Remember Kim Hughes?

It’s important to remember that the Ashes is still tied at one test apiece. It’s not as though this has been a disastrous summer for English cricket. It just feels as though it could have been better. That being said, I don’t think many people are confident that England will find a way to win at the Oval and England’s pusillanimous selection has both failed to inspire confidence and dampened enthusiasm for the fray.

Perhaps this is too pessimistic by far. Perhaps it’s a little too soon to be quite so gloomy. Nonetheless, there’s a sense of foreboding about this test match. So it’s good to be able to read a book that takes us back to a time when it was the Australians, not England, who were a shambles.

Christian Ryan’s Golden Boy: Kim Hughes and the Bad Old Days of Australian Cricket might have been retitled “Kim Hughes and the Good Old Days” for the English market, such are the happy memories of that extraordinary 1981 series.