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  • England seal a superb series whitewash

    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

  • A winning start: what I learned from the Lord’s Test

    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:

    1. Alex Lees
    2. Zak Crawley
    3. Dawid Malan/Ben Compton
    4. Joe Root
    5. Harry Brook
    6. Ben Stokes (c)
    7. Ben Foakes (wk)
    8. Matty Potts
    9. Stuart Broad
    10. James Anderson
    11. 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:

  • Listen To This: Ribbon Around The Bomb by Blossoms

    Cover art for Ribbon Around The Bomb by Blossoms

    I love music. I love all kinds of music. It doesn’t have to be a certain genre or style, it just has to make me feel something.

    One of my favourite bands is Blossoms, who I was delighted to discover when they were heavily promoted by Radio X (formerly XFM) in 2016. The five piece from Stockport have a knack for catchy riffs and singalong tunes, with every song written by frontman Tom Ogden. Their self-titled debut album reached number one, as did their third effort Foolish Loving Spaces in 2020. On 29th April 2022, the band released their latest: Ribbon Around The Bomb. Here’s my review.

    Blossoms. Left to right: guitarist Josh Dewhurst, drummer Joe Donovan, frontman Tom Ogden, bass player Charlie Salt and keyboard player Myles Kellock.

    It was soon after 6am on Friday and I was hauling myself into my car for the half an hour drive to work, contemplating the day ahead. It had been a hell of a week. The new Blossoms album had been released at midnight, though, and I was looking forward to having the time to give it a good listen on my journey.

    The best thing about music is its ability to take you out of yourself. No matter what you’ve got going on, a song can change your mood in an instant. The very best songs transport you to somewhere else entirely. One of my heroes, Alex Turner from the Arctic Monkeys, sums it up:

    “Some of my favourite records, to me, feel like places that you can sort of go to and move in to for a bit.”

    Within a few seconds of hearing the strings of short instrumental opener The Writer’s Theme, I had a smile on my face. When it beautifully segued into Ode To NYC – a love letter to the Big Apple and one of four singles released ahead of the full album – I had the feeling that the world isn’t such a bad place after all. The rest of my car journey was serene, totally enraptured by the tunes coming from the radio.

    Ribbon Around The Bomb, the title track and my favourite of the four singles, is followed by The Sulking Poet, a highlight of the album and a song inspired by a Blossoms fan account on Instagram that referred to frontman and principle songwriter Tom Ogden as such due to him often appearing to have a ‘face like a slapped arse’ in interviews.

    Next is Born Wild, which for me brings back memories of the band’s previous chart topping album Foolish Loving Spaces. Then it’s The Writer, which carries a more than passing resemblance to the Oasis track Half The World Away.

    Blossoms show how they have matured on their new album

    Everything About You keeps up the album’s theme of marrying intriguing, inward-looking lyrics with cheerful melodies. Care For is a disco-inspired joy, with Ogden waxing lyrical about his new wife. Cinerama Holy Days has perhaps the album’s most repeatable chorus, while Edith Machinist has those wonderful strings adding the cherry on top of the cake.

    At 7 minutes, Visions is one of the longest songs Blossoms have ever made and contains its most talked about lyric:

    Was I complete at 23?

    Visions by Blossoms

    Then, with another instrumental lasting less than minute, the appropriately titled The Last Chapter brings us home.

    This is an album that I think will prove as pivotal to the longevity of Blossoms as Humbug was to Arctic Monkeys. An evolution, rather than a revolution. The sound of a band maturing and learning with every new track. Work on a fifth record is apparently already underway and I for one can’t wait to hear more. Ribbon Around The Bomb is an album they should be very proud of.

    Listen to Ribbon Around The Bomb by Blossoms on all usual musical streaming services, including Apple Music. You can buy the album from their official store here.

  • A draw – but for England, it will almost feel like a win

    This article was originally submitted to another website on Saturday 12th March but not published.

    Cricket being the glorious game it is, after five long days in Antigua the first Test between the West Indies and England ended in a draw and both sides move on to Barbados with the series level at 0-0.

    England really could do with winning in the Caribbean. They spent December and January being humiliated by Australia, a 4-0 Ashes thumping that was so bad the coach and the ECB’s managing director of cricket both lost their jobs. With the team’s pathetic top order batting causing outrage, they made the baffling decision to leave their two best bowlers at home. Joe Root remains as captain, but it would seem only because there are no other candidates for the role.

    The ‘red ball reset’ began by batting first, with Alex Lees on debut opening with Zak Crawley. By lunch, England were 57 for 4. Same old story. However, Jonny Bairstow, Ben Stokes and Ben Foakes then dug in and Bairstow completed a fine century, his eighth in Tests. From that dreadful start the tourists managed to post 311.

    Gareth Copley/Getty Images Sport

    Pressure would have been on Chris Woakes (with a poor record away from home) and Craig Overton taking the new ball in the absence of Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad. They had to perform to quieten the talk about the two greats.

    They didn’t. England were poor with the ball as the West Indies openers got off to a flying start. They were almost lucky to make the breakthrough, Overton having John Campbell caught down the leg side. From 83-0, the home side were reduced to 127-4. Nkrumah Bonner made an excellent 123 off 355 balls in an innings where the next highest score was 55. The Windies made England toil, keeping them in the field for nearly 158 overs. The tourists also lost the extra pace of Mark Wood, yet again injured – this time an elbow – and unable to bowl for the rest of the match.

    It’s fair to say that the Antigua pitch wasn’t a shining example of a good surface for Test cricket. It was flat, slow and lifeless. England lost Lees for six in the second innings, a disappointing debut for the Durham batsman, but Crawley and Root made serene progress and both made centuries. Everyone knows the class of Root, but Crawley’s innings will give him huge confidence and likely cement his place in the team for the rest of the year at least. On the fifth morning they were looking to score quickly to set up an unlikely chance of forcing a win so they lost regular wickets but Dan Lawrence scored an enterprising 37 off 36 balls to set the West Indies a target of 286.

    Reduced to 67-4, England sniffed victory but Bonner and Jason Holder dropped anchor and fairly calmly batted out what was always like to be a draw. Stokes was only supposed to be used ‘sparingly’ as a bowler, as he continues to recover from a side strain, but bowled 28 overs in the first innings and 13 in the second. Questions will be asked as to whether that was wise. Eyebrows will also be raised at England’s insistence on playing on until there were just five balls remaining in the match, when it was possible for the two captains to shake hands and agree on a draw much sooner – this sparked an angry response from Carlos Brathwaite on the TV coverage, who claimed that England had shown their hosts ‘disrespect’.

    Gareth Copley/Getty Images Sport

    The fact that England came anywhere near winning this match after being 57-4 on the first day will give them a boost. So, too, will the performance of Jack Leach, who was the main wicket taking threat and exerted the control that had abandoned him in Australia. Foakes has made a welcome (and long overdue) return to the Test team and his immaculate glovework is a joy to behold.

    Wood is unlikely to be fit for the second Test, with it starting just four days after the end of the first, so it looks like a choice between uncapped bowlers Saqib Mahmood and Matthew Fisher for Barbados – but those decisions can be made later. For now, England can reflect on a positive start to their tour of the Caribbean.

  • Watch This: Blossoms – Back To Stockport

    As much as I love football, I am getting a bit tired of the daily dose of games beamed live from empty grounds. I’m really starting to miss crowds now. A living, breathing crowd adds so much to sport. Bordered by empty seats, even the biggest games feel like no big deal – Liverpool v Manchester United might as well have been Tranmere v Oldham.

    Last night Arsenal played Newcastle, and, while I would usually have the game on in the background while doing other things, this time I decided to watch something more interesting. I watched Blossoms – Back To Stockport.

    It’s a documentary film about the band Blossoms, exploring their origins and showing their preparations for a big homecoming gig in front of 15,000 people at Edgeley Park, home of Stockport County Football Club, which took place on 22nd June 2019.

    Blossoms. Left to right: guitarist Josh Dewhurst, bass player Charlie Salt, lead singer Tom Ogden, drummer Joe Donovan and keyboard player Myles Kellock

    In case you haven’t heard of them, Blossoms are a five-piece band from the aforementioned town of Stockport, near Manchester. The sort of music they make is probably best defined as psychadelic-indie-rock-pop. They came fourth on the BBC’s Sound of 2016 list, the broadcaster’s annual pick of musicians to listen out for in the year ahead. I first heard about them as I am a listener of Radio X, who included Blossoms on their similar Great X-Pectations list, and gave a lot of radio play to their single Charlemagne.

    Charlemagne, the breakthrough single for Blossoms

    I was immediately drawn to the band I think, in part, because there was a certain groove, a funk, to their songs – a sound that manages to simultaneously feel both modern and retro. I respect the fact that the frontman Tom Ogden writes all the songs and they all seem genuinely great guys who are living the dream. If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I am a total devotee to Arctic Monkeys, so you can imagine how delighted I was to hear in the film that Blossoms started off doing Arctic Monkeys covers and described Alex Turner as an ‘idol’.

    The film is made to a very high standard. It goes in-depth on the back stories of the five members of the band (discovering that all but one of them is younger than me made me feel old), who go against the grain of many rock bands of the past by showing themselves to be best mates in a way that they simply couldn’t put on for the cameras. Footage of the Edgeley Park gig runs as a thread throughout, and there are even little animated inserts to go along with whatever story one of them is telling at that moment.

    In Ogden, the band have a figurehead who demonstrates great showmanship on stage – the long hair and the 70s suits – but away from it he’s a quiet guy who just likes walking his dog. The drummer, Joe Donovan, has been Ogden’s friend since they were at school together and is a ball of energy brilliantly described by the others as ‘like having a fan of the band who is in the band’. Bassist Charlie Salt is a sort of older brother figure (he was born in 1991 for Christ’s sake!) who has the air of someone who would be able to charm his way into anything. Myles Kellock plays the keyboards, but seemingly only half as much as he plays video games – there’s one shot in the film where he’s playing what looks like Mario Kart at the back of a recording studio while the others are working on a song. His keyboards certainly contribute greatly to that modern/retro sound I described earlier, though.

    That leaves my favourite member of the band, lead guitarist Josh Dewhurst. He has a quality that I admire a lot, and that is being funny with a straight face. He doesn’t go out of his way to make people laugh, he just has a dry wit that makes him naturally funny. I’m someone who relies a lot on sarcasm so I can relate. In one scene, the band are being fitted out with the suits they will wear on stage at the big gig and Dewhurst tells a hilarious story about how he’s had to have pockets made on his trousers because, according to the tailor, ‘you don’t have an arse’. He tells it in such a way that makes Ogden in the background crack up, as did I. Dewhurst is also an incredibly talented musician. On the most recent Blossoms album, Foolish Loving Spaces, on the track Your Girlfriend the cowbell-type sound at the beginning was produced by Dewhurst hitting the wheel of a car.

    Your Girlfriend, from the 2020 Blossoms album Foolish Loving Spaces

    The shots of 15,000 people packed tightly onto the Edgeley Park pitch feel like a window into a different world, one in which no one knew what social distancing was. As hard as it is to believe at the moment, those days will return but for now this film is a wonderful tonic for these locked down times.

    I urge you to both give Blossoms a listen and watch the film. Their music appeals to all ages – I gave my mum one of their albums as a present last year and she’s had it on almost constantly in her car ever since – and the film is inspiring, in that a group of lads who a few years ago were playing to fifty people in pubs are now headlining stadium gigs. Watch the trailer below and the film is on Amazon Prime.

    The trailer for Blossoms – Back To Stockport

  • My favourite film – Submarine

    I have mentioned before that films aren’t really my thing. I’m not quite sure why that is. I struggle to suspend my disbelief for 90+ minutes and therefore find it difficult to feel involved in a film (but then I can do that no problem with a TV series), and while the big explosions and huge fight scenes might entertain a lot of people they tend to bore me. Michael Owen gets a lot of stick for feeling this way, but I’m totally with him.

    As a result of this, I have seen a very short list of films so far. I was taken to the cinema as a child, mostly to see Disney animations as I recall, but you could name a huge number of ‘classics’ that I’ve never seen a single second of. I saw Blade Runner for the first time last year – purely because it was set in November 2019 and it was appropriately geeky in my eyes to watch it in November 2019. To be honest, I didn’t really see what the fuss was all about.

    My favourite film is one that a lot of people probably haven’t heard of. It was released in 2011, following a premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2010. It’s called Submarine.

    Submarine trailer

    Submarine is not about submarines. The film is based on a novel by Joe Dunthorne, who wrote most of it while at the University of East Anglia doing a creative writing degree. I read the book after seeing the film and thoroughly enjoyed it – the big screen adaptation stayed remarkably true to the source material, and Dunthorne’s writing style was very readable.

    The focus of Submarine is a 15-year-old boy, Oliver Tate, who is something of an outsider. No wonder I can relate to the character. You see, when I was at school there was usually one girl a year that I was completely besotted with. But I never told any of them – I never even tried to speak to them at all. I preferred to admire from afar. Oliver seems to take a similar approach, but plans his attempt to get together with the object of his desires, Jordana Bevan, with military precision.

    Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige) and Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) in Submarine

    I don’t want to spoil it, I want you to go and watch it, so I won’t go too far into the story but it centres around Oliver and Jordana’s relationship, Oliver’s fears that his mother is having an affair, and Oliver’s reaction to a crisis in Jordana’s family. There are poignant moments but also some very funny ones (‘My mother is worried I have mental problems. I found a book about teenage paranoid delusions during a routine search of my parents’ bedroom.’)

    The title is derived from a line in the book, a love letter Oliver sends Jordana, in which he states ‘you are the only person that I would allow to be shrunken down to a microscopic size and swim inside me in a tiny submersible machine’.

    Richard Ayoade, who you may know as Moss from The IT Crowd, directed the film and did a fantastic job at rooting it in the book’s 1980s setting. I think it’s the feeling Ayoade creates that seals the deal for me in making this my favourite film.

    Richard Ayoade directed the film

    So, will you have heard of any of the cast? Well, Oliver is played by Craig Roberts, who first appeared in the kids’ TV show The Story of Tracey Beaker and also turned up in one of the later episodes of Skins. Noah Taylor, who plays Oliver’s father, has been in Game of Thrones and Peaky Blinders, his mother (Sally Hawkins) starred in The Shape of Water, and Jordana’s mother is played by Melanie Walters, best known for playing Stacey’s mum Gwen in Gavin & Stacey.

    Oh, and the fact that Alex Turner, the frontman of Arctic Monkeys, wrote and performed six songs for Submarine’s soundtrack is just a coincidence…

    Submarine often pops up on streaming platforms, though at the time of writing is only available for rental or purchase. Click here for places to get it.

  • England’s World Cup success can get the country into cricket again

    It was in early January 2003, just before school started again after Christmas, that I first got into cricket.

    I was 10 years old and would get up in the morning to find my dad in the living room watching the Ashes Test from Sydney on TV. On the screen, I could see Michael Vaughan batting for England and can remember thinking ‘this is great’.

    Vaughan’s strokeplay, especially his cover drive, were just so pleasing on the eye. I knew next to nothing about the sport at the time. I didn’t know England were 4-0 down in the five match series. I didn’t know the Australian team was one of the best there had ever been. But I was fascinated by this Englishman artfully approaching these little red missiles being fired at him and making several Australians chase after them. I didn’t want to stop watching.

    Watching Michael Vaughan bat got me into cricket

    I would say I love football and cricket equally. Thankfully, with the end of the football season signalling the start of the cricket season in this country I rarely have to choose between the two. If I had to pick just one, however, it would be cricket.

    So much can happen at any moment in a cricket match. Every ball is an event. There are so many ways for the batsman to score runs and so many ways for the bowler to get him out. Football tends to be mostly tedious until the last ten minutes of a game. And cricket is so aesthetically pleasing – it certainly takes the crown of ‘the beautiful game’ for me. Sorry, Pele.

    I also love how cricket is so incredibly difficult to be good at. You’ve got three disciplines to tackle and it’s hard to be proficient at any of them. The chances of being good at all three are next to zero. International cricketers seem almost superhuman compared to mere mortals like me. Just look (below) at this catch England’s Ben Stokes took in an Ashes Test in 2015.

    Cricket was the new cool in 2005 when England won the Ashes for the first time in 18 years, beating an immensely strong Australia 2-1 in what is unlikely ever to usurped as the best Test series of all time. The game was on the front and back pages of the newspapers and 7.4 million people tuned in to watch the end of the final Test live on Channel 4.

    Since then, the England cricket team has only been visible on live television to Sky Sports subscribers. Prohibitively expensive to many and not likely to be stumbled upon by the casual viewer, cricket dropped out of the national consciousness and the numbers of people playing and watching sank. The conclusion of the final Ashes Test in 2009, only on Sky Sports, was watched by less than two million.

    These are the reasons why this year’s World Cup has been so important for cricket in the UK. The world’s best players have been competing on our doorsteps for nearly seven weeks. Fan parks have opened the tournament up to thousands of newcomers. And to top it all, England came into it as favourites and have reached the final.

    England thrashed Australia in the semi-finals to reach the Cricket World Cup final for the first time since 1992

    It’s hard to put into words what England winning the World Cup would do for the game. How often can we say that England are world champions in any sport? With the match against New Zealand at Lord’s being the first time the England team can be seen live on terrestrial television for 14 years – it’s going to be live on Channel 4 – this is a massive opportunity for cricket to engage with the wider public once again.

    I’d love for a kid to catch sight of cricket on the TV for the first time on Sunday and be captured by it in the way I was sixteen years ago. For Jonny Bairstow or Joe Root to inspire in the way that Michael Vaughan did. After all, success makes you popular.

    • The Cricket World Cup final between England and New Zealand at Lord’s will be live on Channel 4 and Sky Sports on Sunday 14th July, with the first ball at 10.30am.