Last week I made a decision that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. I decided not to attend the four-day Championship game between Northamptonshire and Yorkshire, which begins on Sunday. I had a B&B booking and, without the Covid situation, I am sure I would have attended. However, some things have changed. Obviously Covid: sitting in the ground, in your own little bubble, unable to walk around and chat with friends and with the home supporters. I like to take photographs...
What fun the new-format County Championship is turning out to be. Covid has been horrid, but live streaming has saved the day, given us new pleasures. If your game of choice is not too engrossing, or has finished early, just fly over to Trent Bridge, or Southampton, or Old Trafford, as I did. At Trent Bridge, I watched an old favourite Tim Bresnan steer Warwickshire home in a tight finish. At the Ageas Bowl, I saw Craig Overton and Josh Davey swing it round corners to prise out determined...
Today Dave Morton remembers an idiosyncratic character that brought colour to club cricket in his area. It’s characters like this that make the amateur game so precious … You have heard this name before, somewhere. Jack Price. Did he play for Middlesex? Or Glamorgan, perhaps? Did he stand in any Tests? He might have, but not this Jack Price. Unless you come from Swinton, a little town at the Manchester end of the East Lancashire Road, or you played your cricket in the old Lancashire...
Today we welcome Dave Morton back to TFT. He poses and existential question about bowlers and the role they play … Many years ago, when I was a pre-teen, my parents upped sticks from our native Yorkshire to a Midlands town called Burton upon Trent. My tears and tantrums were roughly ignored, but there were benefits, it turned out. One early one was that I actually met Wilfred Rhodes, probably the greatest all-round cricketer the world had ever seen. (Garfield Sobers was then a teenager, a...
Before the Ahmedabad autopsy begins, here’s new writer Dave Morton with something far less depressing … Even to me, it came as a surprise. To someone younger, forty perhaps, it must have been a shock, a light-bulb moment. I refer to the arrival in the England Test team of Ben Foakes, not so much selected as ‘rotated in’, a wicket-keeper at last, after all those years. There it all was: those swift and accurate feet, the balance and, above all, the lightning-fast hands. It took me...
