Mid-Winter Complacency
Grade: F
Fine, England. Rain the entire time I’m awake enough to watch this day’s play. See if I care. We’ve got Test cricket of our own here in August, y’know. Against a proper opponent who takes Test cricket seriously. A team that’s already claimed the hairless scalp of Jake Weatherald and is eyeing off Marnus’s receding hairline next.
You think we need your 8pm three-hour sessions of Sky pundits blathering on about Ollie Robinson’s wobble seam? Or Joe Root talking in soft-spoken vagaries about how his leadership will differ from Ben Stokes’? Or Nasser, Bumble and Athers chuckling away at old footage of the time they stumbled onto a random Test win in 1998? While umbrella-unfurling umpires take a perfunctory peek at the covers every half hour? Because we don’t. Check your mid-winter cricket complacency, lads.
On the positive side, yesterday finished with the news that Ollie Robinson and Josh Tongue had sawn a cricket ball in half because they couldn’t think of any other way to acknowledge their shared five-wicket hauls. This is precisely the kind of mad behaviour we want to carry over from the Bazball era. Well done to everybody involved.
It does rather take the stink off all the sandpaper complaints, though, doesn’t it?
