Heat and dust, plus nonsense. If the high temperatures had arrived earlier, the England cricket authorities could claim that their brains had been cooked. But the dégringolade over Messrs Atkinson and Stokes had already occurred. Curfews: what nonsense is this? We are dealing with Test cricketers, not schoolboys. If a batsman can decide when to leave a ball outside the off stump or a bowler whether to go round the wicket or over it, the chaps can also decide when to draw stumps on their celebrations after a match.
I have a rule for walking in boiling foreign cities. Move at funeral pace and never pass a bar
These are the same authorities who want us to refer to batsmen as batters. Some battering may indeed be in order, though only verbal. Castigation is certainly justified, yet one suspects the victims may be too thick to realise when they are being mocked.
Batsman is a fine word, redolent of all the charm we associate with the game and its paradoxes. The batsman strides to the wicket: an elegant figure, greeted, one trusts, with a decent round of applause. Shortly afterwards, a bowler may well be trying to knock his block off. It is always worth remembering that it was a Wykehamist, albeit an untypical one, who invented bodyline. If Rishi Sunak had more of Douglas Jardine’s thrawn-ness, he might have been a more effective politician.
