With his lazy, effortless elegance, few would dispute that David Gower was the most stylish batsman English cricket has produced. But does he count as a great?... In a recent post on my blog The Old Batsman, I argued that the last indisputably great batsmen that England had managed to produce ... Read More...
Sport
Jon Hotten on memory, dreams and cricket pitches... It's hard to write about a feeling as elusive as this one, yet it's that elusiveness that makes it both rare and worthwhile. It happened the other day, for the first time in a couple of years. I was driving through a town ... Read More...
Amongst the most shocking moments of England's shocking Ashes series this winter was the sudden mid-tour retirement of Graeme Swann, one of the country's greatest ever spin bowlers. Here, Jon Hotten examines the mysteries of the spinner's art, and what Swanny leaves behind... Decades ago on a Saturday afternoon in winter ... Read More...
“Happy New Year!” we say to one another, but do we say it in optimistic expectation or in fearful hopes: beseeching Fate that 2014 is not the year when one’s ordained calamity strikes? A bit of both, but increasingly the latter as we accumulate more new years, I suppose. We ... Read More...
Our cricket correspondent Jon Hotten reveals why magazines - and readers - are obsessed with lists... Back in the mad, bad old days when I worked on magazines for a company that seemed invincible but no longer exists, I had a theory, probably rubbish, that most mags had a maximum of ... Read More...
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...
Football fan violence was far from an invention of the 1980s... It’s one of the most extraordinary and tantalizing facts of our time. Take out all the estimated-to-be-drug-related activity out of the crime figures, and what you are left with are the gentle, pacific, Marpleian levels of fair-cop crime enjoyed in ... Read More...
An advantage the Annual Golfer has over the more frequent player is that for 364 days of the year he can completely empty his mind of any thoughts about golf. Not only is this excellent preparation for the annual round itself (it has been proven that practising golf doesn’t make ... Read More...
With Wimbledon getting underway once more, Nige takes a look back at one of tennis's greatest stars... The glamorous, exuberant French tennis player Suzanne Lenglen died in 1938, aged just 39. She died of pernicious anaemia, having been diagnosed with leukaemia, and lost her sight shortly before her death - the ... 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...
