In the past, whenever we watched Ramnaresh Sarwan bat, he always seemed to underperform. It happened so frequently that the line between underperformance and ‘being crap’ became blurred.

Yet every time we looked away he must have scored runs because he’s averaged 40 for almost his entire career, even back when that was a bit more meaningful. To continually average 40 without actually scoring any runs is a neat statistical trick that England’s batsmen have perfected, but as we all know, it’s not actually all that useful when you’re trying to win cricket matches.

In fact, averaging over 40 is inextricably entwined with failure these days. The only time you ever hear that a batsman’s average is over 40 is when they’ve had yet another failure and need to justify their worth. Ramnaresh Sarwan no longer needs to cite his average. We all know how good a batsman he is because nobody can remember a moment during this series when he wasn’t at the crease.

If it weren’t for time constraints, you feel he could make that average into whatever he wanted to. As for underperformance, his innings of 94 in the third Test could be considered such by his current standards.

See King Cricket’s regular blog at www.kingcricket.co.uk. King Cricket is a cult figure in the world of cricket blogs and was TWC’s first Best-of-blogs winner in April 2008.