There’s a funny bit at the end of the 2022 Ben Stokes documentary Phoenix From The Ashes where host and self-confessed cricket obsessive Sam Mendes quotes Albert Camus to a nonplussed Stokes.

After a confusing but good-natured knockabout on some tatty astroturf on the outfield, both men stand on the balcony of Stokes’ boyhood club, Cockermouth CC, as Mendes paraphrases the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher. Pre-empting the quote by explaining to Stokes that it is one that he himself has found meaningful in the context of a life spent writing and directing film and theatre.

‘A man’s work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover those one or two great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.’

Stokes stares at Mendes for a second, and then with perfect timing punctures the lofty atmosphere that has momentarily descended.

‘I’ve got no idea what you just said,’ he says with a small smile. ‘Cut that.’

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I re-watched the documentary on Tuesday evening, the day after the Rex Rooms ‘revelations’ came out and when the pervading mood seemed to be that Stokes was about to announce his retirement from cricket. In truth, I was feeling despondent about the whole unravelling situation, left cold by the march of the eerily cold-hearted pragmatists weighing in on the matter, not to mention the slathering moralists who tend to revel in situations such as these.

Do they seriously want one of the modern game’s most exhilarating players to disappear from Test cricket, a format he has tub-thumped for relentlessly despite the pervading din of shorter formats and franchise cricket, because of a rum-soaked bad decision and a missed curfew?

Stokes made a mistake. An absolute clanger given the circumstances. Of that there is no argument and he should be punished accordingly. Typically, my Guardian colleague Andy Bull hit the nail on the head (no stitches required) with his piece on Tuesday:

‘Let’s ask if Stokes really needs to be banged out of his job because he was in a club four days after his 35th birthday, the evening after his team had just secured their first victory in six months, while he was accompanied by a security officer? Fine him if you need to. Drop him if you have to… but let’s not pretend that, on the evidence of what’s known, it needs to cost him his job.’

I fired up the documentary partly because I wanted to be reminded of Stokes’ finest hours on the field with the prospect that it might be over potentially hours away from becoming reality.

A hit of ‘You cannot do that Ben Stokes!’ and ‘Cut away for four! England’s Ashes hopes are alive because of one cricketer…’ to shake off the maelstrom’s malaise. While watching the documentary I was saddened to see that the main interview Stokes gives Mendes, the one that runs as the spine throughout the documentary and that shows a gaunt and disconcertingly inexpressive Stokes – who was at the time just weeks into a self-imposed mental health break from all cricket – reminded me of the Stokes we had just seen at Lord’s.

Others clocked this at the time too and plenty have come out with it since.

At Thursday’s press conference a clearly still spewing Rob Kew refused to back Stokes returning as captain but did intimate the burden Stokes has been under of late: ‘Don’t underestimate the strain Ben Stokes has been under for the past six months.’

Stokes wore the weight of the winter’s Ashes loss heavily. He then got smashed in the face by a cricket ball training at Durham and required facial surgery. He’s four years into the role as Test captain, a fact noted by Michael Atherton amongst others as about the time that England captains begin to feel and show the weight of the job bearing down on them.

In the documentary, Stokes is burned to the wick. After his annus mirabilis of the World Cup and Headingley Test in 2019, I’d forgotten that a journalist from the Sun had dredged up a 30 year old family tragedy and printed it on its front page just days afterwards. Stokes blamed himself, reasoning that if he wasn’t a famous cricketer the story wouldn’t have been unearthed and his mum wouldn’t have had to relive the pain. Mendes tries to comfort him. ‘You know that isn’t your fault’. Stokes blinks back at him in silence.

Stokes explains to Mendes, haltingly, that he had squashed down a lot of emotions over the preceding years – the ugly scenes outside the Bristol nightclub in 2017, the ensuing court case and media storm, the Covid years and their endless restrictions and most of all, the death of his father, Ged, from brain cancer. Anxiety spirals, panic attacks and a serious finger injury led to Stokes to step away the game.

‘It was like I had a glass bottle I kept on throwing my emotions into. Eventually, it got too full and just exploded,’ he told the BBC about that time.

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The football World Cup here, and there is no better companion than friend of this substack Jonathan Wilson’s The Power And The Glory, deservedly crowned Sports Book of the Year at the Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards. It’s brilliant, and it’s out now in paperback here and here. Check it out!

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It feels like something similar is happening to Stokes again. Speaking ahead of the New Zealand series, he revealed that the obsession that overwhelmed him after defeat in the Ashes was something he’d, ‘never experienced before.’

‘I thought I had sort of gone into those places before, but after Australia, my gosh… It was pretty extreme.’

Speaking at a Wisden event the other day, Stuart Broad mentioned how utterly obsessive Stokes is about his training and his intake, that he measures out the amount of protein he has per day. Anyone who has ever struggled with their mental health will recognise these traits. The attempt to claw back control, to do the things you are supposed to do to be healthy and maximise any moment, however fleeting, of feeling good.

A few weeks ago I interviewed another great all-rounder, New Zealand’s Amelia Kerr. Kerr has had her own struggles with mental health and also took a break from the game in 2021. I told Kerr that her recollections and explanations of her struggles, particularly on an episode of the Dom Harvey Podcast were the most honest, enlightening and dare I say ‘useful’ I’d ever encountered.

That’s not to say they weren’t sad and shocking. Kerr explains that she tried to combat all the things she was feeling, the anxiety and depression, by doing the things she was supposed to do, getting up early, training, being healthy, swimming, sauna and so on. None of it made a difference, this in turn made her feel even worse. ‘I was trying, I was doing everything and then I felt like nothing I did was good enough.’

Plenty of Kerr’s words have stayed with me. Not least that, ‘Sometimes you can just see it in a person’s face.’ The parallels with Ben Stokes are plain to see. Stokes is a highly complex individual. What human being isn’t? I firmly believe that you can’t have Stokes the player without Stokes the person. That is not to excuse some of the things that Stokes has been involved in off the field and this latest error in judgement is a stone-cold clanger, he will be deeply embarrassed and mortified that he has put himself and his teammates and colleagues in this position. That said, it isn’t something that he can’t come back from.

As Key alluded yesterday, time can be the healer here. Perhaps Stokes will reflect that the captaincy well has run dry for him, the Bazball project was so clearly centred on winning the Ashes in Australia, once that failed in the manner it did it was always going to be difficult to go again. Despite the win at Lord’s last week it didn’t feel like a ‘reset’ for this England side, more a re-emphasis that it was the end of something.

Stokes has earned the right to have some time. To get well if he isn’t, and to rediscover his love for the game. After his break in 2021 he said that he got back the feeling he had as a little kid playing cricket again, the excitement and the uncomplicated joy. As Camus, or Mendes might put it, Stokes did rediscover those one or two great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Let’s hope Ben Stokes rides again in Test cricket. A few more years of him at anything near his best is clearly the far superior option to him leaving the game under a not even storm cloud. As he mulls over his future in the coming days, maybe Mendes could try again and send him another Albert Camus quote that is more befitting of Ben Stokes.

‘In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.’

I was idly watching TV the other night, that BBC drama about Gareth Southgate. The actor playing Southgate really caught something of him, mostly his semi-quizzical facial expressions interspersed with a messianic stare into the mid-distance as he had another idea about the shape of England. Actually, no… forget the sarcasm. Bloody good bloke, Southgate. Did something no-one else has with all of those finals and semis and penalty shoot-outs. Changed the mood of the nation.

Anyway, there was a moment in the final episode when England were in Germany for the Euros in 2024, and Southgate spotted Andreas Moller doing a pre-match piece to camera. Moller was the player who’d scored the winning penalty for Germany in the semi-final of Euro 96, right after Southgate had missed his for England.

‘Andreas?’ Southgate said, and shook his hand. As they reminisced about the match, Southgate asked Moller how often he thought about what must have been the defining moment of both of their careers.

‘Oh no,’ said Moller. ‘It wasn’t the defining moment of my career. That was in 1998 against Croatia, when we lost 3-0.’

Southgate looked semi-quizzical at the news. According to the show at least, the missed penalty of ‘96 and what happened to him afterwards had become the pivotal event in his life, a fate that he was determined the footballers he managed would avoid.

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Yet Andreas Moller had walloped home his penalty in unstoppable German fashion and spent barely a minute thinking about the English guy that missed. Why would he? Germany had a final to win.

And if the German football team of that era have a cricketing equivalent it’s probably Australia. They steamrollered everyone for a decade and more, so much so that their rare defeats, to India in 2001 and England in 2005 for example, became more talked about and celebrated than the endless run of victories they interrupted.

I was thinking about this as I looked again at Dan Toomey’s artwork for his Fisher Classics series of imagined book jackets.

This is Shane Warne doffing his sunhat to the crowd in 2007, his final Ashes series when the defeat of 2005 was redressed in dreamlike fashion. The greatness of Warne had been cemented into history long before either of those series and their wildly different outcomes, but to me and I’m sure to others, he was never greater than in that 2005 loss. I can see him now walking off at the Oval, haloed by the sun, arm in arm with Glenn McGrath, beyond gracious to the England team and the English crowd, a true sportsman as well as a sporting great. He understood right away what he had been a part of creating. One team had won, the other had lost, but some things live much longer than that.

I expect most of that England team – a side that had been unchanged for the first four Tests of the series and yet would never play together again – will look back on those moments as a kind of reverse of Southgate’s feeling, a high that comes only once in a lifetime and leaves a different kind of void in its wake.

What was it to Shane Warne? I don’t know, obviously, but I would guess it wasn’t the high water mark or the lowest point, just part of the psychic architecture of an epic career.

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The football World Cup is almost here (no Southgate and with a German manager…), and there is no better companion than friend of this substack Jonathan Wilson’s The Power And The Glory, deservedly crowned Sports Book of the Year at the Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards. It’s brilliant, and it’s out now in paperback here and here.

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Is there any common ground between Southgate and Warne? Superficially not. Southgate won nothing, Warne took home the lot multiple times, so there is no comparison there. But as the Southgate TV show made clear, his real talent was not football but empathy. He wanted to create something that lived beyond the immediacy of the results, and he did.

That’s what Shane Warne achieved as well. And Warne was an empath, too. He treated people well. In the first year of the IPL, he led the most under-resourced team to a maiden title against the odds. Rajasthan Royals have not won it since, but something of Warne’s spirit lingers in the team, as it does at Hampshire, where a stand is named after him at the Rose Bowl. His feats on and off the field there are part of the county’s mythology. He understood the players and the game and he wanted to make it as good for them as it was for him.

And if you need any more evidence, the inclusion of Dimi Mascarenhas in the legendary mural that adorned a wall in Warne’s house shows his love for his friends. The painting has humour and humanity beyond the madness of its conception.

Dimi is pictured playing poker with Sean Connery and James Dean, surrounded by hard living heroes. There is Sinatra, Marilyn, JFK, Elvis, Jagger, Jack Nicholson... Some of them made it through their excesses and some of them didn’t, and it’s still a giant sadness that Shane didn’t either. But he, like they, lives on in all that he has left behind.

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The paperback edition of Vinciness is available now by clicking here. Just £10 plus p+p. Cover and design by the aforementioned Dan Toomey, words by me.

'In its crisp prose and and reflective digressions, Vinciness is typically delightful’ - Gideon Haigh, Cricket et al.

The opening batter sits in the storied old dressing room. Outside, that famous hum floats through an open window. A plummy-voiced man announces something over the loudspeaker and the ambient noise of the crowd ramps up a notch, did he say the coin toss is just minutes away?

The young batter’s stomach roils and churns. There are those nerves again. He’s struggled with these feelings in the past, fallen victim to the insistent murmurings of the ‘man on the shoulder’ but he sought help, spoke to professionals, learnt to sit with the anxiety, to embrace it even. He knows now that the nerves are necessary for him perform at his best.

But still, this is different. This is his Test match debut, at Lord’s – ‘the Cathedral of Cricket’. Everything is heightened, the backslaps and encouraging smiles of his new teammates feel unreal, like they are happening to someone else. He thumbs the rim of the embroidered navy cap in his hands and gulps down a few breaths.

*

Over in the stands the opener’s parents are shown to their seats by a smartly dressed steward. They’ve watched their boy play plenty of times before but this feels surreal. The ground is teeming, the impossibly green pitch populated by dozens of people in sports kit but also numerous photographers, TV and radio crews - their cables snaking across the turf, adjacent to the painted emblem of the corporate sponsor splashed across each end of the ground . All around them a hubbub of greetings and pleasantries by people who seem to be taking all this in their stride, other parents who at one time or another resembled themselves but have now done this many times before. The opening batter’s parents glance at each other, breathe out and break into nervous smiles.

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Up at St John’s Wood tube station, a throng of spectators spill out and hurry their way down Wellington Road. Amongst the avalanche of cream chinos and pockmarks of red corduroys a young dad uses one hand to hoick up a picnic laden rucksack onto his shoulder, the other is gripped tightly by his five year old daughter. Their hearts beating like castanets, the excited questions and wildly sporadic conversations of earlier in the morning replaced by a concentrated silence. The dad glances at his watch, they’re going to make it, they’ll be in their seats for the first ball.

His daughter’s first cricket match, it was worth bunking her out of school and taking a day of precious annual leave for this, he reasons with himself again. It was worth the money, he hopes. A month later and they’ll make the same journey for the first ever women’s Test match at Lord’s. His daughter points excitedly as the North Gate entrance comes into view. They squeeze each other’s hands tighter still.

*

Back in the home dressing room a bowler fusses with his boots to steady his own nerves. His mind whirling with memories of the few times he has played here before. That debut Test five years ago where he felt so at home on the pitch, taking wickets and getting runs only to have the rug pulled from under him moments after leaving the field. Historic social media posts from a decade ago dredged up and released in time to sully his special moment. The shock and the shame. He knows he’s grown up since then. Physically and mentally. He’s in a better place than he was during his last Test match, at Ranchi, where another back spasm and some indiscreet podcasting suggested that despite the numbers looking right on the pitch he wasn’t really ready for the rigours of the game at this level. He looks around the dressing room, it takes the shape of last chance saloon.

*

Out on the field the blue-blazered and conquistador-bearded captain strides out with his opposite number, a coin in his pocket. He knows this is something of a reset, to put the ghosts of winter behind him. It’s a chance to prove to the doubters and to himself that this side is still capable of special things, that they can take the breath away, seize the moment. First and foremost, he knows that they need to chalk up the wins. Do that and the rest will take care of itself.

***

The football World Cup is almost here, and there is no better companion than friend of this substack Jonathan Wilson’s The Power And The Glory, just deservedly crowned Sports Book of the Year at the Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards. It’s brilliant, and it’s out now in paperback. You can get it here and here.

***

Up on the balcony a stocky man in purple kit and sunglasses watches on. He’s thin-lipped and wears an inscrutable expression but the shades and the relaxed body language belie a man who deep down knows he is lucky to be there. Who thought perhaps that his race was run after a disastrous winter, plenty of others simply would not have survived. He goes to put his feet up on the ornate balcony railings, catches himself and thinks better of it.

*

Across the river, seven miles south. On a Clapham sofa sits a short auburn haired man alongside his taller, fair haired friend. This time last year they both made centuries in the first Test of the summer and the future looked bright and full of promise. Now it feels as if it has got away from them, it’s ungraspable, uncertain. Both men struggled to make the most of the chances afforded, deep down they know they didn’t do enough to remain one of the eleven names now being read out on the television. It’s nice to think of them together but realistically, they probably aren’t. In reality they probably aren’t watching either, too painful. Or maybe they are, more painful still.

*

Back at the ground, the coin is flipped. The result announced. The young opening batter and the returning bowler catch each other’s eye. The Test match summer stretches out like a blank canvas, yet to be painted but somehow still flickering with brushstrokes of the past.

It was just another player announcement on social media, you know the sort of thing: some guy has joined one county or another for a few games before he climbs wearily back into the plane and heads for that all-important three-match engagement with the Ghent Gladiators or San Francisco Phoenix, where one of his team-mates will almost certainly be Rashid Khan or James Vince.

The tweet above is an example of the form. Who is Matt Boyle, the Middlesex fans might be asking, and is he going to sort us out then? A quick look at his cricinfo profile seems promising: bloke’s got a hundred for New Zealand A and was the top scorer in last year’s Super Smash. Bowls a bit of leg spin too. But then, you know, so do lots of people…

However, if, like me, you are one of the 31,000+ subscribers to the Three Bridges CC YouTube channel or the 51k followers of their Instagram account, your first thought on hearing the above news was probably along the lines of, ‘bloody hell, not Susan… just when they’d assembled a top six that looks nailed on to finally, at last, win the Sussex Premier League…’

Because ‘Susan’ (as in Susan Boyle, geddit, yeah? Good one) has just returned to the Barker Meads (TBCC’s Field of Dreams, located in central Crawley) after a year away to complete a batting line up that has the subscribers salivating. Boyle joins stellar talents like Sussex tyro George ‘GT’ Thomas, a former England U19, and Luke Beaufort, the South African who served as overseas pro last season in Boyle’s absence but who, excitingly, has now qualified as a residential player and so makes up a fearsome top order. Boyle has three first-class hundreds, Beaufort one, while Thomas has a List A ton on his record. All are capable of some serious brutality on their day; Beaufort is a particular menace to the surrounding houses.

Even so, why are more people than watch some county streams tuning in to a weekly package of club cricket highlights, slickly edited but endearingly prone to overheard boundary conversations and missing footage, and not just tuning in but investing in the team and its players? Every match video attracts hundreds of comments, with the fans evidently deeply engaged in the brittle fortunes of the team’s stalwarts.

And it’s the stalwarts rather than the star players that make the channel what it is. Thomas or Boyle often open with James Russell, who contributes many a stoic half century to the cause while the ball flies out of the ground from the other end. Club captain Joe Walker is classic cricket archetype, a diminuitive wicketkeeper/batter who pulses with intent, running hard after his reverse sweeps and back cuts. A couple of years ago he had his front teeth removed in a freak accident behind the sticks, and played on. Mike Cowdrey joined three seasons ago, and was an instant hit, a deeply unorthodox batter who won game after game from the middle order, but then broke his leg playing football (I think) and is only now regaining his potency.

Then there are the bowlers. It’s sort of hard to judge the pace of the opening pair, Conor Golding and Arran Brown. Golding always opens from what I think of as the camera end, while Brown, a zippy left armer, takes the far end, from which the bowling always looks slightly slower than it probably is. The camera angle makes it hard to see how far back Walker stands or how much the ball is moving, but both his a pretty hard length and get some bounce.

I attach a (probably completely unfounded) air of sadness to Golding, who used to open the batting with James Russell, but has commenced a slow slide down the order to number seven, which doesn’t sit well with the natural elegance of his game. The Golding lofted drive, hit low to high, was a standout Bridges signature for a long time.

They had until this year a couple of high-class spinners in Ben Lucking, a left armer with a hint of the Phil Tufnells about him in the classic nature of his action and variation of pace and loop, and off-spinner Rowan Naude, but Lucking has departed after a season in which he was the league’s leading wicket taker.

George Cave, a footballing electrician, used to offer height and pace in the death overs, but he is another departure, while Ollie Blandford’s medium pace hasn’t been seen for a bit, either. Why’s that, then?

Here lies another part of the Bridges’ mystery and success. The match highlights have a voice-over, but nothing about the players’ lives away from cricket is revealed. Cave’s job as an electrician got the odd mention. Rahul Tangirala, who had a heartbreaking run of failure in his occasional appearances up until last season, when he began scoring runs, is playing university cricket. Walker and Cave spent the winter in Australia, where Cave has stayed on, but why or doing what, who knows?

As such, they remain a group of blokes who have the game in common. The rest is pure projection on behalf of the watchers. The growth of the channel must be a slightly strange feeling for the team – after all, who plays club cricket to have their innings filmed and then unpicked by a bunch of keyboard guys every Tuesday evening? But the matches are a source of genuine joy for the watchers, too. That much was obvious in the celebrations when Bridges first won and then defended the county T20 title.

Again, it’s hard to know if or how the profile or the income from the channel (they now offer merch like replica Three Bridges shirts) is changing the club. Their bete noir over the years has been Preston Nomads, who despite the name, are based just outside Brighton, a behemoth of a club founded in 1927 by a man called Spen Cama. Cama was a property developer who, when he died in 2002, left a reported million pound bequest to Nomads, as well as £7m to Sussex, where he had once served as president.

Nomads have won the Sussex Premier League a record ten times. Three Bridges never have. It would be a very modern fable if social media were to overcome old money and traditional power bases and deliver a change in the long-standing order.

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The paperback edition of Vinciness is available to pre-order now by clicking here. Publishing 2 June 2026.

Aeons ago, Sky televised the Hong Kong Sixes, an out of season hit and giggle tournament played at the spectacular but tiny Kowloon Cricket Club, where high netting was erected all around to stop the ball flying into unguarded streets. The name of the tournament properly alluded to the six-a-side nature of the teams, but its selling point, back in the day, was the novelty of watching the ball soar into the netting again and again. I remember writing about it during the glory days of blogging – something along the lines of ‘what more do you say about a tournament in which there have been 300 sixes?’

Three hundred! How quaint. How olde worlde and naive, how young and innocent in our view of this new currency. If only we’d seen it for what it was and would become – a newly-minted bitcoin just lying there at our feet. After yesterday’s game between LSG and Rajasthan, IPL 2026 has delivered 1,236 of them and counting. The game’s Boy King, Viabhav Sooryavanshi, has hit 53 on his own, closing in on one of the tournament’s apparently unapproachable records, the 59 struck by Chris Gayle back in 2012, when the Universe Boss was in his pomp and outlining what might be possible.

Even cool Chris may bat an eyelid at the idea of a fifteen-year-old blasting him into oblivion, but if it doesn’t happen this year – and the kid has at least one more game to go – someone will do it next. Why? Well take a listen to the regime of one of the breakout finishers of IPL 2026, Mukal Choudhary: ‘I try to hit 100 to 150 sixes every day in training.’

Right.

‘Five years ago,’ Mitchell Marsh said in the between-innings interview at yesterday’s game, ‘you’d walk off with 220 and be fairly confident, but now, not so much…’ Marsh’s 57-ball 96 and LSG’s 220-5 was duly reduced to rags and ashes by the ferocity of Sooryavanshi, Jaiswal and Jurel, the required rate down to less than eights after just 12 overs of the Royals’ reply.

There has been a generational shift on show. Despite noble efforts to raise their games, the old guard – KL, Virat, Jinx Rahane, even Rohit and Sanju – are just a flicker off the pace now, their strike rates still starting with an old-school one. Viabhav, Abhishek, Priyansh all begin with a two, and they are not going backwards from here.

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The six has not just been sponsored and monetised. Its capacity to reset the possibilities of the T20 game has become the prime generator of the money away from the field of play. In a post earlier this month, the excellent Inside-Edge highlighted the evolution of the IPL from venture capital speculation to blue-chip medium-termism. The profundity of wonder on the field is magnified by relative scarcity – there are only ten franchises and a two-month season. It’s a magical formula.

In 2008, Manoj Badale bought the Royals, the last doggie in the window, for $67m, employed Shane Warne as his captain and won the inaugural tournament. The Royals have been perennial underdogs (and non-champions) ever since, but Badale nonetheless this year sold the franchise to Lakshmi Mittal and Adar Poonawalla for $1.65 billion, an 18x return on investment. Mittal and Poonawalla have not bought expecting the same rate of growth. Instead they have a financial near-certainty, a proven asset that will deliver just as all blue chip stock delivers, year-upon-year at a good return. As Inside-Edge noted (and I recommend reading the entire piece), the Financial Times reported that global asset managers like Blackstone, who took a stake in the recent sale of RCB for $1.78bn, do so ‘in the belief that (sport) will be relatively insulated from economic shocks.’

So, ten franchises each worth, at a conservative estimate, $1.5bn+. A league now valued behind only the NFL at $18.5bn, where every game is said to be worth around $15m. The next TV rights deal comes in 2027, and is expected to remain flat-ish – if you can call any and all of the above ‘flat’. It is the behemoth that dwarfs the rest of cricket, which can only look on in awe at the sums.

Imagine being fifteen years old and possessing the ability to mint the on-field currency that has driven all of this, and to do so at a rate that no-one else can. Sooryavanshi’s future is in one way unimaginable and in another already mapped out.

NB: As strike rates have soared, the existential nightmare of IPL bowling is oft debated. I think it comes down to this: can you deliver the over that turns the contest? Yesterday, after 12 overs the LSG score stood at 149-1. Not a single stanza had gone for less than 10, most for more than that, and all contained at least one boundary. Yash Raj bowled the next, took a wicket with his second ball and conceded seven. Brijesh Sharma bowled the next and gave just four, Yash the next and conceded five. For all of Sooryavanshi’s brilliance, the match was won and lost right there, by the bowlers.

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The paperback edition of Vinciness is available to pre-order now by clicking here. Publishing 2 June 2026.

It would have been a cruelty to select Zak Crawley for the first Test match of the summer – and it is an equal and opposite cruelty not to, as well.

But then cricket is a cruel game, physically for bowlers, psychologically for batters. It’s why Kent, Crawley’s county, have a new no comments policy on their social media, instituted by Adam Hollioake. Because imagine being Zak Crawley and reading what they’re saying about you online right now. As the Rt Hon Peter Mannion once noted on The Thick Of It: ‘it’s like opening the door to a room where everyone tells you how shit you are.’

At some point, the debate has to stop being about Crawley the cricketer and become one about Crawley the human being. That point strikes me as being right now.

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Let’s draw a loose connection through all of this. After he made scores of 18 and 22 at Lord’s against India last summer (was that really only last summer… life comes at you fast) Crawley mentioned that he’d been congratulated by Brendon McCullum for batting ‘exactly the way the team wanted me to.’ He told The Times: ‘It’s hard to commit because I’m taking a lot of risk at the top of the order so I’m always going to have failures, and it’s how I deal with those and keep telling myself to be what they need me to be,’ he said. ‘In terms of scores it was average, but thanks to Baz and Stokes I don’t look at it like that as much any more.’

Later in the summer I watched him bat at Old Trafford. He and Ben Duckett walked out at 2.30pm on day two, after India had made 358. Crawley took the brunt of a couple of fierce spells from Bumrah and then Siraj. He and Duckett added 166 in 31 overs before he got out to Ravi Jadeja. Here was why he was picked and played sixty Tests - he may fail regularly against county seamers, but not many batters in the world, let alone the County Championship, could play Bumrah and Siraj the way he had that day, with so much time.

Over 60 Tests, Zak Crawley laid down his game and his ambitions and became the poster child for Bazball. You want someone to cream the first ball of an Ashes series for four - he’s your man. You want someone to keep going hard and accept low scores and failure and all of the attention that comes with them because that’s what the coach and the captain want - he’s your man for that, too.

He kept telling himself to be what they needed to be. He became the wreck of that idea. For better or for worse, Zak Crawley batted how he was asked to bat, and this is what happened.

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Last month, Simon Hughes’ Cricverse ran a detailed technical analysis of Crawley’s game. Like lots of players, his greatest strength – belting the ball hard and early on the front foot - can also be his greatest weakness. Technique, though, can be corrected given space and time. The mind, the emotions, the scars left behind are altogether harder to deal with. Crawley’s dismissal this week, bowled by Will Williams for 17, was the shot of a lost and beaten man.

The last time he played against New Zealand he went through a withering ordeal against Matt Henry, averaging eight across six innings, so it felt as though the direction of travel was only going one way. It has been exacerbated by England’s need to sacrifice some of the tenets of Bazball post-Ashes, even if just for public consumption. There must be blood, and as all of the instigators of the policy are safe from the blood-letting, the poster child is next in line.

I don’t think Zak Crawley asked for any of this. I’m not sure any cricketer would. He must be in a dark place right now. The professional game is unforgiving in many ways, not least in the public nature of its exposure. Crawley’s shot to get out to Williams was immediately and widely mocked on social media, despite the obvious desperation behind it.

What would be nice is if McCullum were here to at least say something in public. Or Rob Key, a man of Kent and Crawley fan. Picking him or not is almost irrelevant at this stage. Just a word to say they have his best interests at heart would work.

Crawley laid down his game for his country. He deserves some credit for that. He lived with his failures, swallowed the pain and batted how they wanted him to bat. He looked at the game in the way they asked him to look at it. This is the outcome. The right thing to do would be to help him find a way back to himself, whatever that looks like.

***

The paperback edition of Vinciness is available to pre-order now by clicking here. Publishing 2 June 2026.

***

You can pre-order the paperback edition of Vinciness, or The Unbearable Sadness of Batting right now by clicking here, and it will be mailed to you on 2 June. It’s a B-format paperback, once again designed by Dan Toomey at Fisher Classics. Cover is on 300gsm silk with matt laminated finish, and the 100pp inside on 100gsm Lessebo Vanilla. Price £10 plus postage. You can read extracts here and here.

The original 102 copies of the hardback edition sold out in a few days, and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone that ordered, thank you! Copies went as far afield as Australia, Japan, Norway and the USA. As promised, the hardback edition will never be repeated. The paperback version will not feature the original artwork of the hardback, either.

But Dan and me thought it would be great to create a real Fisher Classic for the paperback. For those that haven’t seen his amazing work, Dan launched Fisher Classics with a series of imagined book jackets, like these:

So now we have a real one for Vinciness. I think it looks great, but I’m biased. There will be a couple of cool easter eggs inside, too. So do pre-order now if you’d like a copy - it will be mailed personally by me on 2 June… Thank you.

Back to regular substack posting on Wednesday.

Turn on the TV or drop in at the Oval across either of Surrey’s last two Championship games and, were the home side batting, you had a thirty per cent chance of seeing him: a weekday phenom, a throwback, a greedy and atavistic force. Of the 320-odd overs fired down towards the Surrey blades, the eternal Dominic Sibley was on strike for 111 of them – 669 deliveries from which he made 292 runs for twice out. Throughout, he felt about as moveable as the pavilion.

Those dismissals were quite a thing, too, one an absolute ripper that leapt out of nowhere from the most placid of decks and the other a most un-Sibleyesque stumping. What was Dom Sibley thinking there?

His first knock of the three, 101 from 283 deliveries, was broadcast live on Sky. I was at the Oval for part of his second, 187 from 377 deliveries, and the experience was pretty much the same. Sibley is not one of those players who proves surprising in the flesh. The swap from screen to reality embues some with qualities that just don’t come across on the cameras, their size or speed or power a shock when confronted without any kind of mediation. Dom Sibley is as you expect Don Sibley to be. He occupies a lot of the crease. He picks off anything straight, forces the bowlers wider and then leaves it when they do, a circle that eventually brings the bowler back where he wants them to bowl - at the stumps and on his pads, where he picks them off, again and again.

It’s an old school, simple plan, supplemented by some powerful drives when appropriate. Surrey set up to bat for a long time, and batting for a long time is what Dom Sibley does. His name will always be yoked with that of Rory Burns, a Dolly and Daisy opening partnership which has endured. The superficial oddness of the Burns technique, elbows and knees flying all over the shop, offers a contrast to Sibley’s headmasterly technical rectitude. They are tough to bowl at in the county game.

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Inevitably, given Bazball’s newly-fluid selection scenarios, the Sibley name was floated, at least gently, into England’s orbit. It couldn’t happen though, could it? Not if you’re being serious about the direction of travel.

Sibley’s first ton came in a game so deadened by runs that Ollie Pope ended up wearing a pile of caps on his head while Ben Foakes injured himself bowling. It would have been priceless had the ECB insist McCullum fly back to get an eyeful of that.

More pertinently, the ball that got Sibley was the kind delivered in Test match cricket all the time, fizzy pace and bounce on a fifth stump line. His physical size and set-up mitigate against any kind of cut shot. A good Test attack like New Zealand’s might dry him up and bang him out in similar fashion.

Even if they didn’t, England are not in the market for the qualities that Dom Sibley is selling. The rest of them can’t stay in for 111 overs for a start, esepcially not while he grinds away at a strike rate of 40. To pick Dom Sibley would be to rewrite the Bazzer manifesto in the most extreme terms possible. If they choose him, they might as well un-retire Jimmy Anderson, too.

There are calls to do both because cricket fans recognise inherent quality that has been pushed to the side for whatever reason, while what it’s been pushed to the side for is no longer working.

Dom Sibley’s game may not fit the current age, but he is still there at Surrey, unbowed, only 30 years old, and with thousands of runs left in the tank. Like the monolithic stones of the henge, go take him in for a while – he ain’t going anywhere.

A quick note: Thank you to everyone who bought a copy of Vinciness. The edition has sold out, but wanted to offer up the promised second extract – it’s about the quest to find a painting of a place that doesn’t seem real, yet is…

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The pandemic came and everything was slowed, as if the virus had found a way to increase the pull of gravity. You could sketch it in a few lines – the eerie, emptied roads of that older, vanished England; the deserted countryside and the quietened cities; the man charged with leading the nation through Covid-19 immediately catching Covid-19; the fear, the selflessness, the hooting moral outrage; the deaths, the deaths – or you could write novels and plays and make films about it, and you would end up in the same place of terrible wonder at what had just happened.

For a while there was no professional sport and so Sky had to fill their channels with Zoom discussions between presenters who were, like everyone, stuck at home. It was curiously intimate. Here was Mike Atherton in his study. Nasser Hussain in front of his bookshelf, a hardback copy of The Girls, by Emma Cline, right above his head. Had Nasser read that?

One evening their guest was the film director Sam Mendes. He sat before a whitewashed wall on which a single picture hung. Even though Sam Mendes was very good at talking cricket, the picture behind him was all I could really look at.

I knew what it was although I hadn’t seen it for a while. It was called The Cricket Game, and it was painted by David Inshaw. The Cricket Game glowed from Sam Mendes’ white wall like a message.

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In the painting, a flaring sun sets behind a green hill, the shadows deep and long and growing across the flat land below, the players in a cricket match caught up rapturously in the game, apparently unconcerned with both the beauty and the fleeting nature of the moment. They are racing to beat the oncoming dark. The viewpoint of the observer is almost voyeuristic, intruding upon this secret place, a place that appears so perfect that it must be imaginary rather than real. Look at this, the painting seemed to say, look at it, because you will never really know it.

The painting had great power, but what was that power, what was its message? I wasn’t sure. John Cheever once wrote: ‘I’ve been homesick for countries I have never seen, and longed to be where I could not be.’ These are the feelings I had looking at The Cricket Game.

I was in a strange state between books. I needed something to write about. I thought maybe I could write about The Cricket Game. It was painted in 1976, a year of drought and strikes, the summer of punk rock, standpipes in the streets, the summer when Tony Greig said he would make the West Indies cricket team ‘grovel’. The Yorkshire Ripper was murdering women in Leeds, the Black Panther went on trial in Oxford. Big Ben stopped working, Harold Wilson resigned, Jeremy Thorpe resigned, John Stonehouse got seven years. Sid James died on stage. The Sex Pistols said ‘fuck’ on television. The Cricket Game, with its blazing visions of mythic England, was caught in its own heat wave and set in a place that was being torn apart by these wild new forces. It lived as an idea, a feeling rather than a reality.

Perhaps I could pull something together from these loose threads, something that went backwards and forwards in time to visit these different places but kept returning to 1976 as a fulcrum year. It was an idea that felt good for about a day, but then, when I thought about it for any longer, just seemed to dissolve into something intangible.

That feeling was a bit like David Inshaw’s painting, too.

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Note: This next part is from a little further on in the chapter, when me, David Inshaw, David’s friend, the poet and biographer of WG, Simon Rae, and Simon’s son Michael went to Littlebredy, the cricket ground on the Bridehead estate in Dorset which Inshaw had used as the basis of The Cricket Game.

Afterwards, we went to the cricket ground. It wasn’t far from the house. We walked across the fields and from nowhere, there it was, David’s vision made real. I took some photos to compare to the painting, and he really had painted what was there, the shape of the land and its trees, the path of the sun as it tracked over the ground. The impossible was real. Michael went out to the middle with a bat and ball and tried to reproduce his dad’s six. David pointed up at the hills above the pitch and talked about the days he had spent sitting there, allowing the place to go deep into his imagination, from where it re-emerged as The Cricket Game.

How had he done that? How had he brought it up from the chaos inside him? Here was the mystery. I thought again of the mission statement of the Ruralists: ‘Our aims are the continuation of a certain kind of English painting. We admire Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Thomas Hardy, Elgar, cricket, the English landscape and the Pre-Raphaelites.’

It was all there, in the painting, but that wasn’t all that was there.

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NB: Again, thanks to everyone who has supported Vinciness. It’s been an amazing experience so far. All 102 copies have now been dispatched. International orders should arrive within the next seven working days, postage permitting. The Australian orders have been sent as a single consignment to Melbourne, and they’ll go out in Aus post individually from there - it was the only way we could keep the shipping costs down. Those books should be there within a couple of weeks. Thank you!

A quick note: There are still some copies of my new book Vinciness, or The Unbearable Sadness of Batting available from the link below, along with full details about the book. It’s a Limited Edition of 102 copies, each numbered and signed, and with design and original artwork by Dan Toomey of Fisher Classics.

CLICK HERE TO BUY VINCINESS

A huge thank you to everyone that has purchased a copy. The first orders are being packaged up now, and I’ll get them out tomorrow (Thursday).

A mighty thanks too to Gideon Haigh at Cricket et al, who wrote this brilliant piece about the book and its hinterland (Vincerland?), and to Tanya Aldred at the Guardian’s county cricket live blog, who wrote, ‘I’ve read the first chapter and it’s gorgeous’. Thanks Tanya.

This is a short extract from Chapter Three, The Cover Drive Is Decadent And Depraved:

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The cover drive is not like other shots. It is dangerous and beautiful. It is decadent and depraved. It is the purest expression of mastery in batsmanship and it is a destroyer of innings, of matches, of careers.

It is addictive, compulsive, indulgent.

It makes crowds go ‘aaaahhh’.

It makes coaches slam their fists into dressing room walls.

Any change in this equation, the exquisite balance between risk and reward, reduces it, diminishes its capacity for pleasure.

The cover drive reveals a batter’s character. First of all, can they play it? And then will they play it? And thirdly, when will they play it? If I think of the cover drive I have an internal list of the batters that I have associated with it. Right now, without pausing, it goes: Brian Lara, Damien Martyn, Ian Bell, Moeen Ali, Babar Azam, James Vince.

All of them had or have a hint of recklessness about their batting, apart perhaps from Ian Bell. And of this little random and arbitrary group, Brian Lara is their outlier and true king. He made loads more runs than the others, was both measurably and immeasurably greater. Only seven men in history have made more Test runs than Lara’s 11,953. Of those men, five – Kumar Sangakkara, Rahul Dravid, Jacques Kallis, Joe Root and Sachin Tendulkar – cover drove with textbook magnificence, and almost always appropriately. They had the rectitude of schoolteachers where the cover drive was concerned. Ricky Ponting preferred to hit straighter, and if Alastair Cook ever cover drove, it made the papers, it made the news…

Batting for that long at that level is about control. Denial. Mitigation of risk. You can’t just cover drive because you feel like it.

But Lara did.

He did it because he could, because it was there. And what a sight he was, bat arcing high to low in a great rush, a fencer’s thrust with the right knee at the ball:

Have that … it said to the bowler. Have some more …

And as for Moeen… As for James Vince… My fallen warriors, carried out on their shields. Compulsive cover drivers, those two. Vince, in particular, was and remains hopelessly addicted, but nobody does it better.

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For a century, the compulsion existed, if hidden, in a few. Perhaps you sense it in the words of Neville Cardus as he puts himself in the mind of a man bowling at Victor Trumper: ‘Victor is moving at top speed. Well I’m bound sooner or later to send along a really good ball. Victor will flash at it in his ecstasy, and I will have him.’

Flash at it in his ecstasy…

There it is.

Compare it with Cardus’s description of Bradman a paragraph later: ‘He sees the dangerous ball with eyes as suspicious as those of a Makepeace.’

Bradman was machine-like, relentless, the anti-Trumper. He felt his echo in Sachin Tendulkar, the player he said was most like himself, whose epic of self-denial in Sydney in 2004 has become the poster innings for pragmatism over instinct.

‘Tendulkar had managed scores of 0, 1, 37, 0 and 44,’ ran the report in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘and had been dismissed on a number of occasions driving at wide balls outside his off stump.’

And so Tendulkar faced 436 deliveries at Sydney, hit 33 boundaries and not a single one of them through the covers. He made 241 not out.

‘I decided not to play the cover drive,’ he said afterwards. ‘They were bowling consistently outside the off stump and I decided to leave all those balls. Then they had to bowl at me and I used the pace of the ball. I would put this innings right at the top of all my hundreds…’

I decided not to play the cover drive…

By way of contrast, here’s a random dip into the James Vince archive, this from a match report of George Dobell’s on ESPN Cricinfo: ‘He did receive a decent ball that left him a little while inviting the drive. But it was an invitation he could have declined. Or at least an invitation he could have accepted with his foot to the pitch of the ball. As it was, that foot barely moved. It was a dismissal as soft as it was familiar.’

An invitation he could have declined…

The invitation. The dividing line. The flash of ecstasy.

Sachin decided not to play it. For James Vince, there was no decision to make.

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And from Gideon at Cricket et al: ‘in its crisp prose and and reflective digressions, Vinciness is typically delightful’

YOU CAN BUY VINCINESS RIGHT HERE.

NB: I’ve added some instructions about overseas shipping to the shopify page, but email me at jonhotten@icloud.com anytime with queries etc. Thank you!

CLICK HERE TO BUY VINCINESS

As promised in the last newsletter, below are the full details of my new book Vinciness, and how and where you can buy one (ie: here).

The book is a limited edition of 102 copies, each individually numbered and signed, and with an additional hand-printed and inked art stamp on an inside page, just to make sure every copy is unique. Once they’re (hopefully) sold, this edition will never be reproduced. There are also 26 lettered copies for promotion and those heroes who have helped out.

Here’s the blurb:

Vinciness (eng. noun. pron. Vincz-ee-ness)

Definition

1 . the state of being immersed in the beauty of a game.

2. to describe a moment of promise cut short by carelessness, or recklessness, or bad luck.

Format

Vinciness, or The Unbearable Sadness of Batting is a limited edition of 102 copies, each numbered and signed by the author, and featuring design and original artwork by Dan Toomey at Fisher Classics.

It’s bound in a A5-size hardback cover, with bespoke endpapers and 92 pages, 80 on 120gsm uncoated stock and 12 artwork pages on 130gsm silk.

This edition will not be reprinted or reissued, so it truly is a one-off (or 102-off).

The book

What is it like to have the world know one thing about you?

James Vince is a cricketer with more than fifty international caps and a pro career that has seen him lift trophies in domestic and franchise cricket. He was on the field during a World Cup Final and played in heated Ashes Test matches.

And yet that same career has become symbolic of something else: a carelessness and failure that has driven both supporters and detractors to despair – and worse. But Vinciness is not really about that.

Starring not just James Vince, but Tiger Woods, Gus Caeser, Ralph Steadman, John Arlott, Bill Buckner, David Inshaw, George Best, Brian Lara, sharks, and the greatest cricket picture ever painted, Vinciness is a unique exploration of expectation versus reality, and of what makes cricket beautiful.

You can read more about the book here. I’ll post a couple of extracts this week too, so please do sign up below to get them straight to your inbox.

And finally, you can contact me at jonhotten@icloud.com with any queries, requests or other info, or of course with any problem at all.

CLICK HERE TO BUY VINCINESS

In the early Summer of 2020, Phil Walker, editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly, rang and asked me if I wanted to interview James Vince. Hoping it would be set up already, I said yes.

‘I’ll give you his number,’ Phil said, ‘Just text him.’

‘What, text him, out of the blue?’

‘No, he knows about it, just text him.’

So I texted James Vince and he didn’t reply.

It was a strange time for everyone because the first Covid lockdown was in force, and Boris Johnson had called the cricket ball ‘a vector of disease.’ Maybe it was that, so I tried him again, and again he didn’t respond.

When I told Phil, I was hoping he’d say, oh don’t worry about it then, but instead he said, ‘no, don’t actually text him, you have to Whatsapp. They’re all using Whatsapp now.’

So I Whatsapped James Vince and he did reply. He was very nice, and we agreed to a phoner, which he did on his hands-free as he drove to the supermarket. It being an interview with James Vince, he already knew what I was going to ask, and I already knew what he was going to say, and that’s what happened.

By then, I was very much on the record with my admiration of him, despite the many flaws that his detractors were all too keen to point out on social media and in the press. His game had a fragile and apparently unsustainable aesthetic beauty, prone to both recklessness and bad luck. I would rather watch James Vince get 30 than see Joe Root score a hundred, and that’s nothing against Root, who is an all-time great and by all accounts a very nice man.

But I’ve discovered that you can’t pick the players that speak to you in that way. When James Vince bats I hear the voice, same as with the great Ramprakash, the even-greater Lara, and so on. It’s to do with process, not outcome. There is something enigmatic about them, and they were or are very openly battling with themselves and with the game.

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At the same time, Sky Sports were doing lots on discussion shows via zoom because again, no-one could leave the house. One night I watched the cricket show with Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain, who were talking to the film director Sam Mendes, a big cricket fan and by all accounts a very decent player, too.

Sam sat in front of a whitewashed wall on which a single, small print hung. I hadn’t seen it for a while, but I knew what it was – a painting by David Inshaw called The Cricket Game. It blazed from Sam Mendes’s wall like a message, a reflection on cricket and landscape, Englishness and death painted in the red hot summer of 1976, the summer of punk rock and standpipes in the streets, when Harold Wilson resigned and Tony Greig said he was going to make the West Indies grovel. Without really knowing why, I went on a quest to meet David Inshaw and find The Cricket Game, which sort of happened and kind of didn’t.

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I wrote the Vince piece and sent it in. At that moment, it looked like his England career was over, and in Test match terms it was, but then Covid happened and the whole squad got quarantined before a three-match ODI series with Pakistan. Rather than cancel the games, a shadow team emerged, featuring Vincey along with some young blades like Phil Salt and Brydon Carse, and he only went and scored a hundred in the final match. ‘I’ll never forget today,’ he said afterwards.

Between then and now, I was writing what would become Vinciness. I knew from the start that no publisher in their right mind would be interested. Cricket books, even those on big subjects and big players, don’t sell, and there are probably already enough cricket books in the world anyway.

The appeal of my own stuff was, in the words of Spinal Tap, selective, too. But I’d always wanted to try and put a book out myself. Being published is a wonderful experience and I’ve been lucky enough to do so with some truly august imprints. It’s a collaborative process involving lots of people, though, and doing it myself meant that I could decide on everything, from the length to the content to the cover and the artwork and the paper stock, to make a beautiful object as well as a half-decent book.

I got in touch with Dan Toomey, the force behind Fisher Classics, who, in lockdown (can you see a theme here…) had produced his superb series of imagined book jackets. He ran with the idea, and has designed not just the beautiful cover and look, but five pieces of original artwork that precede each of the chapters.

To give it its full title, Vinciness, Or The Unbearable Sadness of Batting is now done. It’s a limited edition of 102 copies (in honour of the great man’s sole hundred, natch), each of them numbered and signed (by me, not James Vince), and on sale as of Monday.

I’ll be putting full details of how here on Sunday - still making the final tweaks on the ecommerce bits, so please do subscribe here below. It’s completely free to do so.

I’ll put up some extracts next week too, so you can try before you buy. Along with Vincey, it features Tiger Woods, Gus Caeser, Ralph Steadman, John Arlott, Bill Buckner, David Inshaw, George Best, Brian Lara, sharks, and of course, the greatest cricket picture ever painted. Fingers crossed, eh…

Publication date: 20 April, 2026.

Full details and pre-order information via tomorrow’s newsletter. Make sure you’re subscribed - it’s completely free to sign up!

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Tonight is the Wisden dinner, held in the fabled surroundings of the Long Room at Lord’s. It celebrates the publication of the Almanack, a book that has arrived each year, come hell or waters high, since 1864, when Charing Cross station had just opened and the MCC legalised overarm bowling. Nothing since, not World Wars, the passing of Kings and Queens, the fads and fancies of publishing, nor the sheer anachronistic madness of putting out a book of stats annually when all of that info is on the phone you’re pocketing as you walk into the do, has so far stopped it – although the pandemic did see a radical slimming-down of its bulky spine.

I'm not sure how many times I’ve been, but it’s a few now. If you’re fortunate enough to have made a contribution to the book, a reassuringly thick invitation lands on the doormat soon after Christmas and you’re de-mothing the dinner jacket once again. The first time I went, more than a decade ago, the event was a sort of curtain raiser to the season, a glimpse of the hallowed turf while the evening light was still milky, but to take place before the first deliveries are sent down now it would have to happen some time in early February, and I’m pretty sure the Almanack isn’t even finished by then.

Writing for the Almanack was daunting at first. If you like cricket, you’re aware that whatever you do will be in there for what is – on the available evidence – forever, and will be collected and referred to not just by the book’s cohort of obsessives but will somehow have to stand the test of time, too. I could never really loosen up and get it right. Ironically, it was when I was commissioned to do a piece on the book itself, and those who hunt down the Holy Grail of the legendary ‘full set’ – an original copy from each year of publication – that it really felt like fun and I at last got into it.

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Whether John Wisden knew it or not, there is something about men and collecting (and it is almost entirely men) that has powered the book through all of those years. I think he probably did, because that first volume tapped into the Victorian fad for Almanacks and their mystical ephemera, an early internet that listed star signs and astrological phenomena alongside the dates of famous battles, the winners of the Boat Race and ‘the rules of quoits, bowls and knurr & spell’.

The Little Wonder had found a magic formula, although dark rumours persist about where exactly he got it. There was Wisden’s frenemy, John Lillywhite, who had been publishing The Guide To Cricketers since 1849, and then there was the diary of a decadent and ill-fated aristo called Francis Elwes, a pal of John Wisden’s whose private diary of 1863 contained much of the same info as the first Almanack – right down to a couple of mistakes in boat race times obtained by Elwes and apparently copied by Wisden.

For collectors there are certain editions that are the hardest to get and often require the expertise of dealers who specialise in the arcane knowledge needed. There is ‘proper money’ in the early hardbacks of the 1890s, while the wartime editions of 1917, 1918 and 1919 alone could set you back a five figure sum. Wisden 1916 is especially collectable because it contains the obituaries of WG Grace and Victor Trumper. Rarest of all, for reasons that no-one really knows, is the 1875 edition, which in its original paper wrappers might sell for somewhere around £40,000, depending on the market at the time.

The minutiae matters. Once you have a full set, which may include a couple of facsimilie editions or a book missing one of the yellow dust jackets that arrived in 1965, the quest for a ‘true set’ begins. “The purest,” said a collector called Bill Furmedge, “is 1864-1895, completely original paperback with completely original covers and spines. No replacement pages. 1896 to present day, completely original hardbacks. From 1965, that Wisden must have its original yellow dust jacket. Seventeen people who are living today, that I know, have sets of that description.”

Mind you, he told me that in 2022, so it’s probably changed by now.

At the dinner, the five cricketers of the year get their own special leather-bound copies, which is always a nice moment. There are some legendary faces at the better tables, and each year there’s a speaker, whose identity is usually kept under wraps. The best I’ve seen was Andy Zaltzman, who, along with being the TMS scorer is a stand-up comedian. He divided the room completely, some sitting in silence while the other half erupted. I still remember one joke he made about Kevin Pietersen playing for the Lahore Qalanders by zoom that landed perfectly with the zeitgeist, albeit that the silent section of the guests had no idea what zoom (or probably Kevin Pietersen) was.

The editor makes a speech too. Under Lawrence Booth the Almanack has become a spiky, moral voice for the game, his editor’s notes regularly dealing out a well-deserved kicking to the various administrative flops and foul-ups. One year the then-ECB chairman Giles Clarke, according to the Daily Mail’s report, “loudly harrangued” Lawrence after the speeches for something or other to do with Paul Downton and – that man again – KP.

Yes, men arguing over a book at a fancy dinner – that’s the content we go for. Plus the history and the sense of occasion, and the Little Wonder itself, part Bible, part historical record, part provocation… above all a reassuring presence in an uncertain world that has changed immeasurably while the book sails unstoppably on.

Every day on the municipal ground in Samastipur, around sixty children aged from four to seven turn up for cricket training, so many in this age group alone that coach Brajesh Jha has had to create timed sessions in the early afternoon, ‘and still it’s not enough to give everyone the same kind of attention I gave Vaibhav, because there are just so many kids.’

Vaibhav is of course Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who began playing on the municipal ground when he was four years old, and who, a decade or so later, kicked off IPL 2026 with a fifteen-ball 50. He and another local boy, U19 star Anukal Roy, are behind this new wave of young cricketers in Samastipur. In a city where the last census listed the total number of children aged 0-6 as just over eight thousand, demand for cricket is so great that Jha opened a sports store on the edge of the ground to sell equipment.

India has a population of around 1.4bn, so you know, you do the math. Sooryavanshi alone has probably already created more future cricketers than all of the pathways in Australia, England and South Africa put together, and he’s 15 – at least according to the bone density tests that the BCCI have put him through to ascertain his true age.

Sooryavanshi might still be playing professional cricket in 2050, and who knows what he or the game will look like then. Once he moved from Samastipur to Patna and Manish Kumar Ojha’s Gen Next academy, he was accompanied by ‘five or six’ net bowlers who, along with the coaches’ sidearms, sent down more than six hundred balls per day at him, ‘and as long as he trained,’ Ojha told Shashank Kishore, ‘I never saw him train defence.’

That will come as no surprise to anyone who witnessed Monday’s innings, or last year’s 101 from 38 deliveries for the Royals against Gujarat Titans, or his 58-ball hundred on U19 Test debut, or the simply mind-blowing 80-ball 175 against England in the U19 World Cup Final, or any number of his failures, when the ball balloons up early and that feeling of loss at the madness that will not now occur brings hush to the ground.

When you’re fifteen, there’s always another innings, always another day.

The IPL, more than any other competition in cricket, is future-centric. It’s about what will happen next as much as what is happening right now. As Gideon Haigh reported this week, two franchises have just changed hands, the Royals for $2.3bn and current champs RCB for $2.6bn. Both were backed heavily by Indian-American investment, some of it as blue chip as it comes, US stock royalty like Walmart and Ford, along with Blackstone. Several of those involved are also invested in the NFL, perhaps the only sports franchise more valuable going forwards than the IPL. As Gideon pointed out, these valuations are punchy – the two franchises sold outright five years ago, LSG and Gujarat, raised $2bn in total. But now there is global franchise expansion to take into account, along with the apparently endless internal boom.

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In a somewhat stark contrast, the County Championship begins on Friday, deep in India’s shadow. The players have been out there since March warming up, in no small part to the contraction of summer brought about by the Hundred and the ECB’s last-ditch efforts to board the gravy train. Even so, Sussex are in special measures, Middlesex facing an uncertain reboot and the Lancashire board being written to by a collective of former players unhappy with the governance.

What the fans yearn for is a return of the annual reassurance of cricket in England, the notion that even as you sit in an office building or behind a laptop of a Wednesday morning, somewhere in the shires Keith Barker might be running in to bowl at Jonny Bairstow before the eyes of a lucky few.

There’s something about time and timelessness and nostalgia that cuts deep in a way that newness cannot. Will Macpherson this week published a list of the 30 Greatest Championship players of This Century, and it tapped the same vein: here were Rikki Clarke and Darren Stevens, Mark Ramprakash and Marcus Trescothick and many more who lived a professional life and occupy a psychic space almost entirely divorced from that so far experienced by Vaibhav.

The domestic game’s own financial behemoth, Surrey, had 80,484 through the doors over the 2025 Championship season. That’s the aggregate of two bog-standard matches in the IPL, a somewhat fake comparision, but a perspective on a competition that is essentially made for TV but nonetheless has more than three million watch its 90 games live.

One of the few defences that cricket like the Championship has is that it is somehow more authentic than these confected teams belting balls out of small stadiums in games that are almost instantly forgotten once they are done. It comes more from the fans than the players, who must at heart be pragmatists to stay alive. In reality, one is feeding the other, with money, with new techniques, with modernising force, with overwhelming desire for the future that Vaibhav and others are ushering towards us.

NB: Do read Shashank Kishore’s excellent feature on Vaibhav for Cricket Monthly here, and of course Gideon and Pete at Cricket et al here.

In 2013, five years after he launched the IPL with an innings of 158 and thirteen months after he’d scored New Zealand’s first Test match triple hundred, but a couple of years before he made Test cricket’s fastest ever century, Brendon McCullum gave a batting clinic to Nick Knight on Sky Sports. In front of a set of plastic stumps, McCullum scratched his guard as he would for a T20 innings. Knight observed that he was six or seven inches out of his ground, even to the spinners.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ McCullum said, ‘I’m coming anyway.’

I wrote about it at the time, because it seemed that McCullum had, in those three words, summed up the psychological shift from cricket’s past to its future. For more than a century, the prime aim of batting was not to get out. As the great Boycott was want to say, ‘you can’t score runs in the pavilion.’ In this shiny new game with its glittering and life-altering rewards, you couldn’t score runs if you were just trying to stay in – and the time to score those runs was right now, not after the tea interval when the ball was a bit softer and the bowler’s heart half-broken. So stand where you like at the crease, because, as Baz explained, ‘it doesn’t matter if I’m stumped by six inches or a yard, I’m still out…’

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Today is the ECB day of reckoning, when Richard Gould and Rob Key will make ‘a scheduled media appearance’ to explain why Baz is keeping his job post-Ashes shambles. Gould is probably also explaining why Key is keeping his job – alas, no-one will be there to explain why Gould is keeping his, but you can’t have everything. We know what they’re going to say anyway, because it’s already been briefed out: more warm-up games, better communication with the counties, a new national selector, an ‘adaptation’ to the style of play, less of a closed shop in selection. Plus a new fielding coach, a more professional attitude, and so on.

But what about the other reasons, the ones that Baz, after a bet or a round of golf or whatever it is he’s doing right now, might be thinking were somewhat more germane to the outcome? The finger injury that Shoaib Bashir did not have the time to get back from; Ben Duckett’s collapse in form; Stokes’ fading returns with the bat; the prevarication over Ollie Pope; the injury to Mark Wood; the injury to Jofra Archer; Jamie Smith’s collapse in form and confidence; the obvious cooling of relations between coach and captain; the tenuous nature of all of the things that go into making a cricket team work on any given day. No-one wants to hear about those. Man plans and God laughs, after all.

And so change must come. After a fat pope, a thin pope, as the Italians say (and that has nothing to do with Ollie, for once, poor lad). The austere reigns of Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower worked until they didn’t. Bazball worked until it didn’t. The response is usually to self-correct, to use all of the faults and failings of one method to justify the deployment of another, and so maintain one’s executive position through this impressive insight. Thus we zig-zag through history, consistency in selection becoming a ‘closed shop’, analytical brilliance turning into the ‘mood hoover,’ a night at the casino now a midnight curfew. Any frame can be reframed if the language is supple enough.

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Back to Baz, then, on his horse farm or his golf cart or wherever he goes to chillax when he’s not chillaxing at the day job. When Andrew Miller coined the expression ‘Bazball’ he tied the thing that England were doing to the man in charge of it, forever. Perhaps that’s why McCullum instinctively hated the term as soon as he heard it. Bazball was sold as a cult of personality – his personality. He and it became indivisible, and as Bazball has diminished, so it diminishes him in a way that it doesn’t Ben Stokes (imagine if Miller had coined it Ben Ball or whatever) or Richard Gould.

McCullum brought the energy of ‘I’m coming anyway’ to England. It was part of the brand, along with the laconic persona and the Racing Post and the range hitting over the pavilion at Lord’s. But that same Brendon McCullum also played some of the great innings of the modern age, including its most significant – that 158 on IPL opening night. The tournament would have succeeded without it, but with it, it was never going to fail. It blazed from Day One. He is a huge figure in the history of New Zealand cricket, and of the first age of T20. He had his moments as a captain, his failures and his dust-ups, but he forged an identity for his team – it just didn’t have the same catchy name. England got all of that, plus the good guy, no dickheads Black Caps bit of him too.

And after the colourless captaincies of Alastair Cook and Joe Root, were you not entertained?

There seems to be a presumption (not aided by Baz’s understandable grumpiness) that he is unwilling to change. Yet McCullum’s batting career, like Chris Gayle’s (another Test match triple centurian) straddled eras – from ‘you can’t score runs in the pavilion’ to ‘I’m coming anyway’; it made the change from one thing to the other, so yeah, he can evolve.

You cannot buy a wolf and train it to become a lamb, though. The thin pope isn’t just the fat guy after a diet. McCullum’s strength is as an uncomplicated red-blooded cricketer who sees the game as kill or be killed.

If England want something more analytical, then Mike Atherton offered the solution: a return to Andy Flower for the Test team. Flower’s approach has changed from back then due to his involvement with franchise cricket. In his way, he has become more Baz and would probably be a better fit.

Just don’t imagine you can leash the real thing. Bazball may be dead, but the man lives and he deserves a life and a reputation beyond the England gig. Expecting too much to change is just kicking the problem down the road.

Ricky Castillo is a pretty good golfer. Last year, he finished in 100th place on the PGA Tour money list, earning $1,409,677. Not bad, but could be better when you realise that everyone in the top 50 took home at least $3m. The Top 10? Entry to that club began at $11m, and topped out with Scottie Scheffler at more than $50m.

Cast back 30 years, to 1995, and Ricky Castillo’s earnings would have secured him third place on the money list, just behind the winner, Greg Norman. The Great White Shark’s $1.6m would have secured him 94th spot last year.

What happened between then and now, between Greg Norman and Ricky Castillo? In golf, that question has a two word answer: Tiger Woods. He turned pro in 1996, and became the game’s transformative force, driving its global popularity and forcing up its prize pots. A lot of golfers owe a lot of their fortune to Tiger Woods.

Does cricket have its own two-word answer? Maybe, and if it does it would be Lalit Modi, the man who conceived of both the IPL and its player auction. Lalit is on the outs now, but a lot of cricketers owe a lot of their fortune to him, and there will be a few more once the Hundred auction concludes today.

When I was helping Sam Collins and Jarrod Kimber make Death of a Gentleman, they shot some amazing footage of Chris Gayle as he described waking up to a phone call after the first IPL auction to find he’d been bought for $800,000. At the time he was receiving a couple of thousand dollars per international appearance for the West Indies. He would become another transformative force.

It’s self-evident that sport operates as a cut-throat meritocracy. T20 auctions simply stick a price tag on the goods, make it all obvious. From day one, it has offered an alternative value system to the one provided by national boards and selectors. In that way, it has been more, rather than less, democratic, but democracy will never be a defining force in sport.

Kevin Pietersen was an early adopter of the IPL, and is rightly having the last laugh as the ECB prostrate themselves before the BCCI and the franchises. No one gave Pietersen anything, and he needed those sharp elbows that dug into so many ribs. In meritocracies, even those built around teams, individuals must be self-centred.

That’s why there will be little sympathy for the arguments about some of the ‘lower’ sums handed out to the rank and file players in the Hundred – those lucky enough to get any kind of a gig. In the women’s tournament, that is £15,000, the men’s £31,000.

Well, in a country facing another fuel crisis, £15,000 for six weeks’ work doesn’t sound like a bad job to me. Not quite as good as Ricky Castillo’s maybe, but then this is only the beginning. In golfing terms, the Hundred is 1995. The competition needs the big names and the headline numbers to assert its position on the stage, to drive it forwards and upwards within the market in which it operates. It’s not a democracy, and never will be. The auction just makes that fact even more obvious.

I’m a Southern man and I love this land,

From the mountain tops to the sea,

From tussock land to pastures green,

So beautiful, so beautiful…

The old fella singing the lines above wears a leather jacket and a bushman’s hat, his moustache as white and crisp as his shirt, the voice deep and strong but wavering here and there with age and emotion. The song, Breathless, starts out as trad acoustic folk but about halfway through makes a sharp left into dissonant and arresting art rock: ‘Leave us alone’ the voice urges, doomily… ‘Leave us alone.’ The accompanying video, which is pretty good, zooms in on an upturned chair, paint cracked and peeling, just in case you were missing the point.

If the song has garnered any attention beyond that offered to 99.9 per cent of the millions of tunes that exist out there in deepest cyberspace, lost in the algorithms of YouTube and the desolate search engines of Spotify, it’s because the voice in the hat is Glenn Turner, the man who was, before Martin Crowe and Kane Williamson, New Zealand’s greatest batsman.

He played the first of his 41 Tests in 1969 – distant and different times. He was good enough to make two double hundreds on tour in West Indies and a ton in each innings against Australia during New Zealand’s first trans-Tasman victory, yet his Test output was dwarfed by an epic first-class career, primarily at Worcestershire. Turner is one of just four non-England batters to have made a hundred first-class centuries (Bradman, Viv Richards and Zaheer Abbas are the others) and the only one who did so by scoring a ton before lunch and going on to make a triple hundred before close of play.

You might imagine that such distinguished levels of achievement would at least ensure him star status in the Turner family, except that his brother Greg made waves as a pro golfer, winning four times around the world and playing on what is the first and so far only winning international team in the President’s Cup. The other Turner brother, Brian, played hockey for his country and took up mountaineering before going on to serve as New Zealand’s Poet Laureate, publishing acclaimed collections that won him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and saw him awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit.

It’s to Brian, who died in February 2025 at the age of 80, that Breathless is dedicated, and inspired by. ‘Music has always been in me,’ Glenn said, ‘and I thought, can I do something other than hit a ball around a paddock?’

Turns out he could.

Turner played in the first three men’s World Cups, in 1975, when he posted what was then the highest ever individual ODI score of 171, and then in 1979 and 1983, the year of India’s maiden win: the very first shivers of a future that yesterday became fully realised. Once again, New Zealand’s dream was ended in the process.

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PRESENT in that India side of ‘83 was a young Ravi Shastri, who was bellowing away on comms during Sunday’s final. His signature tracer bullet got an early outing courtesy of India’s brutal, almost mocking first batting powerplay, but Ravi fluffed his lines at the denoument, when he thought that New Zealand still had a wicket in hand as Tilak held on to the winning catch.

In truth, he, like the rest of the world, had pretty much zoned out by then, so obvious was the outcome. As an entertainment, T20 has revolutionised cricket in all aspects, from its techniques to its finances, but when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong, and the viewer is left hanging around at a party ending hours before anyone is allowed to leave.

In a giant, purpose-built stadium named for a populist Prime Minister whose best frriend’s son sat in seat 1A as the game’s premier administrator, it was a display of power that ran from the pitch, where this outrageously gifted team held sway, upwards through every aspect of the sport. As Ravi said, the next best T20 team is probably India B. The great engine of that dominance, the IPL, begins again very soon. If you didn’t know it already, it’s India’s world, we’re just living in it.

The lineage of West Indies batting was once sharp and clear: George Headley; the Three Ws; Sobers; King Viv; Brian Lara… but then, where? If Lara was a more ambiguous figure than those that preceded him, then his successor blurs the line even more. Enter Christopher Henry Gayle, a name that, for some, may not dine at this highest of tables and yet as symbolic a figure of his splintered era as the others were in theirs.

Sometimes the noise around him, the self-mythologising creation of the Universe Boss, obscures the stats, which, when written down, insist on unambiguous accession to the list. A first Test match triple century at the age of 25, another five years later to join Lara, Sehwag and Bradman as the only men in history to have scaled that giddy peak more than once. And Test cricket was just the warm up act as he reinvented himself from lean youth with an undiagnosed heart condition to the immovable, crease-bound force that was the Universe Boss, Ur figure of T20 batting, its WG, its Don…

His white-ball feats mean Gayle holds one record no-one else has yet reached: the 3-2-1 of international batting. That’s Test match triple, ODI double, T20i hundred, a demonstration of mastery that may be the final mark of all-round greatness before cricket atomises permanently into a game for specialists.

Of Gayle’s peers, Virender Sehwag perhaps came closest. He had both the the Test triple and the ODI double but an T20i best of 68. That was simply a product of timing. Had Viru born born a few years later, it would have been a matter of when, not if. David Warner got within a whisker, with an ODI best of 179. Baz McCullum also dared to dream, a highest ODI score of 166 leaving him a few short. Rohit put up two of the three as well, but he will now never go past his Test high of 212. Martin Guptill completed the white-ball set before he hung them up.

For others it was tougher. Virat, despite at one point averaging more than fifty in all three arenas simultaneously, has just the T20i ton to show for it. His pal AB, remarkably, has none of the three.

So who can follow? After his evisceration of Pakistan the other day, Harry Brook now lacks only the ODI double, and is perhaps best placed to join the Boss. He may even complete the lot against a single opponent, Pakistan, who England host next Summer. The other well-set contender is Shubman Gill, who came within a few runs when he reached 269 in the Edgbaston Test last summer.

Pathum Nissanka has already knocked off the white-ball elements, and perhaps he will get in on a flat one somewhere and bat for days. He has the hunger. Another with two of the three is Ishan Kishan, but his Test match leg may prove harder to stand up – if he can ever get in the team. His best so far is 52.

Self-evidently, the T20i hundred is, for the modern player, the easy part of the job. The ODI double has increased in frequency thanks to T20, so for those without it’s a case of how long the format sticks around. Nissanka, and especially Gill, may just about play enough Test cricket to seal the deal, but the triple comes as rarely as a comet, and less predictably: after a glut in the 2010s, there have been just two so far this decade.

Good luck, lads.

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CLOSEST TO THE BOSS

1. Chris Gayle: 333, 215, 117

2. David Warner: 335*, 179*, 100* - minus 21 runs

3. Shubman Gill: 269, 208, 126* - minus 31 runs

4. Virender Sehwag: 319, 219, 68 - minus 32 runs

5. Brendon McCullum: 302, 166, 123 - minus 34 runs

6. Harry Brook: 317, 136*, 100 - minus 64 runs

7. Rohit Sharma: 212, 264*, 121* - minus 88 runs

8. Martin Guptill: 189, 237*, 105 - minus 111 runs

9. Pathum Nissanka: 187, 210*, 107 - minus 113 runs

10. Ishan Kishan: 52*, 210, 103 - minus 248 runs

The first rule of Jacks goes like this. If you can see Will Jacks on your TV screen, it’s bad. If Will Jacks is bowling when you wake up something has gone wrong. If Will Jacks is batting something has also probably gone wrong.

A return to the above words about Will Jacks, which appeared in a national newspaper during the Ashes Test at Adelaide, a piece that continued:

And yes, the flaw in this equation is the obvious fact that if you can’t see Will Jacks things have probably also gone wrong. But it is less certain. If you can’t see him, there is still a glimmer of hope, perhaps even the dream of the Zero Jacks day, where everyone else does their job, and nothing is seen of Will Jacks at all.

The Zero Jacks Day was emblematic of a fury unmuted by the disappointment and despair of thwarted expectations. Jacks had been plugged into the Test side as a kind of emergency patch to avoid imminent systemic meltdown, a skills exchange that asked a batter who bowled to play as a bowler who batted. Jacks made as much of it as he could, his continued selection proof of the value that the team saw in his contribution.

Moeen Ali was his beloved predecessor in this kind of arse-covering selection. On punditry duty after England’s win over Sri Lanka yesterday, he made the point that the key to making a role like it work was to reframe your self-image and then commit to this new idea of who you might be. The problem came, he said, when you had a bad trot in your first-class or franchise team in your regular position and they started to think, ‘well, maybe we should use him the way England do…’ The purest version of yourself was then under permanent threat.

Will Jacks finds himself once again reframing his position, this time in T20, from dominant opening bat who bowls the odd useful over to lower order finisher given prime responsibility with the ball. He is emerging as a key cricketer in England’s tournament, a more reliable if perhaps less eye-catching Liam Livingstone who may yet edge towards the destructive greatness of prime-era Moeen if he gets the chance. He has made game-winning contributions with bat and ball, and held his catches.

Moeen is in his dotage as a player now, a resplendent new hair transplant rolling back the years. He has a generous soul, which he needed with England because there’s an element of alternative history about his career, storied though it has been. He reframed himself as a player he was not and there he stayed, despite the shimmering promise of his purest version.

Post World Cup, Jacks will have to confront this winter’s work and decide what defines his future as a cricketer. Maybe this new Will Jacks will prove to be his vision of himself, too. After all, experts in that role command a high price in the global marketplace. Or perhaps he has eyes on Jos Buttler’s spot once Jos hangs them up. It’s a question only he can answer, but it feels like a crossroads moment for a malleable talent.

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The ECB have sent a stiff letter to the Hundred franchises about discrimination – translation: the India-owned teams not bidding for Pakistan players in the forthcoming auction.

Without going into the rights and wrongs, what did they expect? They sold it, and are now relying on a vague legal definition to uphold their principals and make themselves feel better and in control.

I’m sure everyone at the ECB knows that discrimination of this nature is almost certainly unprovable and therefore unenforceable, even if they had the will or the method by which to do so. It is just one of the many bad smells eminating from world cricket, by far the largest of which is the complete whitewash of Afghanistan’s ongoing gender apartheid, on which there is now an ominious and ongoing silence from all.

No-one has clean hands, including the ECB.