INJURY TIME

LUNCH

A Lord’s Test is a very posh affair. For the players, there are any number of temptations on the lunch menu each day. Consider day one, which consisted of the following: pumpkin and ginger soup (with freshly baked bread rolls) and prawns with Marie Rose sauce – for starters. The main: Ras el Hanout marinated lamb rump, with giant cous-cous salad, tahini yogurt or roasted halibut, which you could enjoy with crayfish tails, samphire and herb beurre blanc. There’s more: roasted cauliflower and mashed Maris Piper potatoes. For dessert, a selection of ice-creams, fresh fruit salad and a white chocolate bar. One must wonder why the Proteas were in such a hurry to leave.

BETTER RUBBISH

As for the spectators, Lord’s has bunch of different Champagne gardens, which does lead to the unedifying sight of the outfield being dotted with corks. It’s also very dangerous for the players on the boundary, and one year did lead to an announcement over the public address system for spectators to stop popping the Champagne corks onto the outfield. “Always a better standard of rubbish at Lord’s,” Mark Butcher chirped during the TV commentary.

BAZBALL AND TEQUILA

In the build-up to the Test, much had been made of the fact that the Proteas didn’t want to say the word “Bazball”, anymore. You had Ben Stokes, the England captain, saying it was a psychological win for his side before a ball had been struck. Apparently, Ben reckoned, the fact that the Proteas were talking about “Bazball” so much, while saying they didn’t want to talk about it, was a sign of weakness. What rubbish. The Proteas have fielded questions for months about “Bazball”, and to the players’ credit answered all of them honestly. It was just that they were getting tired of saying the same thing over and over again. In fact, they used humour and tequila as a way to try and get the talk moving in a different direction. “Anyone who mentions ‘Bazball’ has to drink a tequila,” Boucher chirped before his press conference earlier in the week. All those questions were enough to drive anyone to drink, to be fair.

BAZBALL AND BATHWATER

Did the Proteas eviscerating the English in less than three days at Lord’s end talk of “Bazball”? This was the headline on the BBC Sport site on Saturday: “Don’t throw the Bazball out with the bathwater”. Oh dear.

KEEPING UP WITH TOTO

Formula One is grateful for the growth in interest in the sport generated by the Netflix series, Drive to Survive, but it has come with some understandable irritation. Formula One had tried to break into the American market for some time, but failed. “And then came Netflix, came Covid and people binge,” Mercedes boss, Toto Wolff explained to the Financial Times. “(They) started watching the gusts. And then all of a sudden we have such great momentum in America that no one expected.” But that came with a caveat, according to Wolff. “It’s athletes in high-performance machines. It’s about life and death, and on top of that we added Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” Wolff said.

WON’T

Massive news out of the Premier League in the UK. According to The Sun, “Chelsea star Marc Cucurella insists he WON’T get his curly hair cut despite having it pulled by Tottenham rival Romero”. The caps for the word “won’t” really did appear in that headline.