ASSUME YOUR POSITIONS!
WORLD EXCLUSIVE!
LONDON: Details of bizzare fielding positions that the England Test side believes can skittle the cock-a-hoop Australians in the match starting at Lord’s tonight have been sensationally leaked here overnight.
While details of the unique positions will disgust Test purists, the Ben Stokes-led home side believes the tactics will see the tourists struggle to reach 100 in either of their innings at the home of cricket.
A packet of the sheets of the fielding position plans – which must be said appear to be very much like psychological warfare in their tactics and methodology – were found in the Tube station at St John’s Wood, apparently left on a seat of a Stratford-bound Jubilee service.
In pride of place on the top of the pile was a picture of what the notes termed “The Angry Mouth”, also known as the Mumbrella or Quarter-Moon field that so psyched and confused Usman Khawaja in the first Test at Edgbaston that he stepped away from his stumps, played a ridiculous one-day shot and got promptly bowled for 141 by a foul-mouthed Olie Robinson.
Someone has scribbled across the back of the sheet the rhetorical question: “Why didn’t we do this at the start of his second knock!”
Here are the highly unusual – cricket tragics might call them unethical and clearly not in the spirit of the game – positions planned for Australia’s key batsmen tonight if the tourists bat.
David Warner: “The contempt” – Provided Warner is facing up, only Ben Stokes and wicketkeeper Jonny Bairstow will take the field with any serious intent. The rest of the team will enter the ground under the main pavilion but only move far enough around to obey behind-square-leg rules. They’ll stand there in a casual grouping and during Stokes’s run-ups will will pretend to rub their balls with sandpaper. The team’s manager Brendon Baz McCullum predicts Warner will play on or get clean bowled by ball four or five.
Usman Khawaja: “The Angry Mouth”.
Marnus Labuschagne and Steve Smith: “The Jitterbug”. The England side apart from the slips cordon will field very much where they want to as long as they’re in the batsmen’s eyelines and will simply jerk about like someone having a fit or being attacked by bees as the bowlers approach their mark. Someone has cruelly written: “Both think they are God’s gift to batting and having their opponents poke fun at their silly mannerisms will make them even more desperate to atone for their first Test failings. Be lucky to get to 10!”
Travis Head: England players will wear fake moustaches and pretend to be porn stars offering to clean young ladies’ pools whenever Head faces up. “Twenty if he’s lucky!”
Cameron Green: “Traditional”. “He’ll be gone soon enough anyway,” someone has written. “No-one that tall has ever batted well; not since Tony Grieg anyway.”
Alex Carey: “Way outside off”. “He’ll eventually nick off trying to cut”.
Pat Cummins: “The Angry Mouth”. “A variation almost got him during his second knock, a la Khawaja. It was a miracle he got his bat down at the last moment: otherwise it would been as ugly a dismissal at Khawaja’s and it would have all been over.”
Nathan Lyon: “The bouncer barrage!” – All players to wear skin-coloured skullcaps and apply zinc to their noses constantly as they loiter about in an apparently aimless fashion as they wait for the GOAT to hook Broad or Robinson down the throat of deep backward square.
Scott Boland: “The Stork Corroboree”. In a salute to Boland’s Aboriginal heritage, the bulk of the England fielding side will gather in mobs of four at mid-off (including the keeper) and four at mid-on and all stand silently with the sole of one bare foot planted against the knee of the other foot and chatting in their traditional county languages until Boland pops one up to the close-in fielders on either side of the pitch.
Mitchell Stark/Josh Hazelwood: “Traditional yet arrogant”. The ball is expected to be only some 15 overs old by now so traditional fields will apply for the five or six players who opt to stay on the ground for the fall of the final wicket when either of these two over-qualified Number Elevens nick off or get bowled sooner than later “for fuck all”.
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