The latest announcement of T20 leagues in South Africa and the UAE is significant – franchise cricket is ready to take over There is a key scene towards the end of every spy film. The hero-outsider figure, on the run from a corrupt secret service cell (or similar), meets an old contact from inside the organisation, perhaps a bookish ally with a stammer, to share key information and have a wistful exchange in a scenic plaza.Some terse dialogue happens. Hero-outsider starts to realise something. But too late. Bookish Ally looks sadly into the distance as a squadron of goons fan out from behind the balustrade. The undercover spook at the pavement cafe raises a pistol behind his newspaper. And it...
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...
The 2012 Games were over budget while existing stadiums like Crystal Palace have been allowed to become dilapidated relicsThis summer marks the 10th anniversary of the London 2012 Olympic Games. It is customary here to suggest that decade has simply flown by, that the years have passed in a blink. In reality this already feels like an event from a different timeline altogether.It’s not the actual Games, which will remain a wonderful thing, tenderly guarded. It’s more the staging. Looking back there is something jarring about the uniformly joyful and empowered response to the opening ceremony, with its ragbag of nostalgia and self-mythologising. Kenneth Branagh pretending to be Brunel. Musical Youth playing croquet. Roger Moore inside a phone box surfing...
The Whyte review highlights a need for radical and widespread change in how we go about achieving and measuring success What does sporting success look like? At times it seems so alluringly simple to answer that – surely it has to be crossing the line first, scoring most, standing on the top step of the podium. At other times, such a view seems naive, misleading, verging on delusional. Reading the Whyte Review is one of those times. Anna Whyte’s chilling report on gymnastics forces us to question the purpose of elite sport and ask whether there is space for values and ethical standards in high performance environments. It challenges all of us involved in sport in some way to take...