England v India Fourth Test, Day Three Report Card

Featuring being willing to accept bribes, the inevitability of Joe Root and DIY Morpheus off the long run

Being Willing To Accept Bribes
Grade: B+

Sadly, due to a combination of social obligations, a need for sleep, and a general vague air of boredom imbued within me by the utter ineptitude of India’s bowling, I only got to see about an hour’s worth of play on this third day.

Of course, within two balls of sitting on the couch, Ollie Pope was out caught at slip. And then not long after that, my favourite empty-headed-but-touched-by-genius England batter, Harry Brook, dooped his way back to the pavilion as well. Brook is wonderful. Might score 180 and look like a god. Might run down the pitch for no immediately obvious reason and get stumped for three. A man of many moods.

The point was, that, as far as I’d seen, India were very much the team on top in this Test. Now, I’m not saying the BCCI should necessarily pay me large sums of money to forgo all other aspects of my life, so that whatever wicket-taking magic I’m able to summon when watching India bowl could help them win more Test matches. I’m just saying that they’ve got a lot of money and it’s worth trying something, for sure.

(And lest you think I’m being unfair to England here, I’d like to point out that prior to yesterday’s play, I made a joke on the ol’ BlueSky that went thus: ‘Imagine if Ben Stokes could still bat. What an allrounder he’d be!’. And he’s now 77*. So, I’m also willing to accept money from the ECB to keep talking their captain down.)

The Inevitability of Joe Root
Grade: A

Also vaguely hanging about in the brief portion of the day’s play I watched was Joe Root, steadily accumulating his way to yet another century, and later, as I slept, moving into second place on the all-time Test run-scorers list, now with Sachin Tendulkar in his sights.

It’s a tremendous effort. Perhaps the greatest demonstration of how immense Root is as a batter is that certain tiresome fans are already explaining why it won’t count when he overtakes Tendulkar, who is still more than 2500 runs away!

That - just so you know - is loads and loads of runs. Like, lots of them. More than I could score, for sure. Probably more than the sum total of every person who reads this report card. (Although hello to Marnus if he’s popped by.)

And yet, a) it now seems inevitable that Root will get there, and b) in the meantime, the number of runs he scores is somehow going to be swamped by the number of excuses for why his inevitable record’s invalid (eg England play a lot more Tests than everybody else, he hasn’t scored a century in Australia, he’s from England and we don’t like it when England fans are happy, and so on and so forth).

All pretty dull, really. He’s an absolutely brilliant batter. One of the very best I’ve seen. Not as entertaining as Harry Brook, of course, but we can’t all have butterflies for brains.

DIY Morpheus Off The Long Run

Oh, you want a limerick for the bits I slept through? No, not today.

Instead, here’s a puzzle to keep you occupied. Below are some of the words and phrases I would have used in a limerick if I could have been bothered. Your task now is to put it together. First correct answer wins a session of me jinxing their preferred Test cricket opponents:

Root, flute, telecommute, runs, Stokes, dick, cramp, ramp, genie lamp, Sachin, eye-catchin’, plot-hatchin’, second, reckoned, beckoned, knowledgeable, rain, lost, bossed, tossed, replacement cost, American poet Robert Frost

Good luck!