As he fades with the bat, it is easy to forget what a revolutionary England’s captain has been as both player and leaderOne of Napoleon’s favourite generals, the glamorous, reckless Joachim Murat, was famous for riding into battle ahead of his cavalry regiment carrying nothing but a small whip. For all the bloodshed around him Murat maintained he never personally injured a single enemy soldier, although presumably that whip could be a bit annoying. In an unfortunate twist he ended up being sentenced to death for treason, his final request a hot bath filled with eau de cologne and a firing squad made up of his own captured men.It is always hard to resist the urge to pack sport and...
Chris Silverwood’s team is behind where he hoped it would be, but India’s series victory can provide a blueprint for successThere was a slightly anticlimactic feel to the announcement of England’s squad for the upcoming Ashes tour. Maybe it was only natural. The England management had, after all, spent a good two years talking about this team, and its goal of urn recovery, right up to the point when a sudden screeching of brakes indicated that hey, there might not even be an Ashes this year anyway. At which point, fans adopted the brace position and prepared themselves for the even-worse-case-scenario – not that England wouldn’t tour, but that they’d arrive at Brisbane with a team devoid of Root, Buttler,...
We’ve already had the first exchanges of chippiness and the start of the actual cricket now cannot come soon enoughThe Ashes series is go. Sort of. Kind of. The Ashes series is confirmed as long as various requirements are met when it comes to quarantining and playing in Australia. Which is effectively the same position that the England & Wales Cricket Board has been taking for the last few months, before Friday’s statement officially conveying the above. The important thing is that now they have said they actually will be going to Australia. Unless later they decide they are not. In which case they will say that they are not. Crowds are warmly invited to book tickets on this basis.We...
Trescothick threw light on to the mental health problems in cricket, and we need better understanding more than everTime flies. It’s been 15 years since Marcus Trescothick last played for England, in a warmup match against New South Wales in November 2006. He broke down in the dressing room on the last day of the game – “All the same feelings of irrational fear, despair and panic came back in wave after bloody great wave” – and flew back to England that same evening. The team management described it as a “recurrence of a stress-related illness”. There were a lot of accusations, jokes and innuendoes, which were only put straight when Trescothick published his autobiography in 2008, and people at...
A crowded calendar is causing injuries and a player like Jos Buttler could miss matches because of his young familyCricket has become a sport that never stops, but though the Indian Premier League restarts this weekend and the bandwagon keeps rolling we have also reached the end of the British summer, as good a time as any to take stock and assess where we are and what the future holds.For England, there are some easy answers and some harder ones. In terms of cricket it has been a solid few months, with success in the short-form game balancing out some disappointment in the Tests. But the way the men’s international summer ended, with the abandonment of the fifth Test of...