Cricket

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.

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.

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 was open for operations on 5 November. Put to the Test Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird, who has died aged 92, was a fixture of the English summer between 1970 and 1996.

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 know I should be grateful for continued interest in past work but, in my 81st year, I should have spent more days at Lord’s or the Oval than in theatres.