Cricket

And so it begins, the Great Debate: no, not who will be deputy leader of the Labour party but the infinitely more important – and certainly more interesting – matter of who will be trudging out at No. 3 to bat for England in the first Ashes Test at Perth, which is now ominously close. Almost as close as the moment the first bars of Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ starts plinking round the supermarket. For some, the choice of Ollie Pope or Jacob Bethell is like saying whether you’d rather be buried or cremated. And sure, the days of Jonathan Trott, Ian Bell and the great Nasser Hussain might be

You don’t have to look hard to find swaths of sports fans around the world who dislike England – England’s men’s teams that is. The women are a different matter. Now, surprise surprise, the Australians have come to the party. If they ever left. The trigger this time is Ben Stokes’s surly behaviour to the Indians at the end of the fourth Test when Washington Sundar and Ravi Jadeja chose to bat on to pick up their centuries, rather than march off for the draw that Stokes wanted. All that was left was sledging: ‘Fucking hell, Washi, get on with it,’ said Harry Brook, who never shuts up; ‘If you

What to drink while watching cricket? Beer or even Pimm’s for the village green, but I think that a Test match on television demands wine. What a series we are having: likely to go down in the record books as a great example of the greatest of games. Cricket incites memories. The current Indian side have a claim to be world champions. In this last Test, they thumped England even though they rested Jasprit Bumrah, probably the best bowler in the world today. But I recall earlier days when they were usually easy victims in England, with one exception: Sunil Gavaskar’s match. This was in 1979 at the Oval and

A state-school cricket competition announced last week with a final at Lord’s is such a good idea you wonder why it has taken until now for someone to come up with it. Ever since Lord (George) Byron convinced the authorities to allow the first Eton vs Harrow match to be played at Lord’s in 1805, the public schools have monopolised the cricket played on the game’s most celebrated turf. Byron himself, although crippled with dysplasia and a deformed right foot, played for Harrow in that match and afterwards went to the West End to ‘kick up a convivial row in the Haymarket Theatre’. The new T20 competition was launched at

If you can bear to turn away from the Fifa Club World Cup, take a moment to ponder cricket and work out how the Bazball top brass have ended up with a team that lacks a proper no. 3 and has a woefully limited pace attack. And that’s after stating that their sole aim was to build a side for the imminent series against India, and then the Ashes this winter. But first things first. The ripples from South Africa’s victory in the World Test Championship will be felt for some time. It was also an outstanding game, which contained a wonderful example of the (nearly) lost art of the

If that was sportswashing, let’s have more of it. The Champions League final, when Paris Saint-Germain vaporised Inter Milan, was a sublime game of football, mesmerising and beautiful in the PSG’s display of sustained excellence. But the win has also generated a fair bit of anguish from many commentators. The club, you see, is owned and financed to the hilt by Qatar. And Qatar has a fairly mixed record, it might be said, on human rights, the role of women, same-sex relationships and all that. Mind you, if sportswashing is meant to be the use of sport to improve a government’s image, it’s not working that well. We still talk

Have you booked your tickets for the World Test Championship yet? Did you even know it’s on? What seemed like a pretty good idea has become mired in the mind-numbing complexity of the scoring. Currently England, who you might think of as quite a good Test-playing nation, are languishing in sixth place, not least because the Bazball bludgers have lost three of their last five matches. England lie just above Bangladesh, who have won only one of their last five. Ben Stokes seemingly hates the competition because his team are penalised for slow over rates, though he would change his tune if England had a chance of winning it. What

You would have to be living a very sheltered life not to have noticed that the Premier League this season is one of the best and the brightest for years. Mainly because it is not permanently dominated by the Big Six – though admittedly one of Liverpool, Arsenal or Chelsea is almost certain to win the title. But exciting, unpredictable, well-managed sides like Nottingham Forest, Bournemouth, Fulham and Brighton mean that more or less any side can beat any other. Sam Konstas is pencil thin and doesn’t look old enough to get served in the Bush and Tucker tavern in his native Sydney Though bafflingly Manchester City can hardly be

It was quite a year for some of the worst of sport – America’s golfers, already among the richest and greediest men on the planet, wanting a massive extra bung to pitch up for the Ryder Cup and, equally noisome, Bill Sweeney, chief executive of the Rugby Football Union, paying himself £1.1 million while announcing a loss of £37.9 million. That salary included a performance-based one-off payment of £358,000. Performance? Well may you ask. As Francis Baron, a former RFU chief, observed sagely: ‘We are paying stellar salaries for junk-bond performances.’ Fair enough in my view, and that’s not even looking at the England rugby team’s less than stellar showing.

Under a dark sapphire sky, tearing across grass as green as a lick of new paint, Mitchell Starc raced in to launch the first ball of the latest Australia vs India Test series last Friday. The murmur from the crowd of more than 30,000 at Perth’s Optus Stadium grew louder with every stride the tall, lean quickie took as he neared his point of delivery… is there anything more exciting than Test cricket at its best? In countries that still take the five-day game seriously, big crowds stillfill big arenas Most sporting contests start slowly – the cautious boxers circling each other, the centre forward tapping the ball backwards from