Cricket

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...

Cricket Housekeeping: 1. Since this post making the case that Shane Warne is, indisputably, a greater cricketer than Muttiah Muralitharan it's only fair to note that Murali had the chance to show that he can win matches in Australia as well as Sri Lanka. Granted, the tests were played at Brisbane and Hobart rather than Sydney but still: four wickets at 100 apiece is not an impressive return. 2. England are now preparing - in their usual slapdash* style - for a series in Sri Lanka. Having wisely decided to leave the best English batsman at home (that would be Mark Ramprakash, who, though 38, has enjoyed a Bradmanesque flowering at Surrey) gambled instead on the fitness and mental health of Steve Harmison to find some sort of form. To no-one's great surprise, Harmison is now injured.

Warning: Cricket blogging! Via Norm, I find that The Guardian asked Phil Simmons and Gary Kirsten to debate the question, Is Shane Warne better than Muttiah Muralitharan? A superficial analysis of the numbers might suggest that Murali has the edge. But then you need to remember that Murali's figures are padded by the fruits of no fewer than 25 tests against hapless Zimbabwe and Bangladesh (Warne has a total of three tests against such feeble competition). Secondly, Wanre's record away from home is just as good as his record at home; Murali is less effective away from the comforts of Sri Lankan wickets. Thirdly, their records when they confront the world's best players of spin in India are broadly similar. You can make an eminently defensible case for either man.

When I saw that The Atlantic had a feature on "The Greatest Sports Book Ever Written" in its October edition I thought, well, that's nice but I daresay they really mean "The Greatest Sports Book Ever Written That Isn't About Cricket." Be wary of your assumptions. turns out I underestimated the Atlantic's taste and perspicacity. For, lo, there it is: a fine piece by Joseph O'Neill explaining why CLR James' Beyond A Boundary is an important work - though a mystifying one should you have no knowledge of the greatest game of them all. O'Neill concludes that it's sad that Beyond A Boundary is off-limits to Americans. But I'm not so sure that's the case. I'm generally a fan of globalisation, but I draw a line in the sand when it comes to cricket.

Americans or, for that matter, anyone unfortunate enough to know little about - and worse, care nothing - for cricket may be advised to pass by this post. You've had your warning. As a kid I used to spend rather more time playing imaginary games of cricket than might have been considered wholly healthy. Actually, to say I was playing is inaccurate. I was selecting teams that would do battle for hours on end in my own modified - and more complicated - version of Dice Cricket (modified in part to take account of different ground conditions: thus a test at Headingley would take place with a grid more thinly populated with run-scoring opportunities than one prepared for the more comfortable batting enjoyed at the Oval).