For a sport often dismissed as dated, cricket has proved remarkably adaptable to the modern world. In the early days of the internet, the Cricinfo site was for a time the most accessed site on the entire web. More recently it has proved equally well suited to spread betting.

The reason is simple – the proliferation of numbers that the game generates. As Jeremy Scott, spokesman for IG Index, points out: “They’re all whole numbers, which makes it much easier to understand. Deciding whether you think West Indies will score more than 430 is rather easier than working out if Chelsea are really 1.2 goals better than Bolton.”