2 days ago
State-school cricket at Lord's? Bring it on
A state-school cricket competition announced last week with a final at Lord's is such a good idea you wonder why it has taken until now for someone to come up with it. Ever since Lord (George) Byron convinced the authorities to allow the first Eton vs Harrow match to be played at Lord's in 1805, the public schools have monopolised the cricket played on the game's most celebrated turf. Byron himself, although crippled with dysplasia and a deformed right foot, played for Harrow in that match and afterwards went to the West End to 'kick up a convivial row in the Haymarket Theatre'.
The new T20 competition was launched at Lord's by Michael Vaughan and Heather Knight, both state-school-educated England captains, and it will be known as the Knight-Stokes cup (Ben Stokes was also state-educated). There will be a girls' and a boys' final hosted on the main ground at Lord's from next summer. Get your entries in now.
England's current batting line-up is a great advert for public-school sport. Opening with Zak Crawley (Tonbridge) is Ben Duckett (Stowe); Duckett was not just an awesome run machine from his first year at Stowe; he also amassed nearly 1,000 runs the year before at his prep school. After them come Ollie Pope (Cranleigh) and at No. 5 Harry Brook (Sedbergh). All very well, but if there's a fraction of that talent learning the game on what remains of the playing fields at state schools, we should surely try to bring it on. The first five batsmen in the first Test England played after the war (against India at Lord's) were all state-school-educated: Len Hutton, Cyril Washbrook, Ben Compton, Wally Hammond and Joe Hardstaff Jnr.
Whoever would have imagined that the worst two teams in county cricket at the moment, currently battling it out at the bottom of Division 2, would be Kent (the county of Cowdrey, Knott and Underwood) and Middlesex (the county of Compton, Strauss and Gatting)? Meanwhile, at the top of county cricket various acts of torture were committed during Surrey's monster innings of 820 for nine declared on Monday. Surrey's skipper, Rory Burns, was presumably muttering to himself as he delayed his declaration through the longest, hottest afternoon of the summer: 'If they were dumb enough to put us in to bat, they deserve to pay for it.'
While quite what the Durham skipper Alex Lees was thinking as he kept spinner George Drissell on for 45 overs while he took one wicket for 247 is hard to imagine. Only 14 of Surrey's runs came from extras, which shows you how regularly poor Drissell and his fellow Durham bowlers managed to hit the full face of the Surrey bats.
I've never met an Aussie I didn't like, but it would be nice to stuff them at the Ashes this winter. Australia's batting line-up is pretty terrible. The current order features Sam Konstas, Usman Khawaja (who is almost as old as me), Cameron Green, Josh Inglis and Beau Webster, none of whom are a patch on Hayden and Langer, Ponting or the Waughs. These Ashes could be England's for the taking, which would be a fitting climax to Ben Stokes's extraordinary, driven, focused cricket career.
These Lions could be one of the best teams our islands have ever sent abroad. The rugby is fluent and assured, free-flowing and attractive, with a mighty powerful front five. One of the most vibrant players is Henry Pollock. There seems to be a refusal by the more grizzled members of the rugby commentariat to acknowledge quite how much fun the 20-year-old flanker is to watch. It's no surprise that everyone who plays against him wants to clock him. But he's a game-changer and the sort of player who can bring the spectators flooding in.
