“…Carberry was whom I wanted to succeed; Compton was whom I felt did nothing to merit dropping,…”

— Amen to that.

I would also like to compliment Hoopy on his sense of irony and historical perspective. Fact is, the cricket being played nowadays is not serious, not professional, not skilful, and lacking in character. The match that just finished was a bad joke, pretending to be Test Cricket. Proper openers do not play in this sort of thing. If Edrich were playing Tests today (but in his prime, not aged 80-something) we would still have an England team that understood about selling your wicket dearly. Correcting for modern bats and shorter boundaries, he would be averaging about 55, too.

If only.

I lost all faith in editing processes a few years ago, when someone somewhere failed to spot an embarrassing spelling mistake of mine in a so-called editing process. I forget the details…

https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/england-v-sri-lanka-at-lords-day-three-match-report/2014/10/24/

…but at least that so-called editor didn’t insert a grievous error where none had been before.

You have to remember that this is only the first week of test cricket. Yes, Cook looks good at the moment, and Stoneman looks something of a busted flush, especially now that he’s been dropped. But if recent events in other sports have shown us anything, it is that by the time we get past the third week of test cricket, Stoneman will have scored over a thousand test runs and will be the best in the world ever. Cook, meanwhile, will score minus thirty-nine.

Bear in mind that this unbelievable effort from Stoneman will in fact not be unbelievable, and will instead be entirely and totally believable.

Thanks Ged. The error you pointed out was actually changed during the editing process. So there.

https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/england-need-a-short-pitched-specialist-like-neil-wagner/2018/04/06/#comment-255107

So now that I have proved myself to be a prediction specialist I’ll answer the “best England opener since Strauss apart from Cook” with a future rather than past player: Nick Gubbins.

Have read, have commented. Nice article, Sam.