Cricket

In the north of Antigua, just by the medical school, is a neat little cricket ground. It was a bit overgrown and bedraggled when I drove past the other day, but the small stand was still there, the changing rooms, the peeling scoreboard, and the sails of the kite-surfers dancing skittishly out on the Caribbean. It was all different in 2013 when a team of us from the UK played in a T20 match against a student side. The mid-afternoon start was breezy, the outfield rugged, but the ground was quite full of youngsters who had come to watch their friends give a pasting to a bunch of ageing overweight

And then there were none. The retirement of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the great Guyanese batsman, is the end of an era. He is the last of the old guard; the last of the great heroes from a time before the razzle-dazzle of the new 20/20 cricketing era. The last connection, too, to the time when the West Indies inspired terror, not pity. He was the last of my own Hornbys and Barlows; the last of the 1974 cohort to slip into the night. The torch will now be carried by other, younger, men. Many of them will prove to be wonderful but it will not be quite the same. My contemporaries no longer

England’s cricketers won a remarkable Test match inside three days in the bearpit of Johannesburg, a victory that put them 2-0 up in the four-match series, with only the final Test to play. It is a remarkable achievement by Alastair Cook’s team because, before a ball had been bowled, most judges expected South Africa, the No. 1 ranked team in the world, to claim another triumph by right. In particular it was a wonderful tribute to the public schools which sharpened the skills of the star players. Stuart Broad, who took six prime wickets for only 17 runs on that tumultuous third day, reducing South Africa’s second innings to rubble, was

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, decided to allow ministers to campaign for either side in the referendum on membership of the European Union, once his negotiations had been concluded on Britain’s relationship with the EU. The government said it was commissioning 13,000 houses to be built by small builders on public land made available with planning permission. Junior doctors decided to go on strike after all, starting with a day next week, after talks between the government and the British Medical Association broke down. In an extraordinarily drawn-out reshuffle, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, replaced Michael Dugher as shadow culture secretary with Maria Eagle, who was

So long, then, to another thrilling year of sport in which the full range of human possibility — from the dismal frailties of the recidivists who run world football to the brazen brilliance of Japan’s rugby players — made for an intoxicating mix. It began and ended with two epic highs. Back in January, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson made the first free ascent of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite, the most difficult route in rock climbing, taking 19 days in all. A truly awesome achievement. Most of us could barely get off the ground; Yosemite is 3,000 ft high. Then, almost at year’s end, another high: the only people who

In 1981, when I was ten and Ian Botham was 26, I thought he was God. Now, the week after Botham turned 60, the 44-year-old me thinks he’s an arse. And that makes me sad. The world is a simple place when you’re ten. There are heroes and villains, victories and defeats. The very best victories are the ones that were nearly defeats. Headingley 1981, for example. No need for the details — you know them already, not just from the match itself but from the hundreds of documentaries made about it since. I still lap them all up like an addict, silently mouthing along as Richie Benaud describes Botham’s six

From ‘W.G.’, The Spectator, 30 October 1915: The late Dr. W.G. Grace had become in his lifetime a legend, and he is likely to remain a legend as long as Englishmen play games. Never was such a cricketer; and it is almost safe to say that there will never be such a cricketer again, for the perfection of pitches and the high organisation of the game have left less scope than there used to be for a man to achieve so great a mastery over his fellows. In this respect cricket is like war; in first-class cricket, as in war among first-class Powers, there is the same human material for personal ascendancy,

The roar of the Premier League is beginning to drown out everything else in sport (there’s even Friday night football now: another blissful resting place occupied. Shouldn’t we ring-fence some time — greenbelt-style — that football can’t colonise, say 2 a.m. on a Monday, that’s preserved from football’s endless development?) But while there’s a chance, let’s not lose sight of a great Englishman and a great English achievement. This Ashes series has not been a good contest; they often aren’t. But with his modesty, determination and resilience, it has been a personal triumph for the captain Alastair Cook. Not long ago, a chorus of self-appointed cricket ‘legends’ in the media

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3″ title=”Alex Massie and Michael Henderson discuss England’s victory against Australia” startat=1184] Listen [/audioplayer]Adelaide airport, 2006. One of those serpentine check-in queues that bring you face to face with a long series of different people. I was leaving, everyone I knew in the queue was carrying on to Perth. See you at Lord’s, then. Sure. Safe trip. Quiet voices. No jokes. Minimal eye contact. Listless body-language. An overwhelming sense of shared experience. Shared bad experience. We were like, in kind if not in degree, people suffering from disaster shock. As if we’d experienced an earthquake. A loss of certainties, identity, hope. Thank God I was leaving: those poor buggers

All across the country this afternoon struggling club sides could cheer themselves with the thought that once their batsmen had survived for 112 deliveries they were doing better than Australia managed in their first innings in Nottingham this week. Australia’s capitulation in 18.3 overs – a Nelson of deliveries – might just be the most extraordinary thing any of us have ever seen on a cricket field. Even now, 48 hours later, it still seems shocking. And when England motored to 274/4 by the end of that first, astonishing, day it occurred to me that this might well have been the single best day of English test cricket in my

What a terrific summer of sport it’s been: a wonderful Wimbledon, a rollicking Royal Ascot, an absorbing Ashes series that still has the best part of two Tests to go. And now along comes football, barging its way on to the back pages, shoving the other sports aside, sniggering all the way to the bank. Every August, the ‘beautiful game’ reasserts itself as the playground bully. Football is the most popular sport in this country — and the nastiest. It has become a cesspit of greed, debauchery and racism, especially in Britain. It is crude and overbearing and has all the subtlety of a disco at Holy Communion. I feel

While Aggers, Blowers, Tuffers and the Test Match Special team entertain us from Edgbaston this week, a different sort of cricket commentary is being broadcast live from a sports bar in north London. Guerilla Cricket, son of the alternative Test Match Sofa, is everything TMS is not. Expect music, drinking, occasional swearing, masses of interaction with fans and plenty of jingles. When Ian Bell trots out to bat, you’ll hear Anita Ward’s ‘You can ring my bell,’ for Joe Root it’s Odyssey’s ‘Going back to my roots’. You get the picture. Guests come and go and are an eclectic bunch, from David Papineau, professor of philosophy of science at King’s College London, to the novelist Nick Hogg, member of the Authors’ XI. It’s safe to say that Alastair Cook or any other England player is unlikely to share the microphone anytime soon. ‘Oh God no,’

Something wonderful is happening in English cricket. The Ashes are upon us and, at last, the England team seem determined to play the right way. The recent series against New Zealand was a revelation. The Kiwis’ have-a-go approach rubbed off and, for the first time in too long, England played as if cricket was more than a job. It could be fun too. Remember fun? We have seen it before. In 1981, at Headingley, England were revived by the rustic virtues of what their captain Mike Brearley called ‘blacksmith cricket’. See ball, hit ball. Bowl as fast as you can. Keep it simple. Trust yourself. For a long time England

A car crash is a terrible thing, but hordes of people still slow down to cop an eyeful on the motorway. Car-crash sport is equally compelling. In the US Open, up at Chambers Bay, Tiger Woods opened with two of the worst rounds he had ever played: 80, with eight bogeys and one triple bogey, and 76 before heading home. But no matter how dismal his performance, he had a huge number of spectators shouting in support. Fellow players refuse to write him off, former golfers are less amiable. One-time Open champion Tom Weiskopf said Woods ‘had gone from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of a coal