Another Moral Victory 2

GH groans (resending with apologies)

It’s hard to keep up with the England cricket team’s shifts of self-definition. For a while, of course, it was all about reconnecting with childhood heedless of victory or defeat. They shouldn’t be expected to understand the World Test Championship; they shouldn’t need to bowl their overs in a timely fashion; the whole world should change because they had ‘reinvented’ Test cricket; all the time arrogating to themselves the right to arbitrate on the spirit of cricket. When the team’s boss admitted that some of their feigned nonchalance made him ‘shudder’, he promised a different messaging, and now we have it: the players have decided they’re ‘too nice’, so they’re going to be meaner.

Too nice?

Just shows that you never really know how you’re coming across, eh? Of all the ideas entertained about Ben Stokes’s team, that they’re ‘too nice’ wouldn’t have been in anyone’s top hundred. Near the top, however, would be too massively self-involved, which this new pivot reinforces. A pity, really. In Stokes and Joe Root, they have two of cricket’s most admirable men. Perhaps some of you saw the recent Sky special on Harry Brook at his old cricket club in Yorkshire - it was brilliant, heart-warming stuff. Which made it doubly unedifying to watch him debase the landmark of Washington Sundar’s maiden Test century a few days ago, and join the general chorus of English whining about India batting on for a whole fifteen minutes.