This is going to be a tad niche, even going by the previous things I’ve written. What follows will only be of interest to you if you’ve played the computer game FIFA. A hugely successful game, yes, and one that tops the charts every year, but I doubt something my usual readers will have had much to do with.
The next edition, FIFA 23, is coming out at the end of September and having owned every one since 2001 I’m seriously considering not buying it. It’s because it feels like it’s increasingly being made for a younger audience, an audience that speaks a different language to me. All the nonsense about “xG”, “top bins” and a new goal celebration called “The Griddy” – this isn’t the football I know and love. It is also obsessed with its Ultimate Team mode (which makes developer EA an absolute fortune), and I have no interest in it.
I have always liked playing Career Mode, where I can put myself in the game as a manager and take over pretty much any club in the game. Invariably, this would start off with me taking charge of my beloved Norwich City. You can play out fifteen seasons, and as well as playing each match you could buy and sell players and bring youth players through.
But there’s so much more this mode could do. In terms of youth scouting, you hire a scout who you can send on a trip. You determine where they go, how long for and what sort of players they are looking for. Each month the scout will send you a report listing the players they’ve found. The list will show roughly how good the player is now and roughly how good the scout thinks the player could become. How accurate these assessments are depends on how good the scout is, i.e. how much you’re paying them. You can then choose to sign the player, reject them or scout them for a bit longer.
The trouble is, if you sign a player they are simply added to a youth squad that doesn’t do anything. There are no Under 18 or Under 23 teams in the game, so youth players just remain on this list until you either promote them to the first team or they get fed up and threaten to leave. The players do very gradually improve, but if you’re managing a Premier League or Championship club they are very rarely good enough to play in the first team straight away. You usually end up selling them for a nice little profit and then you might come across them playing against you a few years later, but there’s very little for you in developing a young player in the mode’s current state.
What FIFA’s career mode really needs is a proper system of U18 and U23 leagues. The young players you’ve scouted could then play some games against other clubs’ academies, keeping them happy and providing them with tangible ways to improve. The manager of these sides could provide you with a report on each match, telling you the result and who played well and who didn’t. The U23s would also be an opportunity to give players who need game time in your main squad a run out. Perhaps FIFA could even go really deep and allow you to start your career managing an U18 or U23 side yourself, rising through the ranks to eventually take the reins of the first team. This would give career mode a whole new dynamic, giving you an incentive to stay at a club for a number of years to see these young players you’ve scouted break through and become mainstays in your first team.
Now I’d like to move on to international management. At present, you have to start off managing a club and then when you start making a name for yourself you are offered a job managing a national team. If you accept, however, you don’t leave your club side – you continue to manage it alongside whichever country you’ve accepted the offer from. This is most unrealistic, unheard of really in actual football. FIFA should allow you to manage a national team and only a national team. You should be able to request scouting reports on players you can pick in your squad, organise friendlies and training camps, and take your side into a World Cup or contintental competition. This would make you feel more involved and therefore care more about the country you’re in charge of – at the moment the international breaks feel like a chore and an unwanted intteruption to managing your club.
Those are my two biggest wishes for career mode. There’s more I could say, and more I could ask for from the rest of the game. Quick substitutes, for instance. But it’s clear that FIFA 23 will be another cash cow, unwilling to make the changes to truly put it amongst the elite. This year’s edition will be the final one to bear the FIFA name – can we hope for better from the new iteration, EAFC? I won’t hold my breath.
A reminder: cricket is the best sport in the world. I feel it worth reminding everyone because I’m about to spend a few minutes chewing my nails about its current state and future direction.
If you’re not a dedicated follower of the game, you would be forgiven for thinking that all is well and that cricket is entering the national consciousness more than it has done for some time. You may have noticed that BBC Two have shown a couple of matches from the first week of the Hundred tournament, and that cricket has also been a part of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.
The Hundred is controversial because, while its outward intention is noble in attempting to get new fans interested in cricket, it has gone about this by implying that the traditional game can’t be sold to the public. The fundamentals – such as an over consisting of six balls – have been thrown out of the window, creating a whole new format that no one else in the world plays and bears little resemblence to the others. If the Hundred is meant to be gaining new fans for cricket, what is the point of changing the rules to the extent that those new fans will find it difficult to get into Test matches or One Day Internationals?
Aside from the format, the Hundred disposes of the traditional county teams and is competed for by sides that reek of a marketing agency brainstorming session. If you think the Manchester Originals and the Welsh Fire sound tacky, you should see their logos. Obviously, in England we only have a few months of the year to play cricket so adding the Hundred to the calendar has raised serious questions about overly packed schedules and player burnout. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) have made it clear that the Hundred is their marquee tournament – it gets the biggest marketing budget – and therefore it gets the prime place in the summer, during the school holidays. The T20 Blast, which since its inception in 2003 had been English cricket’s great domestic money spinner, was done and dusted by the time the kids broke up.
Hampshire won the 2022 T20 Blast, but you’d be forgiven for having missed it
Personally, I’m not a fan. I may have been a cricket devotee for twenty years but I’m not one of those pig-headed enough to think the game doesn’t have to appeal to new audiences. Ever since England internationals were sold to Sky in 2006, the game has waned in its relevance to the public. Children aren’t becoming obsessed by the sport by stumbling across it on Channel 4, like I did. Players like Joe Root and Ben Stokes should be rock stars, yet they could walk down most streets unnoticed. The Hundred does at least put cricket back on terrestrial television, yet in my opinion at an unnecessarily high cost. Pumping the same money into the T20 Blast, pushing it into the public eye on BBC TV at the height of summer would surely have had the same effect.
I do still watch the Hundred. It is still cricket, and I doubt the impact of an individual boycotting something like that. But when I see the BBC Two coverage starting with a sort of rap/hip hop tune in its opening titles, I get the impression that this tournament isn’t for me. Every effort is made to appeal to young people, to ‘urbanise’ the game, and in a way it feels like a bit of an insult to cricket itself because the game is already great. I feel nothing for the teams, being made up and not steeped in any kind of history of tradition, and it takes me a while to remember who won its first edition last year (it was Southern Brave).
So for all the Hundred is doing in appealing to new fans, it leaves us with a summer schedule bursting at the seams. Ben Stokes, arguably England’s most exciting player, withdrew from the tournament last summer as well as all other forms of cricket to prioritise his mental health. This year, he announced before it had even started that he wasn’t going to play in it before retiring from ODIs, citing having to play too often as one of the reasons for his decision. Having only just turned 31 and three years on from almost single-handedly winning the World Cup for England, these should be the prime years of his career so it should be a significant warning to the authorities that he felt his only option was to walk away.
Ben Stokes played his last ODI in July, before retiring from the format at the age of 31
The Hundred is just one of many domestic tournaments around the world that cricketers can sign up for. Unlike football, the international game has traditionally been seen as the most important and most lucrative. This has changed dramatically since the Indian Premier League (IPL) was launched in 2008. According to an article by Tim Wigmore in the August issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly, the IPL’s latest broadcasting rights deal will see each live match generate £12 million – out of all the sports leagues in the world, only the NFL (American Football) is more lucrative. Keen to grab their own slice of the pie, other tournaments have popped up all over the world. There is the Big Bash in Australia, the Pakistan Super League, and a new one that is due to launch in the United Arab Emirates early next year.
The Indian Premier League has been an astonishing success
Professional cricketers can earn life changing sums of money from playing in these tournaments all over the world. Only players from India, Australia and England could hope to earn as much from playing for their countries. This has left players with extraordinary decisions to make, and increasingly they are prioritising representing an IPL franchise over playing for their nations. It’s a worrying situation, and the Hundred is only adding to the headache.
It’s going to take some time for the relegation hangover to clear for this Norwich City team. The first home game of the new season, with its warm sunshine, fresh kits and sense of optimism, was met with a performance that lacked quality and coherence. Back in my seat in the Barclay for the first time since 23rd April, here are a few thoughts I had from the Wigan game.
Some of these players have got a lot to prove
I may get shot down in flames for this but every Ben Gibson error at the back and every failed Milot Rashica cross made me wonder: do these players have a future at Norwich? Gibson, Rashica, Todd Cantwell and Josh Sargent all failed to inspire and they have a lot to prove in the games ahead. Dean Smith will be aware that a poor start to the season would put his job on the line so he can’t afford any passengers.
We still can’t take a corner
Back in June, Norwich appointed Allan Russell as the club’s first ever dedicated set piece coach. Whatever he’s been doing at Colney, it has yet to translate onto the pitch. It’s extraordinary how Norwich never look like scoring from a corner, and they don’t look assured when they are defending them either. This is nothing new but with someone in place purely to work on them, it’s something you’d expect to improve going forward.
Between a rock and a VAR-d place
No one likes VAR. No one likes the way it takes half an hour out of the game and then they still get the decisions wrong. But then, the referee at Carrow Road was really rather poor and Norwich should have had at least one penalty. If we’d had the dreaded VAR, maybe we’d have got what we deserved.
Wigan’s behaviour should be seen as a positive for Norwich
The time wasting from Wigan in the second half, which saw multiple players booked, should be taken as a compliment by Norwich. Clearly, for last season’s League One champions, a point at Carrow Road is a great result. City need to get used to teams that defend deep and waste time like they did today and learn how to break them down.
Two games down, forty-four to go. Norwich are yet to register a win – they go to Hull next Saturday – but these are very early days. With the new players bedding in, patience is the order of the day.
England are the champions of Europe. I, and no one else who holds their national pride through the prism of sport, will ever tire of saying that.
The power of sport is incredible. It brings people together, it divides them, it captures the nation’s attention and it even brings about huge changes in society. I am so grateful to have sport in my life and I don’t know what I would do without it. On Sunday afternoon, I rushed home from work to watch the final on TV. A peak audience of 17.4 million tuned into the BBC, making it the most watched women’s football match ever on UK television.
The match itself was an emotional wrangle. It was tense throughout, the two finalists were well matched and clearly the two best teams in the tournament. Ella Toone’s sublime finish gave England the lead in the second half, only for Germany to level through Lina Magull. Tabea Wassmuth dragged England captain Leah Williamson out of position, allowing Magull the space to finish.
At that point, I felt like the Germans just hadn’t read the script. Like the Italian men last year. This wasn’t their story. The Wembley crowd – 87,192, a record for a Euros match for men or women – were desperate for England to go all the way and put the crowning glory on a fantastic tournament. On the radio on the way home from work, I heard a German journalist say “Germany wants to win it. England needs to win it.” He was right. England had done so well, but they really needed to make that final step.
Extra time came and the dreaded penalty shootout was looming. Everyone knows we don’t beat the Germans at penalties. Thank heavens, then, for Chloe Kelly poking the ball over the line from a (North Walsham born) Lauren Hemp corner and putting England back in front with ten minutes to go. The celebrations were wild. For once, England weren’t following the script.
The way England saw out the game was masterful. Keeping it in the corner, drawing cheap fouls from the increasingly frustrated Germans, not giving them a sniff of coming back. Then, the referee (who had a really poor game, by the way) put the whistle to her lips. She waited a couple of seconds and then blew. No one knew what to do with themselves. England had won Euro 2022, the country’s first major tournament victory in football since 1966.
Here, we were embracing each other in pure delight. It feels so good because it happens so rarely. Germany, for instance, were aiming to win the Women’s Euros for the ninth time. It wouldn’t have felt so joyous and momentous for them. England, with the years of dreaming, the heartbreak, the near-misses… it all felt like it was leading up to that moment.
I have spent a lot of time and energy arguing with men – and it is always men – on Twitter about women’s sport. Tired clichés about how ‘no one cares’, ‘the standard is shocking’, ‘they should be in the kitchen’. Well, last night they were categorically rendered incorrect and irrelevant. I just love sport and I don’t care if the people playing it are male or female. The quarter-final against Spain and the final against Germany comfortably matched the quality of any men’s football match I can think of, and I am so proud that this incredibly likeable squad will have inspired women and girls across the country to start playing and to dream big.
It’s been an amazing few years for women’s sport in the UK. England won the cricket World Cup in 2017, Emma Raducanu won the US Open last year at the age of just 18, and the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games are the first to award more gold medals to women than men. It’s wonderful to see.
So, if you’re one of those blokes who avoided the game yesterday because you feel threatened and intimidated by seeing a woman play sport, I have a question for you:
My view of England v South Africa, Old Trafford, Manchester, 22nd July 2022
I’ve been back from my holiday for a week now, but as these things often do, it feels like a lot longer!
I usually go away around my mum’s birthday (19th July) and this year was no different. In 2021, we stayed in Salford to make it easy to get to Old Trafford for a T20 cricket match between England and Pakistan. On this occasion, we actually stayed in a hotel right in the middle of Manchester.
The Portland Hotel, Manchester
My room was on the third floor of the hotel, with mum and her other half Dave a couple of doors down. It was clean and comfortable with a Queen size bed. You could hear the trams rumbling through the city centre, but rather than being irritating it was actually quite a pleasant sound.
On our first night, we walked across the road into Piccadilly Gardens and found a fan park dedicated to the Women’s Euro 2022. There you could buy merchandise, eat and drink, and watch the matches on a big screen. I had been enjoying the tournament and England had North Walsham’s Lauren Hemp in their squad, so it was fun following the progress of the Norfolk girl. Our first night in Manchester happened to be the night of England’s quarter final against Spain, so we sat in the fan park with hundreds of others and cheered the Lionesses on.
The fan park in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens
England went behind – conceding a goal for the first time in the tournament – but battled back to win 2-1 in extra time. The atmosphere was fantastic and it really made you feel part of the event.
The moment the final whistle went in the fan park
The next day, we had booked to go to the National Football Museum. I’d been to the museum a couple of times before, but there is so much to see that there’s no chance you’ll ever see it all. We spent two-and-a-half hours browsing the exhibits, which include the original written laws of the game, the ball used in the 1966 World Cup final and a seat from the original Wembley stadium. Afterwards, we did a bit of shopping. I used to hate buying clothes but these days I actually quite enjoy it.
The National Football Museum
Friday was the day of the One Day International between England and South Africa – the reason for our trip up north. Now, cricket is obviously the best sport in the world but, famously, it is at the mercy of the weather. You can’t play cricket in the rain. Not because the players are wimps, but because water and a cork ball wrapped in leather don’t mix. Opening the curtains, I was met with typical Manchester weather – grey skies, damp pavements and drizzly rain.
Undeterred, we were at the ground when the gates opened at 11am. We were well aware that the game wasn’t going to start at the scheduled time of 1pm. We went to the club shop, we had a drink, and then a chance encounter meant my mum got a photo with England’s star batter Jonny Bairstow!
Mum and Jonny Bairstow
At one point we thought the match would be abandoned without a ball being bowled, but the weather did eventually relent for long enough for us to get a game on. Play finally began at 4.45pm, reduced to 29 overs per side from the 50 it was supposed to be. England were sent into bat and I didn’t think they played that well, being bowled out for 201 towards the end. It turned out to be more than enough, however, as South Africa were bowled out for just 83 to give England a win by 118 runs.
We (literally) squeezed onto a tram to make the 15 minute journey back to our hotel, pleased that we’d seen a match despite the rain and that England had won.
On Saturday afternoon, after a leisurely breakfast we travelled back to Norfolk in the car. On Sunday, it was back to work…
I just looked it up. It’s 52 days until my 30th birthday. Entering my 30s feels like a big deal. It feels like I should have my life sorted by now. I look around me and everyone seems to be on the right track – my friends are all either in relationships, engaged, have bought their own homes or started families. I haven’t done any of that. I am nowhere near doing any of that.
I’m well past the days when I would get excited about my birthday (I have a vivd memory of telling someone “it’s my birthday tomorrow!” when I was about to turn 10 and that feeling like the best thing in the world) and I wouldn’t say I was dreading turning 30. It is a milestone, though. It’s as if I could still claim to be youthful at 29, but 30 is where sensible adults are. At work, I still associate myself with colleagues who have just come out of uni. I mentally attach myself to that 18-21 age group. I left uni in 2013! This is a natural time to take stock and wonder whether I am where I want to be in life.
Well, I mentioned work. I’ve been doing the same job for the last 12 years. It was only ever meant to be a little part time job I did to give me a bit of extra cash while I was at uni, but it has been my only meaningful income since I was 17. Gradually, I was given more responsibility at work – god knows, my brain would have melted through boredom if I was still doing the same thing after all these years – and I go around trying to make it look like I know what I’m doing when really I feel like a total impostor. I have low self esteem anyway but bad experiences have made me believe that my best isn’t good enough and it would all work a lot better without me. Minor things that go wrong will play on my mind for days.
I am acutely aware that my colleagues probably see me as awkward, uptight, maybe even a bit weird. I wish they could see the real me, who is actually easy going, prefers deep conversations to small talk and likes silly jokes. I just feel like, when I put that uniform on, I have to be serious and I know that alienates people.
Of course, I’d like to do something more interesting. I went to uni for 3 years and left with a journalism degree, even if I have been known to say it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. I have always loved writing, it is my only discernible skill or talent in my eyes, and would love to make a living out of it. It’s a very hard industry to get into, though, and as I approach 30 I have never been paid for a single word. I do browse the job sites on a regular basis but am yet to find anything that sounds better than what I already do. Maybe I’m too comfortable.
If I got a job that paid more, I might able to afford to live alone. I do wonder why women never show any interest in me, but at the moment it isn’t bothering me and I would say my relationship status was “single but not looking”. I’ve got a lot of work to do on myself before anyone will come close to me. My mum is wonderful and her other half has been very accomodating since I had to move in with them recently, but ultimately I would like my own place.
My passions are things that define me: football, cricket, music, comedy. These pursuits have all made hero figures in my life, and I think that’s because they are the living emodiment of what I would like to be. I want to be as good at what I do as Joe Root, I want to be as cool as Alex Turner, I want to be as funny as Dave Allen. I can’t help but think I should just make the most of what I actually am and it’s possible I might be happier for it.
I have never smoked, I hardly ever drink and I have never been anywhere near drugs. My vice is junk food. I eat way too much chocolate, crisps, biscuits and sweets. I comfort eat. This was alright when I was more active but since the pandemic started I am going on fewer walks and have stopped playing cricket, so I am noticing my increasing weight. It sounds like an easy thing to address – just stop eating rubbish – but to me it doesn’t seem that simple.
Well, to bring this ramble to a close, it’s been cathartic to get these thoughts out of my head and onto a screen. Am I where I want to be in life? No. Is there any reason why my 30s can’t be the making of me? Absolutely not.
England vs New Zealand 3rd Test (of 3) Headingley, Leeds 23rd, 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th June 2022 Result: England (360 & 296-3) beat New Zealand (329 & 326) by 7 wickets England win the series 3-0
England received the trophy after winning the series 3-0
It was only innate English pessimism that put any doubt in the ability of our re-energised Test team to knock off the 113 runs required to win the third Test and seal a 3-0 series whitewash.
Tickets for the final day at Headingley were free, just as they were at Trent Bridge last week, but some stayed away as grey Yorkshire skies on Monday morning brought showers of rain that prevented any play until after lunch. I think allowing free entry on the last day of the matches in this series has been a great idea, and I suspect a deliberate ploy to get the fans back in love with Test cricket, which had been in a desperate state over the last couple of years.
With an entire session lost to the weather, part of me was watching the clock, worrying whether England would have enough time to seal the victory. I was a fool – once they did manage to get on the field, they had it done and dusted in just over an hour.
Before this series, chasing anything more than 250 would have been daunting, but in a very short space of time Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have the squad believing they can win from any position. At Trent Bridge, they chased 299 in a mere 50 overs and in Leeds they went after the target of 296 at more than five runs an over. This final act was a formality, a New Zealand side run ragged longing for the plane home.
Joe Root averaged 99.00 in the series
It has been a series full of highs for England, but the brightest lights were Joe Root – officially the player of the series – and Jonny Bairstow, so it seemed fitting that they were together at the crease at the end. Root was 86 not out and would surely have gone on to a third century in the series, while in his current form Bairstow is brilliant fun to watch. Confident and totally at ease with his game, on his home ground he followed up his first innings 162 with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 71 from just 44 balls. With ten to win, he cracked a four off the very much part time bowling of Michael Bracewell and I said out loud: “will he try to finish this with a six?”. Next thing I knew, the ball was sailing into the stands. Jonny, you beauty!
Jack Leach was the deserved player of the match for taking 10 wickets across the two innings. In my piece about the Trent Bridge Test, I said the Somerset spinner “just doesn’t seem like he’ll ever worry a batter”. He is a very likeable cricketer and is clearly highly valued by his team mates, so it was nice to see him do so well but I maintain that if England are going to dominate in Tests they will need to find a better spin bowler. Ollie Pope also had a good series, playing at number three for the first time. He rounded off his series with an 82 to go with the hundred he scored in Nottingham. Matty Potts bowled some excellent spells and, in his captain’s words, appears to have taken to international cricket “like a duck to water”, while Jamie Overton did not look out of place on debut, scoring a superb 97 with the bat and sending down some hostile short pitched bowling.
In fact, the only England player to come out of this series badly is Zak Crawley. He made a tortured 25 on Sunday, during which he ran out his opening partner Alex Lees because he was too busy admiring his own shot, played flashy drives at deliveries that weren’t there to be driven and finally slapped a dreadful shot into the hands of Kiwi skipper Kane Williamson. He looks utterly out of his depth, but is in the squad for the India match next week. With a break after that until the South Africa series in the middle of August, it seems he may have a chance to get some runs for Kent, because surely he will need them if he’s going to keep his place.
Zak Crawley scored just 87 runs in 6 innings in the series
So, having gone into this series with one win in their last seventeen Test matches, England are celebrating a 3-0 clean sweep of the world champions New Zealand. Next up is India at Edgbaston on Friday, followed by three games against South Africa and then the tour of Pakistan in the autumn. The new regime has breathed new life into the red ball side and the fans will be looking forward to, rather than dreading, each fixture. But what of the visitors? It was a year ago that they were crowned the inaugural winners of the World Test Championship, but since then they have lost key players – wicketkeeper BJ Watling and batter Ross Taylor have both retired – and their usually reliable captain Williamson has been out of form. The only partnership England struggled to break was the one between Daryl Mitchell and Tom Blundell, who between them scored more runs than the rest of the New Zealand team combined. They struggled with injuries, Colin de Grandhomme and Kyle Jamieson both going home early, while Williamson missed the second match with Covid. Their team selections were strange, they didn’t play a proper spinner in two of the three Tests and the one when they did he was only given two overs.
All that aside, however, it needs to be said that it is always a pleasure to play against New Zealand, the true gentlemen of the sport. England have had some terrific tussles with the Black Caps in recent years (this being the obvious one) but they always play the game in the right way and in the right spirit. I look forward to our next meeting.
Watch the highlights of the fifth, decisive day of the third Test
England vs New Zealand 2nd Test (of 3) Trent Bridge, Nottingham 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th June 2022 Result: England (539 & 299-5) beat New Zealand (553 & 284) by 5 wickets
Jonny Bairstow’s astonishing century won the second Test for England
Sport is my strongest passion. My life is essentially a continuous festival of sport, and football and cricket are the headline acts. I love them both, but it might surprise some to learn that in the unlikely situation I was forced to sacrifice one to keep the other cricket would be my number one.
It’s not easy to argue cricket’s case in the face of a sport that dominates as football does. Governing body FIFA estimates that 4% of the world’s population are active players or referees, and 3.2 billion watched the 2018 World Cup on television. In Britain, it feels like someone you meet is more likely to be a football fan than not and it is often a safe bet to use a following of the game as an ice breaker.
Cricket is actually the second most popular sport in the world, though the numbers are boosted somewhat by its obsessed following in very large countries such as India and Pakistan. Here, it is not so common to come across a fellow cricket fan (even less so one in their twenties like me) and it at times feels like a passion – a guilty pleasure – to be kept a secret, fearful of hearing some nonsense about it being “boring”.
I expect many to scoff at this, but I believe cricket is far from a boring sport and actually more exciting than football. You see, in football the sole aim of the game is to score a goal. Everyone watching is waiting to see a goal. Some will say they are interested in the tactical battle or the attractive passing style of play, but deep down they just want to see a goal. Even when a goalkeeper makes a great save, what the neutrals really wanted to see was a goal. Absolute goal fests in high level professional football are, however, very rare – that’s why they get talked about so much when they do come along – so in reality most football fans are disappointed and bored more often than not. People keep watching, keep turning up for each game because maybe, just maybe, the next one will be the one with all the goals in it.
Every ball of a cricket match is an event. It has lulls of course, every sport does, but it can’t possibly be boring in comparison to football because you could see the equivalent of a goal every few seconds. Each time the bowler approaches the crease, there is so much that can happen. Perhaps a wicket will be taken – stumps flying everywhere, a stunning catch – or maybe the batter will whack it out of the ground, or try a risky reverse sweep. No one has ever unironically enjoyed a 0-0 result in football, either, while in cricket a draw can sometimes be among the most thrilling things ever to happen in any sport.
Daryl Mitchell scored a century and a half century in the match but was on the losing side
With three distinct forms of cricket (four if you count the Hundred, which I don’t), the thrills come in many ways. The five day Test match is my favourite and the game that finished on Tuesday, with England winning at Trent Bridge, is one of the best I’ve seen in nearly twenty years as a fan.
A flat pitch and a small ground meant a total of 1,675 runs were scored, compared to 837 in the first Test at Lord’s last week. 249 boundaries were hit across the five days, a record for a Test match. New Zealand, missing their captain Kane Williamson because he tested positive for Covid on the eve of the match, made the most of being put into bat by racking up 553. Nine of the eleven batters made it into double figures, with Daryl Mitchell adding 190 to his century at Lord’s and Tom Blundell joining him with 106. On Saturday, many were saying that England had gone back to their old ways – they got the decision at the toss wrong, they didn’t bowl well, they were wasting reviews.
The new approach from the skipper Ben Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum is always to take the positive option, and England were certainly positive with the bat. Scoring more than 500 in the first innings will usually ensure that you don’t lose the Test, at least, but New Zealand remarkably found themselves beaten by five wickets with a whopping 22 overs unbowled on the last evening.
From Alex Lees starting to express himself as a Test opener with 67 and 44, to Ollie Pope’s long awaited second Test century, Joe Root continuing his astonishing run of form with 176 and Ben Stokes seeing England over the line with 75 off just 70 balls, it has been a series to savour for the batters.
Then there’s Jonny Bairstow. In my piece about the Lord’s Test, I was dropping Jonny for Trent Bridge and criticising his recent lack of red ball cricket. More fool me. Unleased, given licence to go full on white ball mode, he cracked one of the great Test innings. 136 off 92 balls makes it the second fastest century by an England batter in this form of the game and, though he nicked behind and wasn’t there at the end, he had certainly “broken the back of it” in his words. An extraordinary cricketer.
England complete a win that will live long in the memory
At the end of it, England have won a series for the first time in 18 months and go to Headingley for the last match full of confidence. For all the positives, Zak Crawley contributed only 4 runs in the game and Jack Leach sent down some very uninspiring spells of slow left arm bowling. So, will they be tempted into a change for Leeds? Here is who I would pick:
Alex Lees
Rory Burns/Ben Compton
Ollie Pope
Joe Root
Jonny Bairstow
Ben Stokes (c)
Ben Foakes (wk)
Stuart Broad
Matty Potts
James Anderson
Matt Parkinson
I maintain that there is still a Test match opener in Rory Burns, who scored a timely century for Surrey this week. Ben Compton is still in excellent form for Kent so should also be in with a shout. I expect them to stick with Crawley, mind. They might decide to rest one or both of Anderson and Broad, the veterans having played two in a row. Jamie Overton has been called into the squad. Matty Potts deserves another go. I completely understood the decision to stick with Jack Leach, who never got the chance to make an impact at Lord’s as he left with concussion after about an hour, but it just doesn’t seem like he’ll ever worry a batter. Parkinson should play in his place.
Just over a year ago, New Zealand sportingly set England 273 to win from about 75 overs at Lord’s. There were no World Test Championship points on the line in that series, so not much to lose. They didn’t go for it, and trundled to 170 for 3 and a draw. It’s incredible how much things have changed. 299 in 72 overs is a stiff ask, and at 93 for 4 even I would have been inclined to shut up shop and take the draw, but this England side are afraid of nothing. That last day needs to be seen to be believed, so I’ve put the highlights video below.
England vs New Zealand 1st Test (of 3) Lord’s, London 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th June 2022 Result: England (141 & 279-5) beat New Zealand (132 & 285) by 5 wickets
I’ve looked it up. There were 281 days between England’s men completing an innings victory over India at Headingley on 28th August last year and scoring the winning runs to beat New Zealand at Lord’s yesterday. That forty week gap between Test wins was without doubt far too long for a nation that loves this form of the game as much as we do. It had included a third disastrous Ashes tour on the bounce, the well-intentioned but ultimately ludicrous decision to drop James Anderson and Stuart Broad, and the departure of the captain, the coach and the managing director.
Joe Root was the player of the match
It was fitting that Joe Root was the one to get England home. To say he is now able to play freely, unburdened by the responsibility of being captain, isn’t quite right. He was still the best batter in the team when he was leading it. At Lord’s, however, the smile was definitely wider and the shoulders a little lighter. His 115 not out to see England safely to their target of 277 was masterful and it was great to see him enjoying being out there. Root is a special one, who we will not truly appreciate until he is no longer there. He would walk into any previous England side and be one of the first names in a World XI of current male Test players. Surprisingly, this was his first fourth innings century, but it also got him to the landmark of 10,000 Test runs. Only thirteen others have ever reached that number and at the age of just 31 he could well have more than anyone else by the time he calls it a day.
England got the bowling attack exactly right. Regardless of their age, Anderson and Broad are two of the best there have ever been and simply had to play. Anderson will always get wickets and won’t go for many runs, either. Broad is capable of incredible spells in which it feels as if he turns a match on its head all by himself, as we saw on the third morning when one of his overs brought about three wickets that meant New Zealand went from being in a very strong position to blowing the door open for England.
Stuart Broad got England back into the match with an inspired spell on the third morning
Had it not been for the staggering number of injuries currently hampering England’s pace bowlers (they have no fewer than six currently unavailable), Matty Potts probably wouldn’t have been in contention for the squad, let alone making his Test debut. I like the attitude from new coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes to give a young man in good form a go and he repaid them with seven wickets. I feel like I’ve seen enough of Craig Overton, the other contender for a place in the side this week, for now. Potts must surely play in the second match at Trent Bridge.
The unfortunate Jack Leach was withdrawn from the game early on its first morning when he landed heavily attempting to stop the ball getting to the boundary and subsequently showing signs of concussion. The relatively recent addition of concussion substitutes meant that England were able to replace him with someone who could play a full part and they called upon Matt Parkinson, the leg spinner, who had to make his way from Manchester to London. Many had been calling for Parkinson to play in the match anyway, so for them the sight of ‘Parky’ being awarded his Test cap was welcome and overdue. He had been taken to the Caribbean but bafflingly left out, carrying the drinks while the bowling attack toiled. His first and so far only Test wicket was that of Tim Southee to bring New Zealand’s second innings to an end, but in a match dominated by the seamers little can be read into that. He simply has to be given another chance in Nottingham.
The batting order is still a deep concern. Alex Lees and Zak Crawley opened, as they did in the Caribbean, but Lees is in danger of falling into the trope of looking good but not scoring many runs. His second innings 20 was, according to Michael Vaughan on the BBC coverage, the best runs he’d seen him make for England so far but then he made a terrible decision to leave a Kyle Jamieson delivery that thumped into his stumps and left him looking foolish. Crawley, we’re always being told, has so much talent, and he does – that 267 against Pakistan two years ago and the hundred he made on the West Indies tour earlier this year are proof of that. He’s not been consistent enough, though, and has a James Vinceian tendency to get out the same way all the time (caught behind or in the slips trying a flashy drive). His average is under 30. It seems incredible that England haven’t found the right opening partnership since Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook.
Zak Crawley so often looks the part but needs more consistent runs
Ollie Pope is another batter with undoubted talent. I have fond memories of his hundred in Johannesburg against South Africa, an innings that made him look every inch the Test player. He was brought into this match, however, as a number three – a position he’d never previously played in. Another couple of disappointing scores will not have helped to get certain sections of the public off his back.
This is something I have noticed with the England team of late. Whenever they dismiss a team cheaply, some fans will laud the excellent bowling. If an England batter should be out for a low score, however, it is always because they are not good enough and should be dropped. I was watching the run chase on television and thought that Crawley and Pope – Pope in particular – lost their wickets to brilliant pieces of bowling that they could have done little to prevent. The reaction online was that both were useless and pathetic. I wonder how many of these commenters had actually seen the dismissals at all, or whether they were just waiting to see the fall of their wickets so they could criticise them.
The next questionable member of the England top order was Jonny Bairstow. He had actually been one of the team’s form players this year, with a century in Sydney and Antigua, but had played no red ball cricket since the Caribbean tour because he’d been at the IPL. It was clear he hadn’t been able to switch his mindset away from the short forms, as a couple of scatty innings saw him bowled both times for not very many. One of the explanations often offered for why England seem to stick to the same underperforming batting line up is that there is no one else waiting in the wings. The early part of the county season has shown this to be untrue, with impressive performances from Harry Brook, Ben Compton and Josh Bohannon giving them genuine options. With the batting once again being spared its blushes by Root and Stokes, it feels like an opportunity was missed to give someone new a go at Lord’s.
On a happier note, Ben Foakes showed exactly why I’ve been calling for him to be in the side for years. As much as I love Jos Buttler, he just isn’t a Test match cricketer and through his immaculate wicket keeping and digging in to support Root in the run chase hopefully Foakes has cemented his place for the foreseeable future.
Ben Foakes provided perfect support for Root to see England to victory
All things considered, this would be the team I would pick for the second Test:
Alex Lees
Zak Crawley
Dawid Malan/Ben Compton
Joe Root
Harry Brook
Ben Stokes (c)
Ben Foakes (wk)
Matty Potts
Stuart Broad
James Anderson
Matt Parkinson
I think Lees is worth persisting with. I was thinking of replacing Crawley with Compton, but feel there was enough in his performance at Lord’s to give him another go. Dawid Malan is a name that hasn’t been mentioned much recently but he was harshly dropped after the Ashes tour, where he was actually one of England’s better batters. Brook is in amazing form and deserves to play ahead of Bairstow. Parkinson needs another go, even if Leach is fit. The rest of the side are assured of their places.
In fact, it’s highly unlikely that England will make any changes. As the old saying goes, ‘you don’t change a winning team’. What a pleasure it is to be positive about the England Test team again, to be writing about a win. In some ways we’ve learned very little – we’re still not sure about the top order, we know that Root is class and that Anderson and Broad are still the best – but in others we’ve learned a lot. Setting the summer up with a victory could be huge for this new England team. Let’s hope they can follow it up at Trent Bridge next week.
Broadcasting is another great interest of mine and it was nice to see Sky Sports back, showing their first live England Test since last September after a winter of BT Sport exclusivity. The commentary team has changed a lot since last year. Michael Holding has retired, David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd has left, Rob Key is now the England men’s managing director of cricket and there was of course the tragic and untimely death of the great Shane Warne. Sky dedicated the whole Test to the Australian legend and his name was never far from anyone’s lips. The TV commentary box at Lord’s has been renamed after him and on the first morning the ribbon was cut live on the coverage. They also used the lunch breaks to show a documentary about Warne. 23 overs into the first day’s play there was an applause for him, a moving moment in which everyone on the field lined up shoulder-to-shoulder to commemorate an icon gone too soon.
When the Australian Mel Jones resumed commentating after the applause, it was with an emotional break in her voice that was shared by everyone. Jones was part of the commentary team alongside fellow Aussie Mark Taylor (great insight), Kiwi Simon Doull, England white ball captain Eoin Morgan and the stalwarts Nasser Hussain, Michael Atherton and Ian Ward. Even with Mark Butcher going down with Covid before the match, the Sky team is still the best in the business. Holding and Lloyd were the subject of another documentary, Voices of Summer, narrated by the brilliant Charles Colvile. I urge you to watch it, which if you can do here:
The topic of why we invest so much of our time, money and emotions into this sport is one I’ve tried to tackle before without coming to any real conclusions. I think it’s a bit like searching for the meaning of life. If you start to think too deeply about it, you realise you have no idea.
My last newspaper column of the season for the Eastern Daily Press is available to read online now.
LEE PAYNE 