A Tale of Two Cities

You know how it is. You leave the country for a couple of days, and... 

No right-thinking man can fail to be lifted up by a weekend in Paris in all of its sombre winter glory, but trying to get a handle on a mad-ass Test match via a hotel satellite channel called BBC World... forget about it. 

Someone at BBC World has been employed to assemble a roster of the most boring stories from around the globe to be run in half hour loops (sample: wife of man who has failed to row the Pacific flies to Australia to meet him). The 'news' of the Test consisted of a ticker running along the bottom of the screen that read, in its entirety - 'Cricket: Andrew Strauss and Paul Collingwood bat England into a match-winning position'.

Thanks for that. One of the sub-plots in Chennai has been Yuvraj Singh's bedevilling of KP. Mike Brearley thinks he's playing the man and not the ball. I think it's something else; an angle thing. In England last year, he struggled with RP Singh and Zaheer bowling left-arm round from very wide on the crease. Yuvraj also comes from quite wide. He just doesn't line them up well.