
Aussie paceman Conway joins Northants on short-term deal
Northamptonshire have signed Australian pace bowler Harry Conway on a short-term contract for four County Championship games.The 32-year-old has taken 119 first-class wickets at an average of 28.86, eight of them in three games for South Australia in this winter's Sheffield Shield.He will be available for the Division Two fixtures against Leicestershire, Lancashire, Glamorgan and Gloucestershire, all in May."Harry perfectly fits the mould of English conditions and will hopefully help us get off to a positive start," said Northants head coach Darren Lehmann.
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Spectator
3 hours ago
- Spectator
The titans who shaped Test cricket
Cricket histories are a dangerous genre both for writers and readers. They can be incredibly boring, the dullest of all probably being John Major's weighty tome, which said everything you knew it would say as drearily as you feared. So Tim Wigmore, a young shaver who writes on cricket for the Daily Telegraph, has entered hazardous territory. Speaking as a proud cricket badger, who even has a book by Merv Hughes on his shelf (Dear Merv, 2001), I will admit that I have read rather too many cricket histories, and I swore that it would be a cold day in hell (or possibly at the county ground in Derby) before I would willingly start another. But Wigmore has written a splendid, comprehensive book full of good stories and droll asides. It dips a little in the middle when Shoaib Mohammad starts batting, and keeps on batting, but what book of 578 pages does not? (Shoaib, who retired in 1995, is still batting in his dreams and my nightmares, and has just played an immaculate forward defensive down to silly mid-off.) In fact Test Cricket is as sparkling and entertaining as any book this long has a right to be. Wigmore has taken as his subject the pinnacle of the game, possibly the pinnacle of any game in the world, the Test match – played over (once) three and (now) five days between no more than a dozen nations (or collections of nations) whose first-class structures justify their hallowed status. So there are no Test matches between Brazil and Argentina – nor are there likely to be until there are first-class stadiums in both countries where regional teams play two-innings matches in whites, with lunch at 1 p.m. and tea at 3.40 p.m. Pork pies would need to be sold locally and everyone would run indoors at the merest sniff of rain or bad light. No, this book starts off with the old rivalry between England and Australia in the 1870s; adds South Africa a quarter of a century later; and then the West Indies and New Zealand on the same day in the 1930s. England fielded two separate XIs against these two teams for their first Tests – an experiment they have never been strong enough to repeat. (Australia often put out two teams in one-day internationals in the 1980s and 1990s, both of which would then beat England, which wasn't that hard at the time.) Wigmore supplies a clean and focused narrative structure. 'Within the space constraints,' he writes, 'I have been led by a sense of Test cricket's overarching story, paying particular attention to players who helped shape the game.' This means a lot of pages are devoted to people such as Abdul Kardar and Tiger Pataudi, while 'titans in less successful or declining sides', like Graham Gooch and Shivarine Chanderpaul, get far fewer. I have no trouble with any of this, although the lack of mention of my own favourite cricketer, Derek Randall, who scored an epic 174 in the centenary Test match in 1977, is obviously shameful. Wigmore has an eye for the telling detail. In a passage on the Australian batsman Victor Trumper, inspired by the photograph of him leaping out of his crease to drill a half-volley back over the bowler's head, we hear that in 1902 Trumper became the first batsman to score a century before lunch on the first morning of a Test match. This was something only five batsmen from any country have done since. I also didn't know that Trumper was the first man to popularise wearing the same national cap at every Test. 'The lore of the baggy green cap, then, is also the lore of Trumper.' Between 1895 and 1904, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji scored 21,576 first-class runs at an average of 60.94. Then he became the Maharajah Jam Sahib of Nawanagar and had to stop batting for Sussex and England. In 1929, Ranji's nephew Duleepsinhji took part in one Test against South Africa, the only occasion in that country's first 172 Tests, until their readmittance to Test cricket in 1992, that they played against someone who didn't have white skin. South Africa, and their supporters in the MCC, don't come out too well from this book. When an Australian Services XI played the first of five matches against an England XI at Lord's in 1945 tickets cost a flat one shilling (five new pence) anywhere in the ground. That's as opposed to the £160 a friend of mine paid recently for one of this summer's Tests. At less than a fifth of the cost, this book represents a serious bargain. It's not quite as good as seeing Joe Root score 100 in the flesh, but it's not far off.


The Independent
3 hours ago
- The Independent
Dave Ryding, Britain's most successful Alpine skier, to retire at end of 2025-26 season
Dave Ryding, Britain's first-ever Alpine skiing World Cup winner and one of Britain's all-time greatest winter sport athletes, will retire at the close of the 2025-26 season. The 38-year-old has competed on the elite circuit for ten years, securing seven podiums – six in slalom, one in parallel slalom – in that time. The highlight of his career to date was a historic win in Kitzbuhel in 2022, the first by a Brit in the World Cup's 55-year history. Ryding is one of four British skiers to have ever recorded World Cup podiums - the most recent a third place in Madonna di Campiglio in December 2023 - and the only one to claim a victory, as well as amassing three World Championships top-10s and two Olympic top-10s over the course of his career. Ryding said it was a 'natural' decision to retire and that it was important for him to go out on a high. He recorded his best-ever World Championships results in the 2024-25 edition in Saalbach-Hinterglemm, Austria, a sixth place in slalom, and his goal is to secure a similar career best in the Winter Olympics next year. The Lancashire native told The Independent that, 'After the last Olympics, I think I was quoted as saying, I'd rather cry than do another four years, or have a divorce or something like that! I wasn't thinking I would get another four years out of myself. As you get older the younger guys catch you up and you naturally peter out. So I took it year by year, and I really felt like I went in all in every year.' But the drive and hunger to compete remained, and with Milan-Cortina on the horizon, Ryding says it felt like the 'right time' to announce this would be his final season. 'It was quite an easy decision, taking into consideration my family as well and the sacrifices they make with me being away. It was nice to think, let's draw a line there and go absolutely all in again, and then come the Olympics try to do my best ever performance.' Ryding, who is Britain's highest-ranked Alpine skier, competed in seven world Championships and Milan-Cortina is set to be his fifth Olympics for Great Britain. He took a different route than most elite Alpine skiers, growing up training and competing on dry slopes in the UK before making the transition to snow in his 20s. He made his debut on the World Cup circuit in 2009, making history as the oldest race winner in 2022 aged 35, as well as the first Briton. His highest placing at an Olympics so far was ninth in slalom in Pyeongchang in 2018. He will likely continue to contest the final World Cups of the 2025-26 season after the Games next February, but that will be his final major goal as a professional athlete. 'Whether that's the number one spot or eighth, let's see, but I want to be better than ninth and sign off with my best ever Olympic result,' he said. 'That's exactly where my mind's at, to do the best I've ever done.'


BBC News
3 hours ago
- BBC News
Ryding to retire in 2026 after fifth Olympics
Dave Ryding, Britain's most successful alpine ski racer, is to retire at the end of the 2025-26 as 'the Rocket', in 2022 slalom specialist Ryding became the first British alpine skier to win World Cup this year, he sealed the nation's best men's World Championship result since 1934 by finishing Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics will mark 38-year-old Ryding's fifth and final Games."I'm committed to doing one more year all in and seeing what we can achieve," he told BBC Sport."Everything feels right now to draw a line after the Olympics while my body's good. I'm still at the top of the sport and still able to compete with the best, I still feel I can go all in. "I sit here with no niggles, no pains in my body, which is really rare in skiing. "I don't want the legs to fall off, it's not fun if the legs fall off mid-season. So while I still can, I'll do all I can to be the best in the world." To date, Ryding has achieved seven World Cup podium finishes, capped by his historic gold in the Kitzbuhel the aftermath of that race, Ryding said he had "never stopped believing, never stopped trying" - encapsulating his "Northern grit" and determination to rise to the top of the sport, despite the odds being stacked against most of his global peers, Ryding was not brought up on first experience of skiing came as a six-year-old on a plastic dry slope in Pendle, Lancashire, while he did little training on snow until he was 13. He continued to race on the dry into his early had a late breakthrough to the top circuit of the sport, earning his first World Cup points just a few weeks shy of his 26th birthday and not adding any more until two years was in Kitzbuhel, Austria, that he stood on a World Cup podium for the first time with silver in 2017, while his most recent medal, a bronze, came in Madonna di Campiglio, Italy, in December best finish at the Olympics is ninth at Pyeongchang 2018, but Ryding feels he has "left something on the table" at the Games, where he will be watched by his nearly three-year-old daughter, Nina."I think ninth is not a true reflection of my ability," he one last season, Ryding will train with British team-mates Billy Major, 28, and Laurie Taylor, 29. They have big boots to fill, but follow tracks that have taken British skiing to a whole new level."Hearing kids openly and talk normally about World Cup podiums, it almost makes me laugh, because this is nuts," said Ryding."I don't necessarily go to a race thinking of podiums, but the next generation are certainly thinking that. "The belief that I've given to the next generation, I absolutely see it, and I'm really excited to see what that becomes for the next 20 years." 'His legacy supercedes his results' Dave's achievements in alpine skiing are an ode to his dedication, his perseverance and the passion that he has put into the grind, because he works incredibly hard. But his legacy in our sport supersedes his results. It's more about the spark of belief that he has ignited in the next generation. He's given young people from Britain the belief that they don't have to follow the model of coming from a wealthy background, skiing their whole life, to be the very best. He fought a huge amount of adversity growing up, he dedicated his life to Pendle dry ski slope and that's where he got the graft and the passion. And he only really went on to World Cup level in his twenties, which is unheard of in our sport. We always say you need a massive amount of volume on snow. But he made a new in sport, we think that you've got to tick certain boxes along the way. Dave ticked the biggest box in our sport by winning in Kitzbuhel and he got there all of his own accord and all in his own way. I think that is the legacy I want him to be remembered for. It shows that our sport can be a lot more inclusive than people give it credit for.