Is broad and pudgy and malleable like plasticine. It’s an amorphous, wobbling built-in cushion so he can lie down anywhere and feel comfortable.

It’s also a trap. When Jesse Ryder needs to take all that weight off his feet, he plonks himself down and leans into his back’s exquisitely welcoming blubber. It may offer excellent lumbar support, but from this position he’s unable to rise again. He flails around like an upturned beetle until a passing forklift spies him and rescues him from his plight.

In other news, Jesse Ryder is in New Zealand’s Test squad for the tour of Bangladesh.

Tags: Jesse Ryder, New Zealand by King Cricket
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Jesse Ryder, you really do appear in the most spectacularly glorious stories.

Jesse Ryder injured himself while he was out drinking to celebrate New Zealand’s one-day series win over England. Did he injure himself in a fight? No. Did he injure himself trying to break into a toilet? Yes.

He’s gashed his hand punching through a pane of glass, by the sounds of it. It’s all a little opaque.

New Zealand’s manager, Lindsay Crocker, said: “It was one of those semi-detached toilets with the lock on the outside. There was no one in there and there was a little glass panel next to it and he put his hand through it - quite forcibly, obviously - to unlock it, and that is when he did the damage.”

Semi-detached toilets? What?

Tags: Jesse Ryder, New Zealand by King Cricket
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Cricinfo’s Statsguru can produce all sorts of valuable reports for you. However, there’s one that it can’t produce, which would be just about priceless to us. It can’t list every single person who’s played international cricket in order of weight, with Warwick Armstrong at the top and Parthiv Patel at the bottom.

Jesse Ryder would feature towards the top of that list. In fact, let’s invert it. It’s only right that all that weight should sink to the bottom, although fat floats, so maybe we were right the first time. In any case, Jesse’s towards the fat end of the spectrum and is therefore given a green light here at King Cricket.

With Inzy having shrunk and subsequently retired and Mark Cosgrove still failing to make the grade, there’s a lot of weight on Jesse’s shoulders - though not as much as is clinging to his abdomen.

Tags: Jesse Ryder, New Zealand by King Cricket
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