Cricket people love debating whether a particular player is great or simply very good. “Great” tends to be over-used but people engaged in this sort … Read More
The Sly Old Fox: Clarrie Grimmett
I made (at least) two misstatements in my piece on John Reid. The first was that New Zealand’s Tests against England in 1949 were played … Read More
A Gong for The Dazzler
Whatever one’s views on Britain’s honours system, nobody is going to begrudge the award of an MBE to the former Yorkshire and England cricketer Darren … Read More
A Victorian Legend: Dean Jones, 1961-2020
The cricket world was shocked to learn of the sudden death of the former Australian batsman Dean Jones at the age of 59. He suffered … Read More
One-County Man
The former England batsman Ian Bell has announced his retirement from first-class cricket at the end of this slightly unreal 2020 season; (not that we … Read More
When the Numbers Don’t Matter
Is Sam Curran in your best England Test eleven? Well all right, twelve? Er, thirteen? Selection is a strange business but few cricketers demonstrate its … Read More
Many a Slip
This is not a history of close fielding; that will have to come later. This is more in the nature of an apology. I always … Read More
The Smack of Firm Government
A number of friends – some not even cricketing friends really – alerted me to the passing, a couple of weeks ago, of the former … Read More
And Then There Were Twelve
My most recent post, on the little masters Tendulkar and Gavaskar, and the not so little Kohli, generated such a wave of interest – there … Read More
Little and Large
I write this on Sachin Tendulkar’s 47th birthday. He made his Test debut, against Pakistan in Karachi, a month before the fall of the Berlin Wall. … Read More
Who is the Fairest of Them All?
I remember listening to an interview with a batsman – a right-handed batsman, I just can’t remember who it was – who was struck by … Read More
Clash of the Titans
Who was the greater bowler, Muttiah Muralitharan or Shane Warne? Such questions are almost impossible to answer. This is obviously the case with cricketers from … Read More