Many fielding sides have grown weary and moved to Plan B in the face of the numbing barrage of obduracy delivered by the England top order, but New Zealand aren’t like that – we’re not entirely sure they have a Plan B. The nature of their bowlers means Plan A can be delivered consistently. Cut from the same hardwearing grey cloth as England’s batting line-up, the Kiwi bowling attack doesn’t scythe through batting orders, but nor does it try to.

Reactive batting

What do you do in the face of this? Fight lukewarm water with lukewarm water?

While it’s comforting to see your nation’s cricketing representatives taking their job seriously, sometimes you need a bit of irresponsibility to open a match up. Not too much; just a touch. In fact just enough to keep full-blown, overcompensatory irresponsibility at bay (Nick Compton, we’re looking at you).

There are times when a little proactivity is required, but Kevin Pietersen is the only upper order England batsman prone to trying to set his own field. The others play according to what they are presented with.

Today, a slow outfield reduced the likelihood of boundaries and run-scoring was further stymied by the fact that this allowed more fielders to be placed saving singles. So perhaps today wasn’t the day for proactivity. Perhaps watchfulness was the correct approach and 160-4 is less underwhelming than it seems. Perhaps open-ended closing paragraphs are unsatisfactory.

We’ve written about how everyone’s far too het up about the first Test over at Cricinfo.

How do you prefer to follow a Test? A lazy assumption is that live TV coverage presents the best option, but we’re increasingly questioning that. When a match is tight and it’s the closing overs, it’s hard to beat – but those situations are rare. We wonder how much we’d really miss live coverage if we didn’t have access.

When we started this website in 2006, we didn’t have Sky Sports and we’re far from glued to the screen now that we do have it. We often listen to the match on the radio while doing other stuff before watching the highlights later on. This approach means we get to experience events as they happen without the Test entirely monopolising our time. It’s not like we don’t know what a cover drive looks like, after all.

It’s funny the way people experience cricket. A few years ago, we were struck by a theme in the comments on a series of posts about the 2005 Ashes. It seemed like hardly anyone had actually watched the matches and yet this had precisely no impact on the excitement people felt.

How would you follow a Test match in an ideal world?

Tim Bresnan had elbow knack. It was a particularly severe case and so he had surgery. Unfortunately, the procedure made him not particularly good at cricket. He therefore had surgery again (not to get bionic legs or owt, just for the elbow).

Now he’s back – even if he wasn’t away quite long enough to warrant a ‘Tim Bresnan’s back’ headline. The good news is that he claims to have recovered pace. He hasn’t had this verified by a speed gun, so it might just be that he can’t remember what quicker bowling looks like, but if he has recovered a yard or two, that’s great news.

A sportsman’s career rarely ends on a high, but injury is the saddest way to go out, particularly if it’s more of an impediment than a death blow. An injury which merely takes the edge off your ability commits you to a grey purgatory where you play a pale imitation of what you once experienced of your sport.

We imagine it’s kind of like going back and playing Outrun. If you’ve spent time driving around virtual cities doing as you please in more recent games, you simply can’t re-narrow your horizons so that the Outrun experience is as satisfactory as it once was.

It probably doesn’t help that we write this at a time of night when our eyes have grown foggy from drink, curry and weekend.

1st – Middlesex

It seems that Middlesex drew with Warwickshire, but who can honestly be certain of that? If we’ve got our dates right and this match really did take place, then it seems that Sam Robson may have made a double hundred and Tim Murtagh may have taken 5-85. But don’t quote us on that. We just wrote ’5-85′ as ’5085′ because we forgot to press the shift key. That’s how we’re operating here. Anything could happen. We could spell ‘anything’ with two Gs or we could write ‘would’ instead of ‘write’ in this very sentence. Both of those things actually happened. These are the mistakes we’re picking up, but Lord knows what we’re missing.

2nd – Durham

Durham are probably still playing Surrey. Surely we should cover that next week? Incidentally, we really have to take issue with Surrey players referring to the county as “The ‘Rey.” It’s not cool. It sounds stupid. Sometimes you just have to accept that abbreviation is not an option. Also, they’re setting an unacceptable precedent for Sussex.

3rd – Yorkshire

They drew with Somerset in the match in which Adil Rashid made 180. Tim Bresnan and Jack Brooks took wickets.

The next chapter

Here’s where things get really shaky. There’s something about future dates which we really can’t get our head around. There’s a chance that Middlesex are away at Somerset and that Yorkshire are away at Warwickshire and that both matches start on Wednesday, but frankly anything could happen.

Don’t believe us? Ask Dinesh Karthik:

“Some of the things that he says in team meetings and some of the points he brings to the fore is really hair-raising.”

Is they? What kinds of things is he saying to raise your hair?

“The other day I had a doubt and I walked up to him. All he said was that if you see the ball and think you can hit it, you hit it. That, I thought was a very positive input and the one I really liked.”

From this article, which was brought to our attention by Cric-O-Fan.

It’s not really selling itself is it?

The other day, Zaheer was asking people to come up with a tagline for his new venture.

Guys, am launching TOSS sports lounge in Pune! Undecided on its tagline, so my team has put together – Write a Tagline contest for you guys!

— zaheer khan (@ImZaheer) April 26, 2013

We’re going with:

“Toss Sports Lounge – but come anyway.”

What’s your suggestion?

Being a young leg-spinner involves being told you’re amazing when you’re not. When you get a bit older and you seem a little less exciting, people tell you that you’re rubbish when you’re not. If you can bat as well, the extra novelty magnifies that first bit and also the contrast with the second bit. Such is life.

How old do you think Adil Rashid is? Don’t look it up; we’re going to tell you in the next sentence. He’s 25.

There’s a feeling that Adil Rashid’s progress has stagnated (perhaps he’s even regressed) but this is perhaps understandable as his confidence has taken a few knocks while those around him have been recalibrating their expectations. Confidence probably has a bigger impact on the performances of leg-spinners than it does on those who practise more prosaic forms of bowling and Rashid’s has been hammered because he has unavoidably let people down.

A leg-spinner short of confidence can serve up some real shod, but even one in form can often start a spell with a fair chunk of it before things settle down. How does a captain distinguish between rhythm-finding shod and the kind that’s there to stay? He just has to have faith really. Even when treated sympathetically, a young leg-spinner cannot always justify that faith.

It makes you wonder how anyone can ever find themselves bowling leg-spin at a high level. The world presents such a hostile environment. On the other hand, if a bowler can conquer this, you can be sure that you have a cricketer of rare resilience.

Perhaps this in itself has added to the reputation of the leg-spinner. When they do make it to the very top, they tend to be special, so we hope against hope that every young practitioner has all the right stuff. We see what we want to see, even though it (currently) isn’t there.

Adil Rashid hit a hundred yesterday, but expectations regarding his bowling are currently low. Maybe they’ve bottomed-out. Maybe they’ll now rise more realistically alongside his performances as a result of that fact. Or maybe he’ll completely corner the market on shod. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

1st – Durham

Durham push Middlesex out of the top slot after beating Nottinghamshire. They secured a significant first innings lead thanks to 153 from 2010 player to watch, Will Smith, but then found themselves needing to score plenty of runs in not many overs in order to secure the win. They made 184 in 20.2 overs and cricket writers up and down the land noted that number of overs and drew fairly obvious conclusions about what modern batsmen are willing to try and do and why this is the case.

2nd – Middlesex

Drew with Surrey. Chris Rogers scored 214 and cricket writers up and down the country noted that he was in Australia’s Ashes squad and wrote things about that. We didn’t. We just left it there.

3rd – Warwickshire and Yorkshire (unless Yorkshire are actually fourth for some spurious reason)

Warwickshire drew with Sussex for whom Chris Jordan earns another mention with 4-73. Yorkshire’s match against Derbyshire has already been covered.

The next chapter

Somewhat unexpectedly, all of the above teams are playing this week and all matches start on Wednesday. They’re all playing counties who aren’t currently in the top three.

For the next three weeks (crashes permitting), Bradley Wiggins will be attempting to win the Giro d’Italia, the second-biggest race in cycling. You can follow his progress over at our other site. Like cricket, the Giro isn’t on ‘normal telly’ – not even the highlights – so our website could almost be considered to be serving a purpose.

If you’re interested, you should sign up for email updates. That is all. Sorry to have taken up so much of your time.