Cricket
Flying boards and killer moustaches
You can trust the BBC to behave like a leaf blown by any breeze, but even that spineless leviathan (if…
Death of a team
Englishmen used to be deported to Australia as a punishment. Now they get sent back to England as an act…
Winter warmers
James Cook’s third voyage as an English captain ended in disaster, stabbed to death and disembowelled by a pack of…
Sir Viv and me
Sir Vivian Richards came to watch me play cricket the other day. That’s the sort of sentence you wait a…
Captain courageous
Andrew Strauss is a serious man and Driving Ambition (Hodder, £20, Spectator Bookshop, £18) is a serious book. It looks…
All change at the top
In sport, as in life, you just don’t know where you stand any more. Look at the Premier League: no…
Bertie Wooster in the commentary box
There can be a strong strain of self-parody in even the greatest commentators. When Henry Blofeld describes the progress of…
A phoenix from the Ashes
Those of us who watched the last day of the final Ashes Test of the present series enjoyed a rare…
Teenage dreams
Were you still up, as they used to say about Portillo in the 1997 election, for Hedwall? It was well…
Failing the Test
Test Match Special is the sound of the English summer. Why are we letting it be vulgarised?
