The end of the season

Cricket is a cruel game, and then you get too old to play it. So why do old cricketers keep going, despite it all? Jon Hotten explains... The end of the season is almost here, with its rain and with its retirements, with its shadows that fall longways across the ground ... Read More...

Chess, Cricket, and Man versus the Machines

Machines are already better than humans at chess, and now computers are increasingly important in sports like cricket and baseball. Author Jon Hotten ponders the implications... Writing about the 1986 world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, Martin Amis said of chess: '[They are playing] the foremost game of ... Read More...

In Defence of Fat Sportsmen

Mark Cosgrove (pictured above) has the talent to be a great Australian cricketer, but he can't get in the side because he refuses to lose weight. But are we missing the upsides of being a fat sportsman, asks Jon Hotten... One of the marks of cricket's ineffable genius is its scale. ... Read More...

The art of not fielding, while fielding

Jon Hotten reveals cricket's dirty little secret: nobody likes fielding... In a game at the start of the season, we fielded for 47 overs in the bone-deep cold. The distant pavilion glowed like a cottage in the paintings of that old fraud Thomas Kinkade. The grass on the outfield was thick ... Read More...

Viv Richards: A Meeting with the King

Jon Hotten meets his cricketing hero and finds himself saying exactly the one thing he had been determined not to say... When he went to the ring, he was often smiling. He knew that when the heavyweight champion of the world defended his title, it was a solemn moment, but he ... Read More...

On being hit in the face by a cricket ball

Jon Hotten on the small but long-lasting humiliations of playing sport... It's funny how a small and insignificant incident in a game can send you off into a reverie, a time-trip back into the long-lost, half-forgotten past to a moment when something similar happened, a distant event that somehow triggers another ... Read More...