrong-headed maths on this issue, so his inclusion alongside Root means they perceive that spin bowler box as ticked.

Sam Curran, in contrast, is not a spinner, even though he sometimes bowls that slowly. England are therefore likely to actually pick a tweaker when he’s in the team. Based on the first Test squad, that would be Shoaib Bashir, which would be interesting. It is however just as likely that they’ll weigh the breathtaking adequacy of Curran’s batting and instead bolster the order with someone like Rehan Ahmed.

At this point you might wonder whether Lawrence reenters the equation as someone who can both bat and bowl spin – but no, he doesn’t. Because that would make Curran one of your four main bowlers and – man alive! – no-one wants that.

If you squint hard enough, you can just about select Sam Curran as either a batter or bowler. It’s just that then, when you’re picking the next bloke, you suddenly gain total clarity that he is actually neither of those things and you’re therefore immediately overwhelmed with a desire to plug all the leaky gaps.

This is very messy and very fun and a great deal more interesting than where this first Joe Root Test squad initially suggested we were heading.

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Stephen Fleming has been appointed England Test coach. This brings to mind the way young Grampa Simpson summed up his preference for American footballer Johnny Unitas over the more rebellious looking Joe Namath. “Now Johnny Unitas – there’s a haircut you could set your watch to.”

England have tried wild untamed facial hair and rebellion and change. Now they’re going to try Fleming. 

Sensible name, sensible reputation, sensible demeanour

Fleming has been what you might call ‘active’ for the whole of our time writing about cricket – first as a captain, then as a coach. Nevertheless, we wouldn’t say we’ve been struggling to accommodate the strong feelings he’s generated in us in that time. 

As a player, he averaged an almost perfectly calibrated 40.06, which is at once both really impressive and hugely unremarkable.

Everyone admired his captaincy – although his ability to wring performances out of a supposedly relatively weak New Zealand side seems a little less impressive these days given they’ve been punching above their stated weight pretty much ever since. It might be time for another weigh-in, you know. 

As a coach, he got Chennai Super Kings to the IPL final more often than not and it is here where his air of consistency stands out most. In a league and format all but defined by change, he ran the team for 17 years and in that time consistently picked many of the same players, season after season, until they got old – and sometimes beyond.

Like Johnny Unitas, Fleming does not seem like a man easily cast about by the fickle winds of headlines, fashion or public opinion. There are worse qualities you could bring to the England Test coach job right now.

Plus he’s friends with Brendon McCullum, which has got to be useful now we’re firmly into the dysfunctional office politics era of England coaching where your ability to lay claim to key human resources is such a central contributor to hitting those all important KPIs.

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.