Sky Sports News cover England's loss like complete amateurs

We're gutted about England's last ball defeat yesterday. We sometimes forget how much we really care. We were actually watching the denouement on Sky Sports News in the bar after having played an inferior sport and the tension was killing us. It was also killing a few strangers who clearly weren't full-bore cricket fans.

This is great, we thought. England will win this off the final ball and all these random people will have happy memories of cricket. They'll encourage their kids to play and England will rule the cricketing world for decades. Then England lost.

It was all the more painful for the manner in which we'd had to hear about it. Sky Sports News, as most of you will be aware, is a kind of textual challenge for the viewer. Stuff scrolls across the bottom. Stuff appears on the right. Stuff flashes on screen. The presenter talks about none of these things. It's very disorienting, particularly when you're trying to follow one particular thread.

We were keeping our eyes peeled for where the England score might be likely to flash up next. For some reason, even though it was a nailbiter and there were only four balls to go, Sky still weren't keeping the score in constant view. In fact, they even went to an ad break.

Thankfully, with just two balls remaining, the presenter attempted to describe what was happening. The penultimate ball passed and we had a fair idea what had happened. The final ball was about to take place. The presenter said: "Dihara Fernando runs in and..."

At this point, he left a good 20 second pause. Those of you who watched the match will know that Fernando didn't release the ball. We had no idea.

Richie Benaud returns!

Yes. It's an exclamation mark day: Richie Benaud is returning.

In a world where people actually employ Dean Jones and where Sky only employ ex-England captains, the BBC have done the decent thing and hired the great man as a studio analyst/discussion bloke. They've also hired Geoff Boycott, Jonathan Agnew (a BBC employee anyway) and, hilariously, Tony Greig, who's always worth listening to if he thinks Australians might be within earshot.

There was always a fair chance that Richie 'free to air' Benaud would accept a job at the Beeb, but until it was actually confirmed in writing, we were edgy. Now it's true and the world is a better place. Bizarrely the BBC are focusing on the new pair of anchormen, relegating Benaud to a lower paragraph. If the BBC knew the first thing about marketing, they'd realise that their two biggest draws are Richie Benaud and The Cricket Tune, which has another name, but we're not using it because nobody calls it that.

This is such important news we deliberately used the word 'returns' in the title instead of 'back'. If you don't know what we mean, just put 'back' in the search box on the left and you'll see yet another of our 'repeat until funny' instances of humour.

Willow and Stumpy - Sky Sports' animated shame

We've had our first view of Willow and Stumpy today. For those who don't know, Willow is a talking cricket bat and Stumpy is, not entirely unexpectedly, a stump. Together they explain the ins and outs of cricket for the benefit of no-one. They crop up intermittently during Sky's cricket coverage.

Children know when they're being forced to learn something. They're particularly attuned to those times when they're taught something in a 'fun and exciting' way. Are they so stupid that they can't tell that the subject matter's dull simply because it's being expressed by a talking cricket bat? Edutainment: The worst of both worlds.

If kids are watching cricket they'll pick things up as they go along. There's no real point getting them to use all the correct terminology. They don't care. If they want to play cricket, they just want to play it. They can find out what all the shots are called afterwards.

The only conceivable use for Willow and Stumpy would be a sequence depicting Stumpy being hammered into the ground using Willow's face. The ensuing damage to Willow's visage ought to teach kids to look after the faces of their cricket bats. That's a picture of a cricket stump mallett. Get one. Look after your bat. Or at least use the end of the handle. Cricket bats cost money you know, you little ingrate.