ENGLAND HAVE A REPRIEVE.

Oh my god ! After looking as though they were coasting to victory, the West Indies unaccountably imploded and England gained a wholly unexpected reprieve in the cricket World Cup. It now looks as though they'll make it through to the knock-out stages and, heaven help us, could even win the tournament.

England winning would, of course, be a travesty but stranger things have happened. England winning would, in fact, be the worst thing that could possibly happen as it would encourage the belief that this team is actually any good. The truth is that they are a bunch of overpaid, cossetted prima donnas, in exactly the same mould as our footballers; the pay is obviously less but the attitudes are the same. Years ago, cricketers thought nothing of playing a full English season, including Test Matches, and then embarking on a 4 month overseas tour in which they'd play far more 'real' cricket than today's sluggards manage. Today's lot complain of being tired, fatigued, stressed and any other adjectives they can conjure up after playing a handful of games. Instead of enduring weeks of sea voyages, they fly around the world in hours; some even manage to either take their families with them on tour or return home mid-tour for a 'break'. What a laugh; the easier their lives become, the more they whinge about how stressed they are. Batsmen are unlucky if they have more than 30 innings in a year and bowlers if they have to produce more than 300 or 400 overs; in byegone times, Freddie Trueman sent down 800-1000 overs in the summer and another 300-400 in the winter. Where is our present day Freddie Trueman ?

The talk is always of our players having to play too much; it makes them stale or tires them out. What tripe. Every sportsman knows that with games like cricket, in which familiarity with the repetitive nature of the task is vital,  playing regularly is all. The real problem is not that they play too much but that they play too little. They need to gain consistency and confidence from playing more 'real cricket', not the one-day knockabout stuff in which the bowlers are often little more than a side show for the batsmen, who are expected to hit every ball for 4 or 6. Today's players may be as good as those of past generations, but I doubt it. They play in a world in which excitement and immediacy are all that matters and real skill and talent has been sidelined; there will never be another Freddie Trueman or Trevor Bailey, no more Dennis Comptons, Ted Dexters, or, even, Geoff Boycotts. The best players rarely appear for their counties, which devalues that part of the game, and they are too often injured or 'tired' to play for their country. What a bloody joke.