The rise of Betfair’s wisdom-of-crowds online gambling model has put canny sports fans in the driving seatSir Tim Rice found a moment during the gripping final hours of the third Ashes Test at Headingley last weekend to tweet about the latest betting on the outcome. “Just phoned my bookie (a rare occurrence of course),” he said, “to see what odds they were offering against an England win. They quoted 6-1! Ludicrous. Should be 500-1. At 100-1 I might have invested a fiver. Having said that I am still rooting for England. Nothing is impossible.”My first reaction on reading his complaint was a wave of nostalgia. A quarter of a century after the internet turned gambling, and so much else, into...
All-rounder kept the Ashes series alive with his brilliance at Headingley and surely enabled some of his England colleagues to retain their places for the fourth Test in ManchesterThanks to Ben Stokes, there is still an Ashes series to savour. Thanks to Stokes, this may even be a summer to rival the epics of 1981 and 2005. Thanks to Stokes, Jason Roy and Jos Buttler keep their places in the Test team.Currently everyone, except a vibrant band of visiting Australians, is indebted to him. This cricketing summer is still alive after more miracles at Headingley, a melodrama that all those watching or listening to found captivating, and they all understood what was going on as well, whatever their age or...
The Headingley hero’s appearance gives us that ludicrous fake spark of hope that at some point in another life we too could have flicked that single off our hipsIt’s rare a sporting moment makes you shake. Last Sunday, while Ben Stokes was carving Australia to all parts of Headingley, I was in a park watching on my phone. As Nathan Lyon failed to collect the ball cleanly as Jack Leach wandered about in no man’s land I realised I had lost control of my body. The screen was all over the place.It might have happened before – but I’m rarely holding both sides of my TV at those critical moments. My scream of terror was too loud for the sunbathers....
It is hard to differentiate between a great game and a great finish but Ben Stokes’s Headingley miracle takes the biscuitBeing broad-minded, we had an unbeliever to stay the weekend. At some point on Sunday afternoon I yelled out of the window: “You’ve got to come and see this! It’s the most astonishing game!” A languorous, world-weary voice replied from the garden: “Cricket! Always astonishing. Always historic. Always unprecedented.” She never budged.It is true that this was cricket’s second astonishing-historic-unprecedented Sunday in six weeks. It is also true it was being shown on Sky, whose policy is that everything must be treated as a-h-u even if it’s a goalless draw between Barrow and Boreham Wood. Which makes it hard to...
Headingley 2019 has left English sceptics, cynics and pessimists in dreamland – being proved wrong never felt so rightThere are things you can learn about yourself only in extremis: when your plane ditches in the Arctic tundra, for instance. Instead of the untapped action hero you’ve always suspected lives inside you, you discover you’re actually the scene-one extra who would rather succumb to a rapid and surprisingly comfortable hypothermia. At least you’re leaving the real fighters something to eat.For those of us too young to have experienced Headingley ’81 – or, as it shall be known from now on, the other Headingley – this weekend’s game was our great examination. Our Test of character, if you will. Related: Magnificent Ben...