Umpires and Earthquakes Make Me Fail Tebbit's Test

Think of me this morning, in front of the cricket and happily flunking that barmy Tebbit test. I am rooting for Pakistan to settle the series with a joyous victory at Lahore. If so, in boxing's simplistic terms anyway, all Pakistan will hail themselves as world champions - "England beat top-dog Australians, ergo if we beat England we claim the title". Cue a national holiday and celebrations with a raucous passion.

Pakistan deserves nothing less. It will cheer a country beset by international turmoils, not least a savagely ghastly earthquake and its ongoing dolours. A famous cricket triumph will at least provide a shaft of spiritual relief, rapture and national pride. If the rest of the world are, by all accounts, hedging and bilking on previously pledged disaster aid, then the least Michael Vaughan's England team can do is donate a couple more batting collapses this week. They are practised enough at them.

Another reason I shall be on first-over parade with Sky's commentators is that it seems to me that in the two Tests so far Pakistan have been generally ill served by the rub of the green, particularly when that rub has been intemperately picked at by the umpire Darrell Hair, that spot-on impersonator of Sergeant Ernie Bilko's vengefully exasperated commanding officer at Fort Baxter, Colonel Hall. Not that Col Hall was such a nit-picking one-eyed showboater as the Aussie one-man judge and jury.

He has previous, has Col Hair, when it comes to the subcontinent. Allowing the run out of Inzamam-ul-Haq at Faisalabad was a dereliction of duty by Hair - as it was, to my mind, for Vaughan not to withdraw England's appeal on the spot. Shame, too, on coach Duncan Fletcher for so demeaningly applauding the act itself all of three days later. Hair is standing again at Lahore. C'mon you Ps!

A grand achievement

It was a slam of grandeur by the All Blacks, even if their surfeit of talent found them uncharacteristically taking their eye off the ball towards the end. The decline into hotch-potch hope-for-the-best by the four British Isles teams can be cruelly but vividly illustrated by picking a select XV from all those who have played in the Tests over the past month. Two-thirds of the 15, easily, would be New Zealanders.

How many home players would presume a selection? And answer came there - none. England boast they are "on track" - but would, say, Mark Cueto, Danny Grewcock or Andrew Sheridan even make the bench? And why is Josh Lewsey's talent being squandered so?

Tana Umaga's 2005 vintage is far more thrilling than Graham Mourie's 1978 slammers. Probably the comparisons should be with 1924's "Invincibles". Scotland refused to play them, so instead they went to Toulouse and made it four out of four by sandbagging France. In their four Tests that lot scored 17 tries, one more than Umaga's team.

After that tour, the Daily Mail lamented the clodhopping state of British rugby: "These colonials moved like blood-horses, while the gait of the Britisher is more suggestive of the shire-stallion. New Zealand play with every nerve and sinew braced up to almost snapping point. They are as persistent as wasps, as clever and alert as monkeys. They work together on the field like the parts of a perfectly constructed pocket-watch."

Quite so. What's English for plus ça change?

A moonraker eclipsed

The first time Wembley's floodlights were turned on for a football match was a precise half-century ago tomorrow, when England beat Spain 4-1. The home forward line was: Finney, Atyeo, Lofthouse, Haynes, Perry. The opening goal in the 11th minute, a thundering volley, was scored by Bristol City's England debutant John Atyeo. A minute later he made the second for Bill Perry.

Atyeo was a "moonraker", a strapping Wiltshire boy from Dilton Marsh, still fabled in those parts and beyond for his 315 league goals in 597 matches, a tally that puts him seventh in the all-time list after Rowley, Dean, Greaves, Bloomer, Camsell and Aldridge. Given a rush job to write Atyeo's obituary in 1993, I was astonished to find no biography to crib from - but now John Hudson and Tom Hopegood have made amends and well and warmly done the Wessex folk-hero due honours with a fully rounded, expertly told tale of a luminary of football's fond, primeval 1950s (Atyeo, Redcliffe Press, Bristol, £17.50).

Countryman John, in turn savvy and shy, was the last man to play for England as a part-time pro, combining his Saturday hobby with being first a quantity surveyor and then a maths and PE teacher. In three qualifiers for the 1958 World Cup, John scored four goals - each one, apparently, a bespoke beaut - but then was wretchedly dropped for the finals in Sweden. The Football Association never gave a reason: did they reckon it was off-message to have a part-time pro leading the line?