When contemplating a sale, it is generally advisable to check out the salesman’s track record. Ten years ago, when he was premier of New South Wales, Mike Baird oversaw the partial privatisation of the state’s ‘poles and wires’ over and above the objections of many well-informed observers, not to mention the Labor opposition and trade unions. It has been a costly and problematic exercise, which the Minns government is currently reviewing in order to restore public interest in transmission planning. The Australian Energy Regulator and peer-reviewed literature have explicitly fingered the privatisation for steepling network costs and retail power prices. But Baird, in the way of these things, has moved on: now he is selling Australian cricket.

The scenarios are different, of course. Not even the most ardent cricket lover would consider the Big Bash League to be ‘critical infrastructure’, even if it is of public character. But it is a form of asset recycling, involving an irreversible release of capital allegedly better used elsewhere - even if nobody will tell us where and how. Similarities extend even to personnel. Cricket Australia’s advisers in the mooted sale are Barrenjoey Partners, whose founder Matthew Grounds, then at UBS Australia, advised the government on those controversial ninety-nine-year leases of TransGrid, Ausgrid, and Endeavour Energy. It was Grounds whom Baird’s office rang to complain when UBS’s bank analysts, independent of the process, published a critical analysis, which was then watered down.

Et Al may get a phone call after this, but the hell with it. On Monday, I noted that Cricket Australia had signally failed to make the case for privatisation of the Big Bash League; what they have also failed to do is even acknowledge the case against. And the case against, that ultimately private capital obeys its own commercial logic and knows loyalty only to itself, is cautionary, as the costs are real, recurrent and inescapable.

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We should know within days how Cricket Australia has fared in its attempt to guide its franchises through the Straits of Hormuz and onto the open market. Queensland, which is yet to choose a side in the conflict, is indicating it will make a call on a potential sale by the end of the week.

Over on Reddit this (long) NSW weekend, somebody started a thread after reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s gently dystopian masterpiece Never Let Me Go, which was timely given the decision by most, but not all, of the Australian cash-strapped states to sell a kidney.

For those unfamiliar with the British author’s sixth novel, it is set in an elite country boarding school, Halisham House, where the students, who are clones, have been raised to donate their vital organs. They’re not fully aware of this at first, but are slowly introduced to and eventually become accepting of the inevitability of their fate.

Of the states involved with the Big Bash League’s organ sale, only NSW has voted against waking up in an ice bath with debts paid and a small stack of crisp banknotes on the bedside table. Queensland is hesitant, but the other five states have responded as desired to the stick, carrot, or a combination of both, and will opt for the radical procedure.

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Pete and Gid catch up with the runs and ruins of the Indian Premier League, anticipate the Pakistan Super League play offs, check in on Aussies in county cricket, and wonder if the Big Bash League debate will ever get anywhere. Also DTF St Louis and Dirty Harry!

You Tube -

Spotify -

Moby -

Cricket Australia’s push to privatise the Big Bash League has now been running almost a year, commencing with a report Cricket Australia declines to share, continuing along lines the parties are loath to divulge, towards ends nobody can foresee except that there might be a buck in it.

One has waited all the way through for the knockout argument, the display of overpowering, relentless logic that routs the sceptics like Athers, Gilly and Greg, and lights the way. It has not come: rather have the same dreary propositions been rerun. The IPL is scary big! The television money is running out! We need to be able to afford Tim Seifert! But how necessitous are Australian cricket’s circumstances, really? Sure, everyone would like a bit more cash, but what are the urgent expenditure items we cannot currently afford, and is a one-off asset sale at the expense of long-term revenue and upside the only way to pay for them? As economists Matthew Lilley and Patrick Ferguson argued in The Australian Financial Review at the weekend:

More generally, as economists, we’re sympathetic to the general case for privatisation: profit-maximising firms compete to deliver better services at lower cost. But professional cricket isn’t an electricity network nor a standard competitive market, and these arguments fall badly apart when considering the Big Bash League….

This is not a sport starved of cash, and there is no clear financial evidence for the claim that Cricket Australia must sell permanent equity in its best commercial asset to secure its future. Nor is it obvious that Cricket Australia has a pipeline of credible investments that would concretely grow the game enough to justify doing so. It is unclear what additional spending, beyond what Cricket Australia can already afford, would meaningfully purchase.

Lately, there has been evidence of a new argument: in its favour is that Cricket New South Wales has set out a stall against it. Never bet against parochialism in Australian cricket. It is always lurking. New South Wales, populous, prosperous and privileged, courts resentment in all sorts of ways - at the selection table, in the schedule, in the queue for the corporate dollar. Its chairman John Knox shivved two Cricket Australia chairs, Earl Eddings from Victoria and David Peever from Queensland. Never mind that both were hopeless. Just as no-one is completely unhappy at the failure of their best friend, so nobody in Australian cricket is altogether displeased by New South Wales finishing second. It’s all right for them, you can hear the other states brooding: they are rich; we are poor as church mice. West Australia has the WACA to pay for, Victoria would love to get shot of the money pit Renegades, Queensland complain that nobody understands their particular needs, and South Australia live in a world of their own. Cashing out of the BBL would save them thinking too hard about their own businesses and governance models, and the individuals concerned won’t be round to deal with the consequences five to ten years round the track, even if they may not have a plush corporate job to slot into like CA chairman Mike Baird.

Individually, I suspect, everyone understands the counterarguments full well: the sacrifice of sovereignty, the risk to our red ball culture, the introduction of parties whose interest is in profit rather than in Australian cricket. But on these it is hard to place a value while the privatisation lobby is free to harp about price. Don’t underestimate the sway of the sight of others falling in and the difficulty of ignoring a bag of money being waved in your face - the Abilene paradox and torschlusspanik at work. So the other states continue sleepwalking, a bunch of rubes ripe for the plucking.

We’re getting to the point now where the best argument for privatisation is starting to become the muddling hopelessness of the existing system that this debate has reinforced - Australian cricket’s lazy monopolism, lack of accountability, tendency to factionalism and opaque decision making. Because irrevocable calls are here being made by a self-perpetuating elite, nominally on behalf of a public with no say in their outcome, that is heavily invested in the season as it is presently constituted, that on the evidence of the last few summers is not impatient for change, that feels a sense of proprietorship over the game it may not be keen to cede to foreign investors. Lilley and Ferguson conclude their survey damningly:

If Cricket Australia does not feel able to run the BBL in the interests of Australian fans and the long-term health of the Australian game, the answer is not to sell the BBL. It is to fix Cricket Australia.

And that raises a sharper question than those presently being asked. If leadership at Cricket Australia cannot faithfully steward a cricket league in the interests of Australian cricket, why are they running Cricket Australia?

CA’s besetting sin, then, may not be so much avarice as naivete - the failure to grasp how this process would destabilise and undermine its own claims to authority. Because there’s a sense that whatever the outcome, the way we do things at present cannot be the way we do them in future.

Relive it all with this guy….

….versus this guy….

…versus these guys…

…versus the guy who arguably had the last word of all.

These highlights reinforce how crucial was Steve Waugh’s handled the ball on the second morning - also how Ravi Shastri’s voice, here heard in the company of Chappelli, Greigy and Hookesy, has over the years gone from basso profundo to downright stentorian.

Anyway, please enjoy Thomas’s grand fusion of cricket, mathematics and art, which all his familiar retro flourishes and deep dives.

For more of Thomas’s handiwork, there’s always this.

In HG Wells short story The Man Who Could Work Miracles, the bumbling George McWhirter Fotheringay invokes a spell which stops the world from spinning. As a result, everything is hurled from the planet, and only George remains. In that instant, he, naturally, regrets what he’s done and wishes for things to be restored to the way they were. His wish is granted, and the story ends with the accidental agent of chaos back with his mates in a bar.

Hopefully, cricket finds its way back to the bar following a summer where the ancient art was rendered redundant by pink balls, green pitches and teams who figured they could exist without contributions from cricket’s most compelling craftspeople.

An anonymous northern hemisphere pundit labelled the Ashes spin bowling’s “nuclear winter” and while they were primarily referring to an English side which did not pick a frontline slow bowler in any of the five Test matches, Australian selectors did not field a specialist spinner for the day night Test in Brisbane and then in Sydney where no home side had taken a field without such since 1880.

Nathan Lyon may as well have been left out of the Perth too, where his total contribution to the bowling effort amounted to just 12 deliveries. The veteran had been similarly absent from Australia’s previous Test, a short, sharp and deflating day-night affair against the West Indies.

The absence of a spinner in Sydney, even accounting for the unavailability of Lyon, was the most depressing turn of events; further confirmation of Test cricket’s enshittification a few days after the MCG debacle, and a few short weeks from a similar premature ejaculation in Perth. Not that long back the SCG was the one venue in Australia where teams considered two front-line spinners.

If the slow bowler was to become a part-time scene sweller, an attendant lord good only to let the retinue of quicks catch their breath, a pick contingent on their ability with the bat, if Test cricket was to stop spinning, the game and we who love it would lose so much.

Dennis Lillee made me fall in love with cricket, but Shane Warne mesmerised batters and fans to the point where it was impossible not to be seduced. You simply had to watch cricket when Warrne played.

What would he think of the 2025-26 spin snub? Suffice to say, the Australian camp was lucky he was nowhere within reach of a microphone or their throats.

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2/ I can never get all that fussed about who’s flying, but am always intrigued by those who aren’t, for there is a terrible intensity about a T20 batter struggling to find the middle, swinging ever harder for diminishing returns. Viz Nicholas Pooran, at his best an imperious striker of the ball, especially down the ground and over cover, but is currently batting as if trapped in amber. Last night it was 22 from 25 as Lucknow Super Giants were swept away by Rajasthan Royals: he got off the mark with a boundary from a misfield, barely disposed of a half volley and a long hop, then as he strove to free his arms hit one straight up in the air. He had earlier butchered a straightforward run out with his beleaguered captain. Critics are clamouring; journalists are watching; social media is roiling.

Do they just? The ultimate insult - not out of nick, but actually corrupt. Such is the lot of the underperforming overseas player in the IPL, readily perceived as for sale to the highest bidder. Pooran is, of course, a thoroughly modern mercenary, having kissed off international cricket in order to daisy chain his T20 engagements. The result is that he’s now sixteen hits without a fifty since the start of the SA20, ekeing out 225 from 201 balls in that time, which by modern standards is almost going backwards. T20 leaves nowhere to hide - not when you’ve been retained for $3.12 million.

3/ While Australian cricket is further beguiled by private investment, rugby league continues grappling with its long-term impacts: on 19 May, the Brisbane Broncos will hold an annual meeting amounting to a giant rubber stamp of Rupert Murdoch’s head, thanks to News Ltd’s effective control of the NRL premier since the Super League omnishambles. If you live in Brisbane and have ever been interested in the raw stuff of governance, Friend of Et Al Stephen Mayne is seeking a proxy for his tilt at a board seat, because the Broncos decline to join the trend to hybrid meetings: on your phone, as Melbourne-based Stephen observes, you can watch the Broncos play but not vote. He wonders aloud how Australians tolerate an American billionaire owning the NRL’s most valuable club, and if they would feel the same way about Collingwood falling into foreign hands. It is one of those questions you won’t see asked in any News Ltd paper. Drop me a line if you’d like to help.

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The Englishman Jon Hotten is one of the world’s more distinctive writers on cricket, as distinct from cricket writers, for he has written, at length, on a range of subjects, including music, bodybuilding and boxing. I was introduced to his work by his excellent blog, The Old Batsman, and now subscribe to his elegant Substack, Arrangements of White on Green. I have also played cricket with him. The first time we did so, I hope he won’t mind me remembering, he had one of those days. He split the webbing on his hand, got pushed down the list, managed 2, clearly incommoded. Yet it was clear from the way he carried himself that he was a very good player, and I grasped, from conversation with others, that he has been a free scorer in cricket of good quality. As an experience, then, it was very Hottenesque, for one of Jon’s preoccupations is how quality asserts itself, especially in batting - what singles out the good, from the better, from the best. How did I know that Jon could play the game, from such a brief glimpse? Was it the way he held the bat? Was it the way he stood, or the shapes his body made in motion? Was it even those moments in repose where he related to others and talked about the game? I could not tell you, but from half a century’s immersion in the game, and playing with a great range of abilities, I intuited that Jon could play; just as from five minutes watching me in the nets you’ll grasp that I’m just a battler.

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READER DISCRETION ADVISORY: This is all Et Al and no cricket. It may also be deeply nostalgic and obviously indulgent. Apologies, Pete.

(I’ve got a yarn on spin bowling I should file later today.)

The past is another city. A Black City, as the Sacred Cowboys sing and sang once again, 40 years on from that place to this, from then to now.

The past came to town and plonked itself on the couch over the weekend. The brooding band that was the centre of our small circle’s late-night lives in the sleepless early 80s, what was left of them, came up from the highway from Melbourne on Saturday night. An old car with American fins, cylinders to spare, panels and parts replaced, but hood ornament and spirit intact.

Bass players, Andrew and Nick, are no longer with us, like drummers Johnny, Stephan and Paul. Many have passed through as the band shifted shapes. Too many perished in sniper alley.

But Garry Gray and Mark Ferrie, two of the originals, the singer and the bass player, legends of the Melbourne scene, have hung in and recruited muscle to fill out and replace those the stage lights could no longer find. And, now they were finally visiting me in Sydney, at my local, no less, the Marrickville Bowlo where you can find me some 6 pms quietly doing a NY Times puzzle. Slippers and a schooner. Shadows long in the setting sun. Gone by 8 pm.

I hadn’t seen the Cowboys since the 1980s. I’ve been up here in Sydney since the 1990s. And now they were on their way, ghosts of the past come to stir strange memories on a small inner suburban strage that’s no stranger to grizzly old rock bands of the past. Almost every weekend you can find a group of men and women, refugees from outfits past, advanced in age, but well-grooved in their task, playing because, well, that’s what they did and do.

Saturday, I sat restlessly on the couch at home, watching the footy, unsure of how to fill in time ahead of a gig that starts at 10.15 pm. These days our bands start early and often have us back at home by this time out of sympathy for the passing of time and the absence of speed.

I make a piece of toast and a cup of tea at 9 pm, saving myself for a few beers at the gig, and then jump on a Lime bike for the quick trip to the Bowlo, revived by the fresh air. I know, I know. Who needs amphetamines when you’ve got toast, tea and an e-bike?

I’m bracing for disappointment, but just a bit excited. There are a couple of tracks from the new album, In the Manifesto, on Spotify (I finally got a vinyl copy at the show), and they’ve still got that thing. Still got Garry’s dramatic noir. The Psychedelic Shooter mines the same threat of songs from 40 years before with all its unclipped safety clips, manifestos, culture and killing.

You found a hill to die on … you’re in the manifesto

The support band is still playing when I get there. There’s a roiling violin and a staggering rhythm, grey sheets of guitar, and a wailing singer channelling Lydia Lunch. They’re the third support at the Tiger Room, Richmond, 1983, stuck in aspic and somehow here. “We’re from Melbourne,” says the singer. “No kidding,” Mickey says. “You don’t say.”

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The incoming CEO of the State Library of Victoria - the shortlist is complete, an appointment may not be far away - will have a full in-tray. The institution has dragged its reputation through the mud. Relations between staff and management are poisonous, between the library and donors strained. Morale is delicate despite the (probably temporary) rolling back of last year’s bone-headed Strategic Reorganisation Change Proposal.

Though a promising new president has taken office, another board member is attracting some unwanted publicity. Questions have been raised about the appointment of the chief librarian. The ‘Director, Experience’ lasted barely two years during which service standards continue to decline. Opening hours cut back during COVID, for example, were never restored, and book retrieval times allowed to blow out. You used to be able to obtain a book from the stacks within half an hour; now if you order at 4.02pm, as I did recently, you’ll have to wait til 11am next day. Despite this, there’s always money for a talking boot. And how’s that dome revamp appeal working out for them?

One of the biggest problems, however, looks irretrievable. This is the imminent closure of the beloved Mr Tulk, the popular cafe that has served the community and enriched the library nearly a decade. It has been booted for the benefit of The Big Group, the corporate catering behemoth who currently service the cocktail party set in Queen’s Hall, which thereby becomes unavailable for a large portion of every day to the public whose taxpayer dollars helped fund its refurbishment.

Disclaimer alert: Et Al is friendly with Tulk’s owners, Michael and Maria Togias. But this simply means that a/ I visit regularly; and b/ as a result am lost in admiration for the couple’s work ethic and sense of mission. But don’t just take my word for it: note the 6235 people who signed a petition protesting its closure. The food is fresh and tasty, the ambience warm and welcoming, the staff of 30 efficient and friendly. There is, quite simply, no better cafe in the CBD, nothing has done more to build goodwill for the library over the last ten years, and everyone knows it - everyone, that is, except library management. They weren’t even aware that Michael had named the cafe for the inaugural state librarian - the previous CEO thought that ‘Mr Tulk’ was Michael.

Et Al has previously described the circumstances of the tendering process, on which Michael and Maria spent $50,000, even to the point of having to prepare a tasting treating library officialdom as though they were the judges on Masterchef. Michael was advised he was the favoured tenderer until….amazing to say….he wasn’t.

I half wish I’d been there for Michael’s meeting with Richard Morrison, the library’s new commercial operations manager, whose previous employer also has its share of problems right now - for anything cultural right now, Jacinta Allan’s Victoria is a fucking hellscape. Morrison, I have on the authority of LinkedIn, is a ‘dynamic and commercially astute professional with significant experience driving strategic growth and revenue generation in the arts and culture sector…with a proven track record of leading high-impact initiatives balancing mission-driven, customer experience, and financial priorities’ and ‘adept at identifying new opportunities, negotiating complex deals and partnerships, and delivering on ambitious revenue targets’, not to mention possessed of ‘exceptional interpersonal and highly developed leadership skills with proven success managing diverse cross-functional teams and collaboratively engaging both internal and external stakeholders.’ But Morrison didn’t collaboratively engage with Michael; he tersely advised that Mr Tulk’s tender had been narrowly pipped; Michael tersely replied: ‘This means fucking war.’

It was a war that Michael, for all his success gaining publicity, was never likely to win, entering a tender being tantamount to accepting its outcome. But what’s worsened the process infinitely has been the degrading and punitive way the library has treated Michael and Maria since the decision. A couple of testy exchanges with management were escalated into a pretext for prohibiting Michael’s presence from the library, as though he was some intractable hooligan rather than a hardworking small businessman nursing a completely understandable sense of disappointment. The forces of lawfare were unleashed, interminable letters sent by the State Government Solicitor clogged with HR jargon (‘Intimidatory Conduct’, ‘pernicious behaviour’ with ‘ancillary staff safety and Library premises amenity considerations’), meetings about said ban agreed to then mysteriously cancelled.

This last followed the publication of excellent articles in last week’s Herald Sun, Greek City Times, and Greek Herald - not a coincidence, one fancies.

But exactly what was this ‘previous behaviour’? Et Al has some insight here, involving one of the ‘incidents’ that started all this pearl clutching. It occurred on 27 February in the little Guild Cafe on Russell Street, which Michael took over when the previous owners could not make a go of it, and which TBG has recently assumed responsibility for the running of. The solicitor’s version of events is that ‘Michael proceeded to the Guild Cafe, loitering in the company of another person who was taking photographs of the cafe and TBG’s staff members’. Then….

Of particular concern in this instance was the way that Michael and his companion moved towards a female TBG staff member in the Guild Cafe area, causing her to feel threatened and quickly move away.

Oh, the humanity! But as you may have guessed, I was this ‘companion’. I asked Michael if he’d join me on a quick look at The Guild under its new management. Here are the two photographs I took during our one-minute ‘loitering’ which bothered no customer, and where no staff casualties were sustained.

Nothing to see and nobody identifiable, with the most offensive aspect being that TBG charges nearly $15 for a pre-made chicken toastie - I mean, I’m not surprised they want to keep that quiet, but it’s hardly confidential information. Who knows what followed? Maybe TBG complained. If so, a wise management might have made enquiries, noted the visit’s innocence, de-escalated with a quiet word, moved on. But State Library management is not wise. It is mean, petty and obtuse. Because what did they think would happen when they shuttered a place so beloved by its patrons and inseparable from its premises? That a couple deprived of their livelihood after a decade of backbreaking labour and protective of their blameless staff would just say: ‘Oh well, easy come, easy go’? That a loyal clientele would shrug their shoulders and respond: ‘We can’t wait to fork out $15 for some sad, mass-produced corporate finger food’? Anyway, because people evidently have nothing better to do with their time, me idling a minute in The Guild was escalated into a six-page letter to Michael and Maria from the State Government Solicitor. The latest letter, I note, is seven pages. They’re actually getting longer…..

Now, you might think I’m sweating some small stuff here, and, of course, I am. Just a library. Just a cafe. Sure. But it just irks me when good people are badly treated by unfeeling institutions, and when beautiful things carefully nurtured and widely loved are trashed for no good reason - as Tulk will be on 13 May. It’s also my opinion that the policy of pinpricks pursued towards a couple to whom the library actually owes a colossal debt of gratitude testifies to the urgent need for change, in culture and personnel, at this jewel of Victoria. A new CEO should be just the start.

Late last night, Ben Stokes’ 25-minute ECB-produced interview popped up in the algorithm, so I tuned in. And it was good to see the complex England captain speak openly and with trademark honesty about his recovery from the Ashes debacle and a horrific facial injury incurred on return home.

When carved up into eye-catching quotes or channelled through social media, Stokes can come across as a bit of a faux-heroic caricature, but in this broader interview setting, it’s easier to be empathetic with one of cricket’s talented and occasionally troubled individuals.

Much of what he had to say in the ECB video release had been reported, but there was a moment toward the end of the interview (23 mins if you are playing along at home) where the shop-worn 34-year-old was asked if he contemplated throwing the towel in after the tour.

“Honestly, no, never did,” he replied.

“Literally, I sort of went the other way.

“I was getting a bit worried, initially, because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about Australia, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the Test summer coming up. Genuinely, it just completely and utterly consumed me. I feel like I was able to switch off from it for about half an hour, and then something else would get my iPad out and start writing down notes and all this kind of stuff.

“I’d never experienced that before. I thought I’d gone into those places before, but Australia, my gosh, it was pretty extreme.

“Not that I got worried, but I was able to turn that around and think the fact that I am doing this, am so consumed by trying to make sure we do things in the future to potentially stop a series like Australia happening again, to me that’s a positive and proves how much I want to do this, how much I’m still eager to do the role as England’s captain, and eager to be part of England going forward. Whereas, if I’d got home and completely shut myself away from it, just see what happens, let other people make decisions for me and think ‘if I’m gone, I’m gone’.

“You know, I think that would be me thinking subconsciously ‘I don’t really want this’. The fact I was, how I was for the first week or two after Australia, proved I’m proper in this still.”

Stokes, bravely, allowed director Sam Mendes into his life to make a documentary when anxiety issues had compelled him to take a five-month break from the game in 2021. He admitted then that he’d had to seek counselling and medical intervention to deal with his issues.

“I never thought I would be on medication to help me with that kind of stuff. I am not embarrassed or ashamed to say it because I needed the help at the time, but it’s not done just because I’m back playing. I still speak to the doc, not as regularly, and I’m still taking medication every day. It’s an ongoing process.”

Few wear their heart on their sleeve, on or off the field, like Stokes.

I resolve to be kinder next time he makes one of those dumb social media posts about effing this up or effing loving effing that.

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There was a cleaning van parked outside of Cricket NSW on Wednesday morning, it was tempting to think they’d been called in to clean the blood and fur from the furnishings in the aftermath of yesterday’s revelations of a serious clash with Cricket Australia.

Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad, but things have got heated in the last 24 hours.

Cricket Et Al revealed yesterday that the push to privatise the BBL had reached the point where the powerful cricket state was at loggerheads with CA chair Mike Baird, a situation complicated by the fact that he is their nominee and, to some degree, serves at their discretion.

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A moment of truth is at hand for Australian cricket.

The state boards had been given until Wednesday to make a call on whether they wanted to partially privatise the Big Bash League franchises. It has been described as the biggest decision in the history of Australian cricket. And, while the potential sale has been argued for and against with some vigour, things have remained essentially civil until now.

Some, however, are bracing themselves for significant fallout should the sale go ahead.

A similar undertaking in New Zealand resulted in a bitter fight and the resignation of a chief executive officer. There’s potential for similar, if not worse, in the Australian scenario with Cricket Australia chair Mike Baird pitted against the NSW board chaired by John Knox.

Baird and chief executive Todd Greenburg have pushed for the sale.

NSW, Knox and the chief executive Lee Germon are rock solid in their opposition and have pushed vigorously for other options.

While it is not unusual for states to be at loggerheads with head office, the complication for Baird is that he serves essentially at the discretion of Cricket NSW and presumably only remains on the board while he has that backing.

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Don’t know if you listened to our podcast with Tim Paine from the PSL team’s hotel in Karachi. If you haven’t, let me encourage you to lend an ear; Tim brings a great perspective to cricket and touring. He’s always good to catch up with and a generous interviewee.

Over there, the players are pretty much confined to their hotels and can’t get out without an accompanying security detail. It obviously gets trying after a while, but Marnus Labuschagne has set up his espresso machine, and the Australian boys have something of a morning coffee club going (the locals tend to rise in the early afternoon). With Steve Smith, Dave Warner, Adam Zampa, Pete Siddle, Usman Khawaja and another half dozen locals playing in Pakistan, it is quite the scene. Tim says Davey hits breakfast with all the energy of a phone that’s been charging overnight. Marnus is like that 24 hours a day.

Glenn Maxwell, who can also swell a scene, is yet to arrive, but flew out on Friday to join Labuschagne and Riley Meredith at the Hyderabad Kingsmen. The outfit with a name that makes them sound like a ‘60s folk group has lost all four of their matches.

Former openers and their alphabetical daughters

Khawaja is yet to get on the park for the Rawalpindi franchise, which is also 0-4. Teams are only allowed to play four overseas players, and the new father has been overlooked in the early matches with the Pindiz looking to strengthen the bowling, having lost Zaman Khan and Naseem Shah. The first is injured, and the second may be protesting against a record fine imposed on him by the PCB for a social media post.

Amira Maya Khawaja, Rachel and Usman’s third daughter, was born in March and joins older sisters Aisha and Ayla. Dave Warner, who has three girls with wife, Candice, says it must be “an opener’s thing”.

It must be an opener’s thing to file all your daughters under the same letter, too, as the Warner girls are: Ivy Mae, Indi Rae and Isla Rose.

Warner was in the news for the wrong reasons after being caught drink driving in Maroubra this week. Some of the public reaction has been very harsh. The former Australian star isn’t everyone’s favourite. The mob rarely forgives or forgets.

It’s no secret I like the guy, but I get to see a side of him most don’t.

Warner, who is one of the most devoted family men you will meet, was back in town briefly to be with his girls for Easter. While here, he also organised the St Andrews Beach, which he is a part-owner of, to provide beer for the Chappell Foundation’s Melbourne Golf Day. Generous. Loyal by nature, he is always happy to help out when we ask for anything, and even flew down last year to play the course with our other supporters.

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Pete and Gid catch up with one of their favourite cricket people, Tim Paine, to discuss his journey as coach of the Multan Sultans in the Pakistan Super League, his approach to the evolving world of T20, the state of Australian and world cricket, the evolving art of wicketkeeping, the fortunes of Cameron Green and Beau Webster, and even how to get the best from Steve Smith (clue: you just let him be himself).

You Tube -

Spotify -

Apple -

Otis Redding -

In other developments, the amazing Cricket Et Al songlist has just clocked up twenty hours, The Fall taking us to that landmark with this week’s invocation of ‘Lay of the Land.’ Curator Evan Willis has kindly passed on the insights offered by Spotify’s AI playlist analyser, to which I can only say: well, yes.

• The segment heavily favors UK post-punk and its related subgenres, indicating a deliberate curatorial choice.

• The average tempo of 150 BPM suggests a consistent, driving rhythm throughout the tracks.

• Despite the relatively low energy and valence, the danceability score implies a listenable, engaging quality.

• The Fall’s significant representation heavily influences the segment’s overall sound, providing a consistent angular and unconventional feel.

The temptation is to reprise Lincoln Steffens: I have seen the future and its name is Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. Because Sooryavanshi is all about the future. Sam Konstas was nineteen when he took his sixes from Jasprit Bumrah; Sooryavanshi has given Bumrah a touch up having just turned fifteen, the age Malala and Greta first rose to prominence. He is younger even than current phenoms like Max Dowman, the youngest Premier League goal scorer, and Owen Cooper, the youngest Emmy winner.

The occasion was an eleven-over thrash between Rajasthan Royals and Mumbai Indians here in Guwahati, much anticipated even by Et Al. Bumrah started with a length ball; Sooryavanshi wellied it into the crowd beyond mid-wicket. Sooryavanshi had hit his first ball in the IPL for six last year, of course. But now he awaited the inevitable change up from Bumrah, and treated it with similar disdain. By hitting three more sixes, in fact, the prodigy took possession of one of those IPL records it never occurs to you they keep - the most sixes before the age of twenty, with another five years to build a peak that surely nobody will else will scale. The fourteenth ball Sooryavanshi faced would surely have gone for six as well, although it hardly tracked above head height: Tilak Varma needed palms of steel to arrest it with his back against the cover boundary. Out for 39, leaving Rajasthan Royals one for 80 after five overs. Yashasvi Jaiswal was going like a train at the other end, but he’s twenty-four and has pencilled a moustache on, so who cares, right? The Royals coach who spotted Sooryavanshi eighteen months ago thought he was better than India’s dashing opener then: ‘I told them, he's Jaiswal multiplied by two already.’

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The latest edition of The Cricketer carries an interview with Rev Andrew Wingfield Digby, who for decade from 1985 was chaplain to the England cricket team. He tells a story of the 1992 World Cup, of that crucial game where England bowled Pakistan out for 74, but were prevented from chasing the target down by rain. ‘You’re useless you are,’ complained Ian Botham. ‘It’s raining and it’s your fault…It’s not surprising there’s a worldwide movement in favour of the Islamic faith.’

A joke, of course, but a secular age will give rise to a fairly transactional notion of divinity - we tend to think of cricket as having gods, sometime interventionist, rather than a God. But, of course, it was not always so. Just as cricket in India is commonly described as a ‘religion’ with Tendulkar its deity, so the prolific social historian Eric Midwinter believed it exerted a similar thrall in the nineteenth century. Eric died last August aged ninety-three having completed the ms for Christianity at the Crease, and by its publication achieves a temporary print resurrection. He saw his task as ‘unravelling the skein of two religions entwined’, cricket being ‘a cult as much as a game’. One need not go all the way with him to enjoy this lively monograph of 168 pages in which all Eric’s trademark even-handedness and erudition is on show, even if the exploration seems preliminary rather than definitive.

Eric’s argument is that Anglicanism was fundamental to cricket’s Victorian renewal after the gambling and corruption of the Hanoverian nobility had pushed the game nearly to extinction. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, says Midwinter, England went from being ‘a restlessly violent and chaotic society to one presenting as calm and polite if somewhat earnest and censorious.’ When the clergy found in cricket a game with the potential for moral education - outdoor, non-contact, rules-based, even eventually white-clad - they made it central to the church communities and public schools they were establishing. Together, Anglicanism and cricket formed part of the ‘jigsaw of Englishry’, fusing inseparably in the doctrines of ‘muscular Christianity’. ‘The game conduces not merely to physical but moral health,’ opined the Christian socialist Rev Charles Kingsley, ‘that in the playing field boys acquire virtues which no books can give them; not merely daring and endurance but, better still, temper self-restraint, fairness, honour…and that “give and take” of life which stand a man in good stead when he goes forth into the world and without which, indeed, his success is always maimed and partial.’ It is so good a quotation that Eric drops it in twice.

Eric has some telling statistics too. One in three Oxbridge cricket blues in the Victorian era took holy orders, and he counted 147 men with the honorific reverend in The Who’s Who of Cricketers (1984) - Wingfield-Digby is the last. For more on this, by the way, I recommend two delightful volumes by Christopher Grey: The Willow and the Cloth (1999), a compendium of eighteenth century cricketing clergymen, and Parsons At Play (2013), which profiles sixty-five of that ilk, from Rev Edward Tyrwhitt Drake, ‘the Sporting Parson’ who under an alias swung a heavy bat for Middlesex and rode in the Grand National, to Rev Joseph McCormick, who played against the 1878 Australians and was a noted rower, boxer and alpinist - a volunteer in the party that recovered the bodies from Lord Francis Douglas’s doomed Matterhorn expedition.

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Pete and Gideon keep up with the Indian Premier League, the travails of Cameron Green, the scrutiny of overseas players and the torrent of sixes. Also what's happening in the Pakistan Super League and the County Championship, the agony of the hipster and the psychopathology of MAFS.

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Blind cricket enjoys the distinction of being the world’s oldest sport for the disabled, and a pioneering Australia innovation. It was purportedly devised at a Prahran hostel by two factory workers who had lost their sight, and improvised a tin containing rocks to hit. After an upsurge of interest during the 1920-21 Ashes, it was popularised by Tatong-born Albert Worrall, a lifelong railwayman and forty-year committeeman with Melbourne’s Association for Advancement of the Blind. And this Easter weekend marks a landmark in its development: a hundred years ago today was concluded the first interstate match, involving a team of Victorians visiting a team of South Australians at the Queen’s School on Barton Terrace in North Adelaide.

It had been quite the project, the Victorians spending twelve months raising a hundred quid by social functions, raffles and charging a shilling at the gate to their three-team competition, consisting of Worrall’s Association, the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind and The Braille Library. The last of these were the newly-crowned champions, their victory having inspired the McGonagall in their ranks to a grand homeric ode beginning…

Do check out the rest, it’s awesome. Anyway, five men from each team were chosen - six completely blind, nine partially blind - and accompanied on their rail journey by Worrall, two sighted umpires and a sighted scorer. They brought with them their remarkable woven cane ball containing pieces of metal.

The Adelaide Advertiser acclaimed their visitors as ‘the first throughout the whole blind world to go outside its own State or country’, and reported their captain Claude Anderson to be ‘the best all-round player’ in the state.

The school ground was small, with thirty yard boundaries, but in only a few years the game had been considerably codified. The sixteen-yard matting pitch featured a white line at halfway - anything that landed further up was a no ball, because the ball in flight made no sound. As today, statutes regulated the commingling of the blind and partially blind: a partially blind bowler could not bowl at a totally blind batsman but vice versa was permissible; blind batters had partially blind players as runners, and the game was single ended to minimise risk of collision. The metal stumps took a drubbing, as batters could only be out bowled, run out or stumped.

There was coverage as far afield as Sydney and Kalgoorlie, and the Adelaide papers took considerable interest. The News report enjoyed the enlightenment of it all.

The Advertiser went into detail about the rules.

There wasn’t much coverage of the actual game and no individual scores, although the visitors, not surprisingly, prevailed, making 168, and rolling their hosts for 39 and 66. I am indebted to Phil and David Penn of Blind Cricket SA for their researches: they explain that the locals were drawn mainly from North Adelaide’s Royal Institution for the Blind, and had had the benefit of only a couple of practices. Superintendent S. E. Fuller was the team manager.

The game was described as having ‘opened up an avenue of unlooked-for possibilities’, and by the following season there was full-fledged competition in Adelaide. The line of descent to today, in fact, is pretty direct. Shortly before his death in 1952, Worrall promoted an interstate carnival by establishing a National Blind Cricket Council. Its successor body Blind Cricket Australia is today one of ten members of the thirty-year-old World Blind Cricket Council. Not until 2004 did Australia play England in a blind ‘Ashes’ - Australia won the most recent instalment in November 2024. Next stop: perhaps cricket at the 2032 Paralympics in Brisbane. Gaz is on board…..

Regular readers of Et Al will be familiar with the scholarly starbursts of Thomas Miles, our doyen of scoring, who shared his story here. For nearly two years, we have been featuring his ball-by-balls and wagon wheels on the Tests we report, and, of course, celebrating his masterpiece: the Usman 232.

Now Thomas has surpassed himself by retrospectively scoring one of the greatest Tests of all: Kolkata 2001, whose twenty-fifth anniversary I recently celebrated. Victory after following on! It gave one of cricket’s totemic numbers: 281 suggests VVS Laxman, as 334 does Bradman and 501 does Lara. It gave us the legend of the Bhajji hat trick and of Gilly’s king pair. It contained other superb hundreds, from Rahul Dravid and Steve Waugh. It also generated a headline in The Age that I still remember for its exquisite unintelligibility to anyone not au fait with sport: Indian Bats Threaten Streak. Huh? It ranks with another I recall when Garry Hocking resumed for Geelong after injury: Buddha In For Cats…..

For night after night, Thomas has been patiently rewatching the Test on Fox in order to reconstitute it using the Miles system, complete with retro flourishes like old Australian Cricket Board symbols - the name changed two years later. He’s magnified the hundreds, and even given us Laxman’s wagon wheels at 100 and 200. He’s loved it too.

That really was the complete Test.

I can’t stop thinking about Laxman’s brilliance. Whipping Warne out of the rough through mid wkt and even driving him through the covers from way outside leg left me jaw dropped. Is KP Adelaide 06 the only other right hander to play him so well against the spin?

Steve Waugh at his gritty best with the most determined ton, Harbhajan ripping gloves off. Loved every second!

Can only imagine what it would have been like at Eden Gardens. Never seen a more enthusiastic crowd.

Anyway, on this day of the Lord’s crucifixion, prepare to be amazed once more by cricket’s great resurrection…..

India by 171 runs: even now it’s hard to believe.