England v New Zealand, 1st Test, Lord's, 2nd dayAhh, cricket heaven. I love it that I can sit down on a Friday evening and watch the highlights and then the live action from the England v. NZ cricket test match at Lords.

The particularly fantastic thing about test cricket highlights is that it's still boring. At one point one of the English commentator started droning on about how "these dull patches of the match really just need a spark from someone to get the whole thing out of doldrums." This was mostly due to infamously slow scorer Mark Richardson keeping true to form - 5 hours standing in the middle for 67 runs when the 'dull patches' comment was made - and leaving absolutely anything outside off stump. And this was all during the 'highlights' package! Brilliant. Richardson was finally given out on a more-than-dubious LBW decision for 93, having held on for over six hours in the middle.

It did strike me that the commentating team often provides a good number of the entertainment high points during a day of cricket, and that often boring cricket can lead to some fantastic off-topic rambling by the likes of, in this case, Ian Smith and Geoffrey Boycott. They somehow got onto the subject of how many wickets Geoffrey (a batsmen) had taken in his career. He rattled them all off, all seven of them - names and how he'd got them out. It's so often the way: the batsmen love to tell the stories of how they got wickets, the bowlers rejoice when asked about their single three figure score.

Anyway, we went back to a live feed around 9:30pm, and finally got some real action by the name of Chris Cairns (the one-man highlights package, as he should be known). He went into his customary ballistic mode for the last part of the innings, as it became apparent that no-one was going to be able to hold out at the other end too long. It. Was. Awesome. The pommy commentators, who seem to love it when their team is getting spanked anyway, were waxing effusive about the big man's abilities, and he tonked his way to 82 runs in just over an hour, including 10 fours and 4 sixes, the latter figure taking him past Viv Richards as the player to have scored the most sixes in Test Cricket history. And from nearly half the number of matches that the West Indian master blaster had played. Awesome. Chris Martin finally came in at #11, and, much the delight of the small Beige Brigade in the crowd, managed to block a couple (and even score a run - which drew a massive round of applause from just about everyone), and held up his end long enough for Cairns to add another 50 runs at his end. Again, the stats books were out, and it was revealed that Martin is the Test Player with the worst (or best, depending on your attitude) runs:wickets ratio. For every run he scores in Test Cricket, he gets 3 wickets. God I love cricket - the facts and figures just keep coming...

And now the Super 12 final to look forward to. Or, more accurately, to fret about all day.
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