Cricket

Apologies for the (unconscionable?) delay in posting this latest installment. I know this has disappointed some of you. What can I say? Well, the truth is that Firefox ate this post and this set me back a few days as it was some time before I could muster the energy or enthusiasm to write a new version. Still, you can't discount indolence as a factor either. Anyway, here we are at last. This series has featured teams skippered by: Armstrong, Benaud, Constantine, Dexter,  Edrich,  Fry, Gower,  Hutton and Imran. There are some tough cookies in that list, you'll agree, but none sterner than the man leading the J XI onto the field: Douglas Robert Jardine. THE J XI 1. Sanath Jayasuriya (SL) 2. Archie Jackson (AUS) 3. Mahela Jayawardene (SL)4. FS Jackson (ENG)5.

Since I'm too young to have seen Dennis Lillee in his absolute prime, Malcolm Marshall is the greatest fast bowler I've watched in my lifetime. He would have been 50 this month, but for the colon cancer that killed him. Pat Lynch remembers the great Barbadian here. One fine story that has just a hint of the Golden Age about it: What he said, he meant, as he did at Pontypridd when playing for Hampshire. With two days remaining, Glamorgan were 13 runs ahead in their second innings with seven wickets left. Just before the start of play in front of a full dressing room Marshall rang his Southampton golf club and booked a tee-time for 4pm that day. In the first session Marshall took six of the seven remaining wickets, leaving Hampshire 70 to win, which they accomplished before lunch. At 4.

After  Armstrong, Benaud, Constantine, Dexter,  Edrich,  Fry and Gower it is clearly time for Len Hutton's lads to take the field. This, I submit, is a pretty strong 'H' XI. It would have been posted three days ago had I not been paralysed by indecision brought on by the difficulty of selecting the man to bat at 6. 1. Jack Hobbs (ENG)2. Len Hutton (ENG) (Capt)3. Wally Hammond (ENG)4. George Headley (WI)5. Neil Harvey (AUS)6. Clem Hill (AUS)7. Richard Hadlee (NZ)8. Ian Healy (AUS) (Wkt)9. Michael Holding (WI)10. Wes Hall (WI)11. Harbhajan Singh (IND) Country representation in the series so far: England 34, Australia 16, West Indies 12, India 8, South Africa 7, Pakistan 5, New Zealand 5, Zimbabwe 1. Selection discussion after the jump...

Well, better late than never, here's the long, even keenly, awaited G XI. No excuses for its late arrival, but comfort yourselves with the thought that you'll have less time to wait before the H XI arrives to batter everyone else's bowling to pieces. So, following Armstrong, Benaud, Constantine, Dexter,  Edrich and Fry, it is time for Gower. 1. Sunil Gavaskar (IND)2. Gordon Greenidge (WI)3. David Gower (ENG) (Capt)4. WG Grace (ENG)5. Tom Graveney (ENG)6. Adam Gilchrest (AUS) (Wkt)7. Tony Greig (ENG)8. Jack Gregory (AUS) 9. Joel Garner (WI)10. Clarrie Grimmett (AUS)11.

One of the great annual treats is upon us: yes, the 2008 edition of Wisden arrived this morning. As always, the obituaries provide some of the best reading. To wit, Mike Brearley's father, Horace who died last August aged 94. He was: A batsman who played once for Yorkshire before the war, and twice for Middlesex afterwards...Mike himself tells the story of his father's only game for Yorkshire, which was against Middlesex: "He batted an No. 5, and faced a side that contained three leg-spinners. Horace had never, or almost never, been confronted by a googly bowler, and here were three all at once. But he was a typical Yorkshireman, and his comment about the occasion was to complain that Len Hutton kept pinching the bowling. One might have though that this would have suited him fine.

After Armstrong, Benaud, Constantine, Dexter and Edrich it must be time for a bit of Fry. 1. Roy Fredericks (WI) 2. Jack Fingleton (AUS)3. CB Fry (ENG) (Capt)4. Tip Foster (ENG)5. Andy Flower (ZIM) 6. Aubrey Faulkner (SA) 7. Andrew Flintoff (ENG)8. Frank Foster (ENG)9. Bruce French (ENG) (Wkt) 10. Arthur Fielder (ENG) Fazal Mahmood (PAK)11. Tich Freeman (ENG) If some teams are a chore to select, others are a pleasure. This is one such delightful XI.There are names to conjour with aplenty: Fry, Faulkner, the (unrelated) Fosters, Freeman... And names one wishes to have been able to include too such as Percy Fender or Chuck Fleetwood-Smith. But there can only be XI and these are they.

Attention cricket fans: this is the best video you will have seen in ages. Left Arm Chinaman reconstructs the miserable first test between England and New Zealand... using blu-tack. Genius.

So here we are again. After Armstrong, Benaud, Constantine and Dexter we come to John Edrich's XI. 1. John Edrich (ENG) (Capt)2. Matthew Elliott (AUS)3. Bill Edrich (ENG)4. George Emmett (ENG)5. Russell Endean (SA)6. Farokh Engineer (IND) 7. Godfrey Evans (ENG) (Wkt)8. Steve Elworthy (SA)9. Richard Ellison  (ENG) 10. Phil Edmonds (ENG)11. Tom Emmett(ENG) Poor Godfrey Evans. What has he done to deserve this? Evans, arguably the greatest wicket-keeper (note, I do not say wicketkeeper-batsman) to play the game, finds himself in shabby, mortal company. Well, that's what happens when you're unlucky enough to have a surname starting with E. Suffice it to say that selecting this XI was neither an exciting nor a delicious experience.

Ross responds to my gentle tweaking about baseball and cricket here. He makes some fair points. But thinking about it just now, it occurs to me that there's another major difference between British sports and their American counterparts that sets British sports apart. Namely, participation. With the obvious and notable exception of basketball, it's notable that very few people actually play the major American sports. Sure, kids play American football and baseball in school and some - a minority obviously - will do so in college but very few adults actually play these sports.

Today, being perhaps the best day of the year*, is a good moment to consider Ross Douthat's assertion that John Rawls was right. We do not speak of philosophy, of course, but of something much more important: sport. More specifically, Rawls' belief that "baseball is the best of all games."There's something to this, for sure, though really it would be better rendered as "Baseball is the best of all American games" - a sentiment with which it would be hard to quibble, much though I also admire and enjoy college football (Go Blue!). Ross elaborates: One could go on to note the perfect balance that baseball strikes between team effort and individual performance, a balance at once deeply Christian and deeply small-d democratic.

In the wake of Armstrong and Benaud and Constantine we come, as we must, to Dexter. THE D XI 1. Stewart Dempster (NZ)2. Ted Dexter (ENG) (Capt)3. Rahul Dravid (IND)4. KS Duleepsinhji (ENG)5. Martin Donnelly (NZ)6. Basil D'Oliveira (ENG) 7. Jeff Dujon (WI)  (Wkt) 8. Alan Davidson (AUS) 9. Bruce Dooland (AUS) 10. Allan Donald (SA) 11. Dilip Doshi (IND) This was a more difficult selection than some and a degree of ingenuity and no small measure of research were required before I could finalise the XI. A reminder of the criteria: the side must, as best as is possible, be balanced, however balance must not be fetishised to the point that it compromises excellence. Style and flair are favoured, generally speaking, over solid reliability.

You didn't think I'd forgotten did you? After Armstrong and Benaud we come, logically enough, to Chappell Constantine. [Updated after much dithering. To hell with  it, however, romance demands that Learie be skipper. Thanks to Sam G for reminding me of this.] THE C TEAM 1. Jimmy Cook (SA)2. George Challenor (WI)3. Greg Chappell (AUS) 4. Denis Compton (ENG)5. Martin Crowe (NZ)6. Colin Cowdrey (ENG)7. Jock Cameron (SA) (Wkt)8. Learie Constantine (WI) (Capt)9. Colin Croft (WI)10. Jack Cowie (NZ)11. Bhagwat Chandrasekhar (IND) This is, as you will notice, a less balanced side than those previously selected in this series. Also, I suspect, a less formidable one.

I've mentioned CLR James' Beyond A Boundary before now, but searching a moment ago for something else I came across this 1984 review in the The New York Times. The author asks: It is... hard to tell how much of what Mr. James says is playful hyperbole and how much is passionate advocacy. Can he be entirely serious when he writes, ''I believe and hope to prove that cricket and football were the greatest cultural influences in 19th-century Britain, leaving far behind Tennyson's poems, Beardsley's drawings and concerts of the Philharmonic Society''? Well, would anyone take the other side of this argument? That is to say, who would claim seriously that Tennyson, Beardsley and the dear old Philharmonic were greater cultural influences than cricket and football?

After the great success of the first installment of our alphabetical cricket teams, it's only natural that we move on to, yes, The B Team. As always, have your say in the comments. THE B TEAM 1. Geoffrey Boycott (ENG)2. Sid Barnes (AUS)3. Donald Bradman (AUS)4.  Ken Barrington (ENG)5. Allan Border (AUS)6. Ian Botham (ENG)7. Richie Benaud (AUS) (Capt)8.  Mark Boucher (SA) (Wkt)9. Alec Bedser (ENG)10. SF Barnes (ENG)11. Colin Blythe (ENG) Selection notes: Tough to decide who should bat number 3 in this largely Anglo-Australian side, obviously. Any team with Bradman is going to be competitive. Apart from the Don, it's not the most exciting batting line-up but that gives him freedom to motor along at whatever pace he chooses.

The internet is all about niche, right? It's clear to me that there's an as yet unfilled opening for a blog that combines analysis of the latest shenanigans between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton with equally speculative and ill-informed musings on England's tour of New Zealand. We break new ground here, folks, with the world's first (I believe) cricket-politics live-blog... We'll be roaming all over the globe tonight, taking in the results from Ohio and Texas as well as the action from Hamilton as the Black Caps take on the visiting English... 9.14pm: Michael Vaughan makes a hash of the toss. He calls heads and it's tails. Daniel Vettori and his boys will have a bat. Odds on Steve Harmison hitting second slip on the knee with the first ball of the match? 9.

It's late on a fiercely cold evening with the rain lashing and the wind howling down the Yarrow valley. Obviously, then, it's time for an exciting new Debatable Land series! Readers possessing elephantine memories may recall this post in which I confessed - nay, revelled! - in being a cricket geek. I'm not alone in this. Like a good number of other sensitive souls I often spend idle moments (of which, blessedly, there are many) selecting imaginary cricket XIs. Thus one can spend hours pondering the greatest West Indies XI of time or the finest selection of left-handed cricketers or, well, you get the idea. An old and favourite variety of this parlour game is to choose sides whose players all share a surname that begins with the same letter.

So farewell, Adam Gilchrist. Norm marks his retirement with all the right links: You may not know him from Adam, but I have to mark the retirement from Test cricket of one of the greats of the game. In the Adelaide Test, just concluded, he passed Mark Boucher to go to the top of the table for the most Test dismissals by a wicket-keeper. Soon afterwards he annouced that he was calling it a day. What a day it has been. Two of its highlights I saw with my own eyes: his 152 at Edgbaston in 2001 - during this innings he shared a partnership of 63 with Glenn McGrath, McGrath's contribution to which was a single run - and the second-fastest Test century of all time, at Perth in 2006. Adam Gilchrist, people - it's been a pleasure to see him play.

A shocking teaser from Arts & Letters Daily: Hitler, Stalin...and Abdul Qadeer? Who is he and why might anyone want to talk about him in such monstrous company?... more» Quite. I was, as you might imagine, taken aback. I always liked and admired this man who, more than anyone else, kept the flame alive through the dark days when a hyperpower destroyed everything in its path, forcing the argument that There Was No Alternative to their way of doing things...