Heading into the ground yesterday, we saw Cameron Green in the nets. Weirdly, practising edging into his stumps but not dislodging the bail. As it turned out, this was an example of the kind of precision preparation one needs to succeed at the top level.

Upon arrival this morning, though, there was no sign of him in the nets, leaving us all completely unspoiled about what he had in store for us today.

A shame. I would have quite liked to have seen him standing (metaphorically and literally) tall in the nets, no other team mates willing to stay out there with him, raising his bat to a crowd desperate for any form of success.

Instead, as he played on for 104, it did make you wonder if maybe another morning’s preparation of deflecting the ball off the stump for four might have come in handy.

Towering Twins
Grade: C

Alex Carey batting at six made Australia’s position at the start of the day feel like they were in a worse position than what they actually were. (Not that they were in a good position, of course. It just wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed.)

Thankfully, Carey swiftly rectified this, caught behind off the bowling of Mehidy Hasan Miraz. His dismissal allowed Green to join forces with Beau Webster, part of an Australian plan to plot a fightback using nothing but raw height. (Explanation of joke: Cameron Green and Beau Webster are both very tall.)

And, of course, by ‘fightback’, I mostly just meant the avoidance of an innings defeat. But when Webster was bowled for five, becoming the first of the towering twins to fall (an inside job? perhaps), Green was joined by captain Pat Cummins, followed almost immediately by Mitchell Starc.

Funny, isn’t it, how whoever bats lower out of Starc and Cummins always scores more runs? And great leadership from Pat to go in earlier and bring out the best in Mitch. (Note: this stat about the pair’s relative batting results isn’t actually researched, but it feels right, and that’s what 98% of maths is about. (Or, y’know, it feels like that’s what 98% of maths is about.))

Removing Parentheticals
Grade: D-

Shortly before lunch, Australia reached 7/228 and, with it, a healthy dose of parity applause. A beautiful thing to see the counter-punching Australians take it to the might of Bangladesh. I mean, come on, a kangaroo taking on a tiger?! Not really a fair fight, is it?

After lunch, however, Starc was soon dismissed, with Green still twelve runs short of his first century on home soil. The tall-rounder rapidly sorted half that problem out with a pull shot for six, then, a short while later, tricked Nathan Lyon into diving for a scampered two to bring up the ton. Good giant puppy. Well batted.

Having safely guided Australia to a fifty-run lead, Green then got himself out, once again showing off his match awareness and faith in his bowlers. After all, Bangladesh were bowled out for 54 in their second innings against CAXI earlier in this tour. Are we supposed to believe that Australia’s much vaunted attack isn’t four runs better than the CAXI up-and-comers?

With Australia therefore now favourites to win this Test, Lyon and Hazlewood added a handful more runs just to rub salt into the Bangladesh wound, finally setting them a target of 57 for victory.

Weirdly, however, Bangladesh ran that down with nine wickets in hand, and therefore take a 1-0 lead in the series.

And, hey, remember all that talk about Australia’s 20 (maybe 21) Tests in the upcoming year? If they keep playing like this, I think it’s probably safe to remove the parenthetical.

Many years ago I proposed that a good way to remember how to spell ‘Hazlewood’ was to think of him in French as a bowler who haz le wood on batters. A very logical and clever mnemonic based primarily on a scurrilous combination of stereotypical accents and weirdly half-translated idioms. It’s served me well for many years.

Early on the third morning of this Test, however, Josh Hazlewood suddenly became Josh Hazlepad, thanks to a couple of successful LBW appeals. Does this haz le pad variation of the original pseudo-French wordplay (aka playing wiz de mots) stand up to scrutiny? Of course not. Which is why one of those successful LBW shouts was swiftly overturned.

Rightly so. Great to see the ICC expanding their deployment of DRS into such fresh new areas. The omniscient wisdom of ball-tracking was fine in its day, but time marches on (le temps, eet eez, ’ow you say, onwards marching).

Darcasm
Grade: A-

However, apart from those two quick wickets (Hazlewood traded in the denied LBW for a catch at gully, another welcome ICC innovation), Australia continued to struggle with the ball.

At one point, Marnus Labuschagne at cover enthusiastically went up for a caught behind appeal that missed the outside edge by about a foot (why was the batter’s foot up near the outside edge? Look, we’re not here to argue with the technique. Focus on the results).

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Australia began the second day keen to bounce back in this Test, only to be stymied by the absorbent goo of Bangladesh’s batters.

The first sign of this looming stymying came early, when, after a Beau Webster change-of-ends over, Mitchell Starc began pawing at the crease like a disgruntled yak. Starc glaring and muttering about footing, as he kicks aways furiously at the crease, is traditionally a sign that it may be a good day for batting.

And so it proved in the opening session, with Bangladesh adding 85 for the loss of just one wicket. Australia tried to counter their opponents with a variety of ploys, all of which were doomed. They went for a desperate review - one sufficiently bad that it made Nathan Lyon, fielding square on the boundary edge, abandon his jog to the DRS huddle and return to his original position immediately upon seeing the first replay.

They also tried bringing Alex Carey up to the stumps in a non-change-of-ends spell from Webster, in the hope of channeling some Ashes vibes. A nice idea, but this is a proper team, not just silly old England. Although, to be fair, Mominul Hoque was dismissed by Hazlewood in the very next over, via a wild waft that had a lot of England top order energy about it.

Heck, an over before lunch, Australia even tried changing the ball. And, upon consultation with the umpires’ Rings of Spherical Purity™, received a replacement ball for their trouble. A brief moment of success, immediately undone by Najmul Hossain Shanto hitting Lyon straight down the ground for four from the first ball he bowled with it.

The Roman Empire
Grade: C+

Lyon was not to be denied, however, effortlessly winning over the crowd after lunch by returning a stray beach ball. Proper cricket. Bangladesh with no answers to this simple act of heroism.

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Australia’s mad run of 20 (maybe 21) Tests in less than a year of cricket began in the obvious time and location of August in Darwin. As a sign of how seriously Australia were taking the first match against Bangladesh, they selected a full strength lineup, including a reunion of ageing boy band bowling attack Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc, Nathan Lyon and Pat Cummins.

Fair enough, too. It’s one thing to have three-quarters of your esteemed attack wander in as they please to play an average of one Test each against England. Obviously, you can get away with that pretty easily. But you need to take Bangladesh a little more seriously, and it’s good to see that George Bailey was doing so.

On the other hand, given the rareness of Test cricket in a city named after Sir Charles Darwin, should Australia have taken the opportunity for some evolution of their eleven? A theory of elevolution? Something to consider.

For now, though, rather than a survival of the fittest, it was more a case of a survival of the finally fit.

Google Alerts
Grade: D-

Just prior to the toss, a Google alert popped onto my phone, confirming that Australia had a win probability of 94%, compared to Bangladesh’s 3%. And, look, perhaps based on history, home ground advantage, ICC rankings, reputation of personnel and the prevalence of large language models in the Google algorithm, maybe there was a case to be made for these numbers.

But, if so, why not extrapolate this to other areas? Post the over rate as nine overs behind before the first ball is bowled, for example.

Nevertheless, despite the mad confidence of Google, Australia’s top order seemed determined to continue the Darwinism theme, overriding the guiding patient hand of Bailey, to get some more natural selection going.

On the back of some persistent Bangladesh bowling, Jake Weatherald, Travis Head, Marnus Labuschagne and Cameron Green all went before lunch, with Green just scraping in to that group via a desperate waft to mid-wicket from the final ball of the session.

Head, meanwhile, who went into the match as the number one ranked Test batter in the world, based on the savvy decision of not actually batting in Test cricket since January, will surely be rueing his mad folly of returning to the middle.

Selves
Grade: B+

But standing tall and typically weird amid the collapse was Steve Smith. Fed up with my increasingly strained references to Darwinism and evolutionary theory he somehow knew I was weaving into this report card, and wary that I might start wandering into the general realms of fossilisation, Smith instead went full selfish genius.

Not selfish in the sense of ‘selfish batting’ - that’s not a concept I think I believe in. I mean ‘self’ish in the sense of a self-evidently self-absorbed, self-assured, self-obsessed, self-contained, self-frisking, self-fulfilling, self-sufficient, self-inflicted, self-appointed, self-parodying genius.

Y’know, Steve Smith.

So, as wickets fell all over the place - Alex Carey, Beau Webster, Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc in the middle session - Smith motored along, trajesturing his way to another half-century.

It was only when Nathan Lyon joined him and the Bangladesh field spread that Smith was undone. Believing he’d spotted a gap in the field, and hitting the ball into it, he belatedly realised that the theorised gap was vertically above him. And, with gravity proving as rigorous a law of nature as evolution, he was caught for 71, a fifth wicket for the brilliant Hasan Mahmud, who went on to finish with 6/55.

Cheering Scott Boland
Grade: B-

Australia all out for 198, and one could perhaps understand why the biggest cheer of the day had been reserved for Scott Boland, engaged in the simple act of walking around the boundary edge to head out to the nets.

(At least, I assume he was heading out to the nets. Maybe he just felt the urge to be cheered. If so, mission accomplished.)

Still, you can’t judge a pitch until both sides have batted on it. Or bowled on it. Or fielded nearby it. So, obviously a big first over for Bangladesh, who needed to see off Starc’s first over.

But mission accomplished for them, too. And, confidence built, they effortlessly made their way to 1/96 at stumps.

Given all this, it’s very possible that the alert that crawls out of the primordial Google ooze and onto my phone screen tomorrow morning might also have undergone some mutation.

I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very first appearance, with Atom-sized summaries. Enjoy!

PREVIOUSLY

Here we go, then. An issue of Justice League of America in which the titular JLA don’t appear at all. Some avant-garde shit for 1960s younglings. As we recall from last issue, our team were deleted from time, and they don’t reappear this issue until the very last page (Snapper Carr, one assumes, was also erased, but nobody in either universe cared enough to notice). As a result, this issue is carried by the Justice Society, six criminals borrowing the JLA’s origins and powers, a tantrum-throwing Evil Johnny Thunder, and three alien moon-monsters. Dr Fate does most of the grunt work throughout, wielding yellow-helmeted magic, while everybody else fumbles oafishly around him, eventually bringing this random nonsense to heel, like the Lord of Order he is. A proper annual crossover in which the guest stars save a team that isn’t there from villains who aren’t real, on an Earth that wasn’t supposed to exist. And it cost twelve cents! Amazing on every level.

Fun With Comics!

MVP

Sorry, folks. It’s Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt again. Here he is effortlessly breaking the fourth wall in the final panel years before Grant Morrison was even invented! (Spoiler: Morrison had been invented by this point, having been born in 1960, but if silly old Flash can’t be bothered to remember the name of an actual team member of the JSA, I’m allowed to be hazy on the birth dates of comic book creators.)

Top Panel

I’m an enormous fan of Evil Johnny Thunder deciding the best and only place for him to gather himself and have a bit of a think about what to do next is the moon.

You want to say ‘well, yeah, Evil Johnny, they will never find you on the moon. Your wild, panicked overreaction at least served a purpose’. But, of course, the JSA sniff out his lunar hiding spot effortlessly.

Villain Cryptic Crossword Clue

See last issue

Next Issue: REPRINT FEVER!

If you’d like to join the ranks of the non-paywalled for the next year, you can do so for a couple of dollars(ish) per Test by following this link:

https://newsletter.danliebke.com/20maybe21testticket

But, y’know, in accordance with the best marketing tradition, I’m advising you to act fast. That link expires once play commences in the first of those Tests (this coming Thursday 13th August).

Hope to see some of you come on board. Or, y’know, all of you. There are no limits on this.

Book your 20 (21?) Test ticket here!

PS If you’re not interested in cricket, but still want to take advantage of this offer, you have my permission to do so. I will write about stuff other than cricket in between all this, and you may read it.

In the process, we cover such topics as frustration with Larry King, Alexander Payne’s daggers and the upsides of a Lois Lane death.

Email us: peakstreakspodcast@gmail.com

Twitter: https://x.com/peakstreaks

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/peakstreaks.bsky.social

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Other links: https://linktr.ee/PeakStreaks

I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very first appearance, with Atom-sized summaries. Enjoy!

PREVIOUSLY

The JSA is back, baby! Thanks to their Snapper Carr-equivalent, Johnny Thunder, a 1940s era bow tie-wearing nitwit who can access infinite cosmic power via a magical thunderbolt, simply by uttering the magic word ‘Cei-U’ (pronounced ‘Hey, Siri’, ‘Okay, Google’, ‘say you’). Johnny wonders if he has an Earth-One counterpart, which is the superhero equivalent of googling yourself. Turns out there is an Earth-One Johnny Thunder, and he’s a career criminal with zero hesitation about hijacking an omnipotent djinn. Upon gaining control of this all-powerful genie that grants literally any wish, however, Evil Johnny decides his first move should be a modest crime spree. But when the Flash intervenes, Evil Johnny’s response escalates from ‘petty theft’ to ‘retroactive genocide of an entire superhero team’, erasing the Justice League from history so nobody’s around to arrest him. Meanwhile, back on Earth-Two, the rest of the JSA are having the mildest possible crisis - their Johnny is late - and Dr Fate’s crystal ball locates him on the version of Earth-One that no longer has any superheroes in it. The JSA’s response to walking into a power vacuum is instant and shameless: they cosplay as the JLA, apparently on the theory that nobody will notice six entirely different body types under a cape. Evil Johnny catches on and sends the Thunderbolt back in time to change history once more, granting the JLA’s powers to his band of hoodlums, just in time for an end-of-issue cliffhanger. Once again, top tier stuff. Genuinely fun superhero comic book nonsense.

Fun With Comics!

MVP

It’s Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt. All that needless hand-wringing from Jor-El, and the time-travelling Thunderbolt effortlessly prevents the explosion of Krypton with simple matter transfusion. Wake up, Jor-El! You idiot!

(As a bonus, I also love how easy it is for the Thunderbolt to erase Batman from Earth-One history. One good punch to the jaw early in his career and he’s tapping out of the entire crimefighting business. Because, as DC comics have long maintained, Bruce’s vow to avenge his parents’ murder was always just a childish flight of fancy.)

Oh, and here’s the time-altered Justice League the Thunderbolt brings into existence at the end of the issue. An absolute tour de force of history-altering nonsense from this magical time-altering imp! Look at the moustache on gangster Flash! Wonderful!

Top Panel

Absolutely torn on this one too. I love Dr Fate in this panel, talking about ‘smoking out’ Johnny Thunder like he’s a cockroach infestation.

But I also love the idea of Bats patenting ‘flying tackles’. Fucken billionaires, man.

Villain Cryptic Crossword Clue

Would the JSA ever hunt holy djinn? Unlikely. (4, 6, 7)

Next Issue: THE JLA IS BACK!

In the process, we cover such topics as excess semen, Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 and making clip shows needlessly complicated.

Email us: peakstreakspodcast@gmail.com

Twitter: https://x.com/peakstreaks

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/peakstreaks.bsky.social

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Topics covers in this jam-packed episode include:

• The Australian men ticking their boxes

• The 2027 World Cup

• The Hundred

• Two Truths and a Lie - Sir Garfield Sobers novel edition

• Plus, another thrilling Muller Award!

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I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very firs…

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Yes, we’re continuing to release episodes from our Patron feed, including this one, Charade (which we ori…

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Over on the HitchPod podcast, we’ve just done a bonus episode for paid subscribers on Bicycle Thieves from 1948.

Enjoy!

Check out more Hitchcock material!

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In the process, we cover such topics as Greatest Hits compilation albums, writing what you know and long lost pilots.

Email us: peakstreakspodcast@gmail.com

Twitter: https://x.com/peakstreaks

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/peakstreaks.bsky.social

Spotify

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Other links: https://linktr.ee/PeakStreaks

Out Of Office Claire Ashworth Wrenfield & Co. | 2026 | 304pp

Deborah Halstrom is out of the office until further notice. Julian Reyes cannot stop replying. What begins as a scheduling conflict becomes a romance that cannot be contained in a subject line.

Review

★½ (1.5/5) This email should have been a meeting

In Claire Ashworth’s ill-conceived new romantic comedy, the entire narrative unfolds through automated out-of-office replies, each one a little more unravelled than the last, as two mid-level compliance officers at rival insurance firms drift from polite scheduling notices into something resembling intimacy. The early chapters show glimpses of Ashworth’s trademark playfulness - Deborah’s message stays fixed at ‘I will respond to your email upon my return on the 14th’ for nearly thirty pages, while Julian’s replies grow steadily longer, steadily stranger, and steadily less related to his actual whereabouts.

It doesn’t take long, however, for the ingenuity of the structural gimmick to reveal its limitations. Julian’s messages, which are supposed to function as a kind of epistolary confession, each one timestamped with the false authority of an automated system, grow tired and sweaty. The gag of Deborah’s fixed message rapidly wears out its welcome. And a subject line that reads simply ‘RE: RE: RE: RE:’ is not the punchline Ashworth believes it to be.

The book regains some of its mojo in the third act, when Deborah’s return date is repeatedly, mysteriously extended, and Julian’s IT department begins flagging his replies for containing what one internal memo calls ‘an unusual volume of feeling’. However, the author never quite explains whether Deborah is avoiding the office or avoiding Julian, and by the final exchange - dated eleven months after the first and offering no clear resolution to the relationship, the novel or the email chain - it’s hard to imagine any reader caring one way or the other.

About the Author

Claire Ashworth is the author of Pardon My Em Dash, Fine, I Like You and You Again, Apparently. She holds a masters degree in narratology from the University of Edinburgh and is dedicated to the correct deployment of the ‘Reply All’ option.

Who Is This Book For?

Readers who inexplicably enjoy being BCC’ed into other people’s correspondence

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I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very first appearance, with Atom-sized summaries. Enjoy!

PREVIOUSLY

Somewhere in DC’s back catalogue there’s a villain who commits crimes through conventional means like theft or extortion or running for the President of the United States of America (NOTE: POLITICAL SATIRE!), but Abnegazar, Ghast and Rath - The Demons Three - are not those villains. This issue leans hard into the idea that magic in the Silver Age doesn’t need to make sense, it just needs a concept to attach itself to, and this time around that concept is laundry. The Demons Three decide to break out of the prison in which the JLA left them back in issue eleven, and, naturally, the method for doing so they come up with is precisely the same one that you or I would. Namely, possessing spare superhero uniforms and using them to animate spare villain uniforms, which, in turn, create duplicates of the villains in question for some reason, leading to a paperwork nightmare. Luckily, the villains are lacklustre fare, such as Killer Moth, Dr. Polaris, Pied Piper, Dagon (?) and (the non-Jim Carrey) Mask, so even though the empty threads go on the rampage while the real villains presumably stay home in their underwear, it’s dealt with by the JLA with all the difficulty you’d expect from a comic book that is, at its heart, a story about superheroes fighting clothing.

Fun With Comics!

MVP

Yikes! It’s very nearly Snapper Carr, who comes perilously close to the famous Onion ‘Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point’ meme here. Luckily, after a page of two of sweating about this, the JLA explain that there were Sensible Reasons™ why they didn’t destroy the magical artefacts, and they just didn’t trust/like Snapper enough to share those reasons with him. Phew!

Top Panel

Here’s Aquaman once again commanding his so-called ‘friends’ to form a series of stepping stones for him, with not a single moment of consideration given to the prospect that maybe they’ve got better things to do with their day. Not acceptable, Arthur. (And yes, even if - in some versions of your continuity - you’re the monarch of these turtles, this is still dick behaviour. Show some respect to your subjects.)

Villain Cryptic Crossword Clue

See issue 11

Next Issue: BATMONSTER!

THE FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE Callum Reyes Selkirk Press | 2026 | 486pp

Shortly after announcing the geometry-shattering discovery of a new shape between a triangle and a quadrilateral, a top-ranking Russian topologist is found murdered. With political tensions rising between two nuclear superpowers, it falls, once again, to Federal Algebraic Number Theorist Naomi Kessler to find the true killer before both sides intersect at a single, unrecoverable, non-Euclidean point.

★★★ Sufficient, but not necessary.

This is the seventh Naomi Kessler novel, and Reyes at this point knows precisely what his readers are here for - competent tradecraft and rigorous mathematics, delivered in functional prose. And so, the indefatigable Kessler, part-time Federal Algebraic Number Theorist attached to the Office of Pure Mathematics Threat Assessment, is once again summoned from her Princeton office with the familiar phone call, the familiar unmarked car, the familiar briefing in a windowless room. But as familiar as it might be, the plot setup is handled with professional, unnervingly serene economy. Reyes, I’m pleased to report, has learned valuable lessons from the mistakes he made in last year’s The Fermat Contingency, and the conceit of the isosceles rhombus, and the scramble by two superpowers to reconstruct murdered topologist Andrei Volkov’s lost proof of its existence, never once strains credulity.

The pleasures here are genre pleasures, and they mostly land. Kessler’s methodical investigation and her delightfully fastidious use of lemmas and reductio ad absurdum once again pave the way for a series of brisk set (and set theory!) pieces that propel the plot with the reliability of a well-formed syllogism. Reyes also wisely complicates matters with the second-act arrival of a Beijing metamathematician whose motives remain, appropriately, undecidable until the final act.

Reyes ties things off with the tidiness longtime readers will recognise and mostly forgive. The final confrontation resolves on a piece of geometric reasoning that is almost impossible to follow in prose form, but this is a minor quibble, and one the editor has seen fit to counterbalance with a thirty-page appendix containing a more formal mathematical proof.

It is, in the end, a perfectly competent seventh entry in the Naomi Kessler series. Any given reader’s enjoyment of this book paves the way for the enjoyment of the next and, hence, by a simple inductive proof, the enjoyment of every book in the series.

About the Author

Callum Reyes has written seven Naomi Kessler novels and, by his own account, briefed ‘more than one’ real intelligence agency on their plausibility. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his MacBook Air

Who Is This Book For?

The same readers all the previous Naomi Kessler books were for.

I talked about why I love the JLA in this piece here. Now I’m breaking down each and every issue of the comic book, from their very first appearance, with Atom-sized summaries. Enjoy!

PREVIOUSLY

Doctor Destiny, incarcerated and bored out of his mind, has developed the welcome ability to make his dreams become reality - decades before Christopher Nolan even pitched the basic premise of Inception to Warner Brothers executives. But rather than simply dream of a universe in which the JLA don’t exist and the entire DC Comics line is thereby reduced to old back issues of Sgt Rock and Bomba The Jungle Boy, the good doctor instead comes up with - and you won’t believe this - a needlessly convoluted scheme. He gives all the heroes prophetic dreams in which they each face their villains while saddled with some new, awkward handicap, then studies exactly how they overcome these handicaps, and then, uh, runs the same scenario again, slightly differently, hoping they somehow won’t adapt? So, for example, Batman gets a ring that gives him super speed, which he works around. Hawkman gets gloves that restrict him to hand-powered flight, which he also works around. Superman gets glasses that swap his Kryptonite weakness for a vulnerability to fire and yellow - a cursed trade by any measure - which he works around. Wonder Woman gets a mask that broadcasts her next move, which she also works around. And The Atom gets telescopic vision, which, yes, he works around. Destiny, having now watched five different JLA members successfully adapt to disability in their literal sleep, decides the real-world versions will go differently. They do not go differently. The JLA visit him in prison afterwards, Atom punches him in the face, and they make him see a psychiatrist. Mental health, people! Take it seriously.

Fun With Comics!

MVP

It’s The Atom, who is not going to let something as trivial as a basic understanding of how light works prevent him from coming to Wonder Woman’s rescue. Good for him. Less general relativity, Einstein, more general chivalry.

Top Panel

I don’t care what anybody says, if more modern comics had the guts to include characters sprouting lines such as ‘Gloves - hurtling straight at me!’, the world would be in much better shape.

Villain Cryptic Crossword Clue

See issue 5

Next Issue: CLOTHING COMBAT!

I’m on holidays, so also didn’t see any of today’s play, such as it was.

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