Already, the plane crash feels like it was a long time ago. Yet at the start of the year English cricket was a mess, a twisted mangled wreckage and, while the blackbox was never found, you assume it recorded little more than management speak and an insistence on ‘taking the positives’. Today, it can be hard to even remember the men that went down in that crash. We’ve arrived somewhere new, a place where the sixes are long, the slip cordons enormous and the managing director comprehensible. Yet...
In an anxious age, BazBall is worth its risks
Cricket is many things, yet perhaps most of all it is an act of anxiety. Much of the sport’s anxiety comes from the tension between the team and the individual. Fail in tennis, golf or some other individual sport and there is no team to pick you up, no cover for your unforced error. The failure is isolating, crushing. Fail in a team sport, say football or rugby, and you have let down not only yourself but others. Your misplaced pass could be the difference between victory and another rotten...