This is the Friends of Mr. Debating Society. I'm John Baxter in southern New England, midsummer, beautiful evening.

Everything's growing, maybe growing a little quicker than usual because we had a lot of rain in June.

Everything's lush, it's not burned out yet. It can be, but not this year.

And I'm speaking with Jeremy Zuckus, New South Wales, where it's Chile.

And Australia is set up for Chile, but not as long as this has gone on, 40, 45 degrees Fahrenheit.

We turn now to cricket, which is being played in England.

So it's summertime where the cricket is being played.

However, the definition of madness you all know,

it's doing the same thing with the same poor results each time,

but no variation.

It begins to suggest that basketball is madness. However, we learn on the job. Jeremy,

the English team is playing a hard driving rival in India, a five-day test. How's it going?

Well, it's not going very well. What's happened here, John, is that England, in their, I guess, stubbornness is probably the best descriptor for this, has decided that Basball is probably the best tactic to use against India, which is one of the top sides that plays very conservative cricket that knows how to skillfully defeat us opponents with a very long game.

But for whatever reason, England decided to bring Basball, which is effectively like a very

short, tactical form of cricket that ties out your own team very rapidly to see if they

could actually beat the Indians very quickly and decisively on about day one of the five-day series.

However, as you can imagine, John, it has not gone very well.

In fact, the English, who went up to bat first,

not only lost most of their top-order batters,

I believe, 1, 2, 3 and 4 very, very quickly,

which meant that the cream of the crop,

their best hitters were basically wiped out

...