It was a good day for lanky Lancashire allrounders. First Andrew Flintoff (born in Preston) flayed his way to 51 off only 38 balls, then Ronnie Irani (Leigh) completed a maiden one-day fifty. The highlight was a scudding flat six off left-arm spinner Yuvraj Singh. All this after the match had been slashed to 32 overs a side - someone will be saying all one-dayers should be over this sprint course - and after Nasser Hussain had slid down the order as every newspaper had been imploring him for days.

Flintoff and Irani never actually played together for Lancashire. Irani upped sticks and moved to Essex after the 1993 season, possibly because he'd seen the young Flintoff in the nets and suspected that there might not be room for the pair of them in the same county side.

And yet suddenly there's room for both of them in the same England side, even if it would have been a feverish night in a Preston pub when anyone suggested they would have been batting at 3 and 4 for England.

After all that batting Freddie and The Ron could have been forgiven for leaving the bowling to other people. Indeed Flintoff did prove rather expensive. But Irani steamed in, with that increasingly familiar stiff-armed chest-on straining action, and blew away five wickets. He started with the dangerous Virender Sehwag, then nipped out the lower-middle order. Irani had a willing accomplice in Alec Stewart, the Man The Selectors Couldn't Drop. Standing up, Stewart grabbed two slick catches to account for Sehwag and Ajay Ratra, and pulled off an opportunistic stumping when Yuvraj lifted his toe for a split-second.

Irani might have had Sachin Tendulkar first ball too, but Stewart couldn't hold on to what appeared to be a bottom-edge of a widish delivery. The umpire called it a wide, though, so it might not have touched the bat. For a while Tendulkar looked impregnable - even Irani didn't look like getting him out again - but India's last hope eventually touched one from Matthew Hoggard to that man Stewart again.

So Irani finished with 5 for 26, the best figures for England in a home one-day international, and their fourth-best anywhere. The list of the ten players who have taken a one-day five-for for England would test the most dedicated of sports-quizzers*. He followed up that maiden half-century for England by doubling his previous one-day wicket-tally in one-dayers. Not the hardest Man of the Match decision, then. And Irani for the World Cup doesn't sound quite as ridiculous as it might have at the start of this topsy-turvy season.

Steven Lynch is database director of Wisden.com.

*The 10 bowlers are Mark Ealham, Ashley Giles, Darren Gough, Mike Hendrick, Graeme Hick, Matthew Hoggard, Ronnie Irani, Paul Jarvis, Vic Marks and Craig White. Ealham, Gough and Marks did it twice.

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