Cricket

Blame it on a marketing survey. In 2001, the England and Wales Cricket Board commissioned the biggest piece of market research in the game’s history. They were told cricket was ‘socially inaccessible’, and that there existed a vast swath of ‘cricket tolerators’ — those who didn’t hate the game yet didn’t attend matches. So the ECB decided to take cricket to them. Twenty20, which could be crammed in after work on a midsummer’s evening, was created in the summer of 2003. The new game followed a traditional path: born in England, but perfected abroad. After India overcame its initial opposition, the country inexorably became the home of T20. A decade

‘Ah, the old man injury!’ That’s what people said when I busted my calf a couple of years ago. At the time I laughed it off because in more than 20 years I’d never suffered any serious injuries, aside from my knee in 2012/13. No back problems or proper muscle tears. I was having a great time on the T20 circuit, playing to 84,000 spectators in Melbourne. Then, last year, I tore my calf again playing for Surrey. At that point I started to worry that it was going to happen all the time. When you sign these T20 contracts the last thing you want is to have to leave

When the much-admired (and very tall) literary agent Gillon Aitken died in October 2016, he left most of his estate in a charitable trust to be named after his daughter Charlotte, who had, very sadly, predeceased him. Quite soon, the trust will start its work, which is to ‘educate the public in the appreciation of literature’, including poetry and drama, by whatever means seem appropriate — to include prizes, grants, scholarships, the funding of retreats, courses and so on. As one of the trustees, my job is to find the best ways to fulfil Gillon’s wishes. The slate is blank. My first feeling is that there are too many prizes

The only thing, as a modern-day Macauley might observe, more ridiculous than the British public in one of their periodic fits of morality is the Australian public acting in just such a fashion. To which we might also add that the spectacle of Australia melting itself in an orgy of cant and humbug cannot avoid being hilarious.  Thus far, the ball-tampering scandal rocking Australian cricket has resulted in the dismissal of Steve Smith, the country’s captain, David Warner, his deputy, Cameron Bancroft, the latest Australian opening batsman, and Darren Lehmann, the team’s coach. Given how high this goes, there’s an argument for James Sutherland, the chief executive of Cricket Australia,

It has been a pretty ghastly winter and the best that may be said of it is that by far the worst of it is now in the past. The sooner England can get the hell out of Australia the better. It is true that few people, I think, viewed this tour with any kind of inflated optimism; nevertheless the manner of England’s defeats – after an initial promising two days in Brisbane – has been grindingly dispiriting. When even Glenn McGrath is reduced to saying, in effect, ‘Cheer up cobbers, you were more competitive than last time you ventured here’ you know the game is up.  True, Steve Smith