Picture the dilemma. You’re given four pegs – a round one, a square one, a triangular one, and one that’s shaped like an oblong. Your task is to neatly fit all four pegs into a series of holes. But you can only see three openings. And even those look like a tight fit. What’s worse, the people who really care about the pegs (well, three of them anyway) absolutely detest the new oblong thing. But the person who gave you the pegs insists that the oblong is by far the most important and you...
Hi folks. It’s been a while since you heard from me, your elusive editor, so I thought I’d quickly give my thoughts on the current situation in English cricket. Big thanks go to Billy, Rob, Chris, Thomas, Jon, Sam and Brian for holding the fort in my absence. Firstly, it was great to see England bounce back so strongly at Old Trafford after an abject display in the first Test. I was particularly pleased for Ben Foakes, who has now scored the same amount of hundreds in 16 Tests as Jos Buttler...
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...
The other day here at TFT, James reflected on one of 2014’s less-reported episodes of ECB misjudgement: their obsession with Stuart Lancaster. If you’ll forgive me, I’d like to give the subject one more airing (even though Dmitri has got in first). A quick recap. In March last year, Giles Clarke told the Evening Standard: Stuart Lancaster has done a fantastic job. In a very short space of time, he has sorted out English rugby. He’s talked the language of teams which Paul...
There are a few things cricket blogs can do better than the mainstream press. Obituaries are rarely among them. I’d love to pay fulsome tribute to Brian Close, but I rather doubt I’d do him justice. Close was never England’s finest batsman or bowler. But he was the stuff of genuine cricketing legend. Pugnacious, rebellious, insanely brave, Close was one of the most colourful and fascinating figures in the history of English cricket, his career a rollercoaster ride of unwitting...
Last month, Tom Harrison – the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board – gave his first full media interviews – to Sky Sports and Test Match Special – since taking up his post in January. It is to be regretted that in a climate of continuing political turmoil in English cricket its most powerful executive remained in the shadows for seven whole months. Did he wait quite so long to introduce himself to Sky, Waitrose or Investec? The public are by far the...
