Fancy seeing you here ...

The Ames scoreboard has been given some TLC this week, with the club deciding it was better to look after an existing masterpiece than tear it down and building something new.

Which leads us neatly, as the late Barry Norman might have said, to the question of ageing cricketers and how and more pertinently when to say goodbye.

You can precis most of the James Anderson retirement articles as follows. “I once passed Sir Jimmy on the way to the toilets at Milton Keynes Services and this is why I’m uniquely qualified to tell you why Lancashire have spat in the face of a legend”.