Roger Alton

Blizzards have been sweeping the country, so it must be the start of the cricket season. And sure enough MCC play Sussex, the champion county, in the annual throat-clearing match at Lord’s today: thermals at the ready please. Though quite why that has always opened the season is beyond me. And ask yourself where would you rather be: in St John’s Wood or flying out to Jaipur, to see Graeme Smith, Shane Warne and Younus Khan take on Chennai’s M.S. Dhoni, Matthew Hayden and Muralitharan in the Indian Premier League’s Twenty20 series which starts next week? In truth, though, for all its stately flummery, cricket has been very nimble in adapting itself to this changing world, while hanging on to the best of the rest. The 100th annual Army v.

Ashley Cole is a difficult man to warm to. The friends of Ashley, like the friends of Heather Mills, are small isolated groups emerging only after dark. But it’s just possible that this tiresome berk may have sparked a revolution that will improve football. The man who nearly crashed his car in fury when told by his agent that Arsenal were offering him the risible sum of £55,000 a week, made himself even less likable, if that were possible, when he childishly turned his back last week on referee Mike Riley who was booking him for a life-threatening challenge on Spurs’ Alan Hutton. Reaction afterwards started off slowly; gathering momentum through phone-ins, the media and even a bizarrely worded apology from Cashley. The FA briefed they would stamp down on bad behaviour.

Two dismal showings by England teams in less than 24 hours make the strongest hand reach for the Paracetamol. What on earth are England playing at? Stuffed by the Scots in a Six Nations match of mind-numbing tedium, then a few hours later the cricketers humiliated on the other side of the world by New Zealand in the first Test. Let’s look at expectation — and coaches. In the Ashes series of 2005, thrilling sure, but over time elevated into some preposterous mythic feat, there was roughly a cigarette paper between the teams. Or a dropped catch — Warne’s off Pietersen at the Oval. But it was like England were the all-conquering West Indians of the 1980s. Please. The Ashes seems to have marked the end of a process, rather than the beginning.

With Shilpa Shetty, Lachlan Murdoch, Aussie feist-meister Andrew Symonds and more Indian billionaires than you can shake a stump at, the eye-watering player-auction for the new Twenty20 Indian Premier League (IPL) in Mumbai last week was never going to be something tailored for the Long Room at Lord’s. But this should be good for cricket, and very good for good cricketers. Money well spent you might say. In case you missed it, some of the world’s best players were sold off to a new set of eight big-city franchises across India — Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Jaipur (where young Lachlan’s Emerging Media owns the team) among others — for mind-blowing sums that put cricket on to the same sort of scale as the Premier League or American Football.

My friend Simon has a lovely bench in his garden made up of the blue-painted wooden seats he sat in with his dad when they went to Rugby League decades ago. He bought them when the old Swinton ground was knocked down. That’s what a lot of sport’s about: you mustn’t let the past disappear. But we can’t sidestep the future either. So naturally Manchester United did a brilliant retro job last weekend for the Munich anniversary derby against City: the plain red shirts were gorgeous, the trad scarves on every seat inspired, only the haircuts had changed — oh, and the performance was rubbish.

First Serb Like this journal’s esteemed High Life commentator, I too have been spending too much time watching the last fortnight’s Australian Tennis Open from Melbourne — but unlike my colleague I found it an absolute revelation, with potentially lethal levels of thrills, shocks, gut-wrenching excitement and great grace in victory and defeat. For most people in Britain, tennis tends to be something they think about over a couple of weeks in mid-summer. Damn shame, that.

This afternoon we are saying farewell to the 11-year-old daughter of a close and much-loved colleague, Robin McKie, the revered and veteran science editor of the Observer. Olivia was killed in a road accident one Friday lunchtime. What the family has gone through is unimaginable, and everyone at the Observer has been affected by the tragedy. But the day is strangely uplifting. It is a brilliant, glorious early summer’s afternoon, warm, cloudless, glowing, and the crematorium is packed — with friends, colleagues and countless kids from Olivia’s school, their faces full of optimism but now shadowed by sadness. Her favourite colour was purple and we have all been asked to wear something in that colour.