“The Olympic stadium should become our Twenty20 venue with £10 tickets … but that’s not going to happen.”

So said Bob Willis to TWC at the end of a textbook rant about Cardiff hosting the first Ashes Test and what he called “the regionalisation of Test cricket”. His Olympic comments sadly fell to the cutting room floor because of their tenuous relevance to the Ashes.

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Many observers feel that England’s bowlers are in for a long, hard, staring-at-the-boundary winter. South Africa’s batting line-up is fearsome: even Ashwell Prince, who averages 47 with 11 Test hundreds, struggles to get in the current side.

They also have two players who have turned enormous hype as teenagers into consistent, world-class performances: Hashim Amla, 26, and AB de Villiers, 25. I spoke to both of them a couple of days ago for TWC’s next issue and, while they share in common the ability to score lots of runs, the two seem to be vastly different personalities. Read the rest of this entry »

The McGrath Foundation are releasing their annual calendar of Australian cricket hunks. Not to be outdone, the ECB have unveiled plans for their own series of pin-ups…

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One of the fun things about a tournament such as the Champions League that is set over a number of venues, is all the people involved end up travelling together, giving people like me a chance to rub shoulders with people like them (the players).

So, on the early flight from Delhi to Hyderabad, I had the whole New South Wales squad sat behind me. Not desperately interesting in itself, but when I did the reverse trip earlier in the week, I travelled alongside the Somerset players – and the differences were marked.

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