Leg Side Filth

It’s been a right old up-and-down week as a Foxes fan.

Thursday: Leicestershire crash to defeat by Surrey at Grace Road in the latest chapter of what has been a dismal championship season.

Same day: James Taylor makes his England ODI debut and scores 1 off 8 balls.

That evening: news spreads that Harry Gurney, the man who has helped bowl the county to T20 Finals Day, is off to Nottinghamshire on a three year deal. Not only that, but injury means that he will not be taking part in  Saturday’s extravaganza.

Friday: the England ODI and T20 squads are announced. James Taylor is in neither of them.

Today, Saturday, August 27th: Leicestershire win their semi-final versus Lancashire by the skin of their teeth, conceding 6 off the last ball of the match to take it to a super-over. Big Will Jefferson, fresh from 121 against Surrey, is the hero of the hour. He wins it for the Foxes with a balls-out, guns-blazing, almighty heave into the crowd for 6, followed by a primal scream of triumph.

Nerve-shredding? Only slightly.

T20 finalist; place in the Champions League qualifiers assured: I was prepared to accept this should they fall at the last hurdle. Actually to hell with that. A loss would have been gutting. It would have been the end of a dire week, and it would have hurt like a motherfucker.

In the final, Somerset limited Leicestershire to 145-6. Abdul Razzaq, opening instead of Andrew McDonald, made a subdued 33. Josh Cobb’s stay at the crease was worth a brief but entertaining 18; Jefferson again played his heart out for 35. Around the 12th over, as wickets started falling regularly, momentum ebbed.

It was a total that looked about 20 short. 20 runs is the difference between twitchy uncertainty and fatalistic resignation.

And then the magic. A true team effort that shows what a small county – struggling financially, plundered for its talent, written off by all and sundry – can do when it believes.

Five Somerset wickets fell in the space of 19 runs – Hildreth, Pollard, Trego, Suppiah and Buttler.

Josh Cobb and Matthew Boyce were the double-act that headlined the show. Every wicket of Cobb’s was caught by super-sub Boyce on the midwicket boundary.

A superlative diving catch by Paul Nixon to dismiss danger man Pollard would have done credit to a man twenty years younger; he will have to put that retirement on ice for a bit longer because boys, you’ve bagged yourselves a trip to Hyderabad.

Hell, Charlie Fox even won the mascot derby.

“Good luck to the underdogs,” Hampshire captain Dominic Cork said prior to the final.

See, the thing with underdogs is: sometimes they have a tendency to bite you on the arse.

Well played, lads. Well bloody played.

“It’s kicking off in Croydon now,” the hospital porter told me gloomily as he brought me back from the X-ray department.

Monday night, well, early Tuesday 1:15AM to be precise. Guest of the Royal Infirmary since 8AM the previous morning due to an ongoing condition that flares up from time to time. Morphine in my system; 40 hours with no sleep, pain by now dulled to something slightly less excruciating.

There’d been a queue for the x-rays: me, teenage lad with broken wrist, old man on trolley. By this point I had no clue as to the day, or the time, but I knew that London was burning.

“There’s a blaze at a furniture warehouse,” said the porter. “A big one.” I felt I should offer an opinion on it, and sensed he was expecting one, but I didn’t have the energy. I just wanted to sleep.

Back on the ward a quick check of Twitter informed me that the riots might be coming to Leicester. I had visions of waking up like the Cillian Murphy character in 28 Days Later, or like a character out of a John Wyndham novel, to a city burnt out and abandoned.

But the main thing was getting home for the Test. Nothing else mattered as much to me. To take my mind off where I was, I’d tried to focus my disgruntlement less on the online rantings of the String ‘Em Up Society and the Moral Decay Brigade than on Ravi Bopara being picked to replace an injured Jonathan Trott ahead of James Taylor. It was a decision I regarded as profoundly bonkers and still do, with Taylor making 106 for the Lions on the same day Bopara managed only 7 being a case of “figures that speak for themselves”.

But then you’d have to say that’s possibly the only thing England have got wrong recently.

This was the Test billed as the big one, the one that could see England ascend to number one status. The staging of it was very briefly in doubt due to the fact Birmingham too had been hit by the riots, with 3 confirmed deaths to follow.

It truly was a case of cricket down the rabbit hole. You could pick a less surreal time to hold a Test match.

It is now Saturday evening. The Test is over because India capitulated far quicker than we would ever have imagined back in May when the Sri Lanka series proved so disappointing. They still have not scored 300 in an innings, or taken twenty wickets. Sachin still does not have his hundredth hundred. Even Dravid could not save them; one of the few Indian players who’s come out of this series with any credit, he was bizarrely given out “hit shoelace”.

Alastair Cook’s batting was better than morphine. Effective but soporific. Hitting the pain that sometimes comes with being an England fan, and that doubled us over in 2006-07 and made us grind our teeth in a cold sweat at the agony of it. Jimmy Anderson’s lethal deliveries were the scalpel that cut away the last of those dead-flesh memories; Kevin Pietersen’s 63 the adrenaline injection straight to the heart.

It’s good to be home, and good to see England complete the recovery that started with Pietersen’s kill-or-cure revolt against Peter Moores in the early months of 2009.

The patient is not only fully recovered, it is kicking arse.

The riots and the looting are over now. Talking heads are occupying the news channels and the blame game is in full swing.

The cricket bat signed by the Lancashire team for Mal Loye’s benefit year remains propped against the wall next to my bed, just in case.

The country’s in a bit of a mess at the minute, but I am home, England are number one, and that’s pretty good to be going on with.

But Jesus, what a weird week.