While Aggers, Blowers, Tuffers and the Test Match Special team entertain us from Edgbaston this week, a different sort of cricket commentary is being broadcast live from a sports bar in north London. Guerilla Cricket, son of the alternative Test Match Sofa, is everything TMS is not.
Expect music, drinking, occasional swearing, masses of interaction with fans and plenty of jingles. When Ian Bell trots out to bat, you’ll hear Anita Ward’s ‘You can ring my bell,’ for Joe Root it’s Odyssey’s ‘Going back to my roots’. You get the picture. Guests come and go and are an eclectic bunch, from David Papineau, professor of philosophy of science at King’s College London, to the novelist Nick Hogg, member of the Authors’ XI.
It’s safe to say that Alastair Cook or any other England player is unlikely to share the microphone anytime soon. ‘Oh God no,’ says Nigel Walker, co-founder of the channel. ‘The ECB wouldn’t let him speak to us.’
And that’s because unlike TMS, Guerilla Cricket is unofficial, an outsider, ‘not one of us’. The
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