In the words of Darth Vader, “the circle is now complete”. When the dark lord slew Ben Kenobi in their Death Star duel, he finally exacted full revenge for an ancient feud which had disfigured both their lives and brought chaos to the galaxy. And now the ECB have done pretty much the same thing. Swap a light-sabre for a press release, and Sith robes for a blazer, and there you have Paul Downton in his fully armed and operational Lord’s office, appointing a new coach with all the contemptuous...
In a Parallel Universe
Picture the scene. It’s August at Wembley. Having been knocked of the World Cup in Brazil after losing all three group games (including a hammering at the hands of Costa Rica) the FA meet in a dusty boardroom to discuss who will replace Roy Hodgson as England football manager. Greg Dyke is sitting in a leather chair stroking a longhaired white cat with one hand, and an enormous bag (maybe it’s that one Bert Millichip used to use for FA Cup draws?) stuffed full of cash in the other. “Right then...
When Saturday never comes
There are an awful lot of reasons why cricket should never try to ape football. But there’s also one extremely good reason why it should. Whatever you think about football’s commercial and aesthetic sensibilities, the plain fact is that compared to cricket, it just has more common sense. Take for example the way football is run as a spectator sport (and it just happens to be the most popular one in the country). The officials in charge of its fixture lists have made a rather...
Trott’s Biggest Test
While England’s best T20 specialists, and Jade Dernbach, toil in Bangladesh, we’ll look ahead to the summer when we might actually win a game. As Jonathan Trott is the only decent number 3 we’ve had in recent years, his recovery is vital to the test team. That’s why Nick Allbury, our new guest writer, focuses on his recovery here. Thanks for your thoughts, Nick. It’s the 25th November 2013. Just hours after England’s first Test defeat in Brisbane, Jonathan Trott is...
Leave Trott Alone
It’s official. The whole world has gone bonkers. And I don’t care whether it’s politically correct to say the word ‘bonkers’ or not. Disclaimer: no bonkers people were harmed in the writing of this blog post. Sky aired a programme called ‘Burnout’ at the weekend that focused on Jonathan Trott’s battle with what the ECB, not Trott himself, called a ‘stress related illness’. In extensive interviews with Ian Ward, who set an all time record for smiling in a documentary about mental torment, Trott...
The ECB and selecting the wrong selectors
I’m not a negative person by nature. I’m actually getting pretty fed up with all the negative things we’ve had to write about recently. With the notable exception of Ben Stokes, there was absolutely nothing positive to write about this winter. Then we had the fallout from Andy Flower’s departure – all good things must come to an end – and the sordid Kevin Pietersen debacle. It almost went unnoticed that during the KP affair, in which the ECB quite rightly became public enemy number one, they...
