I've been watching a bit of test cricket lately. No one is more surprised by this than me. I've never watched cricket in my life - I'm Irish, so it never figured in our house growing up - and I still have very little idea what's going on. You don't really need to, though. What appeals to me about the cricket is the very soothing dullness of it. As Bill Bryson described it: Imagine a form of baseball in which the pitcher, after each delivery, collects the ball from the catcher and walks slowly with it out to center field; and that there, after a minute's pause to collect himself, he turns and runs full tilt toward the pitcher's mound before hurling the ball at the ankles of a man who stands before him wearing a riding hat, heavy gloves of the sort used to handle radioactive isotopes, and a mattress strapped to each leg. Imagine moreover that if this batsman fails to hit the ball in a way that heartens him sufficiently to try to waddle forty feet with mattress