What did sports writers Ian Wooldridge, Rajan Bala and Martin Johnson have in common apart from the fact that their knowledge of sports stretched way beyond facts and figures? Memorable cricketing lines which would go down in the sport’s history.

Wooldridge described Australian opening batsman Bill Lawry as a “corpse with pads on.” Twenty-two years later in 1983, Bala came up with a unique way to describe then rookie batsman Navjot Singh Sidhu: “Strokeless Wonder.” And Johnson, frustrated by England’s start to their 1986-87 campaign in Australia, was moved to hit the keys of his typewriter for this: “It seems to me that England have only threemajor problems - they can’t bat, they can’t bowl and they can’t field.”