Ravinder Bopara called into England's one-day squad

As you're all no doubt aware, Ravi Bopara has been called into England's one-day squad. Bopara has a decent if unspectacular record in county cricket. He's only 21 though, so the seeming mediocrity is more just an absence of information.

Bopara used to open the batting for England under-19s with Alastair Cook. It's presumably on the grounds of his promise at that level and an impressive attitude at the Academy that he's earned his place. He bowls a little bit of medium-pace as well, so he can join Ian Bell and Paul Collingwood as under-used part-time bowlers for England.

Our outside hopes of an international debut came to nothing despite our spending a full six minutes practicing the flipper with a tennis ball last Wednesday. That's six minutes we'll never get back. Although arguably we've redressed the balance by spending precisely no time at all writing anything this weekend.

Ravi Bopara - a bit of writing in which his name crops up from time to time

We've really got to write something about Ravi Bopara after his valiant - yet ultimately futile - innings in England's World Cup defeat to Sri Lanka yesterday. It's all pretty obvious though, isn't it?

It was a good innings. It would have been better if he'd scored three more. He's young. Maybe he'll be really good.

Let's use words like 'maturity', 'focus', 'promise', 'calm' and 'nerveless'. Let's not put them into sentences though. Putting those words into sentences is the job of people who HAVE to write these sorts of things. We don't have to write anything about Ravi Bopara - we just feel like we should.

As a result of these factors, we're updating in an even more half-arsed fashion than usual. Our writing must be down to about one 256th of an arse by now.

We've really got a soft spot for this picture of Ravi Bopara. It's because of evil Mal Loye in the background. Look at him. Look how evil he is. (We like Mal Loye, by the way - he's only evil in this one photo.)

The end.