Cricket
Ben Stokes’s run-in with Aggers
There’s tetchy, and then there’s Ben Stokes ‘tetchy’ – pulling out his mic and stomping off cursing, or so I’m…
Ben Stokes will go down as the greatest captain of modern times
And so it begins, as Donald Trump likes to say, though not usually about cricket. He was offering his thoughts…
England will win the Ashes
The build-up to any Ashes series in Australia provides great entertainment all of its own. This time, as the first…
The maverick magnificence of Henry Pollock
‘Gosh he seems full of himself’ was how my friend’s wife reacted when she came in to see Henry Pollock…
How long does it take to build a runway?
Flight path How long does it take to build a runway? — 33 years (at least) in the case of…
My new show with Andrew Lloyd Webber
The week of my cricket team’s annual tour of Cornwall. I formed Heartaches CC in 1973 and 765 games later…
Why three is the magic number in these Ashes
And so it begins, the Great Debate: no, not who will be deputy leader of the Labour party but the…
Will Ben Stokes be fit for the Ashes?
What a marvellous summer this has been for Test cricket, which is sadly at risk of becoming an endangered species.…
Is it ‘off his own back’ or ‘off his own bat’?
During the last Olympics, Jane Edwards from Worcestershire wrote to the Times observing that Mrs Malaprop herself would have found…
The Ashes just got spicy
You don’t have to look hard to find swaths of sports fans around the world who dislike England – England’s…
The sorry demise of Windies cricket
The tub-thumping atmosphere in the Long Room at Lord’s was so raucous late on Monday afternoon as India and England…
The force of Typhoon Tyson, Sydney, 1954
After receiving a bouncer from Ray Lindwall that left him temporarily unconscious, England’s fast bowler Frank Tyson swore vengeance and annihilated the Australian team – to retain the Ashes
Wine to pass the cricket Test
What to drink while watching cricket? Beer or even Pimm’s for the village green, but I think that a Test…
State-school cricket at Lord’s? Bring it on
A state-school cricket competition announced last week with a final at Lord’s is such a good idea you wonder why…
The (nearly) lost art of the Test match
If you can bear to turn away from the Fifa Club World Cup, take a moment to ponder cricket and…
Sportswashing? Bring it on…
If that was sportswashing, let’s have more of it. The Champions League final, when Paris Saint-Germain vaporised Inter Milan, was…
Is the Pope a Marxist?
Charleston, South Carolina H.L. Mencken, long a hero of mine, wrote: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know…
The unnecessary complexity of the World Test Championship
Have you booked your tickets for the World Test Championship yet? Did you even know it’s on? What seemed like…
Could Thomas Tuchel be the one?
You would have to be living a very sheltered life not to have noticed that the Premier League this season…
I’m a fighter, not a quitter
‘Ring out the old, ring in the new…’ This was the year I discovered that one of my ancestors had…
The best (and worst) of this year’s sport
It was quite a year for some of the worst of sport – America’s golfers, already among the richest and…
Who says Test cricket is boring?
Under a dark sapphire sky, tearing across grass as green as a lick of new paint, Mitchell Starc raced in…
The glaring mismatch in English football
Your starter for ten: who was the last English manager to win the top flight of English football? Treat yourself…
Sorry, but you’ve got to love the Springboks
There may still be some poor benighted souls who regard the Springboks as the bane of rugby union. If you…
Why women’s golf is better than men’s
In the exhilarating event of Somerset managing to sneak past Surrey and being on their way to claim their first…
