There’s an old joke about a journalist sent to Shady Pines to discover the secret of longevity. The first pensioner he meets attributes his great age to booze — a bottle a day for 70 of the past 90 years. The second, a crone of staggering decrepitude, owes it all to cigarettes — started when she was nine, smoked three packs a day until today, where she finds herself a reeking, yellowed 100-year-old.

Cricket people pride themselves on the equanimity that their infamously fair game implies about their souls; and this adoration of evenhandedness is never more explicit than in the sport’s idiom. A cross-cultural lingua franca thick with yin and yang, cricket’s discourse is so accepting and stoic that it can seem to verge on some sort of Victorian Buddhism.

Amid all the optimistic diagnoses and happy anticipation that usher in major international cricket tournaments, it has been easy to forget that the Champions Trophy, already in its second week, is mortally ill and dangerously short of well-wishers. Indeed, players, pundits and sponsors have been queuing for over two years to pull the plug on its life-support.

The archetypal Western bar brawl is curious for its wanton pointlessness: everybody slugs everybody else with considerable vigour, and yet very few seem to know — or care — what the circumstances of the original disagreement were. It’s as if there are two default states — placid chaw-mastication, and wholesale butt-kicking — separated by nothing but a couple of seconds.

It is not surprising that certain elements in the Asian media have been trying to inject into the public discourse some outrage about South Africa’s decision to leave Sri Lanka, writes Tom Eaton. Cricket writers are still media people; and media people do not like to see their deity — money — spurned in favour of simpering humanist sentimentality.

A narrow loss in the second Test went some way to redeeming the Proteas’ reputation, writes Tom Eaton. In his wrap of the extraordinary second Test at Colombo this week, an online correspondent was inspired to declare that the match could not have been ”more tense, dramatic and gripping if it was scripted by Stephen King”.

Bob Woolmer is a professional coach and is rarely drawn publicly on why and how he parted ways with South African cricket in 1999. He will express irritation, certainly, or the bemused frustration of an adult banished from the nursery by petulant toddlers, but he will not assassinate the characters who assassinated his career as Proteas coach, writes Tom Eaton.

A few days before the Proteas left for their tour of Sri Lanka coach Mickey Arthur said two very odd things. Those who follow the grand soap opera of international cricket will recall ingénu Arthur from last season, endlessly optimistic as one Australian after another deflowered his charges, ultimately claiming a relatively successful year as the South Africans ambushed a jaded, understaffed New Zealand squad on midwinter green-tops.

When the novelty of astronauts on Mars begins to wear off, some time in 2020, historians will note that it took humanity 120 years to wobble into the air in a Kitty Hawk, go faster than sound, ride into space, walk on the moon and begin colonising the red planet.