Andy Zaltzman was born in obscurity in 1974. He has been a sporadically-acclaimed stand-up comedian since 1999, and has appeared regularly on BBC Radio 4. Zaltzman's love of cricket outshone his ...

As well as the traditional passage of time bringing that inconvenient darkness, there were other factors in England's narrow failure to pluck Victory from somewhere around the duodenum of A Draw.

Fourteen sessions of turgid gloop, followed by two hours of certifiably bonkers mayhem, almost gave England one of their most extraordinary Test triumphs. They were denied, ultimately, by the ...