Azeem Rafiq will have wanted vindication but at least we have a decisive understanding of what is and what is not acceptableAfter charges against him of bringing cricket into disrepute were dismissed on Friday, Michael Vaughan said in what was generally a well-judged statement that “there are no winners in this process”. To say that you can only be white, and never have experienced the kind of discrimination that made the process necessary.So let’s be clear: the Cricket Discipline Commission (CDC) vindicated Azeem Rafiq. Having experienced racism at Yorkshire, having found the proper channels blocked when he tried to act, having had his life turned upside down after being forced to go public, he will have wanted, and deserves, for...
To Strauss’s mind it is all about high performance, a problem-solving exercise that requires evidence. He doesn’t get itIt’s the design that hits you first. The soft, translucent swatches. Teal for the soothing, explanatory stuff. Bold navy blue for the action points. Coloured boxes with clean, bevelled corners and arrows directing you to the next coloured box, like signs in an airport terminal. The cover design incorporating hundreds of dotted lines, evoking the seam on a cricket ball, but also – eureka! – the road markings on a superhighway to the future.Yes, I read Andrew Strauss’s high-performance review so you didn’t have to. Although as ever, interpreting the gist of these documents is not so much an exercise in reading...
From the ECB to ICC, governing bodies need to realise how the packed schedule makes the 50-over game vulnerableIt feels fitting in some ways that during a week that is hotter than Hades – when alarm bells about our direction of travel should be ringing even louder – Ben Stokes has announced his retirement from one-day international cricket.Yep, the champion all-rounder who powered England to World Cup victory by the barest of margins three summers ago, in front of a packed house at Lord’s and with the UK’s largest cricket audience since the heady 2005 Ashes, has decided the 50-over stuff must make way. If not, his schedule as an elite all-format player would become suffocating. The hope now is...
The priority is not to wring more money out of broadcasters, but to preserve and find a way to share – not sell – this sport“The world keeps on ending, but every year new people too dumb to know it show up as if the fun’s just started.” John Updike’s creation Harry Angstrom, antihero of the Rabbit novels, may have been musing on life as a weary middle-aged car salesman in rust‑belt America. But he could just as easily have been speculating on the fate of English cricket down the years: a sport that is always in crisis, that is always dying, that has been dying in some form since the day it was born.No doubt the denizens of 18th-century...
England will benefit from the former New Zealand captain’s experience but improvement will also rely on ECBThere is an old story about a Somerset team meeting sometime in the 1980s, when they were struggling to come up with plans for how to bowl to the other side’s batsmen. “Easy,” Ian Botham said about the first opener, “I’ll bounce him out.” As for the second: “I’ll bounce him too.” It was the same for the No 3. And the No 4. And so on right through the order. “Bounce him”, “bounce him”, “bounce him”. It can be a simple game when you’re that good at it. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Andrew Flintoff last year. “Let’s be...