Ed Smith

Friday

Ed Smith

The best places to eat in and around London Bridge

Borough Market and the immediate vicinity is one of the best places to shop, eat, drink and socialise in the capital. London Bridge rail and bus station is one of the capital’s key transport hubs. Close to the City (and other businesses), on two key tube lines, and a gateway to both south London and the south-east more generally, it’s rammed with commuters, tourists and indeed residents every hour and day of the week. Which makes it an excellent place for groups of people to meet. It’s also an excellent place for those groups to eat… so long as they know where to look. There’s a depressing clutch of chain restaurants on Borough High Street. Ditto the streets leading to and in both directions along the Thames.

Thursday

Ed Smith

The prophetic fallacy

This book isn’t just about prediction, or even the limits of knowledge. It is about the ascent of man. According to Nate Silver, the American electoral analyst, the digital age and its explosion of knowledge constitute a great turning point in human history. Never before have we had so much evidence on which to base our predictions of the future. Yes, there have been setbacks along the way, but we should feel optimistic about the direction of travel. Yet there is a paradox about the evolution of prediction. Innovations in technology and information make it possible to analyse data far more quickly and extensively.  The availability of so much raw data, however, means that much of the analysis is woeful. There are many more bullets; but also many more inept marksmen. T. S.

Saturday

Ed Smith

All to play for | 4 February 2012

There was a time when sportsmen fretted about the morality of being paid to play. Now the question is whether you are taking money to win, or taking money to lose. Mervyn Westfield, the Essex fast bowler, was only 20 when he accepted £6,000 to bowl deliberately badly in a county match. Three Pakistani cricketers, of course, are in prison for the same offence. How quaint the old distinction between the amateur who plays for love and the pro who toils to make ends meet now appears. How did sport become so morally complicated? It was the Victorians, as Mihir Bose explores in The Spirit of the Game, who decided that sport had to be good for you. The Georgians, in contrast, had been content with sport’s more obvious pleasures of gambling, blood-letting and licentiousness.

Saturday

Ed Smith

He knew he was wrong — Daniel Kahneman interview

When I was 13, my school cricket team received a visit from a top professional cricket coach, an intoxicating visit from the big leagues. I tried to hear what the great man was saying as he watched us, how he advised our teacher. ‘Never praise kids — they only mess it up next time,’ I overheard him say. After pausing to berate me for a below-average cover drive, he whispered to the teacher, ‘It’s different with criticism — that really works.’ Like a typical cocky teenager, I longed for a clever riposte. Perhaps fortunately, I didn’t have the intellectual insight to deliver one.

Saturday

Ed Smith

Strauss rules

Andrew Strauss is arguably the most successful England captain of the modern era. He shares with Mike Brearley the distinction of having beaten Australia at home and away, and this year he became the first captain to take England to the top of the official world Test rankings. Yet, unlike Brearley, Strauss is not talked about with hushed awe. His achievements are acknowledged but not mythologised, and when we meet for lunch at a busy pub in the Chilterns, no one pesters him for an autograph. You sense that not becoming a superstar is one of Strauss’s ambitions and, as usual, he has got what he wanted. Strauss has never quite joined cricket’s aristocracy. Even this summer, as England closed in on the No.

Saturday

Ed Smith

Delightfully not cricket

Even brilliantly accurate satirists can become boring unless they have something to say. That is the triumph of CrickiLeaks. Purporting to be a series of spoof Ashes diaries that reveal the innermost thoughts of famous English and Australian cricketers, CrickiLeaks doesn’t just superbly capture the players’ voices and vocabularies, it also makes them say surprising, hilarious things. Like a champion batsman, CrickiLeaks raises its game when the challenge is greatest. Consider the difficulty of taking on Geoff Boycott. Every cricket fan has heard dozens of decent imitations of Boycott’s thick Yorkshire accent and self-confident manner. How could a satirist put anything new into Boycott’s mouth?

Saturday

Ed Smith

Swards of honour

Our independent schools have a proud tradition of cricket — and cricket grounds.Former England batsman (and Old Tonbridgian) Ed Smith picks his favourites   The excellence of the cricket grounds of England’s independent schools is a double-edged privilege. On the one hand, they are some of the most beautiful grounds on which to play and watch cricket anywhere in the country. On the other, the public schools contribute an increasingly high proportion of England’s professional cricketers. That’s great for the public schools; not so great for everyone else. In recent decades English sport has improved in many respects, but it’s hard to argue that meritocracy is one of them.

Ed Smith

Amateur hour

Thrilling as the race was, last week’s Cheltenham Gold Cup will leave an even more remarkable legacy: the winning jockey, Sam Waley-Cohen, did it as an amateur. Being a jockey isn’t his day job — he is the CEO of a dental business — and he races for love, not money. It’s not supposed to happen these days. According to the logic of professionalism, it is impossible to compete at the highest level, let alone win, unless you sacrifice all else. The word amateur has gone from being an accolade to a term of abuse. When coaches get seriously angry they call you ‘amateurish’, meaning sloppy and inept. When they are impressed they call you ‘a real pro’. The Gold Cup was a delicious snub to that simplistic view of excellence.

Saturday

Ed Smith

Ashes to Ashes

Australian cricket’s fearsome tradition of toughness may be coming to an end This is not wise. In fact, it is madness. For me, as a former professional cricketer, it is a hostage to fortune. For England, with the Ashes fast approaching, it could be worse: I am tempting fate and inviting revenge. It would be risky to whisper it at dinner, let alone spell it out in print. The timing is abysmal and I am not even sure I am right. But the idea will not leave me alone. A sneaking question keeps coming into my head: are Australia losing their cricketing edge? And I don’t just mean the Ashes. I mean the whole legend of the Aussie battler that has been constructed over decades of flinty toughness. Australia have lost their past four series. But it’s deeper than that.

Saturday

Ed Smith

Have pity on Pakistan

Cricket is often said to be a game of inches. An inch is the difference between a fatal edge to the slips and a safe play-and-miss; an inch is the difference between being clean bowled and a mere dot ball; only an inch separates a no-ball from a legitimate delivery that could take a wicket. But for Mohammad Amir, just a few inches have taken on a far greater significance than the question of winning or losing. It is alleged that the 18-year-old Pakistani prodigy bowled deliberate no-balls so that illegal gamblers could manipulate ‘spot’ betting. Had Amir’s foot stayed behind the line, we would still regard him as the most exciting fast bowler in the world. Instead, a photograph of his boot looks set to cast a shadow over his whole career.

Saturday

Ed Smith

Why it’s more than just a game

Simon Barnes, the brilliant writer about sport and nature, would never claim he has had much influence. No, he would say with a journalistic shrug, influence? Me? Of course not: I merely describe, amuse and draw attention to significant events. But his sportswriting, some of it for The Spectator, has been so original and insightful that he has redefined the genre. In doing so, by showing that sportswriting can reveal profound truths about human nature, he has also changed the way many of us look at sport itself. Appropriately, his new book, The Meaning of Sport, has a dual nature. It is about journalism, what life is like as a newspaper’s chief sports writer, and it is about sport — the essence of the stuff itself.

Saturday

Ed Smith

Winning against the odds

How serious a subject is sport? We know it is dramatic and revealing, but beneath the veneer of action and celebrity does sport justify a more considered analytical approach? There is a dual aspect here: does thinking have much to do with winning, and, if so, can the lessons of victory enhance our thinking about other, more ‘highbrow’ spheres? Michael Lewis — formerly of Salomon Brothers on Wall Street and this magazine — is at the forefront of those sportswriters who answer ‘yes’ to both questions. The heroes of his intimately researched sports books are the philosopher kings of sports coaching, men with original minds who rise above cliché-ridden sports chat.