The rise of Betfair’s wisdom-of-crowds online gambling model has put canny sports fans in the driving seatSir Tim Rice found a moment during the gripping final hours of the third Ashes Test at Headingley last weekend to tweet about the latest betting on the outcome. “Just phoned my bookie (a rare occurrence of course),” he said, “to see what odds they were offering against an England win. They quoted 6-1! Ludicrous. Should be 500-1. At 100-1 I might have invested a fiver. Having said that I am still rooting for England. Nothing is impossible.”My first reaction on reading his complaint was a wave of nostalgia. A quarter of a century after the internet turned gambling, and so much else, into...
All-rounder kept the Ashes series alive with his brilliance at Headingley and surely enabled some of his England colleagues to retain their places for the fourth Test in ManchesterThanks to Ben Stokes, there is still an Ashes series to savour. Thanks to Stokes, this may even be a summer to rival the epics of 1981 and 2005. Thanks to Stokes, Jason Roy and Jos Buttler keep their places in the Test team.Currently everyone, except a vibrant band of visiting Australians, is indebted to him. This cricketing summer is still alive after more miracles at Headingley, a melodrama that all those watching or listening to found captivating, and they all understood what was going on as well, whatever their age or...
It is hard to differentiate between a great game and a great finish but Ben Stokes’s Headingley miracle takes the biscuitBeing broad-minded, we had an unbeliever to stay the weekend. At some point on Sunday afternoon I yelled out of the window: “You’ve got to come and see this! It’s the most astonishing game!” A languorous, world-weary voice replied from the garden: “Cricket! Always astonishing. Always historic. Always unprecedented.” She never budged.It is true that this was cricket’s second astonishing-historic-unprecedented Sunday in six weeks. It is also true it was being shown on Sky, whose policy is that everything must be treated as a-h-u even if it’s a goalless draw between Barrow and Boreham Wood. Which makes it hard to...
He scored just one run but in his match-winning stand with Ben Stokes, England’s No 11 became the owner of cricket’s most famous pair of spectacles since the days of David SteeleWell, his running between the wickets borders on the diabolical. It is not straightforward to find a fresh slant upon Ben Stokes’s innings of the century – and possibly any century. However, he is not the first great player for whom there is considerable scope for improvement in this department. Denis Compton was in this category, so too Geoffrey Boycott and in this generation Kane Williamson – peerless batsmen yet sometimes harum-scarum runners.At Headingley Jos Buttler had to go and but for a Nathan Lyon fumble, which – as...
After a dizzying day in Leeds it is hard to imagine anything this year in this sport or any other eclipsing Ben Stokes’s display hereOh hell, just call it all off now. Forget the Premier League, cancel the Rugby World Cup, bin the world athletics championship and whatever else we’re supposed to get excited about in the coming weeks and months. And for goodness sake, junk the Hundred too. They’ll all pale after this Headingley Test, when Ben Stokes, that most unlikely saint, worked the second of the two miracles he needs for his canonisation. This was the innings of his lifetime, and everyone else’s too, certainly the best anyone has played for England since Ian Botham overturned odds of...