(1) It’s not being Australian that makes someone a good cricketer. Australia themselves leave out plenty of Australians from their Test side.
(2) Trent Bridge, where Pattinson plays half his cricket, is kind to swing bowlers.
(3) If Chris Tremlett is first reserve, then Chris Tremlett is first reserve - there’s surely a reason behind it.

Also, he’s not young and nor does he have much first-class experience.

Good luck to him though and thank you selectors for keeping things, er, interesting.

“We’ve got the Ashes coming up as well which we are not directly looking forward to right now because we have a few things in place that we have to take care of first,” he said. “I would be lying if I didn’t say I was looking forward to the Ashes next year.”

Don’t give us that ‘I’m looking forward to it, I’m just not directly looking forward to it’ crap. You’ve told a lie and said as much yourself.

He’s crossed a line.

Before you know it he’ll be violently mugging the elderly for their fetching taupe-coloured clothing.

I returned from a holiday in Sri Lanka last week, and within minutes of getting home I did what I usually do after work and went through lots of pages on Teletext (does anyone else still do this?).

On page 354 I noticed upcoming cricket fixtures - the standout being Middlesex v Kent at Uxbridge. As I live not far from Uxbridge - and as I usually have Tuesdays as my day off - I decided to make that game my first experience of live cricket!

The night before, I decided to ask my dad if he fancied coming along, as he has been sitting at home for a while after having his appendix removed for no real reason. To my surprise he said yes, even though he has shown no real interest in the sport in my previous 28 years of life. I think he just wanted a few hours away from my mum.

I had to drive as my dad was unable to, due to big stitches in his side, which was disappointing as I couldn’t have a drink. I wore my fancy new Sri Lanka top which I paid over the odds for in Negombo as I am too English and unable to barter.

The place was not very busy, and we were not sure what a good seat would be from the options available, which included two stands and some chairs around the boundary.

Decided to sit on the chairs around the boundary, not in the big stand. We watched the players warm up by playing football and throwing to each other whilst wearing a baseball glove. I pointed out the England players to my dad. He hadn’t heard of them. I then had to phone my mum to check if my dad could have a beer. She said yes, so we both had one and it cost £6 for two pints of Foster’s.

When the game started, my dad laughed at the name Yasir Arafat who played for Kent. Justin Kemp signed loads of autographs for kids whilst on the boundary. Darren Stevens signed about two whilst on the boundary.

At the interval my dad had a beer and me a shandy. Still cost £6 though. I queued for a hog roast bap and they cost £4.50 each, which was a rip off, but I bought two due to lack of other options.

In the Kent innings we felt sorry for Eoin Morgan as he had to go from one end of the pitch to the other after every over. No one else moved much.

All in all a good day and next year if they return to Uxbridge my Dad said he will go again.

Beaten men play crap cricket. These pair summoned some almighty resolve to do what they did. Playing one beautiful shot is easy - that’s a one-off. Playing virtually no stupid shots for an entire day is quite another. You can’t fluke that. That is near-superhuman concentration.

Would Andrew Flintoff have dispatched them? Maybe, but there’s no way of knowing, so let’s not go down that road - it looks busy down there, for one thing. It seems fairly certain that he’ll return now though and that IS a big deal. It’s like real cricket’s back.

If Flintoff does replace Collingwood, we’ve some good news for those who are worried about a potentially flimsy middle order. Someone’s had a word with Fred and given him some top quality coaching which should sort out his batting once and for all.

In his own words: “I’ve been seeing the ball well all season, but my body and my hands aren’t going in the right places.”

Diagnosing the problem’s 80 percent of the battle.

On the plus side, at least he doesn’t sound like some throwback to the British Raj, unlike some of his colleagues. You don’t hear accents like those in our neck of the woods and we don’t think it does cricket’s image any great favours.

We’ve nothing against old-school Received Pronunciation, but it’s a bit overrepresented in the TMS box.

Our last post at The Wisden Cricketer blog was about Pougatch. They’ve got an RSS feed over there now, so we won’t have to do this linking to our own words thing again for a while.

You can’t blame India. The last time England toured, the Test series was drawn while the one-dayers were so painfully one-sided they might as well have been us - seriously, we can just about pull off ‘waving’ with our left hand, but nothing more complex than that.

Some England fans (read ‘the English media’) are disappointed by the venues, but we’ve been to quite a few of the towns and it’s not all bad. The one they should be complaining about is bleeding Mumbai. If you want to see a man channelling urine down the inside of his leg and out of the bottom of his trouser leg, go to Mumbai.

Ahmedabad

The first Test’s at Ahmedabad and seemingly everyone hates it. We have no idea why. Despite being in Gujarat (and therefore dry) Ahmedabad’s a top city. They have camel taxis as well as one of the most underrated tourist sights in the entire world.

In the middle of an industrial estate, with no signs or paying-to-get-in or anything else, is this:

Someone will doubtless correct us, but it’s the Dada Hari Vav. It’s a well.

You might think of a well as being a ruddy great hole in the ground, but this is a step well. You can walk down it, descending floor after floor until you get to the water. It’s dark, it’s huge and it’s inexplicably elaborate.

Also, if you do go to the Test in Ahmedabad, you can take a holiday on the island of Diu afterwards. Diu is just off the Gujarati coast and they let you drink there. They also don’t tax you for doing so, so it’s REALLY cheap.

Indore

The second one-day international is in Indore. We’ve a vague notion that we’ve been there, but we can’t recall a single detail. We were probably changing buses. It might have been the station with the unusably bad toilets, thinking about it. (Note: That’s ‘unusably bad’ not ‘unusually bad’. The unusually bad toilets were usable - consider that.)

If you go to the Indore match, make sure you head out to Mandu which is a ruined city. The great thing about Mandu is that there’s a healthy supply of monkeys.

We’re not sure if you’re aware of our entirely wholesome, but perhaps also slightly insane appreciation of monkeys. It stems from an incident which led to our being accepted as their god.

Mandu is a good place to meet monkeys. Tell them we sent you.

Mohammad Asif has again tested positive for ‘banned substances’. Rumour has it that traces of finest unobtainium showed up in his urine. Unobtainium is outlawed because it’s too valuable to eat and it makes you glow like the Ready Brek kid.

Asif was rather leniently treated the first time he tested positive. He got a one year ban which was subsequently overturned, seemingly for the reason that he was a bit naive, which isn’t really any kind of a defence.

Now he’s tested positive again. The stupid thing is that Asif would probably be a world-class bowler without medication. He’s a line and length bowler with a lot of guile. He’s not a pace bowler who relies on searing pace or anything. It’s so needless.

Cricket needs its bowlers. It could lose a batsman or 20 with no ill-effects, but there are so few bowlers with real impact. Mohammad Asif was one, but unfortunately it seems that he’s also an idiot.

It had skill. It had determination. It had urgency when urgency was required. It had patience when patience was required. It had single-mindedness and it had beautiful, delicious remorselessness which we hadn’t even dreamed that Bell possessed.

So what could possibly be better than that? The obvious answer as to what could be better than an innings of 199 would be to say 200, but you’d be wrong. The correct, mathematically counter-intuitive answer would be an innings of 157.

For it isn’t just about the scoring or how the scoring’s done. It’s who’s doing the scoring. Rob Key hit 157 against Yorkshire this weekend.

He did everything that Ian Bell did, only he did it in Rob Key’s body, floating inches off the floor throughout and with the effortless indifference of a man who just doesn’t care, but who also cares quite a lot.

Because here’s Ravi standing outside a shed with his drill and his barbecue and also his rake:

We’re hungry by proxy after looking at that.

Now here’s Ravi hard at work, pointing a drill in no particular direction while sitting outside his shed on an office chair.

It’s what we all do outside our sheds: wave drills about while sitting on office chairs.

Except us that is, because our shed is made of asbestos and therefore UTTERLY LETHAL.

Thanks a bunch Ravi. Thanks for trying to kill us. We’d say stick to the tiling, but you were crap at that as well.

Kevin Pietersen likes a big match. He must be driven by stomach butterflies or something. We’re not quite sure how that would work, because even our rudimentary scientific knowledge tells us that there aren’t actually butterflies in there.

He went out to bat in the middle of England losing three wickets in as many overs. He was playing a Test against the country of his birth for the first time. He scores a remorseless hundred.

We particularly like the way he’s got no time at all for the bowling of Paul Harris. Yes, it’s tactical, but Pietersen tries to hit him out of the attack with a malicious glee.

Ian Bell did himself no end of good today as well. We wonder whether he read about Graham Thorpe this morning, because he adopted that very approach: 15 minutes of heart-in-mouth, counter-punching near-calamity leading to easy accumulation.

England v South Africa first Test at Lord’s, day one
England 309-3 (Kevin Pietersen 104 not out, Ian Bell 75 not out, Alastair Cook 60)