Graham Gooch’s 333 against India at Lord’s in 1990 was the first eye-wateringly big innings we can remember. The idea that one guy could score that many runs on his own in a Test match recalibrated what we thought was possible. There have only really been a handful of oversized surprises from England batsmen since then.

England batsmen have made 24 double hundreds since Gooch’s triple. None was predictable, but some were more likely than others.

Let’s talk surprises and let’s do it with reference to the Sopranos. (So maybe skip to the next subheading if you’re 20 years behind with your TV viewing.)

A lot of people get killed in The Sopranos. That doesn’t really qualify as a spoiler, but if we can now refer to something that perhaps is, the death of Richie Aprile was a bit of a shock.

It was not a surprise that Aprile was killed, because a large proportion of the second series was devoted to setting him up as a problem. His death was a surprise because of who killed him: Janice – seemingly out of nowhere. You just didn’t realise she had it in her. (It is hard to think of a better two seconds of television than Richie’s smug contempt immediately followed by the look of surprise as his chair keels over backwards.)

This is the kind of impact we’re looking for.

To bring this back to cricket, Alastair Cook, Jonathan Trott and Kevin Pietersen double hundreds weren’t generally that surprising. Because of who they were and how they played, you knew these players were capable of such feats. Joe Root is another batsman who is so good that passing 200 doesn’t often seem newsworthy.

Now that isn’t to say that these guys couldn’t surprise you. It just means they were operating with a bit of a handicap. They had to have it large in a more unlikely context to truly take your breath away.

Okay we can start now.

These have been the eight most surprising England double hundreds since Gooch’s triple…

Nasser Hussain 207 v Australia, Edgbaston 1997

Those who have listened to the first episode of The Ridiculous Ashes – the podcast we do with Dan Liebke – will already know our feelings about this particular innings.

This was the situation: England had lost every single Ashes in the 90s, Australia had just been rolled for 118 and England were now 50-3. At this point, Nasser Hussain and Graham Thorpe put on a 288-run partnership.

What was especially remarkable about this one was that it somehow remained surprising long after it had happened. Is it possible to repeatedly feel surprised about something you know full well has actually happened? Apparently it is.

Hussain’s second-highest Test score was 155 and England batsmen didn’t make another double hundred until the next one on our list, five years later. England also continued to get thrashed in Ashes series for quite a few years afterwards.

All of this meant that every time they flashed up Hussain’s highest score in a TV graphic and highlighted the fact that it was made in an Ashes Test, we’d all have to try and come to terms with the reality of it all over again.

Even now, getting on for 25 years later, it is a hard one to wrap your head around.

Graham Thorpe 200* v New Zealand, Christchurch 2002

This Graham Thorpe innings is often overlooked because it wasn’t even close to being the most remarkable double hundred in the match.

England batted first and lost two wickets in the first over. While they ultimately recovered to 228 all out, New Zealand could only manage 147 in reply. England’s second innings then subsided to first 85-4 and then 106-5. And then Graham Thorpe hit what was at the time the third fastest Test double hundred off 231 balls.

As we’ve just said, it had been five years since an England batsman passed 200 and while Thorpe was England’s best batsman of the era, his was a reputation largely forged on gritty fifties. To give a bit more information in support of that, despite finishing his Test career with an average of 44.66, his second-highest score was only 138.

It was a really, really, highly surprising innings. People would probably talk about it a lot more if Nathan Astle hadn’t then tried to chase 550 on his own in a session.

Rob Key 221 v West Indies, Lord’s 2004

If King Cricket is anything, it’s a website that knows how to share a Rob Key picture with the world. The fact that this was an event that needed to occur was in large part due to events at Lord’s in 2004.

Key was a batsman who earned a modicum of Australian respect and a niche UK fanbase off the back of a couple of small but phlegmatic innings during the 2002/03 Ashes series. He only made one fifty in eight innings – plus what Wisden admiringly referred to as “a stout, mostly passive knock” in Perth after Nasser Hussain, Michael Vaughan and Alec Stewart had all been dismissed on the first morning – but it was the way he made those runs that won many of us over.

“He doesn’t give a shit about much and is real relaxed,” said Steve Waugh. “I like that in a bloke; it stops him getting overawed.”

In an era when England batsmen tended to default to quaking in Ashes matches, these were highly desirable characteristics. ‘If only he could make a few more runs,’ you thought to yourself.

Recalled to the side for the first Test against the Windies in 2004, Key still had only that one Test fifty to his name. We monitored the scorecard from a warehouse in North-West England, desperately hoping he’d make another.

He did. And then he turned it into a hundred. And then he turned it into a double hundred.

It was all rather satisfying.

Paul Collingwood 206 v Australia, Adelaide 2006

Like Thorpe’s, Paul Collingwood’s is a double hundred that doesn’t get talked about much – but for very different reasons. This is a shame because it was quite the moment.

One Australian newspaper had called Collingwood England’s worst-ever number four ahead of the Adelaide Test. This was not an isolated thing; it was symptomatic of sneering that extended to – in fact originated in – the UK.

There was a general sense that even though he was at that point averaging 41.77 in Test cricket, Collingwood wasn’t a proper batsman. A lot of people felt that he was actually just a rather fortunate utility cricketer who’d benefited from his willingness to carry drinks on tour.

So that was where Collingwood was. Now consider the state of the series.

Despite winning at home in 2005, England hadn’t won an Ashes in Australia since 1987. They hadn’t even competed really and after conceding a 445-run first innings deficit in the first Test, things didn’t exactly feel rosy ahead of the second.

At the end of day one, England’s worst-ever number four was on 98 not out. We stayed up to watch him make his hundred the next day and then we carried on staying up and watched him make 200. It was the first double hundred by an Englishman in Australia for 78 years.

We don’t ordinarily much care for landmarks, but there was an awful lot wrapped up in this one. The match famously didn’t pan out all that brilliantly for England in the end, but it was such a perfect moment that it almost lives in isolation.

The innings as a whole was so emphatic, and then the shot to reach 200 and the immediate reaction to it so perfect and pure, that we still feel all of the joy that we did at the time, garnished with all of that hugely misplaced optimism about what was to come.

Paul Collingwood was a cricketer you could invest in. This was one of the pay-offs.

Alastair Cook 235* v Australia, Brisbane 2010

It was 2010 and England still hadn’t won another Ashes Down Under because that previous one had ended up 5-0.

Day one of the first Test at the Gabba. Andrew Strauss was out in the first over and then Peter Siddle took a frigging hat trick. On his birthday.

England were out for 260. Australia made 481. Same old, same old. We’d seen this one before.

But then suddenly, out of nowhere, England batted… and batted… and batted.

Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook put on 188 for the first wicket, then Jonathan Trott came to the crease, and then… no further wickets fell.

The match ended with the tourists 517-1. Five hundred and seventeen for one!

Strauss’s 110 was the worst innings. Jonathan Trott finished on 135 not out, Cook on 235 not and the Earth was no longer on its axis.

Kevin Pietersen 227 v Australia, Adelaide 2010

One of the features of this list is that mostly there are quite large gaps between entries… mostly.

Kevin Pietersen’s surprising double hundred came in the very next England innings after Alastair Cook’s surprising double hundred.

As we said at the time, England tours to Australia aren’t so much cricket as visits to a lab where a range of experiments are carried out to help the visitors identify every last one of their flaws. 2010/11 was the one recent exception and Pietersen’s double was when we started to comprehend that this might prove to be the case.

The 517-1 innings was so transcendentally weird it could only have been a complete outlier; a freak event that would never be repeated. So to then see another England double hundred exactly one innings later was almost as surprising.

Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen. ‘Creatures of their time’ we called them. Flat track bullies of entirely contrasting approaches.

The match panned out like this. James Anderson knocked out Australia’s top order and then Mike Hussey and Brad Haddin hustled the home side to 245. Testing pitch maybe? England made 620-5.

Cook made 148 and Pietersen – who hadn’t reached three figures in 18 months – made 227 in that particular and memorable way in which he made big hundreds.

Then Graeme Swann took a five-for and England had an innings victory. In Australia. The first of three in that series as it turned out.

Every time England reached 300 in this series, they also reached 500.

Bonkers.

Ben Stokes 258 v South Africa, Cape Town 2016

England made 312 runs in 38.5 overs while Ben Stokes was at the crease for this innings. No matter what you’ve seen from Stokes before or since, that surely counts as a surprising event. Writing at the time, we suggested that he had actually distorted time.

Stokes started at a decent lick and then accelerated – increasingly defensive field settings failing to slow him because they were offset by a Private Hudson level of demoralisation from South Africa. Even with a good number of men on the fence, Stokes was able to move from 150 to 250 in 61 balls.

The innings was so unearthly it actually left Sky commentator Nasser Hussain sombre with admiration because his brain simply didn’t know how to react.

Asked how the England team would be feeling afterwards, Ian Botham said they would be, “literally circling the moon”.

Responding to England’s innings, Hashim Amla batted for almost 12 hours and still didn’t get within 50 runs of what Stokes had achieved in five and a half. Stokes bowled 28 overs.

Zak Crawley 267 v Pakistan, Southampton 2020

Zak Crawley went into this match with a Test average below 30 and a first-class only very marginally above it. He had made three red ball hundreds and none in Tests. He was up against a rather tidy Pakistan bowling attack.

Crawley promplty clipped his first ball for four and then made another 263 runs. He did this as England endured pace, swing, seam and wrist spin, having at one point subsided to 127-4.

The longer the innings went on, the less it felt like a surprise and the more it felt like everything Crawley had done previously was the surprise. At the time it seemed like a Westworld-esque journey inward, after which he’d realise who he really was. ‘Oh, right – turns out I’m the perfect top order batsman.’

Except it wasn’t that, because one dreamy fifty aside, it was followed by a run of complete failures, such that we’re probably now back to the double hundred being the surprise; a weird-arsed soaring peak from someone who can look for all the world like a natural, but who definitely isn’t.

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We’re picking an England XI comprising the players we invested in the most.

In 2002 Steve Waugh said of Rob Key: “He doesn’t give a shit about much and is real relaxed. I like that in a bloke; it stops him getting overawed.”

As someone who at the time didn’t give a shit about much and was real relaxed, we rather liked the idea that those were positive qualities and so we immediately decided that we’d develop a mad obsession with Key that would climax with a week-long build-up to a GIF of him riding a capybara.

No, that isn’t quite what we thought. But that is still how it went.

There’s an awful lot of Key nonsense on this site, but it’s important to remember that it all started because we thought he could play and, more importantly, that he had the right temperament for Test cricket.

What’s weird is that he probably did. Far worse players have had far better Test careers. It’s hard to claim Key could have been an all-time great, but if he’d missed out on some Tests and played some different ones and also never taken the Kent captaincy, we still reckon he would have ended up with a solid record.

He did take the Kent captaincy though and he stuck with it. There was a lot of duty and loyalty in that and Kent fans tend to see him very differently to England fans. There are a lot of high profile players who don’t really value the organisations and structures that helped create them. Selflessness isn’t great for your Test career, but maybe there’s bigger things than a Test career.

This is the point at which we were going to link to our Cricinfo piece from when Key retired. Unfortunately ESPN seem to have copied over it with some shit about Aussie Rules from four years ago (we’re not even joking) so we’ll have to summarise it here instead.

In fact no, you know what? We wrote it. If they don’t want it lying around clogging up their server space, it can lie around on our site clogging up our server space instead. Here it is, backdated.

2 minute readThe number one highlight of a friend’s stag-do was when we all took it in turns to throw stones into the sea using our ‘other’ arm. (Which is to say the non-doing arm – the left one for us.)

When throwing with your wrong arm, the more effort you put in, the worse you look. It is a highly entertaining pastime and we fully recommend it and also you should video your efforts and send us the footage.

Among the minor joys of Sky Sports’ coverage of England’s 2018 tour of Sri Lanka were the segments in which Nasser Hussain, Rob Key and Ian Ward – and really there’s no other way to put this – dicked about. One Hussain-Key-Ward dicking about segment was ostensibly about how difficult it is to bowl competently with your other hand – a feature inspired by Sri Lanka’s ambidextrous spinner, Kamindu Mendis.

That’s what it was supposed to be. In reality it was three middle-aged sportsmen laughing at each other’s incompetence while simultaneously getting really quite competitive.

Real, actual sportsmen are basically unhinged and don’t stop being unhinged just because they’ve retired. These three are among the more self-aware ex-cricketers and none takes himself too seriously, but even so they’re still super-competitive. This is what can happen to a person when they spend many years playing games for a living. Earlier in the tour, the three of them went up Sigiriya and for no reason at all it deteriorated into a race.

As for the other-handedness, let’s take a quick look and then give each of them a star rating.

Ward is admirably dreadful and almost immediately resorts to throwing (which is surely harder?)

“It’s like he’s never played anything,” observes Key – later adding: You’re the worst sportsman left-handed I’ve ever seen.”

Key is merely pretty bad but rather impressively appears to have difficulty running left-handed.

Hussain is, all things considered, good. He starts by bowling finger spin and then advances to doing impressions (at which point things become a little less good).

In summary:

• Ian Ward is the worst and therefore the best – 4 stars (one star deducted for not persisting with it)
• Rob Key is more adept at imposing and changing rules on the fly than bowling left-handed but can sort of aim and is therefore probably better than 90 per cent of the population – 3 stars (mostly for the run-up)
• You’d definitely pick Nasser Hussain if you actually wanted to win a game, but thanks to his sickening competence, he is the least funny – 1 star

First published in October 2018.

< 1 minute readGetty has got a thing that allows us to embed images. They say it’s free to use and entirely legal – although with Getty being famously litigious when it comes to unauthorised use of their photographs, we still feel a little nervous, like they’re luring is into a trap or something.

Nevertheless, we wanted to take a look at what kind of thing might be available, so needless to say the first thing we did was carry out a search for ‘Rob Key’.

The results feature a surprisingly heavy emphasis on this kind of thing.

However, don’t think for one minute that there’s nothing but Rob in whites looking a bit sad after losing his wicket against Essex.

Because sometimes he’s wearing coloured clothing while in the very process of losing his wicket against Essex.

And at other times he’s wearing coloured clothing, in the process of losing his wicket against Essex, but photographed from the opposite side.

But there are some truly spectacular moments too.

Take this photo of him in profile, for example.

And finally, here’s the Queen getting to shake him by the hand – the lucky bitch.

Can’t wait to see none of these photos show up in the daily email and for this post to make precisely zero sense to all our subscribers as a consequence.

< 1 minute read

And by ‘exclusive’ we mean that we reported information that was already publicly available for a third party before pointing you towards it from here.

This week’s Twitter round-up has just gone up on Cricinfo. Critics are calling it ‘recently published and currently without comments’.

Needless to say, we’ve led with Rob Key and later on it also features something called ‘The Big Wedge’ which is surely deserving of your time.

If today’s King Cricket update and the somewhat ‘less is more’ nature of our entire output this week has left you wanting more, you might also think about signing up for Cricket Badger.

You’ve missed this week’s, but there should be another instalment around 10am next Friday. Critics are calling it ‘weekly’.

< 1 minute read

Bert writes:

It’s been months now since The Revered One departed this plane of existence and ascended to the Sky (Sports studio). Such elevation cannot but affect a man, but I must say I had thought that Robert the Great would be immune, that he would be able to maintain his humbility and humilness. After all, that’s why he is worshipped across the land.

So it was with considerable shock and disappointment that I came across this car parked just outside Wembley last Saturday. Surely not, I thought. Surely this is some sort of joke. But there it was, parked right in front of me, challenging my denials with its stubborn existence.

There are other possibilities, of course. Maybe this was some other Key, Derek Key for instance, a sales executive from Tring. Maybe this was un homage from a committed Keyist. Maybe this was just a random set of letters and numbers that only coincidentally represents the lad Rob. But the likelihood of any of these being true is extremely small. It was just my shipwrecked imagination desperately clinging to some driftwood of hope that came up with these nonsenses.

No, I fear we must accept the truth, that Rob Key is the kind of person who has a Range Rover with a personalised registration on which he describes himself as Boss. In other words, a wanker.

< 1 minute read

If you’re wondering where we’ve been, we’ve unfortunately been too busy writing things to write things. One of these written distractions was about Rob Key.

Cricinfo gave it the coveted midnight on a Friday slot at the top of the homepage, clearly of a mind that this would be perfect for Key fans who would almost certainly be hitting city centre bars until the early hours before returning for a light spot of reading before bed.

It briefly mentions warehouses, biscuits and Ini Kamoze and we misquote Kevin Keegan, but it’s mostly a fairly straightforward look back on Key’s career. We didn’t think Cricinfo would want our usual Key tone. Maybe we were wrong.

Don’t think that we didn’t get carried away though. We overshot our target word count by 100 per cent and only succeeding in hacking it back to 50 per cent over. Fortunately, they let us off though on the grounds that “it’s not every day that Rob Key retires.”

This article was first published on Cricinfo in April 2016, but they seem to have deleted it so we’re republishing it.

For a fair few years, from the early Nineties onwards, there was a phenomenon in British newspapers where Australian opinions of England cricketers were given greater weight. Seasoned cricket journalists would cite instances where an Aussie ‘rated’ an English batsman or bowler as proof of that player’s quality.

The subtext was that Australians knew the secret of cricket, whereas we Brits didn’t. Going by results on the pitch, it seemed a fair assumption.

In 2002 Steve Waugh said of Rob Key: “He doesn’t give a shit about much and is real relaxed. I like that in a bloke; it stops him getting overawed.”

That Waugh had seen a certain something in Key after employing his special Australian ‘good cricketer’ sense was a fillip for the player himself, but there was even more to his assessment for me.

I was, at that time, working in a warehouse and could very much identify with Key’s apparent disinclination to give shits about certain things. A similar age, but with my cricket playing days already behind me (I’m not big on team sports), I perhaps saw him as a slightly larger, southern me vying for the England spot I’d dreamed of as a boy.

In an interview for this website, Key was once asked what advice he would give his younger self, given the chance. “Don’t eat biscuits,” he answered. And what would he be if he weren’t a pro cricketer? “Trade in the derivatives market.” The latter was an obvious lie, but specific enough to be funny where something more commonplace wouldn’t be. In a similar questionnaire for All Out Cricket, he suggested that Here Comes The Hotstepper by Ini Kamoze would be the perfect music to accompany his walk to the crease.

Dry and self-deprecating, Key has never seemed to take himself or his cricket too seriously. Waugh’s assessment hinted that these characteristics could be attributes, rather than flaws. To me, that idea seemed worthy of support, so I supported Key.

He could play too.

Key surfaced as a Test cricketer against India in 2002 via a couple of fill-in appearances following an injury to Marcus Trescothick. This would become a theme of his short Test career. Key was always a stand-in or next in line; never quite the first-choice pick. On that winter’s Ashes tour, an injury to John Crawley saw him return to the side for the second Test.

It was a bleak tour. The first Test started with Nasser Hussain’s infamous decision to invite Australia to bat, continued with the severe injury to Simon Jones and finished with the tourists being bowled out in 28.2 overs. The second Test was an innings defeat and so was the third, in Perth.

In that match, Hussain, Vaughan and Stewart were all caught behind on the first morning failing to cope with what Wisden termed “exceptional bounce and pace.” Key made 47 – “a stout, mostly passive knock.”

This was the innings that impressed Waugh. England fans too remember when someone top scores in such situations. Resolve when fans are most desperate to see it buys a player affection in a way more obviously dominant performances do not.

Depending on your perspective, his dismissal was either frustrating or hilarious. At the time, it was almost certainly the former, but looking back, perhaps the latter. Against an attack comprising McGrath, Gillespie, Lee and Warne, Key was bowled by Damien Martyn.

Further soft dismissals followed against Zimbabwe the following summer. Our man was dropped, never really found form all year and ended up making barely 500 runs in the County Championship.

Fortunately, things were rather different in 2004. Kent finished second in the first division with Key making 1,274 runs at 79.62. He reached 1,000 first-class runs on June 2 and was named one of Wisden’s five cricketers of the year.

There was also that knock against the Windies.

I’ll spare you the detail, but it’s worth emphasising the impact that innings had on me. I’d been desperate for him to make a fifty, yearning for him to make a hundred and this ruddy-faced, somewhat chubby manifestation of my laidback approach to life went and made 221.

He reached the double hundred at about lunchtime on a Friday and when you’re working in a warehouse in the middle of July, that’s when a summer weekend is just looming into view. The endorphins were simmering anyway. The double hundred brought them to a boil.

Yet that wasn’t even his best innings. Two games later, chasing 231 on an Old Trafford pitch on which the West Indies had just collapsed from 88-1 to 165 all out, he made 93 not out as England won.

But he was still essentially a stand-in. Injury to Mark Butcher had given him an opening and it was only another injury to Butcher which saw him return to the Test team in South Africa that winter.

He wasn’t back for long.

To misquote Kevin Keegan, batsmen aren’t born today until they’re in their late twenties or thirties. Key’s Test career was over at the age of 26. He made 83 in his penultimate Test in an England win and never got another chance.

Just as players new to Test cricket are sometimes wrongly perceived to be young, the reverse often seemed to apply to Key in subsequent years. He’d been around for a while and a lot of people thought he was past it.

England went with the unsullied Ian Bell at the start of the 2005 summer. Bell made 65 not out and 162 not out against Bangladesh and England moved on. Key lurked, but always just out of reach.

In 2006, he took on the Kent captaincy. He thought the increased responsibility would help him get back into the England side. At the time, I couldn’t really see the logic in this. It didn’t seem to me that he really needed to do anything different. After his bumper 2004 season, 2005 had seen him score 1,556 Championship runs at 59.84. He just needed to carry on and then take his chance when it inevitably arose.

Unusually, I was proven correct. Key’s batting went downhill. At the end of the season, Graham Johnson, Kent’s chairman of cricket, said: “His commitment to the team has probably impacted on his own form.”

But the commitment was real. Key remained Kent’s captain until 2013 and then took the job on again in 2014. Through prolonged financial troubles and relegation, Key remained. It was not easy and only he knows how much it wore away at his batting.

There were occasional highs. He averaged 70.50 when Kent won the Twenty20 Cup in 2007, despite the necessary pace of captaincy in T20 cricket being “a pain in the arse.” There was also promotion in 2009 – albeit followed by relegation in 2010.

But the overall impression has often been of one man doing his level best to carry almost an entire cricket club. You can only do this if you give a shit, but at the same time it would crush a man in that position if he gave a shit about every last little thing. Rob Key has always been realistic and proportional in his shit-giving.

Primarily, he gives a shit about cricket. If you’ve seen him in what has up until now been his parallel career as a broadcaster, his enthusiasm for the sport is palpable. Laid back, witty and in love with cricket without taking it too seriously, Key seems an ideal fit for what seems likely to be his new career. This means that while he may never again deliver a moment quite so perfect as that Friday lunchtime in 2004, he will surely be given more TV opportunities than Test ones.

< 1 minute readAlmost certainly the finest Rob Key themed cryptic crossword you will encounter today.

Compiled by Bert.

As ever, there are no fantastic prizes.

You can also download a PDF version here.

Click here for the answers.

2 minute read

Rob Key has retired. It is a sad day. We’re going to don a black cardigan instead of a beige one by way of mourning. We will wear it for 221 minutes in tribute to the number of runs Rob once made in a single Test innings.

Adam Gilchrist’s highest Test score was 204.

You lose again, Adam Gilchrist.

But the truth is, today we all lose. Adam Gilchrist loses the most, but we all lose a little bit. The sky is greyer; the sun is colder; our wrinkles are deeper; and luxury goods are slightly more expensive. Everything is worse. Even this cup of tea is worse. It has slightly too much milk in it. That never would have happened yesterday.

Yesterday Rob Key was still plying his trade as the greatest cricketer in the history of the planet. Today he is playing golf. That isn’t even a joke. We saw it on Twitter. This might just be the most depressing paragraph ever written.

Speaking of Twitter, every now and again we happen across SimonC’s marvellous Rob Key creation which first appeared on this website back in 2009. People often republish it. Quite often they send it to Rob Key himself. If we were on Facebook, we daresay we’d see it there too.

As magnficient as the work is, it makes us sad that no-one ever gives it a proper build-up any more.

For the full effect, this is how it works…

You read this.

Then this.

Then this.

Then this.

Now you’ve earned it.

That’s how you publish a funny picture.

Even worse, the people thoughtlessly bandying the image about on social media don’t even know that Rob’s astride a capybara because he’s part of the Hindu pantheon and the capybara is his vehicle.

WHAT KIND OF AN IDIOT DOESN’T KNOW THAT?

We’re putting this post in the ‘England’ category because Rob did play for England and would have done so again if he could have been bothered. Which he couldn’t.

You may well be tempted to wade into the Rob Key archives of this website in a forlorn bid to soften the pain of this dank event. If you do, this is the hub. Don’t neglect the posts on the old site. We used to write songs about him back then. If you can hold back the tears, we could all have a singalong (separately, without making any actual contact with one another).

Rob Key.