Cricket

So all that sound and fury about Manchester City’s sins signified precisely nothing. Well, a €10 million fine isn’t nothing, but City would need just a couple of minutes looking down the back of the sofa to lay their hands on that. What was heralded by Uefa all those months ago as unspeakable financial jiggery-pokery that warranted a two-year ban from European football turns out on appeal to be a minor misdemeanour, a parking ticket at best. Nothing to see here. Move along please. Fair enough. I love Pep’s City and what his team has brought to the Premier League, but I could never understand, if they were going to

The Prime Minister recently blamed the delay in the resumption of amateur cricket on the ball itself, calling it ‘a vector of disease’. Happily, tests have disproved this. Balls contaminated with Covid-19 showed no trace of it 30 seconds later — and recreational cricketers will be allowed to return to the field from this weekend. Much of the complexity of cricket comes from the interplay between wood, turf and the leather of the ball. Bats have changed greatly over the centuries, from curved to straight, from thick to thin and back to thick again, but the ball has remained much the same. A core of rubber and cork wrapped tightly

Where were we? Oh yes, Liverpool were running away with the Premier League and a mere three months later have sealed the deal. For Liverpool fans it must have seemed like the longest drum roll in history. A week ago the drum roll ended in an explosion of joy — too literal an explosion for some tastes — for those who worship at the temple of Anfield. Liverpool were champions of England for the first time in 30 years — and the wait for the first English manager to win the Premier League was extended for another year. That last fact must be one of the sorriest statistics in English

Certain days in the long and sometimes glorious history of English cricket are so brightly coloured they can never fade. Two such are the 20th and 21st of July, 1981. Age and the passing of time cannot weary them. The old tape has been played and replayed so often, it becomes all but impossible to discern between the facts of the Headingley test that summer and the legend it has become. Sometimes the facts are legendary enough.  That was Botham’s match, of course, but also Bob Willis’s finest hour. Without Willis and his eight wickets for 43, Botham’s heroics, his 149 not out that gave England a sniff of victory

The Oval, 1902. Headingley 1981. Melbourne 1982. Edgbaston 2005. And now Headingley 2019. Move over Sir Ian Botham, you’ve got company and there’s a new king in the north. This astonishing, heart-stopping, game will forever be remembered as Stokes’s match and recalled for as long as test cricket is still played and savoured. For a game perpetually teetering on the edge of crisis, cricket’s in pretty good shape when it comes at you like this. Ben Stokes has now, as everyone agrees, played two once-in-a-lifetime innings in six weeks. The World Cup final was one thing; this was improbability on an altogether different, still more elevated, level. England’s final pair,

I suppose the question is who we sack first. For like many, if not most England fans, I am at a stage beyond rage, beyond reasonable doubt, beyond all good sense. I want blood. As a friend of mine who supports Everton posted on Facebook this morning, ‘Name two seven-letter sports teams beginning with E who will always let you down.’ The candidates for the chop are as follows: 1. Jason Roy as opening batsman. Dear god, I could do better. My old friend Simon, who used to open for the team I play for, could do better. He played 252 games for us and averages just over seven. He

Nothing in cricket is quite as visceral, even quite as primeval, as the confrontation between a batsmen of the highest class and a bowler of the greatest velocity. Sometimes, as with a Colin Croft or a Charlie Griffith or Lillee and Thomson at their snarling fastest, this can be streaked with nastiness. Broken bones and shattered confidence is part of the point; the goal of the matter. But sometimes it is just different; somehow purer. Mike Atherton’s famous confrontation with Alan Donald falls into that category. And so to Saturday at Lord’s, always the highlight of the English summer, but rarely, even in the long history of the famous old

During the World Cup (remember that?), Virat Kohli, the very model of a modern major cricketer, appealed to Indian fans not to boo the returned Australian players. It would be nice to think that Joe Root might call for something similar over the next few days from the increasingly egregious English supporters. Current boo-boy tactics haven’t worked particularly well so far. Part of the problem has been the sanctification of Edgbaston as if it was the cricketing equivalent of Notre Dame. Now the sight of a lot of pissed-up Brummies dressed as parrots and chanting ‘Championes, championes…’ seems to be England’s contribution to the summer game. Besides anything else, the

Mars missions When will there be a manned Mars mission? — As early as 1962, Nasa studied the practicalities of a mission to Mars, as part of its Project EMPIRE (Early Manned Planetary-Interplanetary Roundtrip Expeditions). The initial plan was to put a man on Mars by the early 1970s. However, budgetary restraints meant that the programme was limited to a flyby of Venus before being axed. — The prospect of a manned mission to Mars has been revived several times since. However, two years ago Nasa announced that it is unlikely to happen before the 2030s. Counting cups England won the cricket world cup. Which country holds the greatest number