MONTY AND THE DALEKS COULD PUT A CHECK ON TIDE OF T20

The Test series between India and Australia was one of the more enjoyable of recent years, the pendulum swinging this way and that on pitches that made for an absorbing contest between bat and ball. Which in turn meant that the televisual experience was not unduly spoiled by having to listen to commentary that fulfilled most of the criteria required to qualify as gobbledygook.

There was no man of the series award for the commentator who did most to further the argument for mumbo jumbo being added to the list of official languages, but if there had, it would have been hats off to Ravi Shastri.

Which in the case of the ostentatious hat Ravi employed for conducting the post-match interviews – earmarking him for an illustrious future career as a game show host – mostly involved him talking out of it.

It actually added to the enjoyment trying to guess which buttock clenching pun we’d be regaled with when, as happened more than once, Nathan Lyon was enjoying a good day. Not too difficult as it happened, and sure enough, along came: “The Lyon’s share of the wickets” and “the Lyon’s certainly roaring today”.

Cricketers bang on endlessly about “taking the positives”, and in that respect I finished the series realising that you can actually get quite a lot of pleasure from watching something seriously awful.

In which case, Ravi’s commentary was only marginally more entertaining than Ravichandran Ashwin’s fielding.

We have become so used to watching lithe young athletes prowling the outfield like, as Ravi might have put it, hungry Lyons, that the sight of Ashwin pursuing a moving cricket ball with all the athleticism of a supermarket trolley, or a Dalek with its batteries on the blink, was truly mesmerising.

The ball won its contest to beat Ashwin to the boundary by approximately 99.9 per cent of the time, and while it appeared to some of his exasperated team-mates that Ravichandran might have given up the chase a bit too early at times, credit to the fielder for knowing that he had the stopping distance of a Normandy ferry.

Too late on the brakes approaching a heavily populated area of the stadium and it would have needed a crane to clean up the mess. The best moment of all came towards the end of the fourth and final Test, when a routine catch to slip further compromised Ravi’s ability to overtake a moderately speeding cricket ball by hitting him on the knee.

What he was doing at slip is one of those answers-on-a-postcard-please, but short of requiring a long stop, the Indian captain really had nowhere safe to put him.

Test cricket has moved on in all departments, and this summer, when

Some of us feel that the game is actually poorer for the rate at which the cricketing non-athlete is disappearing

England finally get around to playing it again, we will be treated to sights of athletic prowess in the field that were once impossible to imagine. And quite often from the one player who used to be excused all forms of physical exertion in the outfield.

This is the fast bowler, for whom fine leg used to be the equivalent of a convalescent home, where a flicked glance from the batsman would only fail to result in a boundary if the ball came within sticking-out-a-boot range. Not any more, though, and all thanks to the curious belief that six months in traction, not to mention a serious laundry bill, is an acceptable gamble for the chance of saving your team one run.

One of these days during a Lord’s Test, a group of shoppers in St John’s High Street will be forced to hurl themselves off the pavement to avoid been cleaned up by a fast bowler travelling at about 150mph on his posterior. Like an Olympic luge competitor whose forgotten his tea tray. It’s all down to the sliding stop, which in this case has taken him all the way between the Compton and Edrich Stands, past the Nursery Ground nets, and over the Edgware Road.

Some of us feel that the game is actually the poorer for the rate at which the cricketing non-athlete is disappearing.

There was a time when a Test match spectator could be having a quiet doze after lunch, and suddenly be awoken by what appeared to be the tremor, about nine on the Richter scale, of a large earthquake. Only for his neighbour to calm him down with the news: “Don’t worry, it’s only Derek Pringle trotting round from third man.” Derek, on the other hand, was the equivalent of Jonty Rhodes next to one or two England players of his vintage.

Once, watching Gus Fraser lumber in to bowl, I formed the impression of someone who’d got his braces caught in the sightscreen, and he was no ballerina in the outfield, either.

Then there was Devon Malcolm, one of those fast bowlers who seldom knew where the ball was going when it left his hand, and, as a fielder, seldom knew where his feet were going when the ball left the bat. It didn’t help that he couldn’t see very far either.

Once, in his pre-contact lens days, Dev’s specs flew off making a rare diving stop in the outfield, and the batsmen ran a few more until he’d found them.

Every team used to have a fielder that moved like an Arctic glacier, and few were more pedestrian than Pakistan’s Inzamam-ul-Haq. In fact, the only time the speed gun ever recorded an instance of Inzy travelling in excess of 2kph was during a match against India in Toronto, when he jumped into the crowd to take issue with a spectator who kept calling him a potato.

We are now in an era where Test cricket stands Canute-like on the shore, with the tide of T20 coming in so fast that we now require a snorkel. It needs to fight back hard to compete as a spectacle, and a campaign for the preservation of the cricketing carthorse is just one of the ways in which this can be achieved.

In which case, the first thing Joe Root can do for his first Test in charge is bring back Monty Panesar. When it comes to entertainment value, the sight of Stuart Broad’s kettle coming to the boil after watching Monty let one straight through his legs for four off his own bowling is something T20 just won’t be able to live with.