Cricket

When the sonorous voice of Clive Myrie describes something as the ‘biggest sports story of the century’ in tones normally used for events in Kyiv or Gaza it’s probably time to sit up and listen. Or maybe not. The City saga – at root claiming that the club breached financial rules to pay its way from 2009 to 2018, when they won the Premier League three times – has been going on for eight years after all, and if Ferran Soriano, the chief executive, and the unfeasibly wealthy chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, know what they are talking about, it’s got plenty more time to run. God help us! And they do seem pretty bullish. None of this, ‘OK guv, you got us bang to rights, we’ll come quietly’ stuff. Personally, I find it difficult to get worked up about this story.

As Spectator readers will surely be aware, many of the stories we read in the papers nowadays are there not because they’re important, entertaining, moving or amusing, but because they’re the kind – about weight loss, true crime, celebrity and so on – that get the most ‘clicks’ from online readers. And clicks mean advertising. It’s the same in sport reporting: football is endlessly popular even when it’s quite dreary (and I mean you, ‘international break’); athletics much less so. Just doesn’t get the clicks, you see, even when it’s the most thrilling spectacle around – like the World Ultimate Championship in Budapest at the weekend.

Who’s the greatest athlete on the planet? It’s hard to look beyond the Slovenian cyclist Tadej Pogacar, five times winner of the Tour de France, 2024 Giro d’Italia champion, victor in 13 one-day classics and twice World Road Race champion. Last week, he had the Spanish Vuelta – the one Grand Tour he hasn’t yet won – virtually sewn up, when he was badly injured in an accident in the peloton and carted off to hospital with a broken collar bone. Thankfully, his injuries weren’t as bad as Chris Froome’s in his career-ending, life-threatening accident in August last year when he sustained five broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a lumbar vertebrae fracture and a tear to the sac surrounding the heart.

My father had been waiting his entire life for that whistle. After 75 years, the curse was over. Mayo were Gaelic football champions having overturned the second-biggest deficit in the history of All-Ireland finals. The county hadn’t seen such a miracle since Father Horan got the taoiseach to fund an international airport near the shrine of Our Lady of Knock. Three months before Dad was born in Castlebar, Mayo won the 1951 title. Their celebrations on the way home were exuberant and, so the legend goes, disrupted a funeral in Foxford. The furious priest (some versions blame the widow) cast a curse on them, saying Mayo would never again lift the Sam Maguire Cup while any of those players lived. Nonsense, right? Except that Mayo then lost 11 finals, four by one point.

There was always something of John Cleese’s Sir Lancelot about Ben Stokes, ever eager for a flamboyant rescue mission in his own particular, as Lancelot puts it, idiom. Leave no chandelier unswung, no buckle unswashed. He would charge in, gung-holier than thou, and work out the damage later. ‘When I’m in this idiom, I sort of get carried away,’ Lancelot apologises after massacring all the guests at a wedding.  At times, it was glorious. But often, increasingly so in the second half of his England captaincy, ghastly. ‘Incredible highs and pretty low lows’ was Stokes’s own assessment – and we will always be grateful for the highs. But as England rebuild, they need to consider the manner of those lows and how many were self-inflicted.

Whisper it if you must, but it looks as if Gianni (‘Today I feel gay…’) Infantino might have got it right with Fifa’s jumbo-busting World Cup, all 48 teams, 104 games and 39 days of it. Just look at some of the results: forget the Norwegians ‘Viking row’, Messi’s relentless brilliance, magnificent Mbappé, even wise Emma Hayes and her kitchen chalkboard. Look at tiny Cape Verde. With a population of 530,000, about the size of Bristol, it’s one-fifth the size of Jamaica, half that of Mauritius and one-third less than Gran Canaria. But they have been handling football’s aristocrats with the fervour of a French revolutionary execution party.

Cricketers Have Beer, Shock: well, who knew! This wretched incident in some joint in Chelsea involving Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson in a dust-up with some extremely large young Saracens rugby players is hardly world war three, but its ramifications are sending shudders through the cricket establishment. At the time of writing the full details are not entirely clear, though it seems that an England Cricket Board (ECB) security guard might have been accidentally thumped before a full-blown ruckus ensued. Nothing good ever happens after midnight – a sentiment readers will doubtless be familiar with Whether a well-known and widely admired 35-year-old international sportsman should have been out in a nightclub in the early hours of Monday morning is for others to judge.

Many have come to Rome seeking spiritual guidance: Thomas à Becket, Lord Byron, Lionel Richie. I came for a different purpose: to defend a papal cricket trophy. I am not Catholic. And until last year I had never played cricket before. It all started, as many great British stories do, with a pub: the Three Stags in Kennington. My friend Tom had invited me to what he described as a ‘Cricket Club Party’. As I headed upstairs, the barman’s quizzical look when I mentioned I was there for ‘the party’ should have given me cause for concern. As I came in through the doors, I was greeted by what appeared to be the end of a Sunday lunch and a collection of six individuals for whom the collective age would have been a record-setting Test score.

The longest postscript in sport is finally over. On the eve of the first Ashes test, which began on 21 November, English pundits were talking up their team’s best chance of winning down under in 30 years. Australia were old, slow and injured. Mark Wood, Jofra Archer and Josh Tongue would rough up the hosts with genuinely quick bowling. And Bazball, the only-good-vibes philosophy that had underpinned the team’s singular focus on the Ashes for the past two and a half years, would prevail. Such predictions proved as wild as Brydon Carse’s new-ball bowling. Australia mathematically retained the urn before Christmas. But in reality the Ashes were won on 22 November, the day after the series began.

Any account of the third test match, in Adelaide, inevitably becomes an obituary notice on England’s abortive attempt to wrestle the Ashes from Australia’s iron grip. There can be no doubt that trying to win the Ashes in Australia is the hardest task in the world of cricket – if further proof was needed.  The conditions, the ruthless determination of Australia’s cricketers and their huge and intensely patriotic crowds who believe that permanent possession of the Ashes is their God-given right, all help to make it the seemingly impossible task that faced Ben Stokes’s much heralded side. It has been a long time since English cricket and its supporters have experienced quite such a sense of let-down.

In preparation for the 2005 Ashes series, the late Graham Thorpe, a man I looked up to enormously, turned to me and uttered the immortal words: ‘Straussy, there is Test cricket and Ashes cricket. They are completely different things.’ Never has a truer sentence been spoken. The Ashes breaks out of the normal cricket bubble. It means more than cricket: this is a biennial arm-wrestle with the respective sporting reputations of two enormously proud nations on the line. The prize is a little urn but also bragging rights for the next two years. The result of the Ashes, whether positive or negative, invokes an intense emotional response. It makes people feel. That is why it is so important.

The build-up to any Ashes series in Australia provides great entertainment all of its own. This time, as the first test in Perth draws nearer, the contributions from former players in both camps have been unsurprising and surely unnecessary, and also a trifle shrill and irritating. These criticisms can hardly help with preparations for the toughest series of all. Why do old players feel it beholden upon themselves to do this? These ‘has-beens’, as Ben Stokes has pointedly called them, have effectively been saying ‘things ain’t what they used to be.’ They seldom are and these oldies should move with the times. Ian Botham and Graham Gooch have both said England is not preparing enough, with the team having only one three-day in-house practice game.