Golf can offer sublime entertainment but is not a sport with any deep sense of social conscience. Why pretend otherwise?The centre cannot hold. All that is pure is gone. They’re shaving Aslan’s mane up there at the Centurion Club in Hemel Hempstead. And it has, of course, been genuinely shocking to see the grand old community game of professional golf, with its deep social ties, the beating heart of our post-industrial towns, reduced so easily to a row of shrugging men in leisure wear doing stuff on their own for money.This is after all the people’s game, or at least the People Like Us game, still played on every cobbled street and in every playground, providing that playground is at...
ECB chief executive became a defining figure as scandals, failure at Test level and the Hundred left English cricket fighting with itselfNot so long ago someone put a plastic turd in an envelope and posted it to Tom Harrison at the England and Wales Cricket Board. Think of it as a parting gift from the disaffected of English cricket, to go with Harrison’s share of the £2.1m in executive bonuses the ECB paid out this year. Harrison, who has a background in sales and marketing, is someone who imagines he would be able to win anyone over if they would only sit down and listen to him for 15 minutes one-on-one over a coffee. He seemed utterly nonplussed to discover...
Being cool and knowing the right people seems to trump qualifications or experience in the ECB’s brave new worldBlessed are the Blokes, for they shall inherit the earth. There has been a steady evolution in the governing class of English cricket. For many decades the sport was ruled by the Blazers. The Blazers were faceless. They smelt of crusted port and Chesterfield sofas. They ruled the committee room with an iron liver-spotted fist. Over time they staked out the summer sport as their own private fiefdom.The Blazers were eventually flushed out by the Marketing Men. The Marketing Men were rainmakers and deal-brokers. They didn’t wear blazers. They wore ties and suits. They knew about revenue streams. They made deals and...
Whether effective or not, too many of England’s leaders have had to depart under a cloud, tarnishing their reputationThe career of an England Test captain, like a life in politics, always seems to end in failure. Maybe it’s at a tearful press conference after back-to-back thrashings by South Africa. Or by a hastily arranged England Cricket Board statement sent out after a row that also cost the head coach his job. Or off the back of an almighty spat with your star batsman that started when he was caught sending texts to the opposition slating your leadership. Or at the fag end of a slump of form in which the team lost five series in a row. In the end...
Former Kent captain turned broadcaster, who has laid down his microphone and put his head on the block as director of men’s cricket, is not to be underestimatedIn between England’s ruinous Ashes campaign and the largely dismal epilogue in the Caribbean last month, a panel of Rob Key, Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain recorded a podcast for Sky in which they analysed the Test team’s myriad problems and discussed how they would change things.Key, though supposedly steering the debate as host, was pressed for his views. After detailed responses that have been widely reported over the past few days and which included his belief that player power needs addressing, Atherton joked that the only solution was to take charge of...