I suspect the naivety had been replaced by tutored bitterness and disgust by the time he wrote Animal Farm

Agree on the ODIs and I do like Test Cricket, but I do like the 20-20s for other reasons.

Just as there is space to listen both to Stan Getz playing the sax and AC/DC banging out their oeuvre, or both the book and the movie there’s room to like test and 2020 cricket. You just have to remember that the similarities are mere allusion and these are different kinds of thing, rather than judging one by the criteria of the other.

I suspect that 20-20 as a format is going to compete a lot better with other kids sports on Staurday mornings than the variuous formats of junior cricket we have now.

I don’t take my 16-year-old to cricket — he does baseball because the format ensures he gets a fair go and the whole thing is basically over in 2 hours.

Broadly, Pakistani fans do not care about the results of Test Matches, only ODIs; Indian fans have largely moved this way already and the sea-change has begun in England with perhaps only The Ashes still exciting the tastes of the general public there.

Test Cricket will largely revert to Australia-England-South Africa-New Zealand.

The rest are largely not interested in it.

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs.

As to Test Cricket, I can’t see it surviving much longer. The importance of the pitch and the cross-usage of grounds by other sports and of course the demands of other formats will kill it. The format that may really be under pressure though is L50 since it is caught between two stoools. It’s not test cricket and it’s too formulaic and boring and subject to the vagaries of D/L to be marketable to those who like seeing something happen in a hurry.

One of the most perceptive (and softly powerful) books of the 20th century, and really only a children’s animal story after all. That’s books for you!!

As to sledging, it sucks. If the Aussies reckon sledging (sexual references, adult themes, verbal violence) is clever, they deserve the disapproval of cricket followers: Pommie or from wherever. Decency takes many forms. So does indecency.

There isn’t of course, anything wrong with “seeking decency”, and if we could all agree what decency entailed and it happened to entail robust attachment to concepts like “inclusive governance” and “appropriate separation between the state and civil society on the basis of a well-conceived notions of harm to legitiamte individual interests” and “empowerment of the producer class across national jurisdictional boundaries” and “approximately equal life chances for all” then by all means sign me up for “decency”. If it doesn’t, it’s a bit wolly at best and likely to be of most use to misanthropic interest, regardless of who first utters it.

It was my point that this term underlined Orwell’s naivety and thus the experiential arc from his arrival in Spain to his later recruitment by anti-communists.

Fran