Cricket

Wednesday

Thomas Steventon

My miracle match against the Vatican’s cricket team

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

Thursday

Roger Alton

The inner secrets of Rory McIlroy

It’s easy to be sceptical about top sportsmen turning to psychologists for help. A bit precious, no? After all, what’s wrong with the good old Fergie hairdryer treatment to unmuddle the thinking of some bewildered player? But when you hear Rory McIlroy extolling the virtues of the man who gets inside his cranium you start to think a little differently. Dr Bob Rotella, a craggy sports shrink from Vermont, is, it turns out, one of the key members of McIlroy’s team and they have been working together for years. McIlroy paid a very handsome tribute to Rotella after his second successive Masters victory. Say what you like about Rory, but

Thursday

Kristina Murkett

The rise of the Oxbridge AI admissions cheat

‘This is the future, my wife says./ We are already there, and it’s the same/ as the present.’ So begins Ciaran O’Driscoll’s poem ‘Please Hold’, about a husband talking to a telephone robot and becoming ever more frustrated at the mind-numbing automation of modern-day life. There’s a lot of ‘Your call is important to us’ and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and ‘We appreciate your patience’, until eventually the speaker resigns himself to the fate of growing old while on hold. This same reluctant acquiescence can be seen with AI: this is the future, and we are already there. Except instead of asking us to hold, it’s always asking us how it

Sunday

Mike Jakeman

Australia’s cricket was just too good

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. Two days was all it took for Australia to eviscerate an undercooked England team in the first test in Perth. This is

Thursday

Roger Alton

Don’t blame Ben Stokes

So what was the best bit of this dispiriting Ashes series? Lucky you if you’ve found one, but for me – at the time of writing, before Jacob Bethell was belatedly allowed to unfurl his brilliance – it was the moving homage to the heroes of the Bondi massacre at the start of the Sydney Test. It was flawlessly executed, unlike a great deal of the cricket: a group of first responders, including paramedics, lifeguards, police and Ahmed al-Ahmed, the shopkeeper who disarmed one of the terrorists, were given a guard of honour as applause and cheers flooded the ground. If it didn’t bring a tear to the eye, check

Tuesday

Henry Blofeld

An obituary for Bazball

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

Saturday

Andrew Strauss

My advice to Ben Stokes

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

Thursday

Roger Alton

Ben Stokes’s run-in with Aggers

There’s tetchy, and then there’s Ben Stokes ‘tetchy’ – pulling out his mic and stomping off cursing, or so I’m told, after Jonathan Agnew asked a disobliging question. Admittedly it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Stokes, an inspirational leader on the pitch who had just seen his team skewered in two days in Perth in one of the most brutal (and thrilling) Ashes Tests in history, and then had to do a live BBC interview. But this was the ever-courteous Aggers, for heaven’s sake, the nearest thing to a secular saint for TMS.  There’s no need for a four-letter outburst. He was asking what were standard if faintly

Thursday

Roger Alton

Ben Stokes will go down as the greatest captain of modern times

And so it begins, as Donald Trump likes to say, though not usually about cricket. He was offering his thoughts on the New York mayoral elections, which is not as much fun as the Ashes. Pleasingly, the goading is reaching volcanic levels as the Perth Test gets ever closer. Who needs Trump? The West Australian is not a paper many readers will be familiar with but its pages have been plastered with pictures of English players making their way through arrivals at Perth airport. A large photograph of Ben Stokes pushing his luggage trolley was headlined ‘BAZ BAWL’, with the subheading ‘England’s Cocky Captain Complainer, still smarting from “crease-gate”, lands

Monday

Mark Mason

Why I’d take a close Ashes defeat over an easy victory

The Ashes start this week. If, as an England supporter, you were given the following two choices, which would you pick? First: England win the series 5-0. Second: the series ebbs and flows, the teams arrive in Sydney locked at 2-2, the match goes down to the final hour of the final day, and England lose. If you went for the second option, you’re my kind of fan. I’ve always preferred to see my team (or player) lose narrowly than win easily. Sport is there to entertain us. This is the supporter equivalent of ‘It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts’. As a fan, you get excited

Sunday

Henry Blofeld

England will win the Ashes

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

Thursday

Roger Alton

The maverick magnificence of Henry Pollock

‘Gosh he seems full of himself’ was how my friend’s wife reacted when she came in to see Henry Pollock celebrating his stunning try against the Aussies at the weekend. And she was spot on too: 20-year-old Pollock, England rugby’s latest prodigy, whips up emotions, not least the desire from anyone who has played against him – and plenty who haven’t – to give him a good belting. He’s swaggering, confident, brash, with rockstar charisma and a bleached blond mop, and he can wind up opponents until they need a bomb disposal expert to calm them down. Referees might soon want to tell him to rein it in. That’s youth

Thursday

The Spectator

How long does it take to build a runway?

Flight path How long does it take to build a runway? — 33 years (at least) in the case of Heathrow’s third runway, first consulted on by Gordon Brown’s government in 2007, but which is not expected to be open until 2040 at the earliest. — 17 years in the case of Gatwick’s second operational runway, which involves the current emergency runway being moved 40ft to the north. Proposed in 2013 by Gatwick airport and approved by the government this week, it could be in service by 2030. — 90 days in the case of Tegel airport, Berlin, work on which started 5 August 1948, during the Berlin Airlift. It

Thursday

Tim Rice

My new show with Andrew Lloyd Webber

The week of my cricket team’s annual tour of Cornwall. I formed Heartaches CC in 1973 and 765 games later it is still going strong. Not that I am a key component of the side these days, if I ever was, despite my seven wickets against Mullion in 1991. When I suffered my fourth injury in three of the past four seasons (and one of them occurred when I was minding my own business umpiring) I saw the writing on the scoreboard. I just hope I’m not injured as a spectator this year. For some reason 2025 has been an extraordinarily hectic year, musicals wise. Annoyingly hectic in fact. I

Thursday

Roger Alton

Why three is the magic number in these Ashes

And so it begins, the Great Debate: no, not who will be deputy leader of the Labour party but the infinitely more important – and certainly more interesting – matter of who will be trudging out at No. 3 to bat for England in the first Ashes Test at Perth, which is now ominously close. Almost as close as the moment the first bars of Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ starts plinking round the supermarket. For some, the choice of Ollie Pope or Jacob Bethell is like saying whether you’d rather be buried or cremated. And sure, the days of Jonathan Trott, Ian Bell and the great Nasser Hussain might be

Thursday

Patrick Kidd

The joy of school cricket

Few presidents can claim such an immediate success. At the end of June, I became president of my school’s alumni association and then, just five days later, the First XI won their first match at the annual Royal Grammar Schools’ Cricket Festival since 2017. A coincidence? Well, obviously. But I’d like to think that Colchester’s youth drew confidence from me having a net at the school field on Old Colcestrians’ Day and getting hit on the bonce by the first ball I faced from the sixty something head of Year 12. If this is how poorly the alumni play, they will have thought, we can’t be all that bad. I

Thursday

Henry Blofeld

Will Ben Stokes be fit for the Ashes?

What a marvellous summer this has been for Test cricket, which is sadly at risk of becoming an endangered species. The dramatic world of the T20 franchise, fuelled by the outrageous success of the Indian Premier League (IPL), has pushed traditional Test cricket uncomfortably close to the margins. The Test matches began with South Africa’s remarkable win over Australia at Lord’s in the World Test Championship final in June. This has been followed by a thrilling drawn series against India. These matches have perfectly illustrated the greater variety and more exciting possibilities the two-innings game has to offer. In two-innings cricket a side can be bowled out for 40 in

Tuesday

Michael Henderson

It’s hard to beat a drawn Test series

‘You can always tell a proper lover of cricket’, Michael Kennedy, the great music critic, liked to say. ‘It’s whether they can appreciate a draw.’ A hit, a palpable hit. By concluding a magnificent Test series at two matches each, after India’s victory in the fifth game at the Oval, even England’s disappointed players may nod in agreement. They fell seven runs short, but nobody lost. Everybody who took part in this contest of equals should feel proud. ‘Proper’ cricket-lovers will have no doubt, for this contest was one for the annals. All five matches went into the fifth day, and India eventually prevailed by the tightest winning margin in

Thursday

Roger Alton

The Ashes just got spicy

You don’t have to look hard to find swaths of sports fans around the world who dislike England – England’s men’s teams that is. The women are a different matter. Now, surprise surprise, the Australians have come to the party. If they ever left. The trigger this time is Ben Stokes’s surly behaviour to the Indians at the end of the fourth Test when Washington Sundar and Ravi Jadeja chose to bat on to pick up their centuries, rather than march off for the draw that Stokes wanted. All that was left was sledging: ‘Fucking hell, Washi, get on with it,’ said Harry Brook, who never shuts up; ‘If you

Dot Wordsworth

Is it ‘off his own back’ or ‘off his own bat’?

During the last Olympics, Jane Edwards from Worcestershire wrote to the Times observing that Mrs Malaprop herself would have found stiff competition from commentators saying: ‘Edging their bets’, ‘Having a conflab’, ‘In one fowl swoop’ and ‘Off his own back’. The Olympic legacy has certainly included ‘off his own back’. It is curious how often it turns up in sporting contexts, considering it is a mangling of a metaphor from cricket, ‘off his own bat’. In Trollope’s novel from 1869, He Knew He Was Right, in which a brittle-sounding character is called Glascock (which I suspect is pronounced Glasgow), a lesser hero, Hugh Stanbury, asks an old servant of his