Cricket

All winning cricket teams are alike; each losing cricket team loses in its own way. It doesn’t matter, right now, that Shane Watson and Michael Clarke will never be chums just as it did not matter very much, back in the day, that Shane Warne and Adam Gilchrist couldn’t stand one another. Victory spawns solidarity. Happiness too. We are wired to over-react to defeat and under-react to victory. England have been trounced in Australia. Battered in Brisbane, assaulted in Adelaide and pummelled in Perth. The tour has become a travelling horror show and, god help us, there are still two tests left. A 5-0 whitewash is a distinct possibility. Don’t

Here we go again. Time for another round of that perennial game so wearily familiar to England cricket supporters: Hunt the Positives. It is a mean game because, most of the time, there aren’t any. Certainly not today. England were abject in Adelaide. Scarcely any better than they had been in Brisbane. If, borrowing from Evelyn Waugh, we classify sides as Leading team, First-Rate team, Good Team and Team we must acknowledge that England, at present, rank as Team. And as Mr Waugh would have put it, Frankly, Team is pretty bad. Less a team, in fact, and more a rabble. With the exception of Joe Root’s second-innings knock England can take nothing but

Don’t say you weren’t warned. You were. “Australia will win at least one test this winter…England will have a bad test or Australia an extremely good one…This is an Australian side learning who it is. There are signs of improvement, signs that on their day they could be formidable. (The question being, as before, how many of those days there will be). Meanwhile, England are solid but not perhaps quite as good as they think they are. Brilliant individual performances saved the English collective in this series. They are not a team in transition but nor are they quite a team going anywhere.” That was this blog’s verdict on the

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

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

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

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