What about all those great Lancastrians who never had a go at captaining England?

John of Gaunt
Henry Bollingbroke
Henry of Monmouth
Me
The Queen
Stuart Hall

All of these and more would have done a proper job.

@howe_zat

Michael Vaughan

Tit he may be, but by that standard he’s a true Lancastrian tit.

Using Bert’s analysis I have estimated the “true” population of Lancashire to be 0, due to the one man who arguably fulfils the latter qualification having died before the opportunity to test the former two qualifications.

He’s got good form for assessing players, has Michael. Under the headline “Journeymen Put England on Brink of Victory”, this was Atherton’s analysis of the 2009 Lord’s test against the West Indies:

“The first day at Lord’s witnessed the arrival of a special talent; now it was the turn of the journeymen. For Ravi Bopara, the possibilities are endless, but we know, as much as we can know anything in sport, that Graeme Swann and Graham Onions will not finish their international careers as greats of the game.”

I discarded him as a Lancastrian some years ago. Any true Lancastrian would be able to tell the difference between Graeme Swann and a journeyman, and between Ravi Bopara and a great of the game, and would also be able to captain a team to international glory through sheer force of Lancastrianism. His journalism is following his cricketing career – immensely stylish, very classy, rather short on results.

Fickle.

What next? An article about how sorry you are that Finn didn’t get five wickets, thus implying that he got four? An article asking what when wrong on Finn’s hat-trick ball, thus implying that he got two in two? Well if you are planning anything like this, keep it to yourself.

Thanks. Sometimes it all just flows and it feels like we don’t even have to try.

So we don’t.

you’ve outdone yourself.

congratulations.