An hour wafted by on Monday before Xavier Doherty got a bowl – crazy, seeing as how one of the morning’s big intrigues promised to be the sight of Australia’s new spinner operating on a last-day pitch with cracks in it

Could we have a little less politeness and a little more "stupid emotion" from Mitchell Johnson?

Had we been playing in a log-fenced park up the road, and not in a cauldron of concrete and plastic, the seagulls would have been spooked and the people pushing their prams around the oval mystified

Not until his 307th first-class innings was Simon Katich asked to turn himself into an opening batsman

Forty-three, which is the number of runs Kevin Pietersen scored today in Brisbane , is roughly par

In Brisbane, precipitation changes everything

Batting is a business of quandaries and possibilities

In a hilly suburb of Adelaide, on a morning so still that even the crows must have been sleeping in, Andrew Hilditch decided to catch a bus to the solicitors’ office where he worked

Few travelling English cricketers have skirted the continent from west to south quite so contentedly as Andrew Strauss and his men this week

What are you supposed to do when somebody falls out of love with you

In keeping with the So You Think You Can Select spirit of the times, I give you this: an XI of Graemes (and Grahams).

With a cautious nod and eyes wide open with suspicion he shuffled into the room, not like Garry Sobers or Dick Diver or the Great Gatsby but like the man he actually was, a man with a serious job at a brewery

Future fans and boffins might well dwell on the day, yesterday, that Ricky Ponting added this interesting yet eerie nugget to the collective cricketing wisdom

You knew another Ashes summer was upon us when England’s captain Andrew Strauss, in a moment of children-pushing-toy-submarines-round-a-bathtub inanity, said that for ten weeks and five Test matches two cricket sides would be “at war”

Ricky Ponting's departure can't have been the dream script people make it out to be, but at least he controlled his own destiny

McGain, he of one-Test fame, is well placed, perhaps, to see cricket's little disappointments for what they are

Has cricket missed out an obvious candidate?

Is there any point in being sad about the Sheffield Shield's place in our culture today?

They say no one ever remembers how you leave cricket, that the memory of you at your peak is what's everlasting. Is that true?

Television defines Ricky Ponting, but the more we see him on it, the less we know