The A Team

It’s late on a fiercely cold evening with the rain lashing and the wind howling down the Yarrow valley. Obviously, then, it’s time for an exciting new Debatable Land series!

Readers possessing elephantine memories may recall this post in which I confessed – nay, revelled! – in being a cricket geek. I’m not alone in this. Like a good number of other sensitive souls I often spend idle moments (of which, blessedly, there are many) selecting imaginary cricket XIs. Thus one can spend hours pondering the greatest West Indies XI of time or the finest selection of left-handed cricketers or, well, you get the idea.

An old and favourite variety of this parlour game is to choose sides whose players all share a surname that begins with the same letter. Some members of the alphabet are weaker than others. We shall have to wait for the great Chinese cricketing revolution before the X’s are competitive, for instance.