Cornershop Man watches every single cricket international he can on his satellite TV under the counter—and, unlike me, he fails the Tebbit test. At the start of the week, I asked him: “Suppose you’re looking forward to whupping England’s backsides?”
“Hmm,” he inhaled, “I don’t know. You’ve got some good bowlers with you. You could give us a run for our money.”

As I said to my dad later on, he neglected to factor in England’s seemingly infinite capacity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

I’m turning the radio off now.