So Colly, Will You Defy Time Like Close And Illy?

When Stan McCabe was scoring his 232 for Australia against England at Trent Bridge in 1938, Don Bradman is reputed to have ordered his team-mates out onto the dressing room balcony with the words: “Come and look at this. You will never see its like again.”

- Martin Johnson

It would come as no surprise to me to discover that much the same instruction has been issued inside the Durham dressing room over the past 22 years, with various new boys invited onto the balcony on the grounds that Paul Collingwood going through his entire repertoire of nudges, nicks and nurdles is indeed something they may never see again.

In some cases – if someone has broken a curfew perhaps, or been caught slacking in training – a player might have been ordered to watch by way of a punishment. You wouldn’t call it pretty, and it’s just as well Colly chose cricket ahead of, say, ice-skating.

He’d be sitting next to his coach, blowing kisses to the camera after getting the full set of sixes for technical merit, only to end up sobbing uncontrollably onto his teddy bear when the marks for artistic impression come through. 0.1, 0.2, 0.1……

There used to be a programme on the telly called Faking It, in which some electrician or plumber would have a few days coaching on how to conduct an orchestra, or drive a Formula One car, and fool a panel of experts into believing that’s what he or she really does.

But after watching Colly having a net for five minutes, the suggestion that he’d scored Test centuries for England, and once represented a “World XI” (presumably someone got the invitations mixed up) would have brought the response: “I believe you. Oh, and by the way. I’m Father Christmas.”