With the final Test beginnning on Thursday (no, don't be alarmed: not the final test, in which you stand before a panel of your peers and try to justify yourself in the light of what they have discovered about your past and about your character, and not that examination on some arcane subject you've never studied and for which - the exam - you haven't prepared but seem in the dream to be having to sit anyway, even though you thought you'd put exams behind you a long time ago, but the final Test, in which the destiny of the Ashes is finally settled for the next year and a bit until they are again contested in Australia), I point you towards...
(a) an interesting piece by Mike Brearley disgreeing with Chris Dillow (though Brearley doesn't name him), and which contains a no-nonsense suggestion to deal with bowlers leaving the field in order, putatively, to relieve themselves:
It may be that the rules need to be changed, so that toilet breaks may be taken, but no substitutes permitted. That would both lessen their occurrence and speed them up......and (b) Gideon Haigh, writing about 'Richie Benaud's imminent disappearance from British television screens':
There is only one Benaud. And shortly, in England, there will be none: another reason, if it was needed, not to miss this Oval Test.When I was a mere boy of 14, Richie Benaud was in Bulawayo with Ian Craig's Australians, and on November 1, 2 or 4 of 1957, I approached the players' enclosure at Queen's Cricket Ground to request Richie's autograph on a book I had with me of the 1956 Ashes series. Not only did he sign it in three places, over his own picture, but he also saw to it that I got the signatures of everyone else in that enclosure: Jim Burke, Ken Mackay, Peter Burge, Ian Craig, Alan Davidson, Bobby Simpson, Barry Jarman, Ian Meckiff and Lindsay Kline. Lindsay Kline, incidentally, took a hat-trick against South Africa at Newlands. There you are - you didn't used to know these things and now you do.