How's the mature man to sleep during a test match with all that going on?

The Bombardier writes…

…with the usual apologies to Peter Tinniswood.

P’shoar. That was good days cricket. Not old-fashioned test cricket. Not, as old Ma Boycott would have it, fending off ball after ball with her pinnie and stick of rhubarb, “occupying the crease, lad” and “it’s a game of accumulation, is cricket”, compiling an innings at a run a session. These new guys, they like to smite the ball to all corners, then bugger off back to their massages, ice-baths, and rub-down regimens.

There’s something wrong at the BBC tonight. The news was being read by some sort of blithering buffoon. Is the 10^th of July the first of April in disguise? First the imbecile blathered on about some Cameron and Miliband chaps. Who do they play for? Methinks they might bat for the other side. Then the newsreader started off about some brotherhood. The Waughs retired long ago, and in any case they’re not muslims. I know Broad was off getting treatment, but he’s hardly likely to entrust his valuable body to the vagaries of NHS treatment, so I don’t know what he was on about there, nor do I know, to paraphrase the song, “What’s Gove got to do with it?”

The ball swung under low cloud. Well it would, wouldn’t it, fancy playing in the northern wastes of Nottingham. Whatever old Ma Boycott may say, cricket is best enjoyed in the home counties.

Cricket is a simple game. As the late, great, Dave ‘Bumble’ Lloyd would say, “’it th’ball wi’ tha lump o’wood in yer ‘ands, lad”. It is made complicated by the test match special team, and particularly that playboy of the Ratcliffe Road end, Henry Bloefeldt. He keep on about his twin obsessions, buses and pigeons, when he should be focused, as the immortal and sadly missed Dicky Davis said, “on the action out in the middle.”

So, what happened? The cucumber-cool captain didn’t play at a wide one, he swung at a wide, and edged it to slip. Root got a good ‘un. Trott forgot, for a fraction of a second, that he is one of the most boringly reliable bats in the history of chanceless innings, and played a wide one onto his stumps. He’s probably wearing out straight lines in the hotel carpet now marking his bedside guard. Pietersen got a decent ball, but it was just after lunch, which is an interruption and therefore fatal to the concentration of anyone with a goldfish-type brain, and as the game is played by the male of the species, that’s all of ‘em. Bell got a very good un, the rest got what they deserved. The wicket-keeper and Desperate Dan fan lashed one straight at a fielder, but he is a Johnny no-razors.

Then our lot got into them, and something you don’t see every day from a country so totally lacking a history and a culture developed, an Australian procession.

They seem to think they’ve had the better of the first day, but that will all depend, paradoxically, on what happens in the first hour tomorrow.

As the late, great John Fashnau said when introducing Galdiators, “let the battle…er…resume.”