Cricket

It was the sort of summer’s day that makes you glad to be alive; but we were watching the telly. We would not normally do this. If the weather was fine, we would play games of catch on the lawn: my 4-year-old self hurling any object that came to hand at my 78-year-old grandfather. The old man would leap about for my amusement, often careering into my parents’ sacred flower beds. He would pooh-pooh my father’s concerns about the wisdom of these exertions, and ignore my grandmother’s distress over the ruin of ‘yet another pair of trousers’. My delight would urge him to even greater theatrics when their backs were

In sport, as in life, you just don’t know where you stand any more. Look at the Premier League: no club knows where they stand except for Crystal Palace, who are being stood on by all the others. Everyone else can beat everyone else. Manchester City, who must be one of the best teams, are eighth; Southampton are good for the Europa League but currently could end up in the Champions League. But it’s all good for business. The England football team are about to find out exactly where they stand after two friendlies and the World Cup draw next month. The England rugby team are about to find out

As you know, only seven batsmen have scored more than 50,000 first-class runs. Hobbs, Woolley, Hendren, Mead, Grace, Sutcliffe and Hammond are untouchable. We shall not see their like again. The game changes and old records written on parchment are left unmolested, gathering dust. Comparisons between the great players of a single era are troublesome enough; fashioning them between the cricketers of the prelapsarian past and those of today is an exercise easily considered futile. And yet the hunger to do so is a craving that can never be wholly pacified. The 50,000 run mark is an arbitrary figure, for sure, but if you add-up all the runs scored in

Those of us who watched the last day of the final Ashes Test of the present series enjoyed a rare and unexpected treat — and I write as one who has been a devoted cricket follower for more than 70 years: the first first-class match I ever saw was the Royal Navy playing the Army at Lords in 1942. There has, however, been much controversy over the anti-climactic ending, when the umpires decided to call it a day, on grounds of bad light, with England on the brink of victory. Much has been said about how this sort of disappointment must be avoided in future. In fact, the remedy is

It was pretty dark. Darker, in fact, than it had been when the players were hauled off for bad light earlier in the test. Darker, too, than it had been in Manchester when Michael Clarke objected to the umpire’s decision to halt play on account of the light. But so what? Was there any evidence that continuing to play would constitute an “obvious and foreseeable risk to the safety of any player or umpire, so that it would be unreasonable or dangerous for play to take place”? That is what the laws demand; it remains a mystery why this is not the standard umpires actually use. The England batsmen did not think conditions

Were you still up, as they used to say about Portillo in the 1997 election, for Hedwall? It was well past midnight on Sunday, the sort of hour when all good Spectator readers should be tucked up in bed — or when the really good ones are thinking about heading home — that Caroline Hedwall, a young Swedish golfer, made a birdie at the 18th hole of Colorado Golf Club that meant two unprecedented things. For the first time on American soil, Europe could not lose the Solheim Cup, the women’s version of the Ryder Cup, and Hedwall had become the first player to win five matches out of five

Thumping Australia is grand; thumping Australia without playing well almost feels like cheating. But in a good way. This is where England find themselves today. The Ashes are safe for another few months and England have not had to be very good to keep them. Which is just as well, frankly, since even though they are unbeaten in 12 tests England are not quite as good a side as they like to think they are. They are good enough to defeat these hapless Australians, however. The Australians are basically New Zealand in disguise. Like New Zealand they are a side good enough to get themselves into good positions but not

Michael Henderson has written a rather brave piece for this week’s Spectator in which he brands Test Match Special ‘Radio Halfwit’ and argues that it has lost its edge. This is braver even than admitting that you don’t #lovethenhs because TMS is an institution even more beloved and revered the world around. Perhaps Danny Boyle missed a trick in the Olympic opening ceremony by not projecting a giant light-up image of ‘Boycott Bingo’ onto the floor of the stadium. Criticism is hard to take, especially when it is aimed at our most loved institution. I adore TMS, and during tests in different time zones, frequently go to sleep with the

There’s a 13th man at the table at Lord’s this week as England resume the Ashes contest with Australia, which began so thrillingly at Trent Bridge, where England prevailed by 14 runs. For the first time in half a -century, -Christopher Martin-Jenkins is not present to renew one of the great rituals of the English summer. ‘CMJ’, who passed away on New Year’s Day at the less than grand age of 67, was always going to be missed and listeners to Test Match Special, the programme he adorned with his balanced commentaries, are cursing Time for being so vicious in his reaping. The graveyard, it is said, overflows with people once thought

Forget the Ashes, this is the cricket news you have been waiting for: the Confederation of British Industry vanquished the Trades Union Congress at their annual match last night. Chasing 114 to win, the CBI recovered from 5 for 4 to win with a boundary from the last ball of the game. The venal capitalists’ last gasp triumph will come as a bitter blow to the Brothers. But this is a long war and there will be countless other battles.

Mr Steerpike is still a boy at heart: I feel giddy with anticipation on the first morning of an Ashes series. England versus Australia. 5 Test matches. A golden summer in the offing. There’s nothing like this rivalry in sport, at least to those for whom it matters. And perhaps it matters most to those who’ve played for the Ashes. I bumped into Ted Dexter a few days ago. The former England captain is 78, but he had lost none of the dash, sparkle and elegance that made old mother Steerpike swoon for him in his ‘60s heyday. Dexter towered above me, ramrod straight at 6’2 (or thereabouts), as he

Many years ago, when I used to work for the Guardian, Germaine Greer, who was then a columnist for the paper, wrote a vicious little piece for the op-ed pages slagging off Suzanne Moore, who was also a columnist. Even in the shell-shocked state that goes with the territory of trying to handle egos like that, I realised this could be a problem, so I rang up Ms Greer to wonder whether she felt like toning it down a tad, dropping the reference to ‘fuck-me shoes’ and suchlike. She snorted with laughter: ‘Stay out of this, dear; this is a mud fight.’ Happy days, and a nice fore-runner of the

Marcus Trescothick. Nick Compton. Alviro Petersen. James Hildreth. Craig Kieswetter. Jos Buttler. When all troops are fit and available Somerset enjoy a batting line-up one might compare favourably to this summer’s visiting New Zealanders. Today they were dismissed by Sussex for 76. At Horsham. Granted, Compton and Kieswetter were absent but, even so, this was a dismal showing.  Somerset, damn it, won the toss and chose (rightly!) to bat. At the time of typing Sussex are 241/7. The best that may be said of it is that this year the Wurzels are not teasing their supporters. A season that began with hopes that – at last! – the Cider Men