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...
It is bizarre for the ICC chairman to say cricket needs to go back to the drawing board before the first final has been playedAmong all the many obstacles to this job in the past few months, the hardest has been that I’ve had to share our one TV screen with my kids. I know, I know, and yes, it would be a lovely gesture if you wanted to go out on your doorstep and clap for the poor sportswriters this Saturday morning. The weeks when there wasn’t any live sport to write about were tough; the weeks when there was but we weren’t allowed in to watch it were tougher. England’s Test series against Pakistan and West Indies had...
The tone of the game flows backwards from the possibility of five days – just look at Dominic Sibley’s century in Cape TownNo. No. No. And also: no. Not even: no thanks. No, later or maybe or let’s see. This is simply a hard, flat no. And indeed an angry and reproachful no, too. When it comes to the ICC’s suggestion that four-day Test matches may be the future of international red-ball cricket there is only one sensible response. That response is an aggressive, concerted and righteous rejection.This is an informed no, too, a no that understands we live in a sporting world dominated by greed and short-termism (otherwise known as the commercial or “real” world). Change and compromise have...
Nothing compares with five-dayers as the sport’s ultimate battle, so why shorten them? Are some sports just crisis junkies? Less than a week into a new decade cricket already needs rescuing again. So forget all you can of the past six months – a World Cup final that stood alone in history, one of the greatest ever Test comebacks, the good-news expansion of top-tier nations – and concentrate, if you will, on the negatives. Test cricket just isn’t popular enough. And that, the combined wisdom of the international cricket authorities has decided, means it’s too long. Apparently we should all start getting used to the idea that in future, Test matches will be played over four, not five, days.To be...
Australia opener’s century and mad axeman’s charge lit up a fine game but the World Cup has not been designed to thrillThe rain was interrupted by a cricket match on Wednesday, rather a good one actually, and played right through without the umpires even having to look heavenwards.Nonetheless, painterly clouds hung constantly over the Quantock Hills and a chill blew off them, suggesting this bout of traditional English summer weather is not going far away soon. I was grateful for the Quantocks, and the clouds. Otherwise I might have had no idea I was in Taunton. Related: Mitchell Starc sinks Pakistan’s pursuit of Australia after David Warner century Related: Michael Holding responds to ICC ‘censorship’ after criticising umpires Continue reading...