Weather report

I usually count the end of summer being the last day of test cricket, or when you can't buy Summer Ale anymore, whichever comes later. But I am a Pollyanna, and in fact summer packed its chilly bin and marched off to its inglenook a day early. The last day at the Basin was indubitably autumnal, and rain, so often our best performer, saved the game.

So what have we got to look forward to? Six months of drizzle, frost and nasty winds ferreting up trouser legs. It always feels like a funeral when cricket goes into hibernation. Googlies and Grass Stains will also be cradling a brandy bowl in front of a fire and dreaming of flannel and linseed oil and King Leather.

But let's put the logic into meteorological and assess how our lads have done over the domestic summer. We've had two test series, and the Chappell-Hadlee excursion in Oz. Let's get our thermometer and stick it somewhere.

SCORCHIO

Jesse Ryder - I have said just about all I need to say about Jesse. If he avoids fights with bathroom fixtures, he will become the best batsman in the world. He averages 55 in test cricket, scored three centuries and five 50s in all forms and bowls a bit.

Better, better, better by far

A few years ago I was playing cricket in Middlesex. I went out to a place called Hayes - a dormitory town west of London - to play their local team. It wasn't the romantic English cricket idyll that you might imagine, with elms, and a mock Tudor pavilion. There was an open paddock at one end, a bunch of ugly brick houses at the other end, and a new aesthetically challenged cinderblock fitness centre at the cover boundary - which is where we changed. It was a bit like the Brittas Empire, if any of you remember that series.

The team we were playing was good - one guy had played first-class cricket, and swung the ball in a mile at medium pace. I remember taking offstump guard and facing mid-off to face him. He got six wickets without even trying. Apparently he was a "spinner" for the county team. We scored 170-odd, and it never seemed enough.

I was put at cover, a position I loathe. Their opening batsman was a tall, aquiline man who looked like an accountant. In the first over our opener bowled too full. I remember seeing the blade of this guy's bat rise above his shoulders in an extraordinary movement and slam the ball at me. Not hit. Slam. Not caress, stroke or even punch. Slam. Even now I am convinced I was in the right position to stop it, but the ball was travelling so fast I was about half a second too slow.

It became clear that this was his one shot - I can't remember him playing anything on the leg side. Over the next 30 overs he launched a good 20 cover drives at me - all of them with the same power. I stopped some, missed a bunch, lost a fingernail, and was finally sent to long on. It was a bad day. They won by eight wickets, and this bloke got 90-odd.

I have never before or since experience the power of those strokes from any other batsman. At one point he hit a cover drive at my replacement and the ball bounced back to the bowler, who was standing in mid-pitch. From the cover fieldsman's leg. He was just plain better than us.

Come in number 1917, your time is up

The game at McLean Park is the 1917th test match, going back to 1877 when 2,000 Melbourne residents turned up to watch the touring English side take on a 'combined' side including players from both NSW and Victoria at Richmond Park.

There have been a lot of incredible moments in-between - Bert Sutcliffe and Bob Blair batting in the fog of grief and emotion at Ellis Park (number 378), a test tied by a matter of a meter (498), a game which lasted ten days, and still ended in a draw (271), a game that was decided on just two innings (1483) and such extraordinary sporting moments that even a cipher of a ground and a year can recall memories of shots and wickets - Headingley 81, Kolkata 01, Carisbrook 80, Madras 86, Edgbaston 05, and older matches where no eyes who saw them remain to bear witness to them - The Oval 1882, Sydney 1895.

There have been controversies on the field that have rattled cricket - creating diplomatic incidents - names like Shakoor Rana, Darrell Hair, Douglas Jardine, Hansie Cronje, Muttiah Muralidharan, Geoff Griffin.

There have been heroic moments from Graeme Smith, Colin Cowdrey, Michael Atherton, Michael Whitney, Ewen Chatfield.

There have been performances of absurd athleticism, skill or stamina from Mark Greatbatch, Tom Richardson, Brian Lara, Harbhajan Singh, Waqar Younis, Willie Watson (no not that one...), Richard Hadlee, Jim Laker, Hugh Trumble and Mitchell Johnson.

The Armory Show

Well let's get some things out of the way first. If the skipper wants Chris Martin, you give him Chris Martin. It doesn't matter if all and sundry can see he seemed to be lacking in zip in Australia, or that he is averaging over 100 in the State Championship, or that he is old enough to have grandchildren, or that he bats like a gibbon in a splint. If Daniel Vettori sees him as an important piece of his armory - you must must give him the quiver he seeks.

There have been disastrous selections where a captain hasn't had faith in a bowler gifted to him by the benevolent dictates of three guys with waxed 'taches and pinstriped suits. I think of Gary Robertson in 1986. One of domestic cricket's best bowlers, he suddenly seemed unable to bowl with the same verve and steadiness at Eden Park as he did at Pukekura Park or Hagley Oval. Coney didn't even bowl him in the second innings of his first test.

Then there was Paul Wiseman, never a go-to-guy for Stephen Fleming, or the recent bizarre selection of club cricketer Darren Pattinson for England against South Africa, where it became increasingly clear that Vaughan would have preferred somebody else. Anybody else. And going way way back there was Archie Maclaren, captain of England, yelling to the long room at Lord's, "My God, look what they've given me. Do they think we are playing the blind asylum?" He went into a test lacking the best bowler ever - Sydney Barnes, the only man he had explicitly asked for. England lost.

I have less truck with a captain wanting a batsman - Fleming obviously would have preferred to have Cantabrians at various times during John Bracewell's rein - but quite frankly most of a captain's control is abrogated when any side goes into bat. But bowlers? That's micro-management. Give them everybody they ask for. Vettori will have spent months planning the dismissals of Tendulkar, Sehwag and Dravid.

It's only about seven levels down, but when I was captaining my Thorndon side, two or three opposing batsmen in the grade would play on my mind. I would think of their technique, trying to find their flaws, even when I should be doing law.

The curtain falls

BY HAMISH MCDOUALL

When you work as a cricket blogger you don't expect to get intensive training in geopolitics. But in the last week I have learnt more about Pakistan, the country, as opposed to the famously predictable group of eleven who wear the country's colours, than I have ever previously known. It seems that the country is currently in a deadly, globally destabilising internal conflict - an undeclared civil war between radicalised Islamist factions, and a barely competent government. The divide seems to be religious, political, ethnic, social, geographic and generational. It also seems largely irresolvable, which should make everybody reading this blog contemplate the world we are bringing our children into.

That sounds like fear-mongering, but it is based on a week-long immersion programme. Last weekend I had been writing my previous blog. I made a statement in my first draft that I questioned on re-reading. I realised after ten minutes' research that what I thought I knew about Pakistan (Karachi - a crazy megalopolis barely holding it together; Baluchistan - nasty wild west type place; Punjab - Westernised, intellectual; Peshawar - nice city, but don't head out of town; Kashmir - pretty, peaceful except near the "border" with India; Tribal Areas - full of US drones, caves and angry mullahs) was either plain wrong, or drastically altering.

So I decided to get to know Pakistan a little better. It is hugely ironic, considering the attack on Sri Lankan cricketers and match officials the next day, that I opened a book, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book called Ghost Wars, on Monday morning. I read about an attack on the US embassy in Islamabad in 1979, and a discussion of the tolerance and even active support the government of General Zia gave to radical versions of Islam, and the complicity of the sectors of the Pakistani Intelligence Agency in terrorism.

Then Tuesday night occurred and truly things will no longer be the same, certainly for Pakistan cricket, and probably for Pakistan. But in global terms, thank goodness the plan to systematically murder the team and match officials failed. The horrorism of that is barely conceivable. To be without Jayawardene, Murali, Mendis, Sangakkara, Taufel, Broad and all the others would be too great a sadness, cricket's 9/11.

I know one of the Sri Lankan team quite well: we went to a party together and spent the night drinking whiskey and talking about cricket history, of which he had an intricate knowledge. This guy could describe the innings Bradman played in Ceylon thirty years before he was born - because he had listened wide-eyed as a boy to the eyewitnesses telling their memories of the Don, just like I remember my father telling me about seeing O'Reilly and Hammond. He invited me to stay at his home in Colombo if I ever travelled there.