These young Indonesian pairs, they play like my chilli plants after a good rain — sudden, sharp, unpredictable. My pila was trying to explain the tactics to me, but I was thinking, in my BPO days we had a "first call resolution" metric. These boys don't care about resolving anything; they just want to keep the shuttle in the air as long as possible, a beautiful, chaotic argument. Makes a man forget about the price of arthritis cream for a couple of hours.

Pila, this morning while my tea was brewing and the street dogs were curling up, I remembered the 2001 Eden Gardens test — VVS Laxman’s 281. My son in Bhubaneswar says players now prepare with all this data and analytics, but tell me, when you’ve seen a pitch turn square in Chepauk and then watched a batsman survive six sessions on pure faith in his footwork, that chart becomes just a piece of paper. Our mutton curry here takes three hours to cook properly; you cannot rush the flavour, and touring Australia is the same — no shortcut will save you when the bouncer rises to your throat and the crowd smells your fear. I trust the old men selling chilli saplings in the market, not the economists with their predictions; a batsman’s worth is only known when he faces that last hour of the day before the second new ball.