Kane Williamson presented a study during the Lord’s Test, his 110th, with some pathos. He batted at number three, where for so long he was a guarantor of New Zealand batting quality. He fielded at slip, where his hands were always soft and enveloping. But to his first ball in the first innings, he propped forward, and an inducker looped from the pad to a predatory short-leg catcher. In the second, he played a few soundless flicks and a velvety off-drive before being plumb lbw to Josh Tongue for 18 - his review, a Hail Mary, was to no avail. As he vanished, still helmeted, up the stairs, the commentators reflected that this might be his last Test at Lord’s. He had more decisive plans.

Williamson turns thirty-six in August. His beard is flecked with grey. But that’s not the only reason for him to ‘step away’ - it’s that he had already stepped back, abjuring a central contract two years ago, and playing only five of New Zealand’s Tests in the last thirty months. He revived his ODI career last year with fine hundreds against South Africa. But otherwise he was a name on a T20 franchise teamsheet, or at home with a young family, and red ball cricket requires more than such spasmodic intensity: a Test career is a life’s work. That was the message of Virat Kohli’s retirement last year, and also his continuation in the Indian Premier League. You can still be an amazing cricketer, but unable to scale the heights of the toughest cricket of all. Kohli was among the first to acknowledge Williamson’s exit, and may know better than most how he feels.

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Pete and Gid catch up with former Australian star Lisa Sthalekar in Dhaka to discuss Australia's white ball defeat in Bangladesh, the forthcoming women's T20 World Cup, and the privatisation logjam ahead of Monday's meeting of the state chairs with Cricket Australia.

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It’s official then. English cricket has moved from denial to acceptance. And is now grieving the death of its great experiment. Director of cricket Rob Key has acknowledged, grimly, that a side of people previously believed to be responsible adults needs to be disciplined and monitored like delinquent schoolboys, and that Ben Stokes, the current captain, is dangerously tired.

At least we presume Stokes is; rescue parties have been unable to locate the leader since the whole box and dice came tumbling down on his head.

Stokes’ captaincy faces threats from several fronts. Key refuses to confirm he will keep the job, and if that does not play out, Stokes himself is understood to be close to calling it a day and may just walk away anyway.

With the cricket boss acknowledging that Harry Brook is not ready for the skipper’s role in Test matches, Joe Root may find himself asked to consider another stint in a job which left him as exhausted and unable to go on four years ago.

Root will lead England in the second Test while these matters are worked out.

Key admitted there were a number of reasons why if didn’t feel like the right time to give Brook the job, high among them would have been that the acting captain would have had to field questions about off-field discipline when it was his drunken exploits in New Zealand that began this narrative.

Round and round and round we spin.

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…but was thoroughly immersed in events in Mirpurrrrrr.

2/ And why not? It has been gruesome watching for Australians - the batting timid, the bowling ineffectual, the fielding indifferent, the general sense of hoping nobody was watching. Perhaps just as telling, however, was the uninhibited and unintimidated quality of the cricket from Bangladesh, in contrast to the bygone days when Australian teams of any description were preceded by an aura of success. While conscious that this was an isolated, little-watched, mid-winter series, it has been hard to resist a sense of foreboding about what lies just over the horizon - is Australian cricket’s future a kind of mid-table proficiency, as it disappears into the maw of private capital?

3/ Surprisingly, perhaps, I remain on the Cricket Victoria mailing list, which last week brought this.

Obviously terms and conditions apply, such as who the hell will be playing. But the quiz question Cricket Victoria kept avoiding was how CEO Nick Cummins could represent them at Monday’s meeting of state chairs when he isn’t a director, and is currently the game’s most radioactive administrator, having smelted the Stars and Renegades into the Melbourne Murk? At last it has been acknowledged that he won’t - it will be some other member of CV’s largely supine board. They are getting a lot of unsolicited advice, even from those cordially disposed to private investment, such as former Australian Sports Commissioner (and ex-Yarras player) John Wylie:

Even if CV’s commercial objective is accepted, this is a strange way to run an auction process. The time-tested way to maximise outcomes and allow informed trade-offs is to keep your options open for as long as possible. Restructure your commercial offering at the end of a process if needs be to achieve a great outcome, not at the start when you have no information. Tell would-be investors, if they want CV to blow up the Stars and Renegades brands after 15 years of investment, that you’ll consider that, but only if they pay you enough to motivate you to do it.

There’s also a very good chance CV as the first seller of a BBL licence will get an inferior deal. There are no pricing benchmarks. All you’re doing is setting a pricing benchmark for other states to beat when they come to sell. The history of sequential auctions in new and opaque markets is it’s generally the sellers around a third or halfway through a process who get the best deals.

Moreover, the only thing a first buyer will know with certainty is they will be the owner of one franchise competing with seven others owned by the party setting the rules for the competition. If I was the investor facing that risk profile, I’d discount my price. Maybe they won’t and CV will look like crazy-brave heroes when a deal is done, but they’re stacking the odds against themselves. The outcome matters a lot, not just to Victorian cricket but Australian cricket as a whole. A Melbourne team is one of the most valuable franchises CA has to offer.

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Speaking of which, the next ODI World Cup will be between October 4 and November 21 at venues across South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe. Once, one imagines, when the format was in its pomp, fans would block a break from work and take the trip of a lifetime to attend. Australia is the king of the 50-over tournament, having raised the trophy six times back when the format genuinely meant something.

Australia has had more big names scratched from this and the previous series against Pakistan than the Trump administration’s Freedom 250 Concert. Absent are captain Pat Cummins and his mates Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc, and Travis Head. Acting captain Mitchell Marsh is injured, and Steve Smith retired.

Josh Inglis is the interim Australian captain.

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The cover of Ron Cardwell’s In Search of Frank Ward is at first perplexing. It shows the 1938 Australian cricket team trench coated on a ship’s foredeck, evidently being felicitated by a local mayor and/or town clerk. Newsreel cameras are focused on their captain, Bradman. Some figures – McCabe, O’Reilly, Fleetwood-Smith, Brown – are readily recognisable. Others are less familiar. Which one is Ted White? Is that Ben Barnett? I’m bound to say that my knowledge of the book’s subject was so blurry I did not at once single him out – in fact, he is on the right, a woman in a fur hat and coat behind him.

This, of course, is the effect Cardwell is seeking: Frank Ward belongs to that category of cricketer readily lost in the mass of others. The sum of my prior knowledge may be much the same as yours.

Ward, I knew, was a leg-spinner who started in Sydney, wound up in Adelaide, played a handful of Tests, was controversially chosen ahead of Clarrie Grimmett for those 1938 Ashes, then after spending the war in uniform did….well, what exactly? This, Cardwell explains, is how he encountered Ward, as an unrecognised name on an honour board at St George sixty years ago - he renewed the acquaintance in 2009 when entrusted with publishing the club’s history. So little was known of Ward that Cardwell, a researcher of unflagging industry, turned him into a project at which he has chipped away these last eleven years, and which has yielded this slim, attractive, well-illustrated and decidedly unlikely book.

Unlikely because Frank Ward, you soon get the sense, had little wish to be known, or at least that anonymity rather suited him. Cardwell has moved heaven and earth to establish a plausible chronology of his life: Ward, it turns out, also tried his luck in Queensland and Victoria before landing in South Australia, where he was reunited with his erstwhile St George clubmate Bradman, who would be among the selectors to advance him past Grimmett. After a nondescript war service in the 4th Division 2/8 Field Ambulance, Ward drifted from place to place like a twentieth century swaggie, generally unrecognised, and seldom divulging anything about his sporting prowess. For the time poor, Cardwell offers this timeline both as a two-page biographical entry and a three-page calendar of dates. The balance of the book is, per the title, principally composed of his search for these hard-won facts.

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When Ben Stokes promised to fuck some shit up, he would not have had this in mind. After a scandal so third-rate it has yet even to justify a -gate suffix, England’s captain has, with Gus Atkinson, been deemed ineligible for selection in next week’s Oval Test. Rather than anoint a successor, the England Cricket Board have appointed a locum: England’s most experienced captain, Joe Root.

It’s probably, as Athers concludes, the best of a range of bad options. England keep Stokes; England keep white ball skipper Harry Brook waiting for his red ball commission. It would have been ludicrous to promote the latter when, as Cam pointed out yesterday, the indulgence of his follies in New Zealand set the whole fiasco in Chelsea in motion by resulting in the imposition of the curfew that Stokes and Atkinson breached.

Stokes has been extended a lot of sympathy these past few days, which I’m afraid I only partly share. Who celebrates winning the first Test of a congested Test series with a full day’s drinking? The Saracens’ season was at least over; England’s was just beginning. There is enough research into the impact of alcohol on sleep, and on performance, to discourage a rum-and-coke diet. There is also enough experience in the England dressing room for some other member of the team, perhaps even Root, to have reminded Stokes that those precious team protocols applied to him as well. Perhaps Stokes is agin the curfew management has imposed; if so, the adult response would have been to argue for its repeal, not to ignore it so ostentatiously. I wonder whether the endless deference to Stokes hasn’t instilled in him a sense of impunity; I also wonder also whether he hasn’t developed a propensity for self-harm that can also manifest on the cricket field. So, yet again, England find themselves in a mire of their own making. Sympathy shouldn’t be anyone’s first response.

That said, sacking or retirement would have been a squalid end to a magnificent career, and these things do matter to the fabric of a game. What with all that experience of royal funerals, England does manage cricket farewells pretty well, and Stokes’s deserves to be best of all. Still, on the evidence of this week, the planning had better start soon. Certainly next year’s Ashes looks a long way away.

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As you get older, a hangover can take days to shake. The regret, the depression, the sick feeling in your stomach, the throbbing head. “Will I ever learn?” you ask yourself with no intention of eliciting an honest answer.

English cricket has rested its sore noggin on the pillow for another night of uneasy dreams, a sword hanging over its captain’s cot. Today is the day it deals with the consequences.

England is expected to announce its side for the second Test against New Zealand today. Captain Ben Stokes and bowler Gus Atkinson are unlikely to be part of it. The bigger question is, however, if Stokes’ name will ever be on a team list again, with or without the captain’s initial beside it. There are real concerns that the all-rounder might have had enough and it’s time for another flawed Superman.

England and its skipper find themselves in a mess that there’s no easy way out of. You can’t undo what’s been done; there’s no removing that tattoo on the red skin of its forehead after the Big Night Out, the one that says, well, what would it say? “Do as I say, not as I do”? “Oops, I did it again”? “Born Looser”? (apologies to Leunig), “There’s no room for sober men in my dressing room”? “Curfews are for losers”?

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Nine years ago, in the wake of Australia’s first defeat in a Test match against Bangladesh, an email ricocheting round the inboxes of state and national elite coaching and management achieved a certain cult status. It quickly became known as the “Café in Dhaka” despatch, as that’s where the sender, high-performance czar Pat Howard, reported composing what he acknowledged was ‘not a supportive email’.

I am sitting in a café in Dhaka hotel at the conclusion of the first Test loss ever to Bangladesh. I am personally embarrassed and take accountability and happy to accept any criticism that comes our way.

For some of you sitting here in Dhaka you are fully aware of how poor a result this is and you have a material opportunity to address in the next few days. Rightly the system is often judged on the outcomes of the national team. As you can imagine there are many questions being asked of us, and I think they are fair.

Howard launched into a culpa tua that didn’t miss anyone: ‘To the CA Team Performance—When you go home at the end of the day, does what you do actually make a difference? CA spends over $100m on players’ wages and teams, all in the effort of producing great national teams. We have failed, you have failed and I have failed and it is not good enough.’ He concluded: ‘Understand change is coming, pressure is unavoidable and if you are not up to accepting that, you are in the wrong place.’

At the time, Howard’s histrionics were rather ridiculed. The subcontinent was hard. Bangladesh were pretty good, and their spinners on tailored pitches formidable. In any case, Australia squared the series in Chittagong, and people moved on - until the whole over-the-top, whatever-it-takes, we-never-cross-the-line system blew up seven months later in Capetown. Nobody will circulate such an email after last night’s one-day international in Mirpur - our managerialism has grown too suave and self-assured. Yet it is hard to recall a game in which an Australian team has been so outperformed in all departments, including pace bowling, with Nahid Rana knots faster and lots nastier than anything at Josh Inglis’s disposal, and fielding, where the effort was ham-handed at best. It’s continued a low-key post-Ashes shambles in which Australia has won three of eleven white ball matches on the road, two of those against Oman and Ireland.

Certain pleas in mitigation can be entered - limited availabilities, the desire to try new talent and to conduct experiments. But Australian cricket has not historically excused mediocrity; indeed, it has prided itself on depth and uniformity of excellence. And remind me: why exactly is Travis Head on ‘personal leave’ after an Indian Premier League season earning $2.5 million and averaging 27 for Sunrisers Hyderabad? The attitude used to be that the IPL formed part of players’ ‘rest period’; if they should play it, on their own heads, and bodies, be it. We have moved on to resting players from the rigours of their rest. But better be nice to Trav or he’ll go off and play The Hundred, or even the Saudis!

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It’s not fun anymore.

Where England’s previous dramas brought a touch of gossip, drama, excitement and disbelief, now there is just disbelief. How, how, are England in this position again? Week one, match one of the summer. And the boys who couldn’t handle their booze, are back to not handling their booze.

For all of the mess, there is currently one fact and one unknown to take into consideration.

First, the fact. The protocol that was broken was that Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson were out past the midnight curfew.

The unknown is their respective roles - Stokes’s in particular. At the moment, nobody knows whether further punches were thrown after a Saracens rugby academy player took a swing at Atkinson, missed, and left the ECB security guard needing stitches.

If all Stokes has done is to intervene to prevent his teammate from getting beaten up, his offence is somewhat mitigated. If CCTV video turns up of Stokes throwing haymakers, his offence is magnified. Mind you, it was Stokes’ excuse after the Bristol ‘affray’ in 2017 that he was defending two men from homophobic attacks. There’s only so many times you can take on a defensive role in a pub brawl in and remain England captain. It’s probably not two.

Two trains of thought are nearing the station in the UK. One is that enough’s enough. This was England’s new curfew, and the captain has broken it. In the summer of everyone being on their best behaviour he’s broken his own rules and his position is now untenable.

The other is: really? We’re going to fire one of England’s greatest ever cricketers, or force him to retire, on the basis of being out past midnight after a Test win with the next match not for almost two weeks? Curfew or no curfew, everyone grow up.

That sentiment lasts as long as Stokes’ role in the situation remains as peacekeeper not punch thrower. And given the ECB’s insistence that neither Atkinson nor Stokes has done anything that trips into the world of illegality, it could be the one that wins out.

My view is that it is impossible to declare what punishment should be given to Stokes before knowing the extent of the crime. And yes, the fence is uncomfortable, but I don’t care about the curfew. I do care if the England captain was beating people up. So I’m not really sure what other position can be taken until the full facts are known. But I’m also genuinely intrigued by others’ opinions on this. People are angry in all directions.

On Monday, Stokes was offered the chance to resign as captain by the ECB. On Tuesday, he responded by hovering over the send button of a retirement post on social media. Stokes’ packing it all in was the clubhouse favourite for much of the day. Slowly, that prospect cooled, but it remains a possibility.

A quirk of the Ashes thrashing was that Stokes left the series with his authority, if not his reputation, enhanced. He had been the one to drop anchor with the bat, he had been the one issuing rallying calls, he had been the one fit as a fiddle and he had been the one who, when it all ended, announced that England needed to change their ways. They had become too predictable. Had that not been the case, he would already be gone.

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Pete and Gid on the latest Ben Stokes shambles - can he survive as England's captain? Also the latest privatisation upheaval, the integrity murk at Cricket Australia, the shambolic Lord's Test and Australia's white ball escapades.

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“I may not be as stong as I think, but I know many tricks and I have resolution.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Ben Stokes has been strong, wily, and resolved through his captaincy of England, but news of a potential Test ban for ill discipline is cause for concern about the man and his ability to shoulder the load much longer.

Et Al has seen suggestions that the incident, which also involved Gus Atkinson is worse than reported, and heard whispers that Stokes has been given the opportunity to tender his resignation, but this has not been confirmed. It’s the early hours in England, and those concerned are presumably attempting to get some sleep before confronting this depressing situation.

Even if these reports are exaggerated as they often are, England has a crisis on its hands, and Stokes is in a world of trouble.

Curfews are dumb, their imposition desperate. Appropriate enough, perhaps, for school children and errant teens, but they have no place in an elite adult sporting environment. They’re among the last cards a management - one that has let things slip so far that it endangers their roles - can play. A curfew is a declaration of martial law, and leaves only one option when they fail: public trial and punishment.

The only thing dumber than a curfew and the people who impose is Stokes. A cricketer and a man who I find compelling, and difficult not to sympathise with, but the England captain has made a fool of himself, his team, his coach and his head of cricket.

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The shock of the unexpected. Let’s think about this carefully. England cricket has had no drinking stories, zero players have been spotted out drunk, and no misbehaviour tales have hit the news for …. well, exactly five months. From January 8 when a story broke about Harry Brook being hit by a bouncer - man not ball - till June 8 is a good run, yes? That’s got to be a positive, doesn’t it?

Then at six pm London time (June 8) a message appears on my WhatsApp feed. Gus Atkinson and Ben Stokes have ‘broken team protocol’. It’s a cross-code affray as a rugby player was involved. I needn’t write anything, but the story demands illustration: I must rifle all yesterday’s images for something that expresses the idea of a captain at bay. It happens that I spent a good six minutes photographing Ben Stokes as he was interviewed very close to me.

I like taking portraits on a 600mm lens and although Stokes was kind of too close I took dozens of frames in the time he spent answering questions. The fixed focal length lens left no zooming option for me to adjust: I had to really concentrate in order to get his whole head in the frame and to make sure at least one eye was sharp. Fortunately, in the age of digital photography, you can take as many pictures as you like; there’s always a chance that one frame will stand out. It happened in Grenada in 2022 when Joe Root was interviewed, dozens of almost identical photos but just one frame where he looked quite down and disappointed. The difference between published and unseen.

But that was the former England captain. Stokes yesterday had just won a Test by 115 runs. There were no images that suggested he was not happy in the 234 images I’d took in those six minutes. But sometimes he looked away, constructing his next answer, and in doing so looked momentarily reflective, contemplative - as he must be feeling now. So that’s the image for the moment. I’m not claiming it’s exceptional but it works - and who knows when I’ll next point a lens at this great cricketer?

Nikon D5; 600mm lens; 1250th sec; F4.5; ISO 500

Normally when Australian cricket goes a little dark, it is because of some misadventure of the national team, usually in a foreign clime. It is not, usually, because of the activities of its administrative elite. But right now it feels like cricket is on the verge of a full-scale nervous breakdown. And if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs….then maybe you haven’t caught up with the latest in the ‘privatisation process’.

Australian cricket has still to benefit by a cent from all the jawing. It has, however, thrown away fifteen years’ hard-scrabble brand-building in its biggest market by foreshadowing the scrapping of two teams who last season drew nearly 70,000 people to the MCG. All because….remind me why we’re doing this again. Watching Cricket Victoria’s CEO Nick Cummins trying to explain his ‘merger’ is like Trump trying to explain war with Iran. It’s because fans are too ardent in supporting one team; it’s because fans aren’t ardent enough and support no team; it’s because there’s uncertainty, even though the outcome is further uncertainty; it’s because the focus groups told us, even though we only have his word on this.

Let’s just dispense with the Big V nonsense, and the distraction of the name generally. Blazers? They’re what administrators used to wear, usually with dandruff on the collar.

The bottom line is that Cricket Victoria, because they’ve proven incapable of making it work themselves, want to sell the second Melbourne licence as a greenfields site to a new investor, free of nominative, chromatic or heritage encumbrances. A lay fan would be entitled to ask: is this really so urgent? Why not just give the new owners an option over what exists? Maybe they’ll continue it; probably they won’t. But in the meantime, what’s the loss?

The only conceivable rationale is that Cricket Victoria, and their Jolimont enablers, wish to engineer a fait accompli, creating a ‘burning platform’ by setting fire to it themselves. It’s perfectly possible, by the way, that a potential buyer already lurks in the wings, perhaps Mumbai-adjacent given Cummins’s recent trip there with Cricket Australia counterpart Todd Greenberg, and there exists a deadline to act, with CA assuming that the sale will cause an orderly stampede among the other states. But is shouting ‘every man for himself’ the way to maximise value in what Greenberg has called cricket’s most momentous strategic step? Isn’t this meant to benefit everyone? Before executives start trousering bonuses and bankers success fees, have they quite thought everything through?

It was interesting last week, for example, to hear Cummins’s proposition that an Indian-owned franchise would immediately engage with the local Indian diaspora in a way that the Melbourne teams, apparently, have not. This was, on its face, quite an admission. Is Cummins not only the man who couldn’t sell sport to Melburnians but who failed to sell cricket to Indians? Yet would Indian owners make such a difference? Isn’t it players who really move the dial? Perhaps the assumption is that Indian capital would bring Indian players - but that is a largeish assumption given that none have been sighted in The Hundred, the SA20 or IL20, where Indian capital is already heavily deployed.

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The Big Bash League privatisation attempt is an ongoing train wreck. Carriages continue to derail as the belching locomotive pushes on. The sensible option was to find the emergency brake when three states rejected the idea, but chief executive Todd Greenberg barely paused. Like Casey Jones, he was hell-bent on getting the mail delivered. “The project doesn’t stop,” he said. “We are not pausing; we will look now for some alternate considerations.”

It might have been wise to reconsider and readdress the situation soberly once NSW, Queensland and South Australia left the tracks of this runaway vehicle, but this is an organisation in a hurry. There’s no time to waste, doing nothing is not an option, Greenberg is fond of saying, for a financial, nay existential, crisis is at hand.

Thus, we find ourselves at the scene of another wreck a little further down the line. Monday morning greets us with news that the players are pissed off about signing contracts with franchises that no longer exist. And then there’s the curious partner-swapping coach scenario. States need to be talked out of demanding that their fellow associations be sanctioned.

These things don’t happen in isolation.

They’re informative, and they’re recognisable parts of behaviour patterns at an organisation where the tone is set by the boss, presumably at the behest of the board. Greenberg, at the behest of the board, has been setting off alarms about financial crises, the extent of which depends on who you listen to at the time, but what was a $90m hole a few months back was claimed to be $400m by Victoria last week.

When did the size of a debt become a pissing contest, and what does the current corporate incontinence tell us?

Amidst all the noise, a second and instructive scandal has passed with scant time to examine what went wrong or address the broader problem.

Et Al can reveal Cricket Australia’s whistleblower has presented the organisation with a third set of claims about the conflict of interest scandal over the awarding of over $600,000 in contracts that led to the dismissal of one general manager in late May.

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Sometimes memory lets us down. Sometimes we omit key details of what happened. Sometimes we recall events as bigger and more momentous than they were. It can happen to anyone. It happened this week to Cricket Victoria’s CEO Nick Cummins.

To SEN’s Gerard Whateley, Cummins was trying to explain CV’s plan to nuke the Melbourne Stars and Renegades, with their long-running and successful Melbourne derby, in the name of a Big Bash League team playing under ‘the big V’. ‘We had one game, I think, with the old Big Bash where we were playing as Victoria, where we had 80,000 to the MCG,’ stated Cummins. ‘So I think it’s possible to achieve big crowds without it being a derby.’

Except that this game never happened. The best crowd Victoria achieved in the state-based Twenty20 Big Bash that pre-dated the city-based Big Bash League was barely half that, and crowds in that competition, while respectable in comparison with previous state-based white ball cricket, were paltry compared with what has been standard in the Big Bash League.

Memory, of course, is likeliest to fail us when it supports a prejudice we already harbour. So it is with Cummins. For this chaotic week he asked us to believe, seventeen years after Lalit Modi’s insight that modern cricket allegiance is chiefly urban rather than provincial, that it was time to throw the switch to Ted Whitten.

It is quite a heterodox notion until you grasp that it has been reverse engineered from the perceived necessity of selling the licence formerly known as the Melbourne Renegades as a cleanskin to a private investor. Both Renegades and Stars, Cummins insists, then had to disappear into a new entity, because of the advice from Cricket Victoria’s focus groups: ‘We were concerned that the Renegades fans in this instance then may not support the new team, but then also because they’d spent the last fifteen years hating the Stars, wouldn’t support the Stars.’ Yeah nah….

First, a note: while I understand it is flippancy, ‘hate’ is not a word to be lightly bandied about in the context of cricket, least of all in Australia. Clubs may hate each other in the NRL, and begrudge each other in the AFL, but cricket is not, and has never been, remotely similar. All Cummins means is that, after fifteen years, fans partial to one club may not have migrated readily to the other - and you hardly need a focus group to tell you that. I dare say that respondents’ first preference was not to have their clubs disappear at all, but one must assume that option was not on offer…..

Running the tatty old Bushrangers pennant up the flagpole because it ‘holds a lot of emotion and heritage for a lot of fans’, meanwhile, is an exercise in distraction. Firstly, it is nonsense: I mean, do you remember anybody complaining when the Bushrangers name was retired eight years ago? Secondly, it makes limited sense even in Cummins’ own terms. He tells Whateley that focus group respondents indicated they would ‘support a team that played under a sort of Victorian banner’ in one breath, then that ‘it will still be called Melbourne as a city-based team.’ The “Melbourne Bushrangers”? I mean, I know that sports names needn’t make sense, but I don’t remember Captain Thunderbolt claiming Captain Cook’s Cottage, Ned Kelly robbing Melbourne Town Hall. Maybe Cummins does. But, as we know, you need to discount his memory by about fifty per cent…..

Cummins next volunteers some woke gesturing about Bushrangers being ‘fairly gender-specific’ and maybe not entirely suitable to the women’s team: ’So we are mindful of that. We’re just working through that at the moment. We’ve got a few boxes we need to tick with Cricket Australia.’ You’re meant to be impressed with this deep thought and detailed analysis, and forget that the new team’s name is inconsequential compared to the concept. You might as well call it the Melbourne Focus Groups. After all, they seem pretty bloody powerful - apparently you can’t make a move without them.

I could go on, but I risk repeating myself, and you’re getting the picture. The more you contemplate the value proposition of axing two established brand names in a crowded market in the hope someone down the track will pay over the odds for the chance to put their logo on an empty box, the less sense it makes - indeed, it’s almost hard to find the right descriptive scale. When someone rolls out a stupid idea posing as a subtle one, you usually invoke Baldrick. When someone proposes that eliminating value will somehow create it, you’re reminded of the major at Bến Tre who claimed it was ‘necessary to destroy the town to save it.’ But because these allusions are stale, maybe let’s combine them: Cricket Victoria’s plan is an episode of Blackadder set during the Vietnam war.

So here we are, thanks to Cricket Australia’s desperation to drive privatisation, now mutated into the so-called ‘self-determination’ model aimed at forcing change by exploiting short-term local financial exigency. ‘Burning platform’? It’s starting to savour of arson….

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A few years back, somebody who’d had a brutal experience after going into business with a close friend said one of the takeaways was that at the first smell of significant money, people change. Cyndi Lauper had something similar to say.

A few months back, I’d remarked to somebody in corporate affairs at Cricket Australia that I’d never known Australian cricket to be so free of controversy for so long.

And then came talk of privatising the BBL. Talk of money in them there hills.

Suddenly, there’s a civil war, and as we’ve learned from bitter experience, there’s nothing less civil than internecine conflict. The rolling chaos that started when three states withdrew from the fumbled privatisation push went to another level this week when Cricket Victoria blindsided everybody and announced to its staff that it was, well, what was it again? Folding the Renegades and the Stars, selling the greenfield site that housed the Renegades for the past 15 years, tearing down the house that was the Stars and building something else, selling 100% of something that used to be the Renegades, and fattening what was the Stars ahead of throwing them open for inspection to anybody who wants to buy 49% — something like that.

The details are unclear, and Cricket Victoria chief executive Nick Cummins says the miscreant who leaked what he told staff and stuffed up all their plans was, to some degree, caused the confusion. Forced by “the level of misreporting currently circulating”, Cummins circulated a note to his fellow state chief executives on Wednesday evening explaining what he would have told them, had word not got out after he’d told staff and before they’d told the players.

If you haven’t read it already, here is Victoria’s explanation to his peers of the events that sent Australian cricket into a tailspin:

Good evening all,

It has been a busy day, and firstly, apologies for any additional work this may have created for you. That was certainly not my intention.

Given the level of misreporting currently circulating, I thought it was important to provide some direct context on CV’s decision yesterday and the reasons behind it.

As you know, CV has held the position since around February that we would sell 100% of the Renegades as part of any BBL sale process. We have waited patiently while other states worth through their positions over the ensuing months, and as we are all aware, some matters remain unresolved.

I have been very open in this forum about the impact that uncertainty has had on our organisation, including on our staff, players and sponsors. As we have moved further into 2026, that impact became more pronounced, with staff leaving and sponsors seeking assurances we have not been able to provide.

For CV, timing has become a significant pressure. CNSW’s decision not to sell at this time has enabled them to return to business as usual. For other states, continuing in your current structures while contemplating a 49% sale is less disruptive, or at least less disruptive than that position CV has been managing.

It is also clear that there is still some distance to run in the broader discussions, including the self-determination model and the negotiations with the ACA. Both may take time.

To be clear, the decision we made yesterday was not intended to expedite the BBL sale process or place any pressure on any other state. It was about relieving CV of the time pressure we are currently under and allowing us to move forward with more clarity.

By restructuring our organisation, the CV BBL team is now more aligned with the Heat, Strikers, Hurricanes and Scorchers business models. This enables us to pursue a 49% sale in due course, without the same immediate operational pressure. Our team can focus on preparing for next season’s Big Bash, including memberships, sponsorships, community engagement, event presentation and ticketing.

By moving the other team out of CV, we now have a structure that can operate effectively without being dependent on the timing of the sale. That sale could happen before, during or after the season. The team now sits outside CV operations and is able to chart its own course. If the sale has not completed before the WBBL, the team will play as the Renegades. If it has completed, it can play under a new brand should the eventual owners wish that to occur.

In short, we can now operate as two separate businesses, each focussed on the coming season, each not interdependent on the other.

This means the impact of the speed of any discussion around on CV is significantly reduced.

I recognise it would have been preferable to share this with you before it reached the media. We needed to prioritise our people first, and unfortunately the opportunity to speak to you all beforehand was taken away by someone who though the media should be the next person to find out after them.

I hope this provides some useful context. Tomorrow, I will try to speak with those of you I did not catch today. In the meantime, please call me anytime if you would like to understand our position further. You have all known me long enough to know it will be open and honest. I think it is important that we continue to speak directly with one another, rather than be at the mercy of misinformed intermediaries.

Please also feel free to share this with any interested board members.

Regards,

All of this on the day NSW, determined to find a middle path that didn’t involve flogging franchises or sacking staff, announced it had shown its faith in the existing BBL by hiring Andrew Freddie Flintoff as Thunder coach.

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To moan, or not to moan. That is the question.

There’s an overwhelming desire to roll your eyes at the latest reincarnation of Bazball. And that’s from here looking out, let alone if you’re overseas and looking in.

In an act of due diligence, I did a self-audit of my own Cricket Et Al pieces ahead of the Ashes to see how the messaging then, of a smarter, wiser England team who had learnt their lessons after throwing away a series win against India, compared to now. When following their thrashing against Australia, they have promised once again, to be a smarter, wiser England team, who have learnt their lessons.

My standpoint has ever been thus. I like Brendon McCullum. I’ve enjoyed his time as coach and found the adventure, as nonsensical as it has been, fun. But after four years the experiment didn’t work. And so, I don’t believe he should be coach now.

Regardless of what happens from this point onwards, the Bazball blueprint failed. And even a home victory against Australia next summer will not mean it has all been worth it. You can’t, in all seriousness, win one out of five series against Australia and India and declare it mission accomplished all because it’s the last of the ones you’re in charge of. There are groundsmen who have moved fewer goalposts in their time.

That’s the moaning bit done. Because we’re here now. And while the series against New Zealand will take place in the shadow of the football World Cup, it’ll be a good one.

Their seam attack is world-class, and their batting line-up features a great of the previous generation in Kane Williamson and a potential great of the next in Rachin Ravindra. England can play well here and lose. A fact that creates a banana skin of England’s own making in only respecting nations who begin with an I or an A.

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Today marks the centenary of the death of Frederick Spofforth, the original Australian cricket hero. Charles Bannerman scored the inaugural Test century, and Tom Kendall came by the first match-winning bag, but these achievements were isolated. In the decade following the first Test match, Spofforth was the world’s most menacing bowler, taking 733 first-class wickets at 14.4. By routing Marylebone at Lord’s in 1878 and England at the Oval four years later, Spofforth also created a persona, vulpine and mephistophelean, almost as compelling as his foremost English rival, Dr WG Grace. It helped that in a game where the action occurs so far from spectators, his figure was unmistakable, almost a counterpoint to Grace’s bearded bulk: tall, lanky, beaky, moustachioed. On that original tour, said his teammate Tom Horan, people flocked merely for a glimpse of him.

At Wayside stations in distant counties little country lads – and old ones too – would flatten their noses against carriage windows, and ask ‘which be demon’? In the narrow tortuous street of a Yorkshire village, hatless women in ‘wooden shoon’ would rush to see the ‘demon’ and his comrades. At Liverpool an old man came 40 miles to see the ‘demon’ bowl. It happened that Spofforth was not bowling when the old man came and the latter went at once to Conway and said, ‘Put on demon; I have come 40 miles to see him bowl.’

Rev RL Hodgson, ‘Country Vicar’ of The Cricketer, likened ‘The Demon’ to the Spirit of Evil in Faust: ‘A long face, somewhat sardonic; piercing eyes; a hooked nose; and his hair, parted in the middle, giving the impression of horns. He was also immensely tall, lean, sinewy and loose limbed — with long thin arms; he would have looked the part of the stage-demon.’ Et Al subscriber Tim Rogers would play at least the young Spoff in the biopic.

On his death in 1926, Spofforth left an estate of $164,000 - equivalent, by the calculations of historian Ric Sissons, to $52 million. These, of course, were largely Spofforth’s post-cricket earnings, after he emigrated to England and prospered in the tea business. But one suspects Spofforth approached investment with the same minute intent as cricket. He was not, in fact, among the more militant personalities in his restless age, standing out of the players’ 1885 strike. Perhaps Spofforth was always confident of his being able to look after himself - did not feel an urgency to cash his cricket in while the going was good. Certainly, Australia has fielded few cricketers more confident of their skills, and their capacity to reproduce them under pressure. ‘This thing can be done’ is the foundational Australian cricket quotation, and remains a kind of national mission statement. Every time Como Park hosts a big game, I have a Yarras teammate who loves to trot it out on the club WhatsApp.

Pleasingly, the anniversary has not passed unnoticed, with a seminar convening this Saturday on The Life and Times of Frederick Robert Spofforth, admirably convened by Ronald Cardwell. The papers, including excellent contributions from the aforementioned Ric Sissons, Spofforth’s biographer Richard Cashman, and new Substack recruit Pat Rodgers, are to be published.

It’s good meaty stuff. James Cattlin looks at Spofforth’s schooldays and Rob Franks at his youth in New Zealand, while Geoff Lawson, always worth reading, offers a lively appreciation of his antecedent as a strike bowler, grappling with that perennial question - what manner of bowler was he?

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There are probably more extinct T20 franchise teams than extant ones. Even in the biggest and richest cricket competition in the world, the Indian Premier League, a third of the clubs founded have ceased to exist. Somewhere, I dare say, sit shipping containers full of replica gear for the likes of Kochi Tuskers Kerala and Pune Warriors, awaiting phantom fans. What am I bid for this limited edition framed print of the IPL-winning 2009 Deccan Chargers, who folded three years later?

Australia, so far, has been a stranger to this kind of attrition. It has built enduring cricket properties - not just teams but competitions and fixtures. Our Sheffield Shield has run since 1892. Our Boxing Day Test is virtually scored on stone tablets. And our T20 competition has accommodated one significant change since 2005 - the 2011 shift from state-based to city-based clubs, which added second teams in the biggest population centres. That is until yesterday when, with a stroke of the pen, the Melbourne clubs were forced to amalgamate, and a new eighth Big Bash League club foreshadowed, the TBA Titans. Fifteen years’ investment, sporting, financial and emotional, gone just like that….

Imagine, for a moment, you are teen follower of the Melbourne Stars. They were your entre to the game. You have followed them faithfully all your life, dreamed of success, trusted in Maxy. Perhaps, when the Melbourne Mace was christened, you bought into the idea and ‘chose a side.’

More than just a trophy, the Melbourne Mace is designed to elevate the city’s sporting divide, reinforcing the league-backed Choose Your Side call to action for fence-sitting Melburnians to get behind green or red.

In a city known for its tribal sporting culture, neutrality is no longer an option with each Melbourne Derby across the Weber WBBL and KFC BBL now carrying added significance.

Click on the option now and this is what comes up:

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