Cricket

When Charlotte Edwards collected her CBE today from the Queen for services to cricket, the acclaimed sportswoman and current captain of the England women’s cricket team, got slightly more than she bargained for. Her Majesty used the meeting as an opportunity to let her feelings be known on the appropriate length of cricket matches for all-female teams compared with all-male teams. Speaking with Edwards, the Queen allegedly said that men were better suited to the longer format of matches than women: Although some social media users were quick to take offence at Her Majesty’s ‘sexist’ suggestion that women can’t cope as well as men at test matches, she does at least have history on her

Cricket-captain-turned-cricket-commentator Richie Benaud died in Sydney this morning. He would have been 85 next October.  That last pair of sentences contains, believe it or not, two of the most crucial facts in modern Australian history. As of the last (2011) census, approximately 24 million people lived in Australia. It is a fair bet that (whatever the Fourth Estate supposes) fully two-thirds of them would struggle to remember – on the optimistic assumption of their ever having known – who Malcolm Fraser was, or who Gough Whitlam was. (From the mere fact that voting at Australian elections is compulsory, it need not follow that voting at Australian elections is literate.) But

“We’ve got to look at the data”. And so ended the Peter Moores era. Sure, Moores may yet remain the England cricket coach but he can never move on from the ignominy of this morning’s disaster in Australia. He could, at a pinch, remain in office but he’ll never again be respected. “We’ve got to look at the data.” If ever there was an appropriate epitaph or this era of English cricket this is it. England have, under Moores, known the price of everything but the value of nothing. The data has given them heaps of information; they’ve had no idea what to do with it. But why would they? Cricket

The cricketing world has begun its slow trudge back to normality. Phillip Hughes has been buried and conversation has, half-heartedly, began to turn back to the game itself. Australia will take the field at Hughes’ adopted home ground of Adelaide on Tuesday for a Test match against India.   But it would be remiss to let this week pass without praise for Michael Clarke and the dignity that he has shown as he has led the game and Australia in mourning the death of a young man who was on the verge on fulfilling his great talent. As Alex said the other day, to anyone who has played cricket at

Kevin Pietersen’s autobiography is the saddest book of its type I’ve ever read. By its end you begin to think that KP and the ECB deserved each other and realise that, a) no-one deserves that and, b) there’s no way this marriage of convenience – for such it was – could ever have ended happily or with each side fondly wishing the other all the best in their future endeavours. And it was a contractual arrangement from the very start. Pietersen’s book is clear about that: KP “tried too hard” to fit in with England and Englishness. He now realises South Africa is his “real home” and he should never

Seven years ago Kevin Pietersen produced his first attempt at autobiography, Crossing the Boundary: The Early Years in My Cricketing Life. Atrociously written, it demonstrated no awareness of the world outside himself. This time round Mr Pietersen has taken the precaution of hiring an excellent ghost writer, David Walsh of the Sunday Times. It is hard to overpraise Mr Walsh’s vivid prose. The book is a brilliant portrayal of Pietersen as a misunderstood genius continually brought down by lesser men: a Mozart beset by a sequence of Salieris. Three of his England teammates fare especially badly: Stuart Broad, Graeme Swann and Matt Prior. He describes their behaviour as egotistical, bullying

Seven years ago Kevin Pietersen produced his first attempt at autobiography, Crossing the Boundary: The Early Years in My Cricketing Life. Atrociously written, it demonstrated no awareness of the world outside himself. This time round Mr Pietersen has taken the precaution of hiring an excellent ghost writer, David Walsh of the Sunday Times. It is hard to overpraise Mr Walsh’s vivid prose. The book is a brilliant portrayal of Pietersen as a misunderstood genius continually brought down by lesser men: a Mozart beset by a sequence of Salieris. Three of his England teammates fare especially badly: Stuart Broad, Graeme Swann and Matt Prior. He describes their behaviour as egotistical, bullying

Twenty years ago, in 1994, I had a golden summer. I scored 375 against England in Antigua, a Test record that stood for nine years, and two months later I posted 501 against Durham, which remains today the world record in first-class cricket, as my team Warwickshire achieved an unprecedented domestic treble. I was in my mid-twenties, and of course I was very happy, but I was also very aware that in another part of the world, a great tragedy was unfolding. Every evening when I turned on the TV there were images of the genocide in Rwanda, and the contrast with my own feelings of euphoria haunted me. It