Cricket

As dreams of winning the Ashes became, well, the only word is ash, for 4-0 is not a number even I would minimise, there is a place — a restaurant actually — where you can hold the Ashes in your hands. Calm down. What, as I imagine myself telling Chris Grayling all the time, would your cardiologist say? They may not be the real Ashes — the person looking after them was vague, like a parent telling a child that Father Christmas would probably come down the chimney on Christmas Eve, they couldn’t really say, but it’s quite likely. This restaurant is the Long Room at Lord’s Cricket Ground, the home of Maryle-bone Cricket Club. I don’t have a sport — just arguing — but if I make mistakes, please write in like angry birds.

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 enjoyed a halcyon summer and, in Australia, David Warner is a formidable batsman. True, too, that Australia’s attack hunted well together.

And so to a cloudy, chilly Adelaide, more like London in October than Australia in the early days of high summer, for one of the most thrilling Ashes Tests of modern times. Now the key moments in the fate of these Ashes are becoming very clear. Forget Joe Root putting Australia in, or Steve Smith’s unimaginative reluctance to give his bowlers more work and enforce the follow-on on the third day under the lights. Forget that rousing final session for England as the pink ball seamed and darted and hooped as if it were on crystal meth, and the Aussies were reduced to 53 for four. Forget even that extraordinary fightback led by Root that, for a tantalising few hours, allowed us to dream of a miraculous victory.

So the Ashes has finally got over the line, and not a minute too soon. At the time of writing we don’t know what happened in the first day but it’s a fair bet that it hasn’t turned out well for England — they haven’t won in Brisbane since 1986. Steve Harmison’s first-ball delivery to second slip heralded the 2006-07 whitewash and Mitchell Johnson’s merciless spells on the second day set up another 5-0 Ashes wipeout in 2013-14, as well as ending the careers of a few England players. Which is what Nathan Lyon wants this time too, but you can’t get that worked up about Aussie trash talk, especially from an off-spinner generally agreed to be a thoroughly nice guy. The English policy of keeping shtum seems more sensible.

So West Ham took the least surprising option and sent for David Moyes. Same old same old. I have a feeling that if Theresa May fell on her, or anyone else’s, sword, we’d send for David Moyes and that familiar figure would be shuffling up Downing Street with his wrinkly-eyed grin, proclaiming outside No. 10: ‘We’re in a relegation battle here.’ He wouldn’t be wrong either. Looking at West Ham’s lacklustre performances, with players sometimes putting on a bit of a reluctant jog in vague pursuit of opponents sprinting past, it’s easy to imagine them in the dressing room with a fag and some of owner David Sullivan’s old top-shelf magazines.

Rugby’s autumn internationals are almost upon us and dark thoughts hover over lovers of the sport. One day soon a professional rugby player will die playing the game. The players are fitter, bigger, stronger, faster and too powerful and it is no longer a 15-man game. It is a 23-man game: more than half the team gets replaced so the intensity and impact never subsides. Rule changes around the breakdown to encourage attack have had the opposite effect, meaning that defences line up across the pitch, no space is created and every game is 80 minutes of unsustainable collisions. Seasons go on longer, players get no rest and they keep smashing into each other.

In the rarefied circles of the sporting establishment a decision will soon be made affecting not just the future of 17 of the most hallowed acres in the land, but the very game of cricket itself. The MCC has been conducting a debate about Lord’s, primarily its redevelopment, with a nod to future expansion of the limited-overs game. This has boiled down to a binary choice for members: the MCC committee’s overwhelming recommendation, unsurprisingly, is for its own ‘Masterplan’, against the outsider, known as the Morley-Rifkind plan. It’s a rum sort of club, the MCC. Primarily devoted, it seems, to keeping people out, it has people on the inside who don’t want much to change.

Stereotypes die hard. Consider the summer game, for instance. It is axiomatic to complain that cricket is a desperately conservative game, run by fuddy-duddies, inimitably hostile to reform or change or modernity.  If anything the pad is on the other leg; there are times when cricket’s rush to attract new audiences leaves one suspecting that the game’s presiding officers think the sport’s current audience is part of the problem. If you like things the way they are and have been you’re an obstacle to progress. Sometimes, at least in darker moments, you think cricket’s administrators are so caught up in and obsessed with the need to attract new fans they’d happily jettison the game’s existing admirers if that was the price of success.

The weather forecast last Saturday promised 100 per cent likelihood of rain. I like that formulation: it doesn’t leave much wiggle room. And so it turned out as I pitched up at the Oval just as the players trooped off in the wet. Even so, at the halfway stage, there was still a 100 per cent likelihood of an England victory; 250 odd runs ahead, nine wickets remaining, and a fragile South African batting side. This has been an odd series: three intensely uncompetitive matches but some thrilling Test cricket. England may have stumbled upon the best side for the Ashes and that tricky first morning in Brisbane. Of the three England newcomers at the Oval I like the look of Tom Westley most. Could England have found a proper no. 3 at last? He hit a half-century on his Test debut at no.

For obvious reasons this column always welcomes ‘King Roger Rules The World’ headlines on the back pages. And the front too. So warm congrats from one Rog to the greatest Rog of all. Is Federer the best sportsman ever? Pelé? Ali? Bradman? Maybe, but it’s hard to challenge Rog. Look at this year: two grand slams at 35 and four children under seven to tire him out, too. What odds on the two sets of Federer twins for the mixed doubles in 2040? Their dad will probably still be reaching the quarter-finals. Though just a word Rog: maybe you were slightly overdoing the whole Von Trapp shtick with the younger twins in their little suits and you in floods of tears. I mean I know you’re Swiss, but baby blue?

There is, let us be honest, a certain kind of England supporter who derives some cheerful satisfaction from disaster and weak-minded capitulation. Many England cricket supporters - for it is summer and time to put away minor matters such as Brexit and concentrate instead on more substantial civilisational matters - are naturally crepuscular, forever looking forward to the dying of the light. And why not? There is much to be said for being an Eeyore, especially if - as sometimes seems to be the case - being a Tigger is the only available alternative. Nevertheless, it is always a mistake to take things too far. Today’s miserable collapse at Trent Bridge, where England have been beaten by 340 runs, losing twenty wickets inside 100 overs, is a case in point.

A funny thing happened on my way to lunch last week. I opened the Daily Mail and read a few snippets about the Camilla–Charles saga by Penny Junor, stuff to make strong men weep with boredom. But then a certain item caught my eye: ‘Camilla and the Queen finally met in the summer of 2000, when Charles threw a 60th birthday party at Highgrove for his cousin King Constantine of Greece… They shook hands, smiled at one another, Camilla curtseyed, and they had a moment or two of small talk before going to different tables for lunch.’ Hey, wait a minute, I told myself. You were there, for God’s sake, and had much too much firewater. It had obviously slipped my mind, 17 years and 5,000 booze-ups later. Thinking back, I remember it well.