CategoryTalking Points

The leaked version of the Future Tours programme which reached us last month makes for concerning reading. It provides us with endless contests between the big three of the international game, England, India and Australia, whilst marginalising the rest of the Test playing nations even further than they currently are. No matter that the tourism from England tours sustains the WICB and Caribbean economies, or that the West Indies toured England at the height of the Covid pandemic when no one else...

The issue of class is woven into the history of cricket like no other sport.  As a non-contact game, it was more socially acceptable for the English upper classes to play alongside the working class.  It was a shared sporting endeavour but without the potentially awkward physicality of rugby or football. Thus cricket helped forge the powerful English myth of social cohesion across class divisions: the blacksmith bowling to the Lord of the Manor on the village green. Snobbery...

As one shifts from commercial art to literary fiction, they are greeted by increasingly ambiguous endings. After all, when a plot unravels in the subtext rather than on the surface level, how can one expect ‘blockbuster’ climaxes in the truest sense of our modern understanding? To stretch the analogy beyond its natural limit, Test cricket’s followers might just form the ‘literary circle’ of the sporting world. There doesn’t seem to be much going on at any time when one tunes into the format. If...

Today we debate one of the ultimate ‘down the pub’ topics. Is watching cricket at The Oval, England’s traditional stronghold in South London, better than watching it at Lord’s, the home of cricket itself? There’s no right or wrong answer, of course. It’s like deciding whether Renior or Rembrandt was the better painter. It all comes down to personal taste – unless you support Middlesex or Surrey and partisan biases come into the equation. First let’s look at Lord’s – the cricketing Mecca...