Cricket has always had a peculiar vocabulary. The sport’s baffling use of language is part of its charm – naming a boundary fielder after a Graham Greene novel, for instance – but there have been recent additions to the lexicon I refuse to endorse. Bowlers putting “tail” on the ball – as if the word swing did not exist – or batsmen hitting it “downtown”. I hoped with the World Cup over we would have seen the end of the frankly gruesome use of “slot”, which seems to have been widely accepted as a bona fide technical term for a hittable length in limited-overs cricket. Yet there it was, leaping out of commentator’s mouths during the Edgbaston Test: “That’s right in his slot.”
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