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...
Jon Hotten discovers that Australian cricket legend Jeff Thomson - one of the most dangerous fast bowlers of all time - still knows the right way to tell a story... It was a few hours after David Warner had taken a swing at Joe Root in a Birmingham bar, and Jeff ... Read More...
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...
Richard Briers died on Monday. By way of a tribute, here is a repeat of Jon Hotten's post about an episode of Ever Decreasing Circles and its "quiet, unacknowledged and deep-running despair", which features, naturally enough, a game of cricket... You might remember Ever Decreasing Circles, a British - make that ... Read More...
Jonathan Rendall was a gambler and boozer who died last month in grim circumstances. He was also one of the finest writers of his generation, says Jon Hotten... Jonathan Rendall has died at the age of 48, and as befits much of his life as a writer, the news of his passing ... Read More...
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...
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...
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...
Jon Hotten is struck by an old English sitcom's "quiet, unacknowledged and deep-running despair", which features, naturally enough, a game of cricket... You might remember Ever Decreasing Circles, a British - make that English, because it could only be English - sitcom of the early 1980s, the fading final years of ... Read More...
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...