I watched Fire in Babylon last night. What a terrific flick. Botham: The Legend of ’81 is also worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. The problem for us cricket nuts, however, is that there are few decent cricket films out there. It’s a scar on our magnificent game. The world of football is saturated with cringe worthy titles such as Goal, Goal II, When Saturday Comes and Escape to Victory (ok, the latter is actually pretty good after a few beers at Christmas), but there are few...
Have the ICC sold out test cricket?
Andrew Strauss is all smiles, but he’ll never play in the ICC test championship now We knew it was coming, but it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. The ICC today confirmed that the inaugural test championship will no longer be held in 2013. It has been postponed until at least 2017 – a whopping six years away – which means that the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting, Rahul Dravid, and even Kevin Pietersen, will never grace what purists hope will become the leading event...
Testing Times: Join the campaign to help test cricket
Regular readers of TFT will know that we’re rather keen on test cricket, but somewhat indifferent to the shorter forms of the game – particularly ODIs, which dominate the international calendar like the BCCI seems to dominate the ICC. It’s not that we’ve got anything against 50 over cricket in particular – the World Cup is always a great showpiece – but we’re worried that test cricket is being overshadowed, and not enough is being done to promote the purist, and most challenging, form of the...
The end of the season
October has begun, and the cricket season is over. Even the hardiest village cricketer will now have pulled stumps and hung up their whites. That’s our lot now, until April. The death of summer, and the demise of the season, go hand in hand, each a symbol of the other. As the leaves turn golden and fall, and the air turns crisp, you return the kit bag to the loft as a melancholy metaphor for the relentless onwards march of time, for nature’s inexorable cycle of renewal and decay...
BBC highlights fail to satisfy
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the BBC’s nightly World Cup highlights programme. It’s great to have some cricket back on terrestrial television, but why, as ever, does it have to transmit so late in the evening – usually at 11.20pm, after Newsnight on BBC2. Much as we might deride the tournament, it’s still the biggest single event in the sport, and deserves a more prominent slot, if for no other reason than to give children who live in non-Sky Sports...
The Ashes commentators: a form guide
For the last six weeks we’ve been scrutinising the form of the English and Australian players. In newspapers and blogs, no stone has been left unturned as we endlessly analyse how the two sides have shaped up. But what about the performance of an equally important squad of participants – the ex -players and pundits who keep us company through those lonely small hours of the night. We thought it high time we considered how the commentators are shaping up in this, the most crucial...
