Jordan Cox, who lots of good judges say is not really a number three, replaces the injured Jacob Bethell, who also, in many good opinions, is not really a number three, and scores 73 batting at number three. Marnus Labuschagne, who has been a number three for years and years, bats at number three for Australia against Bangladesh and fails, and Ricky Ponting, perhaps the greatest number three of all-time says, ‘I think there’s some technical deficiency there… he’s making the margin for error for the bowlers too great. With the length, he can’t score off the back foot. If you can’t score off the back foot in Test cricket then batting becomes a hard game.’ At Headingley, Jordan Cox faces Mohammad Ali and hits one right at the top of the bounce off the back foot and it goes through point like a rocket.

It’s only one innings though. Stats say that batters, and that means pretty much all batters throughout history, fail to make their average in two out of three innings, so maybe Cox fails in his next two or three visits because the numbers say that he may well fail, and those failures play into the idea that he’s not really a number three and he’s replaced once again by Jacob Bethell, not really a number three, who has to go to South Africa against the World Champion Test side in statistically the hardest conditions for top order batters, and he fails too, and that proves that he’s not a number three either.

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So what is a number three in the modern age?

We know what it was. It was the best player, what Tom Wolfe called in Bonfire of the Vanities the Big Swinging Dick, or if not, it was the best technician. We know who it was, too – it was King Viv, it was the Punter, it was Rahul Dravid, softening them up for Sachin. It was Kumar Sangakkara, princely and left-handed, and it was Hashim Amla, a whispering Shaolin master who trod so softly he left no footprint on rice paper.

On air for TMS in Leeds, Alastair Cook is trying to goad his fellow commentators into mentioning a hundred he scored in a Test at Cardiff against Sri Lanka in 2011. Andy Zaltzman looks up the card. ‘Yes, replying to Sri Lanka’s 400 all out, England 495-5 declared, Jonathan Trott 203…’

‘Oh yeah,’ says Cook, ‘Trotty got a double, I’d forgotten about that…’

By the time Jonathan Trott was batting number three for England, the mood had shifted and times had changed. Trotty made forgettable double hundreds. Of the emerging Big Four who would dominate this generation of long-form batting, only Kane Williamson (technician) seemed to favour three rather than four. India found their Trott in Cheteshwar Pujara. Steve Smith got concussed by Jofra Archer at Lord’s and Australia stumbled upon Marnus. As batting changed through its T20 era and Test matches became arenas for wobble seam bowling, a number three was something different, somewhere alien, perhaps some place impossible to score consistent runs.

It was easy to aspire to bat three when Viv Richards or Ricky Ponting did it. By the time Trott, Pujara and Marnus were grinding out scores it was both warm-up act and dying art. When big shots equal big money, why limit your options in the market by being a grinder? Pujara’s T20 strike rate was 112. Marnus never played the IPL. What youngster yearns for that?

As a case study, the modern England batting line-up spotlights the shortage. Come Bazball, Ollie Pope was asked to bat three having never really done it in first-class cricket. His success was equivocal and his credit expired with the feeling that he never really understood how he wanted to play. Almost every innings involved a madcap opening as he sought to Baz it up and also, you know, stay in for a while.

Out he went, and in came Bethell, not a number three, and then Cox, also not a number three. Except, how can you not be a number three when nobody really seems certain what a number three actually is? All England seem to know for sure is that Root and Brook bat four and five, with Stokes (until now) at six, and Smith seven, so if you want a go and you aren’t an opener, it’s Hobson’s choice, a spare spot, a non-role, a hospital pass.

And yet, and yet… Bethell and Cox have both succeeded, albeit via small sample. Neither show the skittishness of Pope, but nor are they classically defensive batters. In fact, they’re the opposite of that. Both produce tremendous power and chronometer timing from a backlift that goes beyond the perpendicular, a key trait of the batter raised post T20.

Perhaps here lies the secret to batting at three in the new age. In Tests, Bethell strikes at 60, and in a career total of 579 runs has made 330 of those in boundaries – 75 fours and five sixes. Cox’s 125 Test match runs to date have included 19 fours and a six. His maiden half century came from 71 deliveries, ten of which he hit to the boundary.

What do we deduce from that? Probably that both know they can afford to leave and block a lot of deliveries because their scoring shots count and the board still ticks. They’re boxers with a big punch. It’s really noticeable too how slowly both move around the crease between deliveries. They have low heart rates, these two, and they are un-agitated at altitude. They bat like they want to.

To pick up on Ricky Ponting’s technical point, both hit the ball hard with a straight bat, taking it late at the top of the bounce, and they’re white ball guns, which may not be unconnected.

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Nevertheless, a spectre hangs over this argument, and it’s that of the great Vince himself. As I wrote in Vinciness (out now in gorgeous paperback and yours for just £10 plus p+p here), he too was a not-number-three who hit lots of boundaries - in fact, of players to have scored more than 350 runs in Tests he had the highest boundary percentage, at somewhere over 70. But for Vince, more of a front foot player, it meant he faced more balls consecutively from each bowler as he was not rotating the strike, and so those bowlers had extra deliveries to play on his weakness, which was being caught at slip. Bethell and Cox are younger, less scarred and fleeter of foot than Vince, and if you spend much time batting with Joe Root, the strike will turn regardless.

Only one of them can have the place, obviously, so perhaps for now Cox, a not terrible keeper, is actually in competition with Jamie Smith rather than Bethell. The key to accepting either of them, or anyone else born after the turn of the century, at number three is to understand that batting, and cricket, is accelerating, sundering from its past and fighting for relevance in a fast-moving online culture. Nothing is the same, let alone a place in a batting order. Three, now, is whoever walks out there.

It’s great when you discover that someone you didn’t know liked cricket turns out to like cricket. Reading Et Al this morning came a name that unexpectedly took me right back to somewhere I’d not been for a long while. In a piece about the experience of the Darwin Test – and thankfully right before what would, in pre-electronic days, have been called ‘the fold’, that bit which now signifies the point at which non-paying subscribers have to stop reading or cough up (what can I say, times are tight round here) – Peter Lalor mentioned that one of those very subscribers had emailed in, and that man was Bernard Fanning.

His name may not be immediately recognisable over here, but in Oz, Fanning is a bona fide star. I first came across him in the features department of the Brisbane Courier-Mail, where I worked for three years back in the late 90s/early noughties. Among the key events while I was there were the Gabba Test when England were saved at the last by a god-almighty storm; the death, at 92, of the Don; and the release of what would become, for lots of reasons, one of my favourite records, Powderfinger’s Odyssey Number Five.

And Bernard Fanning is, or was, Powderfinger’s singer, frontman and songwriter (or one of them), but in my innocence, and due to the fact that before the release of Odyssey the band weren’t particularly famous anywhere other than Australia, I’d never heard of Powderfinger, and the name Bernard Fanning made me laugh because, being English, it had the unfortunate connotation of sounding almost exactly like the late and unpleasant comedian Bernard Manning, who, I quickly discovered, wasn’t very famous anywhere other than England.

One of my jobs at the paper was to lay out and sub the weekly music section, edited by Neil Melloy and written by Noel Mengel, the Courier-Mail’s music critic and another big cricket fan. I recall Noel sliding me a copy of the Powderfinger CD with the words, ‘see what you think’.

To my eternal shame, I remember returning it the next day and telling Noel it was ‘one song short of being a classic’ a verdict that manages to be both idiotically pretentious and utterly wrong in seven words, quite an achievement on my part. Soon, within weeks in fact, the record would be inescapable on radio and TV, on its way to becoming a high point in the culture and one of those pieces of art that takes you right back to a particular place and time the second you hear any of it.

In truth, I might not have known Bernard Fanning’s name but I had already heard what would become one of the great songs of the era, These Days, which had recently appeared in demo form at the end of what was already a stand-out Aussie indie film, Gregor Jordan’s Two Hands, a movie that got lumped in with the whole gangster chic Lock, Stock thing happening at the time, but which is far, far better, and more profound, than that.

The leads in Two Hands are a very young Heath Ledger, already suffused in that premonitional sadness, and Rose Byrne, but the real stars are the great Bryan Brown in the role of Pando, a scuzzy, low-level Sydney crime boss to whom Ledger’s character owes money, and his offsider Acko, played unforgettably by David Field. The song comes at the end of the movie, a perfect synthesis of mood and moment that confirms Two Hands as something rare and special, uniquely Australian in its combination of talents (and if you’ve never seen Field deliver, during these climatic moments, the single and immortal line, ‘shut your fuckin’ mouth, Wally,’ then seek it out as soon as you can. It’s magnificently done).

So yeah, having Bernard Fanning as a subscriber is a big deal, and to know the great man is as wrapped up in the agonies of Australia’s rickety top order and ancient attack as everyone else is tremendous news. Here he is with the lads performing These Days as the final song of Powderfinger’s last ever show, Brisbane, 2010. Vale.

And a friendly reminder that Vinciness is out now in this beautiful b-format paperback edition, yours for £10 and available here.

It’s been a big week for fans of Bobby Fingers, the Limerick artist whose new film dropped on YouTube a few days ago. If you don’t know Bobby Fingers, well it’s quite hard to describe what it is that he does. ‘Multi-disciplinary’ is the tag that art followers might recognise, in that he makes films, writes the scripts and songs for them, is the main character in them, narrates them and creates almost everything that appears on screen. At heart he is, I think, a sculptor, model-maker and painter of sublime skill and imagination with a dark and absurdist take on life and culture.

His latest, which is built around the construction of a diorama of Johnny Depp’s bedroom, lasts for 35 minutes and is so intricately plotted and interwoven that it took eighteen months to make. You really have to watch it to make sense of what happens and why, because what he seems to do with all of his films – and I’m guessing here – is to start with an image, Depp’s bedroom this time, and follow wherever some kind of internal storytelling urge takes him.

I’ve been wanting to write something about Christian Ryan’s new book, but wasn’t quite sure what until I saw the Bobby Fingers film. The book is called Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun, and it’s about… well, what is it about? Just as Fingers’ film is sort of about Johnny Depp’s bedroom but isn’t, Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun is about eleven apparently unconnected individuals who somehow have cricket in common. It took him between 10 and 20 years to write, depending on who you ask, and it’s a true work of art in the sense that it has vision, imagination, ambition and it could only have been written by him. It exists inside a universe of Christian Ryan’s creation in the same way that Bobby Fingers’ films exist in his, and those universes would simply not exist without them.

The threads that link the eleven can be gossamer thin, a picture hung on a wall for example, or a one-off game of cricket, or a fatal car journey, or a piece of jazz music, but these are the dark matter of the universe that Ryan has made. Disparate characters like John the disillusioned groundsman who tried to turn his pitches into works of art, or Watk, who played a solitary Test match that came to overshadow the rest of his life, or Shirvan Pragg, a Trinidadian all-rounder of haunting promise who took that fateful car trip one day in 1982, come together here.

I had to review the book for Wisden Cricket Monthly, and looking back over Ryan’s work, the seeds of this intricate creation were there and sewn into Feeling Is The Thing That Happens in 1000th of a Second, his fragmentary book on Patrick Eagar’s photographs, and also in one of the greatest pieces of sports journalism ever written, Jeff Thomson Is Annoyed, his story about a single afternoon on which Thommo bowled perhaps faster and more terrifyingly than any man ever has. It’s there too in Twenty-Two Balls From Chris Jordan, published in 2015, an outpouring of densely-assembled detail that builds and builds into bright and unexpected illumination.

Imagine that Jordan piece at the length of a book and you’re part of the way there. Eleven is experienced as much as read, with the choices Ryan makes hinting at all of those he didn’t, and at other unwritten books that might have emerged had he pursued them.

“We burn them in the sun” is a throwaway phrase uttered by Shirvan Pragg and in a book about absences, Ryan floats the idea that had Shirvan lived, the decline in West Indies cricket may not have happened in the way that it did, or perhaps not happened at all. Who knows? That ephemeral sense, ghostly and unreal, is what the book drives at.

Are these connections just the process of imagination? As I was watching the Bobby Fingers film, the YouTube algorithm threw up a sad and beautiful little documentary called Scuz: The Life of Graham Kersey. It’s just half an hour long and assembled very simply, mostly talking heads along with old photographs of another cricketer who died far too young in a car accident. Kersey was just 25 when, on Christmas Eve of 1996, he dropped his Surrey team-mate Adam Hollioake off at Coolangatta airport and was involved in the crash as he drove home. He’d been playing grade cricket in Australia, Hollioake had just finished an England A tour, and they’d been on holiday to the Gold Coast together, “just to spend some time,” Hollioake says, “cos he was my closest friend in the team.”

Lots of people felt that way about Graham Kersey. Mark Butcher and Alec Stewart also contribute, along with some of Kersey’s childhood friends and clubmates – Butcher, Hollioake and Kersey were a tight unit, and Kersey was Stewart’s understudy, coming into the Surrey side to take the gloves when the Gaffer was away with England. Stewart keeps a picture of himself handing Kersey his county cap on his office wall: “Do I think of him every day? Yes.”

It’s also impossible to watch the film and not think of the losses to come at Surrey: Adam Hollioake’s brother Ben, Tom Maynard, Graham Thorpe. Such are the connections that emerge. Do watch Bobby Fingers, do watch Scuz, and do read Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun. Art and life, eh?

And a friendly reminder that Vinciness is out now in this beautiful b-format paperback edition, yours for £10 and available here.

Two equal and opposite things can be true at the same time. In a new Times piece, Mike Atherton asks whether the owners of The Hundred franchises have overpaid in coughing up £500m for their three-week window of exclusivity plus access to grounds and players. And he’s right, they probably have – here’s the caveat – for what they are currently getting.

Equally clearly, the ECB have not realised enough money for what they have sold, because they could only sell it once and now it has gone. To offer an analogy: the real estate on which Lord’s cricket ground stands has a commercial price, and yet the ground itself has a value that cannot be put in financial terms. If someone were to buy it, they would undoubtedly both overpay for the amount of land but underpay for all of the ineffable things that Lord’s means and stands for, for all that cannot be replaced.

The havoc that The Hundred window wreaked on the schedule – early summer days bulleting past, the retirement of Ben Stokes like something in a yellowing newspaper now, a white-ball series with India already half-forgotten, the women’s World Cup final interrupted by the sacking of Baz because said white-ball series began the following day, the T20 blast quarter finals happening in empty grounds while England were playing Argentina with Finals Day scheduled for 72 hours after their conclusion – all are part of the price, part of the cost of clearing the decks. How much is that really worth?

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As Atherton pointed out, there was a deliciousness in Stokes’ return to Durham, the Northern Odysseus making it back to Ithaca in perfect time to biff a hundred that would remove the start of the actual Hundred from the headlines just as the publicity machine cranked out its messages and its montages.

There is more than a hint of the warrior god about Stokes, an exiled king returning to his lands, all muscles and scars and wounded ego. Revenge? Oh yeah, you bet there’s going to be some of that, and a bit of righteous carnage too.

Gloriously, the setting for this cinematic homecoming is the Metro Bank Cup, the red headed stepchild of English Summer, a competition that lands perfectly for the die-hard domestic fan as a badge of purity, the anti-Hundred, a County Championship proxy for the unwanted and unloved not blessed with a contract for the televised good times.

Stokes is the one player in England who can shift the centre of gravity that far. £500m for the Hundred, sure, but bet your last quid that anything he does in the Metro Bank will make bigger headlines, and he knows it. He may ‘fucking love’ Test cricket, and he admitted to getting the chills when he played for Durham earlier in the year, but equally he and his ‘people’ understand the optics too. Having probably pushed it too far with the whole resign and then rush off to open the batting thing, Stokes can reunite his army with a meaningful effort in a team that has an obvious piece of his heart.

Is there a bigger picture here, too, an Imax-size master plan? Until the confected curfew nonsense, Stokes was all-in for for a final tilt at Australia next Summer. Maybe the way he was hung out to dry did change things. Perhaps the love has gone, maybe his giant reservoir of willpower drained away overnight. After a winter’s pain and the death of his vision of how the game can be played, followed by the PR war post the Lord’s Test, killed what desire he had left after a decade on the front lines.

But maybe not, too. There has always been a sense of drama about Ben Stokes, a feeling that his big days are bigger than anyone else’s. There’s a dynamic at play: he’s up, then he’s down again. The epic triumphs get their sense of scale from the depths of his low moments. His great pal Root operates on one setting, humming along on a single frequency. Stokes is Meat Loaf doing Bat Out Of Hell, a symphony of excess.

You don’t think he knows it, too? Think again. This sense of narrative has mapped his career, so who could resist the grand finale, the big finish, the warrior king triumphant or carried out on his shield? The pull of a return to what will inevitably be Harry Brook’s Test team, maybe even his World Cup team too, under a compliant coach might be impossible to resist. After all, it’s not as if Ben Stokes is easily replaceable.

Unless he comes out and says so (and maybe even if he does) the circus will remain in town, self-generating its story and its headlines.

Will he come back or won’t he?

Two things can be true at the same time.

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If you’re jonesing for the World Cup, Jonathan Wilson’s The Power And The Glory, deservedly crowned Sports Book of the Year at the Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards, is out in paperback now. It’s brilliant, and it’s available here and here. Check it out!

And a friendly reminder that Vinciness, precursor to Stokesiness and unlike Stokesiness actually a real thing, is out now in paperback, yours for £10, and available here.

It’s hard not to feel the true weight of football in England at the moment, and it’s measured in tons. L’affair de Stokes has receded to background murmur. The women’s World Cup final at Lord’s was – let’s be real here – a damp squib in part because of the scheduling. Even the debut of a 15 year old wonder-kid followed by a billion back home became nothing more than a throwaway down-pager for the sports sections. At Wimbledon, the organisers were leaning heavily on old-stagers Djokovic and Williams for a tiny bit of cut-through.

All else disappeared from view last Sunday night/Monday morning with the match at the Azteca. The pubs stayed open. The schools stayed closed. And England – oh boy, did they do the business. With a kick-off delayed until 2am, more than nine million watched the match live on BBC, while the next day saw 48 million requests for highlights on the iPlayer. When someone as eminent as friend of this Substack Jonathan Wilson calls the game one ‘that will be discussed as long as football exists,’ then you’re scrabbling around for a vaguely comparable moment in English cricket: 2005 maybe, or the final of 2019?

This, let’s not forget, was not even a quarter final (that comes on Saturday, so good luck to the England-India men’s T20 taking place a few hours of drinking time beforehand). The thought of the England football team contesting a World Cup final and even winning it, well… what would that involve? A national holiday, a countrywide open top bus tour, a rise in the birth rates, a feel-good windfall for the economy? Andy Burnham getting the three lions tattooed above his heart on a Kik livestream? Thomas Tuchel accepting accelerated British citizenship from Prince William? A vast unfolding of the law of unintended consequences will quickly take place should the impossible dream become real at last.

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This football World Cup has the effect of compounding the errors in English cricket’s governorship, specifically the calendar and the mess over the men’s Test team. The Hundred begins two days after the World Cup final, and concludes as England try to cram in a Test series with Pakistan and some white ball cricket against Sri Lanka, while the women’s inaugural Test at Lord’s starts on Friday, just in time for the England v Norway build-up. At this point, the ECB’s prime marketing focus might be to see how many England footballers it can get on camera at a Hundred game, but then the Premier League kicks off on August 21, which is day three of the First Test against Pakistan, so there’s that, too… Can the sport afford an invisible summer beset by bad news and weird vibes?

Given the inequalities, there’s an odd similarity, almost a singularity, between the men that embody either side of the divide, Harry Kane and Joe Root. Kane is England’s greatest goal-scorer, Root its highest run-getter. Both come from ordinary backgrounds, both are husbands and dads with impeccable reputations built on their innate and obvious decency. They treat their followers well, and do so because they want to, not because they have to. There’s no downside to being a Harry Kane fan or a Joe Root fan.

On the field they are exemplars of a certain kind of talent. Root is more of a Tendulkar than a Lara, technically pure, consistent, reliable. Close your eyes and imagine a Joe Root innings and it’s a frictionless experience, the ball sent where it asks to go, a glide from start to finish. Cricket can be a violent game, but Root’s batting hides that violence away behind the sweetness of his skills. His numbers have ascribed an upward curve because he learned the lessons of his early career, when he found it harder to convert starts into proper scores. Now he bats like a wise Buddha, at peace with himself and the unequal game, not its biggest player but maybe its best.

You could say the same about Harry Kane, who in terms of star power and commercial grunt exists on the rung below Haaland, Messi and Ronaldo, just as Root lies below the Gods of India in fame, exposure and earnings. Like Root, Kane is elevated to their company by the numbers: he is Tottenham Hotspur’s all-time leading goalscorer, England’s all-time leading goalscorer, the all-time highest English goalscorer in the Champions League, a winner of multiple Golden Boots (hopefully he asks for alternate feet as he piles them up). He has 500 career goals, and is now the joint fifth highest goalscorer at World Cup Finals, which, given that those above him play for teams which actually win it from time to time, is not bad going. Like Root, there is the feeling of craftsmanship rather than unfathomable genius to what he does, an attention to detail applied with a natural intelligence and feel for the game. The first yard for Harry is always in the head.

As they grow older, both are almost superhumanly injury free and permanently available. Below the placid surface there is a rage to hold on, a fierce will to survive.

And what of those surfaces? What do they say? They are the traditional kind of English storybook hero: modest and unassuming, fair-haired and fresh-faced, a post-war timelessness that suggests they may have emerged from any era. There’s a Harry Potter quality to them, a kind of moral simplicity of the good guy. In public at least there is little complexity, no darkness shadowing their personalities in the way it has more ambiguous heroes like Gazza or Stokes or O’Sullivan, nor the vulnerability of the fallen giant that existed in Frank Bruno and Andrew Flintoff. They feel less at the whim of their emotions, as likely to do the business on a wet Wednesday night in Leicester or an empty arena in UAE as they are on the days of full houses and epic repercussions.

No doubt when the time comes there will be knighthoods and the long afterlife of the legend. There’s no sense that either yearns for the bigger post-game existence of a Beckham or a Flintoff, richer and more famous now than they were back then.

They are, in short, reassuring in so many ways, proof of some kind of natural justice that shows you get out what you put in. England can’t be too bad if Kane and Root are the avatars of its winter and summer sports.

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But for all of Root’s greatness and approachability, the England cricket team still lacks the stories and the representation of Kane and his team-mates. For any ordinary kid, how appealing is being hoovered up by a public school or set on a talent pathway when football is available on the doorstep and geared up to find every player of ability and potential by the sheer force of competition. Jude Bellingham may be a minority shareholder in a Hundred franchise, but an athlete of his quality, or that of Saka, or Eze or Rice only really has one choice to make in terms of which sport to play.

Should Kane join Root as a World Cup winner, the weight of football will be doubled, cubed, multipliable by unknowable factors. Cricket may look on in envy, temporarily obliterated and in fear of its own mistakes.

If you want the ultimate companion to this World Cup, Jonathan Wilson’s The Power And The Glory has been 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!

And a friendly reminder that Vinciness is out now in paperback, yours for £10, and available here.

They talk about bowling fast like it’s a choice you make.

Jofra Archer can bowl at 95mph, but today he’s bowling at 85 mph, why is that?

They don’t say, Joe Root chose not to make a century today, do they? Joe Root instead chose to be leg before wicket with the keeper standing up again. No. And anyhow, batters that choose not to get runs, like Barry Richards did sometimes, they became legends. Sunny Gavasker batting on a go slow in the first World Cup. Famous.

Fast bowling is not like that. Fast bowling is like nothing else. Look at Ben Stokes. He’ll run in and bowl at 84mph any time you want. Do it for twelve overs in a row, and then do it again the next morning. Ben Stokes probably bowls 84 mph at his kids in the garden.

But Ben Stokes can’t bowl 90, not today, not tomorrow and not next week, not at 35 years of age, regardless of how much he might want to. You can’t choose to do it and you can’t necessarily choose when it happens even if you can.

If you’re Jofra Archer, you’ve got a hinterland of speed, a place where you can sometimes go and sometimes not. To travel there is not just down to you, not just down to effort. It can be down to the country, the pitch, the temperature, the wind, the slope, the condition of the ball, the state of your body, the extent of your injuries and your strains and your workload. It depends on your mind and where it is, on who you’re bowling at and the circumstances of the game.

What was it Steve Smith said to you that time?

‘Bowl fast when there’s nothing happening, Champion…’

He wasn’t saying that when you laid him out at Lord’s though, was he.

Bowling fast is not a choice, it depends on all of these factors and more, and anyway, what is speed?

Speed is empirical, but not to the person facing it. The batter can be playing well or badly. His biorhythms might be right and they might be wrong. His sight lines, his perception of what is happening could be sharp or fuzzy. What seems fast one day feels playable the next. Same number on the speed gun, but different in the mind and to the eye.

If you’re Jofra Archer, like some of the great quicks before you, there is something else too, something in the way your arm comes over, hiding the release point from the batter for that extra split second, a moment of time so small as to be almost immeasurable by the standards of cricket radar, but enough for the ball to have travelled a yard by the time they pick it up again. That’s a yard of speed regardless of what the gun says.

When you really are bowling fast, very high eighties and into the nineties, even Test class batters won’t always see it. Look at Steve Smith. You hit Marnus right after, too. They’re not bad, are they. In this series alone you’ve hit Phillips, Latham, Mitchell. They’ve all been facing this stuff for years, ducking and hooking thousands of short deliveries, and they could do nothing about it.

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Even so, they still say, Jofra could have bowled faster. Or longer. After you worked Phillips over at the Oval, Root had to hold you back the following morning, and people that don’t understand fast bowling can’t understand why. Oh Fred Trueman bowled a thousand overs a season, they say. But there were no speed guns on Fred, were there. He just told you how quick he was.

Then you bowl a quick one to Blair Tickner who’s nowhere near good enough to get out of the way, and he gets sick and bad from the shock of the impact and can’t play on so New Zealand sub in a young lad who bowls barely 80, cross seam with the keeper standing up, and he knocks over Brook and Stokes and that probably wins them the Test and the series. Maybe someone loses their job because of it, who knows…

Cause and effect, they call it. Or the law of unintended consequences. And someone will still go on about your gold chain and whether it makes you bowl slower, or maybe you’re just lazy and you spent too long at the IPL. They just want you to go to that magical place all the time, but what they don’t understand is that it wouldn’t be magical if that was how it happens, it would just be normal wouldn’t it, and fast bowling is not normal and never will be.

***

The football World Cup here, England are winning*, 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!

*Not guaranteed.

And a friendly reminder that Vinciness is out now in paperback, yours for £10, and available here.

Maybe the higher up you go at a cricket ground, the loftier your perch, the more starry your view becomes. Maybe here, up in the gods, you start to feel like one yourself…

Yesterday at the Oval, James Rew walked out to bat as England’s number six. The score was 170-4, and, disconcertingly, he had to pass Joe Root, who was stomping off having reviewed a marginal leg before decision and not much enjoyed the result. Has there ever, in the history of the game, been such a disparity between outgoing batter and the incoming one? Root had just fallen to the 24,327th delivery he received in Test cricket. Rew, as if he needed reminding, was yet to face a single ball. What would he give, at that moment, for just one of Root’s 13,998 runs?

Tom Blundell remained up to the stumps. Matt Henry switched to around the wicket. It must have been an out-of-body experience for James Rew, that first delivery. No matter how you prepare, how long you have visualised the moment, it can’t have been like this, not 170-4 on a muggy afternoon at the Oval, the captain out, the early serenity of the afternoon’s play broken open, this lifetime’s dream now a visceral reality.

Henry ran in and bat somehow searched out ball, which made a good, solid sound as it ran back up the wicket. It was a moment big enough to fill the ground, big enough to be felt right up in the highest seats.

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Rew batted all too briefly with England’s vice-captain and travelling circus act Harry Brook, who as is increasingly his want, played one shot of unreliable genius but otherwise looked skittish, like he couldn’t quite believe he hadn’t yet made another 30-ball half century but instead was getting pinned into playing French cricket by New Zealand’s up to the stumps tactic.

High in the Gods it’s all so clear, so easy to see, you see… Someone please tell Harry that all he needs to do is bat normally. Pretend it’s a spinner or something. It’s mad the way he lets it affect him. When Henry nipped one back, he was so plumb, so immobile, that he walked off before the finger was half-raised, the spin and turn and stomp away the most he had moved his feet in about five overs.

That brought out Jordan Cox, also on debut. Has a batter ever moved from junior player (add to Root’s 24,327 deliveries faced Harry Brook’s 3,767, his triple century, his average of 53) to senior partner more rapidly than James Rew?

From the starry perch, Cox looked like a boy in his first school uniform, fresh out of the packet, impossible clean and bright and whitey-white, the sleeveless sweater a size too large and bought with next term in mind, his straggly mullet having somehow evaded the barber before the big day.

Rew got a few runs on the board, but Cox had the time and the class, his first scoring shot a lazy square drive hit from one knee like Kim Hughes, the ball disappearing at a speed out of synch with the shot. Maybe he is that good. Later he hit a square drive off the back foot, the ball clipped at the very top of the bounce like that’s easy to do. One of the most technically accomplished shots in the game made to look like nothing.

They’d put on 40, which was more than England had the right to expect, probably, from a pair on debut. O’Rourke was back on, Latham sensing the moment even though he’d flogged the big fella through 15 overs in a couple of sessions. Like Archer, O’Rourke got a bit more out of the pitch than anyone else.

With the field spread out before us, the Gods watched the obvious play out. A deep backward square, a deep fine, a short midwicket. Rew had nailed one pull, but O’Rourke is sharper and he was firing it in as the captain wanted, mixing it up with some length stuff, too.

But the Gods – the real ones – smiled, and when Rew got a top edge it flew from sunshine into shadow, dropping fast on Ravindra at deep fine and poor old Rachin, who has been deserted by the gods himself, dropped another one.

That’s it, the bit of luck you need isn’t it, the bit of luck that life turns on from time to time. Only twenty minutes or so left now, and that’s what, four overs? Face half each and there are another 12 or so deliveries between you and the pavilion, between you and night’s sleep and another go in the morning… Just you know, don’t hook at it again. Simple really, especially if you’re high above the play, watching Latham keep the field in place, seeing Nathan Smith give Rachin a hug and telling him not to worry, we’ll get him, watching O’Rourke’s head go down not in disappointment but determination.

When you’re out there in the middle of it on debut, there’s probably not room in your mind for all of that. All you can think is something like, ‘stay positive’ or ‘play your normal game’ or ‘run towards the danger’ so Rew went for the shot again, not once but twice, the second time to a straighter one that flew high but not far from his glove into the hands of Mitchell running back from slip.

As he walked off, the dream over for now, the dream of the next morning and the chance of a proper score, the kind of score that might keep him in the team even if Jamie Smith comes back, gone, at least for now. It’s so easy to see, but only when it’s not happening to you.

***

The football World Cup here, England are winning, 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!

And another friendly reminder that Vinciness is out now in paperback, yours for £10, and available here.

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.

***

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!

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

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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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