This would be quite a throwback, all the more remarkable because centrally-contracted England players are rarely made available for their county. Yorkshire members may be rightly proud of Joe Root and Jonny Bairstow, but they don’t often see them bat for the county. For a long time, it’s been obvious that to win the championship you need one or two overseas stars. Would Essex have won titles without their South African off-spinner Simon Harmer?

There were always a few overseas players in the county game, but till the late 1960s, they had to qualify by residency. So in the 1920s the great Australian fast-bowler Ted MacDonald played for Lancashire, but only after a couple of seasons in the Lancashire League. And, in the 1960s, Australian wrist-spinners Bruce Dooland and George Tribe, seeing no Test future back home, took hundreds of wickets every summer for Notts and Northants, respectively.

Lord’s and the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) being what they were then, amateurs were not required to qualify by residence, never indeed had been. So, for example, a succession of Indian Princes —Ranji and his nephew Duleep, then the Nawab of Pataudi, father and then son, shone for Sussex. The county was also captained for a couple of years before the Second World War by Alan Melville, a South African who would return to England as his country’s captain in 1947.

Restrictions were lifted in the late Sixties, 1968, I think. Most counties welcomed the change, except Yorkshire who insisted for another 20 years that to play for the White Rose you must have been born in the county. But other counties realised that importing ready-made Test stars strengthened the team and made the game more attractive for members and the paying public.

Overseas players were delighted; England was the only country with a fully professional game and the only place where they could earn what they merited. Straightaway came the great West Indians: Gary Sobers to Notts; Rohan Kanhai and Lance Gibbs to Warwickshire; Gordon Greenidge to Hampshire.

The other immediate beneficiaries of the relaxation were South Africans, deprived of Test cricket as opposition to Apartheid condemned the Republic to sporting isolation. Barry Richards joined Greenidge at Hampshire: has any county ever boasted a finer opening pair? Perhaps not even Surrey in the days of Hobbs and Sandham, or Yorkshire with Sutcliffe and Holmes. Mike Procter, fast-bowling, hard-hitting, all-rounder, whose Test career was confined to a single series against Australia, did such splendid work for Gloucestershire that the county became known as Proctershire. Clive Rice, another South African deprived of Test cricket, captained Nottinghamshire with great success in harness with the outstanding New Zealand fast-medium bowler Richard Hadlee. All the great West Indian fast bowlers played full seasons of County cricket: Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Malcolm Marshall, Curtley Ambrose, Courtenay Walsh, as did others Wayne Daniel and the terrifying Sylvester Clarke, who for one reason or another played little Test cricket. Then came the Pakistanis; Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis and Shoaib Aktar. Any opening batsman had to be brave, skilful and lucky to make runs in county cricket in the last three decades of the last century.

Then, as more international cricket, and especially more white-ball cricket, came to be played, the season-long commitment of overseas players became rare. There were exceptions, of course. Shane Warne captained Hampshire for a couple of seasons at the end of his career, and the South African Kyle Abbott, finding himself unwanted at home, has played full seasons successfully for the same county. But it has become more common for overseas players to be signed on very short contracts, with them available for only a handful of games before they are off to play in some tournament somewhere. These brief mercenary hirings are unsatisfactory, even when both county and player may benefit. One example of this is the South African-turned-Australian Marnus Labuschagne, with his couple of short spells with Glamorgan.

I doubt if the proposal to restrict the Championship to England-qualified players will be carried, though it does suggest a deal of dissatisfaction with things as they are now. It would be a pity to exclude overseas players. Young English ones surely learn from playing alongside or against imported stars, even if there is the danger that a club may come to rely too much on them. At the same time,  this drop-in-for-a-couple-of-matches practice, which has become very common, seems unsatisfactory. I doubt if it’s good for county club finances too.

Perhaps any overseas player should be on a minimum three-month contract to be eligible to play in the County Championship. That would seem fair and reasonable.

There are fewer draws in Test cricket now than there used to be in the days when more overs were bowled in a day’s play than now. This change is usually attributed to more aggressive batting, but there are other reasons which may be classed as improved technology. Floodlights on Test match grounds allow play to continue long after the game would previously have been stopped for bad light. Then improved covering and drainage means that pitches, and even much of the outfield, are better protected than used to be the case. There are fewer days now when umpires go out to inspect conditions after rain and return to the pavilion in brilliant sunshine shaking their heads and saying there will be another inspection of the wet outfield in an hour’s time.

The use of technology to help decision-making goes back a long way in some sports. In horse racing, a camera was first used to record a photo finish in a race in New Jersey in 1881. This was soon in general use, though the picture was often blurred and it wasn’t till the invention of the “strip camera” in the 1930s that the photographs were almost fully reliable.

Television has of course hugely changed our experience of watching sport, though TV technology took some time to affect decision-making. It was the use of immediately available action replays which provoked a demand for using TV evidence, especially when a slow-motion replay called a referee or umpire’s decision into question. There was a good deal of resistance to this, however, as in almost all sports the code of law declares that the referee or umpire is the sole judge of fact; his decision is therefore final and must not be questioned. Unfortunately, TV replays showed that such decisions were quite often wrong. Worse still, the incident in question might be repeatedly shown on the screen and the authority of the referee or umpire consequently challenged. This was all the more unfortunate when giant screens were installed in the stadium, and the crowd could see that the official had blundered. Even so, football, being a very conservative sport, resisted even the use of fairly simple “goal-line technology” and it is only in the last few years that the FA has reluctantly permitted the use of VAR which, among other things enables the referee to check if a player is offside. Many football fans still dislike VAR, believing (rightly) that it destroys the spontaneity of the game.

The use of technology generally makes for better, and therefore fairer, decisions. Nevertheless, there is a downside. Repeated recourse to a Television Match Official makes for frequent, sometimes long, breaks in the action. It is not unusual for professional rugby matches to last for almost two hours. Even allowing for a 15-minute half-time break, this means that play is interrupted for some twenty minutes over the course of a game. Players stand about while pictures of what has caused the interruption are shown and debated. This is not only tedious and tiresome; it has a wider consequence. The game doesn’t open up in the later stages as it used to. This is partly because the number of replacements permitted brings fresh legs onto the field. But it is also because frequent recourse to the TMO and the discussions this entails gives players periods of rest and recuperation, and opportunities to recharge batteries.

Much of the use of technology in sport is welcome and uncontroversial. In tennis, for instance, Hawkeye — the instant replay — merely establishes whether a ball was in and out. The picture is concerned with a matter of fact; there is no opinion or judgement called for from the umpire. In short, it’s an aid to the work of line judges.

This is only partly the case in cricket. The DRS — Decision Review System — comes into play only when either the batsman or the fielding captain calls for a review of the umpire’s decision. But this is not a simple right-or-wrong matter. The camera deals partly in fact: where did the ball pitch? Where — in the case of an lbw — did it strike the batsman? Did it touch the bat? These are all questions of fact that the TV replay and other refinements may fairly determine. But in the use of DRS to decide lbw, there is also a predictive element: technology is employed to decide what happened next, or, rather, what would have happened if the ball hadn’t struck the batsman’s pad. This is not — and perhaps can never be — always conclusive and this is recognised by what is known as an “umpire’s call”. If a ball is just nicking the stumps and whichever way the umpire has decided — out or not out — before his judgement was appealed, will stand. In one way this is satisfactory; it acknowledges the authority of the on-field umpire. In another, it may be irritating because it doesn’t settle disputes. But perhaps this is as it should be. In cricket, football and rugby there are, and will surely always be, uncertainties.

In general, the use of technology has made for better and fairer decisions. There is far less brutal foul play in rugby and football than there used to be, and less dangerous, if unmalicious, play too. No doubt there will be more developments, some more useful than others. Most will be welcomed, if sometimes grudgingly.

Ball-games can never be an exact science. Mistakes are part of them, even mistakes made by referees, umpires and officials in front of a TV. One question needs to be raised: How far, in a game of movement like rugby, should a TMO track back to point up some minor error like a forward pass several phases before a try seemed to have been scored?

For even the greatest there is one last walk back to the pavilion or dressing-room. Some seem to take that walk calmly, as if it was just an ordinary evening stroll. Others — Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka, for instance — rage, rage against the dying of the light. The only men outside the Great Triumvirate to have won more than one Slam singles title in the last 20 years, neither is likely to challenge again at one of the Slams. Both have had many seasons interrupted by injuries and operations. Both are now in the second half of their fourth decade. This week they met again in Cincinnati: a three-set, three hours long encounter eventually won by Murray. Hard slogging, only for him to lose in the next round to his latest successor as the number one British player.

Someday or evening soon at New York’s Flushing Meadow, tennis will say “Good Night and Farewell”, to the greatest woman star of the century. For at least the middle dozen of the last 20 years, Serena Williams dominated the Women’s game as no other player, not even the great Martina Navratilova, has done in the professional era.

Williams is having a last crack at the American title, but the portents aren’t good. In Cincinnati this week she lost in straight sets to the precocious Emma Raducanu, 4-6 0-6. Serena Williams was winning slams before Raducanu was even born. The young girl won’t have felt sorry for Williams — that would have been patronising — but I guess her pleasure in victory may have left her also feeling a little guilty. When, more than a hundred years ago, the young leg-spinner Arthur Mailey bowled his boyhood hero Victor Trumper, he said it felt as if he had shot a dove.

Serena Williams will, I hope, have a happier last stand, a glorious sunset exit in New York, gorgeous as Turner’s “Fighting Temeraire”. Meanwhile, she has at least held out the baton. Who can seize it? Perhaps Raducanu herself who is, of course, the reigning American champion, having won the title in last year’s Covid-strange tournament.

Not all 40-year-olds are ready to call “time” on their careers. Even as I write, Jimmy Anderson is opening the bowling for England on the second day of the Lord’s Test. Remarkably, one of the South African openers, Sarel Erwee, playing in his fifth Test, has made less than half the number of Test match runs than Anderson has taken Test wickets. Something similar must of course have happened quite often before when an inexperienced batsman faced a veteran bowler. Nevertheless…

A cricketer even older than Anderson is still reluctant to leave the first-class game. This is Darren Stevens, now aged forty-fix. Stevens is much less famous than Anderson and has none of Serena Williams’ global celebrity, but for those of us who maintain a lifelong love affair with County Cricket, Stevens is one of the top heroes of our time.

The Test selectors have never troubled Stevens, but he has played for a quarter of a century first for Leicestershire, then for Kent. He was a better player at 30 than at 20, which is, of course, quite usual, but, remarkably he was better at 40 than at 30. Middle-order batsman, with a flair for hitting sixes, well before six-hutting became commonplace in the T20 game, and a purveyor of deceptively simple-looking medium pace, he has the appearance of a Saturday-afternoon club cricketer and the ability to make scoring runs and taking wickets look as simple as ordering a beer at the bar.

The Kent committee, to their shame and the dismay of thousands, have concluded it’s chucking-out time for Stevens. Last orders have been called and downed. The man himself thinks otherwise, sure there is life in the old dog yet. Some other County Committee will, one trusts, agree with him and offer terms. Lots of counties have a nursery of bright young things, some of them scarce wet behind the ears, yet aware that they have much to learn about the game.

Sports stars usually know when the light has faded and it is time to depart. Sometimes we are pleased to see them go because it is distressing to struggle to do well what they used to do sublimely. And yet there is a nobility in the determination to deft the cruelty of time and keep on going. And of course, the Sporting Gods are capricious beasts and you never lose the hope of a wonderful later flowering. Most true sports fans are sentimentalists and so we warm to those who seek to deny or defy the ravages of time.

Not always, however. Nobody but a brute can be comfortable watching a once-great champion having yet another one fight too many. Even his opponent may feel guilty. When Terry Downes beat the greatest of all pound-for-pound boxers, Sugar Ray Robinson, he rejected congratulations and said, sadly but finely, “I didn’t beat Sugar Ray. I beat his ghost.”

Comparisons are interesting, though they prove nothing. Anderson now plays little but Test match cricket, only a handful of matches for Lancashire early in the season. Trueman and Statham would come straight from a three-day County match to a Test, and then straight from a Test to a county game. They regularly took, and were expected to take, a hundred wickets in an English summer. Statham did so thirteen times, Trueman twelve. In their first-class career, each took more than 2,300 wickets. Anderson has taken 1,065, but then, in his long career, he has played only 105 first-class matches other than Tests. Trueman and Statham each ended their Test career in their mid-thirties, though they continued to play county cricket for Yorkshire and Lancashire respectively for another three or four seasons.

Trueman was the first bowler of any kind to take 300 Test wickets. Statham took 252. Trueman’s record was surpassed by Bob Willis, the greatest England fast bowler between Trueman/Statham and Anderson. His match-winning 8 for 30 against Australia at Headingley in 1981 was arguably the most remarkable performance by any English fast bowler. Unlike Trueman and Statham, Willis was rarely a great bowler for Warwickshire in the County Championship.

Comparisons may, as often said, be odious. We all make them, however, even while we recognise that circumstances and conditions change over the years and generations. As often I find myself recalling the old caddie at St Andrew’s, almost a hundred years ago. Asked which was the greater golfer, Bobby Jones or Young Tom Morris, he replied “baith of them played perfect gowf”.

I picture all four of these bowlers easily and with pleasure. Fred Trueman, 5 ft 10, stockily built, broad-shouldered and big-bottomed, didn’t look like an athlete till, ball in hand, he started his run. Then it was poetry in motion: the arched back, the great leap, the perfect side-on action, the great sweep of his right arm, the long follow-through.

Statham was less dramatic, a high action, bowling close to the stumps, a bit chest-on. Trueman was menacing, Statham matter-of-fact. “If they miss,” he said of batsmen, “I hit”. Both their actions seemed entirely natural, uncoached; and the same is true of James Anderson, whose career stalled when he was young and England’s coaches tried to change it. Happily, he had the good sense and courage to revert to what came naturally. I suppose he is the most beautiful and classical of fast or, now, fast-medium bowlers; the perfect model for an essay on the Art of Bowling.

Nobody could have called Bob Willis that. If the others, especially Trueman and Anderson, seemed to bowl as if it was the most natural thing in the world, what they were born and formed to do, Willis bowled fast by sheer determination and willpower. His run was inordinately long — hard work even to get to the wicket at the right moment. It was almost as if he bowled fast — and on good days he was very fast indeed — in defiance of nature.

Willis can, like Anderson, be recaptured in colour, Trueman and Statham only in grainy black-and-white.

None of the four was the fastest England bowler I have seen. That was Frank Tyson. His career was brief as a meteor. I saw him only once: The Oval in 1956. That’s to say I saw Tyson bowl, but never the ball. In his first or second over, the Australian opener Colin McDonald struck the ball off his legs. One could hear the sound even if the ball was invisible. Then he was walking ruefully to the pavilion and caught Tony Lock at short-leg, perhaps ten yards from the bat.

Nowadays you could see it all, repeated time and again, just as you can have the pleasure of assembling a portfolio of James Anderson’s greatest wickets. But the real pleasure is watching Anderson ball by ball, seeking out a batsman’s weakness. This may be the last summer for him, but he will surely have one more Ashes series when Australia are here next.

Eventually, however, he will leave the field and, like Trueman, Statham, Willis and indeed Tyson and Botham, survive in memory, and cricket-lovers young today will bore and irritate their children and grandchildren by looking at their new heroes, shaking the head and muttering, “ah, but you should have seen Jimmy Anderson. Now that was as close as bowling can come to perfection…”

Well, that boy is now grown-up and I wouldn’t be surprised if he watched the Lionesses in yesterday’s match with delight, and did so not only because England have at last beaten Germany in a final, but because it offered good and entertaining football. It would indeed have been a cracking match even if the somewhat scrambled extra-time winner had come from a German boot rather than from England’s Chloe Kelly.

Women’s football has a long history, even if there were fifty years from 1921 when the FA prohibited Football League clubs from staging women’s matches on the ground that football was a game unsuitable for women. That judgement looks ridiculous as well as offensive today, but, in fairness to the old dinosaurs, one might remember that even half a century later there were no 5000 or 10000-metre races for women in the Olympics, the distance being thought too demanding for them. This was bizarre because even between the wars there were women’s international cross-country races.

The surge in popularity of women’s football, reflected in that 87,000 crowd at Wembley is, of course, very recent. After all, it is not long since Victoria Beckham and Coleen Rooney, wives of England’s football captains, were very much better known than any woman footballer. Footballer’s WAGS (wives and girl-friends) were celebrities as no woman who kicked the ball and scored goals ever was. This European Cup should change that, even if there is still some way to go before the Lionesses are as well known as England’s male football stars, few of whom have ever, had to juggle other jobs, while establishing themselves as footballers. Unlike the centre back Millie Bright, who previously juggled working in leisure centres and as a stable hand with playing football.

There was something very refreshing about last night’s match and indeed about the tournament as a whole. There was something old-fashioned about it for anyone who, like me, has rather fallen out of love with the often ten arid professionalism and safety-first efficiency of the modern men’s game, which so often sees long phases of unchallenged inter-passing by two, three or four defenders in their otherwise empty half of the field, and vain attempts to find a way through blanket defences. It was a very important match — the most important any of the Lionesses will ever have played, and no doubt, their approach, guided by their Dutch coach, Sarina Wiegman, was highly professional. Nor was it free of the niggling and obstruction that characterises the men’s game. Yet there was also a freshness and sense of enjoyment about their play, also — if it’s not an insult — something of the amateur spirit, a game played for fun.

Will this victory change society’s view on women far beyond the football field as some have suggested? Or is it perhaps rather evidence of how completely that change is already underway or has already taken place? It’s no longer a man’s world, and quite right too, even if some of us oldies are sometimes bemused by the different landscape we have survived into, even at times resentful of it — if, also, one hopes — ashamed of such a feeling. 

We are, it seems, about to have another female Prime Minister and there are numerous walks of life, such as universities, publishing, the City, and the media – where women were not so very long ago rarely more than junior employees, but are now equals or chief executives.

The huge crowd at Wembley reflects a change that has been underway for a long time. Some sports have, for easily identifiable reasons, moved faster than others. This has perhaps been easier in minority sports, but it is coming everywhere. Women’s football has been given a huge boost by the Lionesses. The next step is for the club game to profit from the new popularity and celebrity. One can see signs of this already in the much greater coverage in the press, radio and television given to women’s sport in general. 

In those sports in which some degree of equality has long been established women stars have long been celebrities. Tennis is an obvious example. It is almost a hundred years since Suzanne Lenglen was as bright a star as any of the male champions of her time. Of course, men will always have certain physical advantages which is why direct competition between male and female teams will remain impossible, but there are others where this is not the case. Rachel Blackmore has ridden the winner of the Grand National and Hollie Doyle has won classics on the Flat.

The days of discrimination and “women can’t do that” are surely over. After all, the Lionesses have achieved more than any England men’s team, sporting the Three Lions, since Bobby Moore led England to a World Cup triumph in 1966. And they did this while attracting a record crowd and watched by tens of millions on TV.

Chataway, who also assisted Bannister by taking over the pace-making from Brasher, never, I think, won gold medals, but one 5000 metres race at the White City in 1954 made the front page of newspapers and him a national hero. In a dramatic finish he beat the great and reputedly invincible Russian Vladimir Kutz; a British victory in the Cold War. I recall even my father, no great sports fan, waxing enthusiastic.

It may be doubtful if Jake Wightman will become a popular hero like these distinguished predecessors. The times have changed. In Bannister’s day, there was only one TV channel and if it featured athletics the audience was huge. Even by the time of Coe and Ovett and the 1980 Olympics, there was still only terrestrial television — the BBC and ITV. Now, of course, we watch sports when, where and how we please. Very few, except athletics fans, will have known much, if anything, about Jake Wightman before this week. Yet, given the level of competition now, and the fact that in the days of these aforementioned triumvirates, East African middle distance runners had hardly made a mark on the world scene, Wightman’s achievements at least match that of these celebrated predecessors.

His background is interesting. His parents are English and both competed for the Great Britain team in championships. But despite this, and despite being born in Nottingham, Jake now counts as a Scot and will be wearing a Scotland vest in the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham in a couple of months. Certainly, his athletics career was formed in Scotland as a member of the Edinburgh Athletic Club, his father having taken a post as a director of Scottish athletics. His mother taught and coached at Fettes College where Jake himself was educated. Fettes has been more famous for producing Rugby players and politicians than athletes, even though no great rugby player has come from Fettes for some time, nor any notable politicians following in the wake of Tony Blair and Iain Macleod.

Actually, this is a great time for Scottish Athletics. Fifth behind Wightman in that 1500 race was his club-mate Josh Kerr, bronze medalist in the Olympics last year. Then there is the outstanding middle distance runner Laura Muir and, in the 10,000 metres, Eilish McColgan, whose mother Liz was an Olympic silver medalist, winner of the London Marathon and a BBC Sports Personality of the year. There is no sporting field in which Scotland is currently more successful than on the athletics track.

You wouldn’t think so, of course, from a reading of our newspapers. I would guess that football still gets twice as much coverage here as all other sports put together. It’s bizarre. There has been far more Scottish success in individual sports — athletics, tennis, boxing, swimming, even golf (if not much recently) — than in football where we struggle even to qualify for entry to international tournaments. Moreover all the once proud and — one has to say boastful — Scottish football clubs, even Rangers and Celtic, are now known as “selling clubs”; that’s to say young stars are seen as marketable assets, and clubs cash in on them as soon as they can. Sad, really.

For a few weeks, as a result of Jake Wightman’s triumph, and during and after the Commonwealth Games, we will read and hear a lot about athletics and other individual sports, and stars will be gratefully and enthusiastically featured. Then they will be shuffled aside, returned to the box, as it were, and once again it will be football, football, football. Same in England, of course, but at least their team has some chance of winning cups, not just occasional matches, usually against countries we used to consider beneath our notice.

Well, writing this on the morning of the second round of The Open, the answer is “so far, so good”. Nobody took the course apart on Thursday. The lowest round was 64, eight under par, not at all outrageous.

Moreover, the conditions were benign. It has often been said in recent years that the Old Course is so short, in comparison to most courses today, that vile weather with strong winds and rain is needed to test the top pros today. Fair enough; there’s little natural protection from winds on the Firth of Tay. A few years ago, the young Rory McIlroy had a first round of 63. The weather gods, disapproving of such impudence, let loose a gale, and his Friday score was 80.

The Old Course is a work of nature rather than artifice. A few holes may be lengthened – one is now a monstrous 611 yards – but limits are imposed by the site. Protection can be offered by cunning and difficult pin-positions, but that’s about it.

The course is not only ancient; it is also old-fashioned – to an extent that perplexes, dismays and angers many on their first acquaintance with it. It’s aye been like that. More than a hundred years ago, the great American amateur Bobby Jones’s first tournament there ended in angry tears.

The course seemed absurd and unfair; they could keep it. But of course, he returned, came to understand it and love it, and won The Open there. You couldn’t count yourself a true champion unless you have won there. Other undisputed Greats – Peter Thomson, Jack Nicklaus, Seve Ballesteros and Tiger Woods -came to agree with him.

It’s an anomaly. Even today, looking at the landscape of the course, you aren’t surprised that a hundred and fifty years ago the fairways were still grazed by sheep. Indeed, they still look as if this might be so today.

Then, though the Rules of Golf and the management of The Open are still made by the R&A (the Royal Ancient Club), from its clubhouse behind the eighteenth green, the R&A doesn’t own the course, which remains the property of the town of St Andrews.

Consequently, all residents of the town are entitled to play there, and on the adjoining municipal courses. Alone, I think, among the Open Championship venues, the Old Course is not the property of a private members’ club.

The course is itself old-fashioned. Twelve of the holes – the first six and the last six – share a fairway and a green. So you may find yourself with a sixty-yard putt or even longer, and usually an undulating one. Sadly – one drawback – with the professionals this will often make for very slow play – rounds on Thursday taking up to six hours. There is more than one reason why you need the patience to win an Open at St Andrews.

It is more than sentiment that connects an Open at St Andrews with the Opens of the distant past. And so with champions like the Morrises, father and son, Old Tom and Young Tom, and the great Edwardian triumvirate – James Braid. Harry Vardon and J H Taylor who dominated the championship in the years before the First World War.

Links golf has changed less there than anywhere else. Chance still plays a big part. You can hit a drive or second shot correctly and find that the bounce of the ball on bumpy fairways treats you “unfairly”. All golf is a test of character as well as skill, nowhere more so than at St Andrews.

Its not only the best and greatest who win Opens, even there. Luck plays a big part in any golf, bigger arguably than in any game or sport except perhaps cricket. This is one reason why we love it. A player not quite of the highest class may win an Open if the gods are with him for four days.

Indeed, the last St Andrews winner, the American Zach Johnson, was, and indeed still is, only very good golfer rather than a great one. But most St Andrews winners are judged to have been the best, or in the top two or three of his generation; and this, one thinks, is how it should be.

That’s why I hope that Rory McIlroy follows his first-round 66 with three rounds good enough to let him win the famous Claret Jug this year. But who knows?

The Men’s Singles at Wimbledon is nearly always won by the best or highest ranking player in the field. Golf is a more chancy game. Its gods are capricious. Still, one thing is all but certain. The Open at St Andrews is very unlikely to be won by a player who doesn’t respect and has come to love the Old Course.

Alternatively, you might say that it was South Africa’s worst for some time, even worse than their defeat at Twickenham in November, when a combination of poor decisions and defensive errors cost them a match they dominated for most of the game.

Ireland predictably lost to the All Blacks. There is no shame in that. Yet there were worrying signs that coach Andy Farrell may have taken this Ireland team as far as it can go. Scotland had a wretched first half, rallied briefly to score two good tries to level the game, then slumped weakly again.

England was just as feeble, the final score 28-30 flattering them, their last two tries coming in the 80^th and 83^rd minutes. Coach Eddie Jones says not to worry. It is all part of his preparation for next year’s World Cup.

He is working to plan, and only naïve supporters and untrustworthy journalists think the best preparation is winning matches. A year before the 2003 World Cup Clive Woodward had more or less settled on his best XV. But Jones is, of course, much smarter than the only northern hemisphere coach to have guided his team to win the World Cup.

Actually, Woodward’s team may have peaked the previous year. They played poorly in the early stages of the 2003 Cup and didn’t last as a team long after their triumph. But the point is that Woodward had been consistent in his selection. He didn’t flirt with this, bringing in players for a match or two and then discarding them. His experienced team had developed a winning frame of mind. They knew each other and how their game should be played. They knew one of the most important things: how to win even when you are not at your best.

Jones’ team don’t seem to have the confidence to win if things are going badly. Too often, they look confused, uncertain of how they should be playing, and even rattled. They lack imagination and, even worse, self-discipline. It is ridiculous.

There is no shortage of good players in English rugby, but selecting them and moulding them into a team seems now to be beyond Jones’ ability. Defeats are excused as staging posts on the way to a golden future. Jones is the old jam-merchant: jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, never jam today. He even talks of a full international against Australia as “practice”. Practice for what? The same confusion tomorrow?

He comes up with absurd excuses. Australia had a man sent off. Eddie Jones tells us it’s always more difficult to play against fourteen men because the referee, feeling sorry for the side he has reduced to fourteen, “unconsciously” favours them thereafter in 50-50 decisions. One doesn’t recall Jones spinning this line when England had a player sent off in the first minutes of their match against Ireland in the Spring.

The best coaches trust their players to think for themselves within the pattern the coach has designed. The best coaches know they belong in the back room, not the limelight. You rarely find an All Blacks coach shouting his mouth off and singing his own praises. It was said of Kaiser Wilhelm II that he had to be the star of every event — even, as it were, the bride at every wedding. Jones seems to me a bit like the Kaiser.

Of course, England may beat Australia in the second Test today. There is enough talent in the team for this to be possible. But English fans shouldn’t worry if they lose again. Eddie Jones knows what he is doing, or at least he has told us he knows what he is doing.

Win or lose, it is all part of his cunning plan. Only naïve supporters think it’s important to beat Australia this month. Win or lose, this is, for Jones, a development tour. So that’s all right?

Incidentally, have you heard England’s cricket coach Brenden McCallum singing his own praises after his side’s remarkable victories this summer? Thought not.

As for the folk who post their opinions on screens, any notion of English reserve or moderation has gone for a burton. Dryden’s judgement on the Whig politician, Shaftesbury, anticipated the modern English cricket fan by more than three hundred years. “Railing and praising were his usual themes,/ And both, to show his judgement, in extremes”.

Six months ago, after being thumped by Australia and then a dreary and dismal three-Test series in the West Indies, England’s cricketers were in the stocks or the pillory. In a curious way, the fickle fans even seemed to revel in the team’s repeated failures. Some indulged merely in insult, others, more agreeably, in gallows humour.

But now, in the flash of an eye, everything had changed. The new conductor, the genial Man of Kent (or Kentishman) Rob Key, has waved his wand, summoned up the Kiwi coach Brenden McCullum, awarded the captaincy to Ben Stokes and hey-presto, England have won a series against New Zealand 3-0. Even the deposed captain Joe Root played with a smile on his face, making three centuries and averaging 99, while his Yorkshire mate since Colts cricket days, Jonny Bairstow has hit two marvellous centuries, scoring fast and peppering the boundary, becoming the darling of the moment, praised even by many who not long ago sourly said they hoped never to see him in the Test team again.

Honestly, it’s been like the transformation scene in a pantomime. Everyone is buying into the idea of this New England, even that most astute and sensible of cricket writers Mike Atherton. Well, we shall see. As I write, England has won the toss at Edgbaston and in the modern fashion sent India in to bat: preparation for a fourth-inning galloping run chase?

India’s response has been to send Cheteshwara Pujara, one of the surviving masters of the art of defensive batting, in to open. In contrast, England has retained Zak Crawley — Mr One Big Innings in Ten — as one of their opening pair. He’s a great survivor in the selection room, if not often at the wicket. Discarded openers like Sam Robson and Adam Lyth, both still making county centuries, must look on bewildered and forgivably jealous.

The New Zealand series was splendid, a delight to watch. No wonder so many have been carried away. England, like Steve Waugh’s Australians 20 and more years ago rattled along at four runs an over and more. Victories were boldly snatched in every match from what looked like the gaping jaws of defeat. Terrific.

Time perhaps for an Old Hack to sound a sour note. Yes, the batting was at times ridiculously good. One felt sympathy for anyone bowling to Barstow in this rich vein of form. Some Golden Age bowler — I forget which — reputedly said of bowling to Victor rumper: “I puts the ball where I likes, and Victor, he puts it where he likes.” It must have felt like that bowling to Bairstow or indeed to Joe Root and, if more briefly, Ben Stokes.

Yet the truth is that, except for the excellent Trent Boult, the New Zealand cricket team’s bowling was pretty poor and asked few difficult questions. Tim Southie was a shadow of the fine, near-great, bowler he as been, and when the lofty Kyle Jamieson, departed injured midway in the second Test, Boult had no real support. The spin bowling was inviting, never threatening. Moreover, Kane Williamson’s handling of what passed for his attack and his field settings were poor. India’s attack will be more dangerous and one can’t but wonder how the all-guns-blazing style of English batting would fare against Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins.

England’s bowling gets only a Beta mark. New Zealand ran up some big scores and the repeated difficulties England found in trying to break a succession of partnerships between Daryl Mitchell and the wicket-keeper Blundell were just a bit ominous. Still, not to worry: Anderson and Broad are still getting good batsmen out. The young Durham quick, Matthew Potts, looks the genuine article, and Jack Leach, intelligently handled by Stokes, has begun to look like a genuine Test Match spinner.

This India Test, being a one-off, may tell us little. A more severe examination will be offered by South Africa in the three Test series to follow. England will surely continue to attack with both bat and ball, but there will just as surely be days when the “New England” look a bit tattered, batsmen coming and going from the pavilion and bowlers struggling to take wickets or impose control. Interesting times lie ahead. Will the fans keep faith, or will they prove fickle as ever?.

The local press — where it survives — is different of course. There you can read about club matches, tennis and golf tournaments featuring people who plan for pleasure. They take it seriously — that’s part of the pleasure — and scheme and struggle to improve. It’s amateurs who buy “how to improve your golf” and similar books.

Much has been gained by professional sport. It would be stupid to deny this. Top athletes’ commitment to success is remarkable. Standards of fitness are higher. More thought and science are devoted to the search for improvement. Yet something has been lost. Reading the obituaries of Phil Bennett will have brought this home to many. It was not just that he was a man who belonged to his community as no top international sportsman can do today. It was also that he seemed to play rugby as self-expression and fun. Nobody would have doubted his will to win (or that of his contemporaries, in a golden era of Welsh rugby), but you also had the sense that even international rugby was something to be enjoyed, and that there were more important things than the game, even for a young man touched with genius.

One has to admit that some of the newspaper coverage of amateur sport half a century and more ago was coloured by snobbery. Broadsheet newspapers reported gold tournaments such as the President’s Putter at Rye and the Halford Hewitt Cup, which were restricted to graduates of Oxford and Cambridge and the Old Boys of Public Schools, and did so in more detail and with more enthusiasm than their reporting of the average professional tournament. 

It must seem remarkable to anyone under sixty now that, after Test matches, the most important match of England’s domestic cricket season was the Gentlemen v Players at Lord’s, and it’s somewhat shameful to remember that I supported the Gentlemen, even though the cricketing heroes of my childhood and youth were professionals like Len Hutton, Bill Edrich, Denis Compton, Alec Bedser, Fred Trueman and Johnny Wardle. I did so even though I was aware than some of the admired Gentlemen were by then really shamateurs. But then, right up to the 1980s, 20 years after the amateur/ professional distinction was abolished in English cricket, England was the only Test-playing country where professional cricket was a full-time career. I would guess that many today don’t realize that Don Bradman, statistically still the greatest of all Test batsman, earned his living outside the game, latterly as a stockbroker in Adelaide.

Rugby Union, as Bennett’s obituaries will have reminded many, and taught others, remained amateur longer than any other major sport. When Scotland won the Grand Slam by beating France at Murrayfield in 1984, one of the heroes of the day, full-back Peter Dods, whose goal-kicking had made victory possible, was back at work on the Monday after the match, painting the public toilets in his home town Galashiels. Another of the heroes of that team, scrum-half Roy Laidlaw, had been able to tour with the Lions the previous year because friends in Jedburgh had been able to subsidise his employer so that he could continue to pay Roy’s wages while he was in New Zealand.

It’s natural to think nostalgically of the amateur days at this time of the year, on the eve of the Wimbledon fortnight when the top players will be surrounded by their numerous employees — skills coaches, fitness coaches and nutrition advisers etc — even more so now, when the world of professional golf has been divided by the repulsive Saudi enterprise offering players extraordinary rewards for playing in meaningless tournaments.

Standards of performance in all major sports may have improved enormously in our time, but almost all major sports have also been corrupted by money. One cannot but admire the dedication of today’s professional stars, even while comparing the world they inhabit unfavourable with the game Phil Bennett knew, loved and adorned.

Nevertheless, the credit for this remarkable Test at Trent Bridge should go first to the Nottinghamshire groundsman who produced a wicket which invited batsmen to play strokes.

This was to be the heart of my column, or so I thought at the beginning of the week. The idea was sparked by comparing Joe Root’s centuries here at Trent Bridge and last week at Lord’s.

Both were splendid pieces of art and craft, the work of a master at the height of his powers. One doesn’t perhaps think of Root as a maestro like the greatest of his Yorkshire predecessors, Len Hutton, but this is because there remains something boyish about him. A happy relish for the game, itself astonishing after bearing the burden of England’s batting for half-a-dozen years as captain.

Nevertheless, a maestro is what he is, and like Hutton in his prime, one that can play whatever sort of innings the pitch and the state of the match, or a series, demands.

At Lord’s, his hundred in the fourth innings secured a win; at Trent Bridge, his first-innings hundred made the ultimate victory possible. There was the same quality of mind — of intelligence — evident in both innings.

Yet technically, they were different, and here is where thanks are due to the Nottinghamshire groundsman and the fast and true wicket he had produced. At Lord’s, Root played mostly off the back foot. All great batsmen, it used to be said, are back-foot players.

One of the first great theorists of the game, the Indian Prince Ranjitsinhji, instructed batsmen, “Play back or drive”. Few are good enough to obey his command.

Root is one of the happy few. Root, like Hutton before him, can do so. Moreover, like Hutton again, when the ball is swinging, he checks his drive and plays it late and square on the offside.

At Trent Bridge, however, recognizing that the wicket was true, he was driving off the front foot through extra-cover or in the V between wide mid-off and wide mid-on. It was delightful.

One has seldom seen him play with such freedom for some time, doubtless in part on account of the responsibility of being not only England’s captain but the only batsman with a Test average over 36.

Still, this match will be remembered chiefly not for Root’s masterclass, but for Jonny Bairstow’s astonishing hitting, a power and sustained ferocity rarely seen in Test cricket.

I think it matched only in my memory of English batsmen by certain innings from Ian Botham, Kevin Petersen and, of course, Ben Stokes, England’s new captain and Bairstow’s partner in this destruction of the New Zealand attack. Extraordinarily, however, Baistow’s power and ferocity were such that Stokes was all but overshadowed.

I have been a fan of Bairstow’s ever since he first appeared, along with Root, in the Yorkshire team, but his career has been a bit more of a rollercoaster ride than Joe’s.

He has been in and out of the England team, not always, I think, well-treated by selectors and coaches. Sometimes he had kept wicket, sometimes not, and he can rarely have felt secure for long.

Fans have criticized him, and in the last couple of years, social media has been awash with posters declaring that his time in an England short is up. Curiously these critics have rarely observed that Bairstow’s Test Match batting record is much the same as Stokes’s. Meanwhile, Bairstow has become one of the best white-ball batsmen in the world; few question that.

Still, he came to these New Zealand Tests straight from the IPL and made low scores at Lord’s in the first innings at Nottingham. Another failure would undoubtedly have provoked loud cries of “enough” and demands he is replaced by the young Harry Brook, another Yorkshireman but one who has scarcely ever played with Bairstow.

I suspect the cries would have gone unheeded d because both McCullum and Stokes know what he is capable of — that is, an innings which can turn a match in a dozen or twenty overs, which is exactly what he did on Sunday.

After tea, when the result was still in the balance, New Zealand appraised the state of the game. It was likely that if Stokes and Bairstow batted through to the close, England would win. So Trent Boult, their best bowler, and Matt Henry bowled short and fast, inviting Bairstow to risk hooking or pulling into a field with three men out on the boundary. This was quite sensible.

Hooking or pulling a fast ball is always a risk when there are men waiting to catch a mishit. Bairstow, of course, accepted the challenge, and there was an extraordinary flourishing of sixes. The match was turned on its head in the space of a couple of so overs.

But it might so easily have been different. One less powerful and well-timed strike fell short of the boundary, and New Zealand might have won.

It was extraordinary, so extraordinary, that Bairstow all but broke what must be one of the longest-standing records in England’s Test Match history.

At The Oval in 1904, Gloucestershire’s Gilbert Jessop took only 75 balls to score a hundred against Australia; Bairstow’s hundred took one ball more. Not bad.

I like long-standing records, and so I am happy to think Jessop’s remains, though I would have been just as happy to see Jonny Bairstow match it. Jessop incidentally was at the crease for only 75 minutes, but they got through overs faster than they do now.

There was goodwill but some doubt when Brendan McCullum was appointed England’s head coach; doubt because he has little experience of coaching. But the head coach’s job is surely first selection and, second, setting the mood. There are other batting and bowling and fielding coaches to deal with the technical stuff or, often, to offer no more than a quiet word of advice.

I never tire of the story of the young apprentice rowing coach who once asked Steve Fairbairn, the Australian who coached the Cambridge Boat race crew, if he might accompany him along the towpath so that he might learn from his experience and wisdom.

Afterwards, he admitted to being a bit disappointed.” You don’t seem to say much”, he said. “Too right, mate, but I stop any bloody fools from saying anything.”

I guess McCullum is a coach in the Fairbairn style.

Greg Norman, the project’s frontman, as unimpressive before a microphone as he was impressive on the links in his golfing heyday, tells us LIV has brought free agency to the game of golf.

Well, I suppose any breakaway from the established order may be described as “free agency” in a sense. That might have been claimed for European football’s proposed Super League. The fans soon showed what they thought of that and it expired overnight long before a ball had been kicked. Golf doesn’t have that sort of fan base. So LIV may have more chance of success, or at least survival.

On the other hand, nobody outside its own magic circle is going to care who wins its tournaments. The Centurion Club at Hemel Hempstead isn’t the Old Course at St Andrews or Masters at Augusta. LIV is challenging the PGA in America and what used to be called the European Tour, but for the moment anyway, the established order still has the trick-taking cards.

The winners of LIV’s tournaments will receive huge cheques, but no Claret Jug or Green Jacket. Winners of golf’s majors are remembered, just as winners of the Derby and the Arc de Triomphe are. LIV will flop or peter out if its players are debarred from the major tournaments. The PGA has already suspended the membership of players who have signed up for the Saudi millions. If the suspension holds, surviving a legal challenge, LIV is likely to be short-lived. 

Some have compared this to Kerry Packer’s cricket breakaway in the 1970s, but that was very different. Packer’s motive was clear. He wanted to secure TV rights to Australian cricket which he had been denied. He recruited almost all the best Australian cricketers, and stars from the West Indies, England and South Africa to provide his Australia XI with opposition.

Moreover, cricketers everywhere but in England were no more than semi-pros, holding down other jobs or, in the case of the West Indians, playing their trade for English counties or in the Lancashire Leagues. Even English test cricketers were poorly paid. Nobody then became rich playing cricket. Packer won his battle with the Australian Cricket Board. Things returned to normal, the only difference being that Test match players everywhere were better paid.

In contrast, all the ageing stars who have signed up to take Saudi millions have already made huge amounts of money out of their career in LIV golf. Most of them are worth hundreds of millions. Dustin Johnson says he is doing this for his family. How much money does his family need?

Is it even – he might pause to wonder – good for his children to have so much money they haven’t themselves earned. While it is clear that he cares deeply about money, doesn’t he care for his own reputation?

For Europeans it is depressing to see players we have admired, even revered. Stars of Ryder Cup-winning winning teams like Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter are now happy to take the Saudi loot and seemingly indifferent to the damage they are doing to their reputation.

Happily – so far anyway – golfers still in the summer rather than the autumn (or even winter) of their career have resisted the temptation to sign up for LIV. Some – Rory McIlroy being a happy example – have greeted the Saudi enterprise with a proper contempt. Nevertheless, money talks very loudly, often seductively. This is why it is important that the established order – the PGA especially – not only holds its ground but defends its position intelligently.

Suspension may be temporary, though one must confess it is difficult to see an acceptable way back for the rebels. The best hope for the established game is that the LIV tour is met with public indifference, and indeed this may well be the case once the initial flurry dies down.

The American Open next week and The British Open at St Andrew’s next month will not suffer from the absence of Johnson, Mickelson and co whose glamour and prowess are failing.

First run in 1780, it is older than the United States of America, for heaven’s sake. It is true, admittedly and sadly, that for quite some time now it has demeaned itself by bearing a sponsor’s name, but there it is: we live in a commercial age, not an aristocratic one. The present sponsor is Cazoo, a firm of car dealers.

However, this year is different and Cazoo, to its credit, if also displaying commercial acumen, has agreed that the race will now be the Cazoo Derby (In Memory of Lester Piggott), thus honouring the greatest flat-race jockey anyone now living ever saw. Piggott won the Derby nine times, the first when he was only eighteen on Never Say Die in 1954, the last on Teenoso in 1983.

Epsom is a difficult course to ride. This is one reason why the race is so fascinating. Actually, it’s a crazy course. Lester told his biographer, Dick Francis, that “whoever thought of putting that racecourse where it is must have been an idiot. If it wasn’t for the Derby, nobody would run a good horse there. A lot of it is downhill. Horses aren’t supposed to gallop downhill. It’s not so bad if the going is good or soft.” But it is, of course, the difficulties of Epsom which make the race so fascinating as a supreme test of the horse and of the jockey’s skill and judgement.

Never Say Die was unfancied, starting at 33/1 — my mother, who bet only on the Derby and the Grand National, had half-a-crown on him. Back then a winning half-a-crown — 12 ½ P — bet at 33/1 could buy you five bottles of good NV champagne. Lester’s Derby horses never started at such generous odds again. His best three winners were probably Crepello (1957), Sir Ivor (1968) and Nijinsky (1970). Sir Ivor was his favourite among them. There’s a lovely film, The Year of Sir Ivor, easily available.

There were hopes that the Queen would have a runner this Jubilee year. Sadly her well-fancied colt, Reach for the Moon, had a setback in training, though with luck he may win for her at Royal Ascot. The Derby is the only classic her horses haven’t won. The closest she has come was in Coronation Year when Aureole finished second to Pinza, the only winner for the many times champion jockey Gordon Richards.

There have been Derby winners for George IV when Prince of Wales, Edward VII as both Prince and King, and George VI though that was a wartime Derby run at Newmarket. Only one Prime Minister has owned a Derby winner: Lord Rosebery who led in the winner three times, once when he was in office. I suppose many would take a very dim view of a race-horse owning Prime Minister these days. I think Churchill was the last, though he never had a runner in the Derby.

In some respects, The Derby is no longer what it was. It remains a great racing occasion, but it has lost some of its wider public appeal. The same may be said of course for the FA Cup. There is more competition for our interest. 

Moreover, racing used to be the great betting sport, and indeed, continued to be that even after betting shops became legal in the late 1950s. Now there are all sorts of gambling outlets; racing is only one among many, and not perhaps the chief one.

The Derby used to be one of the great popular festivals, commemorated in Frith’s painting The Derby Day. Londoners flocked to Epsom, by train, carriage or horse-drawn bus. The race was run in mid-week, first Wednesday and later Thursday. Its national significance was clear. Parliament did not sit on Derby Day. It was falling attendances that led the switch to Saturday, but imagine the fuss if the race was still run on the Thursday and Parliament took the day off to allow MPs to be at Epsom.  

Even the quality of the race is not always what it used to be, simply because there are now more big races, rich in prestige and prize money, than there were when Lester Piggott was a boy.

Still, for those of us who follow racing it remains one of the biggest days of the year. There is as usual a strong entry from Ireland. Aidan O’Brien, almost as dominating a trainer as Lester was a jockey, saddles four, and any could win. His 23-year-old son Donnacha, now too tall to be a jockey, enters Piz Badile who will be ridden by Frankie Dettori, probably the only jockey today to be almost as much a household name as Lester was.

Still, there could be no more suitable winner in a race in memory of Lester than Desert Crown. The winner of the Dante Stakes at York, he is trained by Sir Michael Stoute, already the trainer of five Derby winners. Sir Michael is now in his seventies. More to the point he trained the last of Lester’s twenty-nine English classic winners: Shadeed in the 1985 Two Thousand Guineas, The Dante Stakes by the way, is named after Dante, the winner of the last wartime Derby in 1945, rather than after the greatest of Italian poets, though the horse, a son of Nearco, was indeed Italian bred.

There are people who think cricket of little account in Scotland. At least one ignorant SNP politician has denounced it as “an English game”. Well, cricket everywhere stems from England, but its roots in Scotland are deep. My local club, Selkirk, is celebrating its 150^th anniversary this summer. Selkirk is better known for rugby players, such as John Rutherford — that sublime fly-half — Iain Paxton and Iwan Tukalo, all having been Grand Slam winners for Scotland in either 1984 or 1990. But the rugby club is more than thirty years younger than the cricket one.

The Selkirk club is indeed older than several English county clubs, or at least has a longer unbroken history. Great players have appeared at Selkirk’s ground, Philiphaugh. The first, perhaps, was Wilfred Rhodes — farmed out by Yorkshire while not yet twenty, to serve an apprenticeship as a professional with Selkirk’s rival, Gala. That was in 1897 or so. Remarkably, Rhodes would also end his playing career in Scotland, as Perthshire’s professional in 1937, almost 60 and still taking wickets cheaply.

Cricket was as popular as football in the small Aberdeenshire burgh, Kintore, where I spent much of my childhood. The local club fielded two XIs playing in the Aberdeenshire leagues, known as Grades, as in Sydney and Melbourne. The Aberdeenshire club played in the Scottish County Championship and attracted so much interest that placards were fixed to the front of trams promising they would take you “to and from the cricket match.” It was in Aberdeen that Don Bradman made his last playing appearance in Britain — scoring a century, of course.

Two Scots, Douglas Jardine and Mike Denness have captained England in Ashes tours of Australia. Both series were dominated by fast bowling, happily for England — Larwood and Voce — in Jardine’s tour, unhappily — Lillee and Thomson — in Denness’.

According to our school pro, Frank Matthews, a lovely old man who had bowled fast for Nottinghamshire in the 1920s, Larwood might well have played some of his pre-Test cricket in Scotland. A couple of committee men from Perthshire went down to Nottingham hoping to get a young fast-bowling pro. They were offered a choice of two. One was Larwood, the other Bert Marshall. They chose Marshall, who, indeed for several seasons, bowled very successfully for them, but they might have chosen Larwood.

Because cricket was an amateur game in Scotland, with only some leagues permitting clubs to employ one professional, it long ago ceased to attract spectators in any considerable number. But this has of course been the fate also, if more recently, of lower league football and amateur club rugby pretty well everywhere. Moreover, because Scotland played no Test cricket, Scottish cricket fans have mostly supported England, finding no incompatibility in hoping that England win at Lord’s, and lose, even heavily, at Twickenham and Wembley.

An old friend of mine, Buff Hardie, of the much-loved “Scotland the What?” cabaret trio, described himself as “a passionate and biased supporter of the Aberdeen football club, the Scotland rugby team and the England Test team,” and a good many of us could echo his sentiments, with an appropriate change of football club.

Now, with the proliferation of ODIs and T/20 cricket, there is a professional Scotland team with aspirations to attain Test status just as Ireland has. This may put some strain on loyalties, weakening any allegiance to the England Test side, even though many of us are, I suppose, too old and stuck in our ways to shift. Nevertheless, when Scotland played and defeated England in an ODI in Edinburgh a few years ago, Scottish patriotism surged even in diehard supporters of England’s Test team.

It’s a truly global game now — international cricket matches in Texas for heaven’s sake! — one in which T/20 is enthusiastically played in what, not long ago, would have seemed improbable places. But essentially, the amateur game is much as it was when the Selkirk club first took the field in 1872, when W G Grace, not yet qualified as a doctor, was still a slim young man.

As for 17-year-old Ollie Davidson, I doubt if he will play much of his cricket in Scotland, certainly not for Stirling County. Still at school in Bromsgrove, and attached to Worcestershire — where, as a spin bowler (left-arm) and aspiring opening batsman, he hopes to learn from Moeen Ali. He will, if all goes well, find himself playing all over the world.

Another slow left-arm bowler and old friend, Jimmy Allan, began his first-class career for Oxford University in 1953. His first ten overs were maidens, spread, on account of rain, over two matches: one against Yorkshire, the other against the touring Australians. Not any chance of young Davidson matching that. Maiden overs in white ball cricket are a species as out-of-date as maiden aunts.

Perhaps I’m out of date in this as in so many things, but I still think it’s likely that many readers of The Times, Telegraph and Guardian are as likely to be as enthusiastic followers of cricket as of football.

I admit to being old-fashioned. I still think you pick batsmen to score runs and bowlers to take wickets. The announcement of the first Test squad of the summer has had people posting moans about the likely length of the English tail. Well, it’s obviously nice if your bowlers can contribute a bit with the bat, but that’s not, or shouldn’t be, why you select them.

The first rounds of the County Championship have seen unusually high scoring, whereas we have been accustomed to green wickets and a seam bowlers’ delight in April and May.

A decree went out, commanding groundsmen to prepare better pitches, and perhaps they have overdone it, first-innings scores of over 500 having been quite usual. There have also been bowlers’ complaints about the batches of the Dukes ball being used; they have gone soft very quickly, to the despair of bowlers. 

Too many high scores are as bad for the game as too many low ones. The ideal wicket offers something to both bowlers and batsmen. I’ve long thought that the ideal match sees first innings scores of 350 to 400 for both teams and second ones of 200-250.

It will, however, surprise many if this high scoring is replicated in the three-match series against New Zealand. England’s batting looks as fragile as it has been for the last few years. The openers from the West Indies series have been retained, more in hope, one thinks, than as an expression of confidence. 

Alex Lees, like Dom Sibley before him, spent a long time at the wicket without making many runs but did just enough to deserve to keep his place. His partner, Zac Crawley, is a lucky man.

Few doubt his ability; he strikes the ball splendidly. But his judgement is poor. He keeps getting out to rash or careless shots. Even in this run-happy Spring, he hasn’t made many runs for Kent in the County second division.

It seems that Ollie Pope will bat at first- wicket down. Again his talent is unquestionable; he has a first-class average of over 50. But his recent Test record has been very disappointing, and he seemed technically confused in Australia a few months ago. 

He usually bats at 5 for Surrey; now he is quite likely to come to the wicket with fewer than 20 runs on the board. There is some fashionable concern about batsmen’s place in the order these days; certainly, more than there used to be. 

Colin Cowdrey made Test centuries batting at 2,3,4,5,6 and even 8. Pope certainly needs a good score. There are mutterings comparing him to Mark Ramprakash, the best English batsman of his generation, but one whose Test record was overall very disappointing and who had an in-and-out Test career. 

He is the last man to have made a hundred first-class centuries, but only two of them were in Test matches. Nevertheless, he was a delight to watch, just as young Pope is now. Artist batsmen who make the game look easy when they are going well are always more harshly judged than some with less grace and less natural talent.

Joe Root will be at 4, and may be all the better for being freed from the burden of captaincy. A hundred for Yorkshire against Lancashire last week suggests he is in fine form; a second-innings duck, victim of a beauty from Jimmy Anderson, hardly calling that judgement into question.

Another Yorkshireman will be at 5, though whether this will be Jonny Bairstow or the new star of the White Rose, Harry Brook, is unclear. Bairstow, with two hundreds in his last four Tests probably deserves to keep his place, but he has been away hitting sixes in the IPL, not necessarily the best preparation for Test cricket, while young Brook has been enjoying a wonderful run of form in the County Championship. 

It would be a shame to leave him out. Of course, both could play with Bairstow keeping wicket and batting at 7, but this would mean dropping Ben Foakes whom many judge to be the best keeper in England and who has also been in splendid form with the bat.

The captain Ben Stokes will be at 6 which is where Gary Sobers usually placed himself when he was the West Indies captain. Sobers of course was a great batsman, one of the greatest indeed. Stokes isn’t that. Like Ian Botham, he is a batsman who sometimes plays a great innings. While Sobers had a Test average of just under 58, Stokes, like Botham, averages 36.

There is a lot of talk about the need for big hundreds from at least two batsmen. Fair enough, but it’s just as important to have very few individual scores of less than 20 from your top order. Avoid that and a team can make a first-innings 400 without any really big individual scores.

In truth, there’s as much doubt about England’s bowling as their batting at present. Though Anderson and Broad have a marvellous record and are still capable of deliveries that will get anyone out, neither can now be used as a workhorse and the supporting cast is not one to alarm a good Test match side like New Zealand’s cricket team. 

The young Durham fast or fastish Matthew Potts looks promising and I trust he is preferred to Somerset’s Craig Overton. Indeed both may play if the new English management shows as little confidence in spin bowlers as the previous one and prefers Overton to his county colleague, Jack Leach. I hope they don’t.

Otherwise, almost all English pace bowlers with Test experience and several with Test aspirations appear to be injured, several with stress fractures in the back. Lord knows why or what is wrong. 

My guess is that players today are often gym-fit rather than cricket-fit. Several have front-on actions rather than the classical side-on (like Anderson and Broad), which imposes less strain on the back. 

They might be better walking the roads or the hills than spending hours in the gym. I don’t recall either Fred Trueman or Brian Statham suffering from stress fractures — and they bowled many more overs in an English summer than anyone does today. Finally, success or failure for England may depend on the quality of their close catching. 

It was a wretched Ashes series for England and a happy one for Australia, but it would have been somewhat different if Australia had dropped more catches and England fewer. 

New Zealand is almost always a good fielding side. England has recently poor one, close to the wicket anyway. Almost everyone who made a hundred for Australia was dropped at least once before he had made 50. No wonder we lost heavily.

Now aged sixty-seven, he is making a sad spectacle of himself. As the organizer, or at least figurehead, of the Saudi breakaway tour, he is clearly a man out of his depth or, to put it mildly, a bloody fool.

There are questions that anyone promoting a sports enterprise financed by Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund shouldn’t ignore and, in any case, can’t dodge: the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, for instance.

A United Nations rapporteur and the CIA have claimed that the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered, or at least gave his approval, to the killing. The Crown Prince is also chairman of the Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is paying Norman to front the new tour. So what was his response?

“Everybody has owned up to it, right? It has been spoken about, from what I’ve read, going on what you guys have reported. Take ownership, no matter what it is. Look, we’ve all made mistakes and you just want to learn from these mistakes and how you can correct them going forward..”

Undoubtedly, Khashoggi made a big mistake entering that consulate, but there’s no way the poor guy can learn from it. Conversely, it may well be that the Crown Prince has indeed learned from it, to the extent at least of trying to improve his image by engaging in what we have come to call “sportswashing”, with Norman as its Persil-clean face.

You might think that he might have been better prepared for questions about the murder, for surely the $255 million LIV GolfI Invitation Series can afford to hire some PR person who is smarter than the great golfer and capable of supplying him with a better line rather than leaving him to sink.

Apparently not, however. Evidence of intelligent PR was conspicuous only by its absence in the car-crash press conference, for when he was then asked, as might have been expected, how he felt about the execution of 81 men in Saudi Arabia last month, he was, if not lost for words, provided with no convincing reply.

“I got a lot of messages but quite honestly I look forward. I don’t look back. I don’t look into the politics of things. I’m not going to get into the quagmire of whatever else happens in someone else’s world. I heard about it and just keep moving on.”

Then he got on to what was clearly for him happier ground, explaining how the new tour would protect golfers who signed up for it if they were refused release by the PGA and European tours and subsequently banned.

Well, it seems that several respected players, among them Lee Westwood and Sergio Garcia, and others, perhaps not so respected, Phil Mickelson, for instance, are ready to signup. Why? They can’t surely be in dire need of the Saudi money.

A depressing business, but that’s sport or at least sportswashing for you. We’re back with the Emperor Vespasian and his tax on public urinals which his son and heir Titus objected to on the ground that it stank. So the old emperor held up a coin and said, “non olet” — this doesn’t stink. Quite so.

Consider Newcastle United. There was disapproval, even anger when the struggling club was bought with Saudi money. Some fans even protested. But a capable new manager, Eddie Howe, was appointed. Matches were won. The danger and fear of relegation were avoided.

Fans were relieved and delighted. Who now cared where the rescue money came from? What mattered was that the club’s Premiership status was saved — for another year anyway.

You may find this depressing, but that’s how the world works. It’s what will happen with Greg Norman and his money-rich tour for ageing stars and young hopefuls alike.

Few in sports today care where the money comes from. What matters is that it buys success. Sport washes the stink from the dirtiest coin. Just keep moving on, as Greg Norman says.

Sure, there are embarrassing aspects to a deal. But really, who cares? Don’t look into the politics of things, and life is that bit easier. Keep out of the quagmire of what happens in someone else’s world. Look ahead.

It reminds me of the day when an American firm took over an electronics business in my home town, and the American PR man told the workers that the future was so bright they would need sunglasses to look at it. The business was closed a couple of years later, but that’s beside the point. Keep moving on, follow the money.

Khashoggi was just an unlucky guy. None of our business. And isn’t St James’s Park in Newcastle a much happier place than it was a few months ago?

Offhand I can’t think which has supplied most, though what used to be known as “Lords influence” suggests the answer may be Middlesex. Durham had already provided a white-ball England captain in the utterly admirable Paul Collingwood and fielded a former England Test skipper Ian Botham in the evening of his remarkable career.

Still, Stokes is Durham’s first, even though the county’s loyal supporters get very little chance of seeing him in action in the Championship. But this, alas, is the way it is now. I haven’t done the sums, but I would guess that Joe Root played more Test matches in 2021 than he has played Championship games in the last five summers.

This has been the case since central contracts were introduced, and a select group of players were employed first by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), only secondly by their counties.

Consequently, the England management decides when should be made available to their counties. This is bad for County cricket, and there is little evidence that it has been good for the Test team. Certainly, England’s recent record doesn’t suggest that central contracts have been a great success.

Be that as it may, the appointment of Stokes as captain comes as a relief, given some of the other names canvassed. He has admittedly little captaincy experience. This need not matter. England’s most successful decade of my lifetime was the 1950s.

Neither of the two captains who never lost a series between 1952 and 1958-9 — a run which included Ashes victories in 1953, 1954-5 and 1956— were county captains; Len Hutton, because he was a professional and it was still thought desirable that counties, even Yorkshire, should be captained by an amateur, and Peter May because he came into a Surrey team led by the tough exuberant businessman Stuart Surridge who remained in charge even while May captained England.

Stokes has a challenge to meet, and it is not made easier by the fact that his own recent form has been disappointing. He had a poor Ashes series in Australia and, apart from one century, an indifferent one in the West Indies.

Nevertheless, given that Root has wisely stepped aside, there was no sensible alternative. He has begun well by calling for the return of James Anderson and Stuart Broad.

Their omission from the West Indies tour may not have been misguided but was undoubtedly mishandled. It might, more sensibly, have been said that they were being rested with an eye to a demanding summer with Test matches against New Zealand and India, both of whom have recently beaten England.

Admittedly, given their age — Anderson rising forty, Broad already in the second half of the thirties — there is the question of whether they can still be expected to lead the attack and, more pertinently, whether they should be played together. How many overs can either be expected to bowl?

How much support will be needed from other fast or fast-medium bowlers if both play? How much can, or should, Stokes bowl himself? Who else should help form the attack? Will either Josh Archer or Mark Wood, our two genuine and proven fast bowlers, be fit? What of Ollie Robinson, named as one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year?

He did well last summer and in the first couple of tests in Australia. Then there were questions about his application and fitness, and he was only a spectator in the West Indies. Will there be a place for Chris Woakes, so often good in English conditions but so poor abroad?

And what of Sam Curran, the most talented all-rounder under the age of twenty-five, who is currently recovering from that fashionable complaint, a stress fracture in the back, possibly caused by the ill-advised demand that he should bowl faster than is natural for him.

Questions, questions, questions. One can hope only that the search for an answer doesn’t lead yet again to the selection of a Test side without a full-time spinner so that the slow -bowling is entrusted to part-time spinners, Joe Root or even Dan Lawrence.

Still, it’s the batting that has been letting England down. Openers come and go through a rapidly revolving door. The most talented young batsman in the country is Ollie Pope, who makes runs for fun for Surrey but had a miserable Test year, a wretched time in Australia and was left out of all three Tests in the West Indies.

England would look -and be-a very different side if he could reproduce his county form in Test matches -will, I would rather say when he does. England can’t go another year relying on Joe Root to carry the burden. 

The old adage has it that “bowlers win matches”. So indeed they do. You usually need to take twenty wickets to win a Test. It is equally true however that batsmen lose matches, and this has been England’s case for too long now.

In the old days before central contracts — days when there were fewer Tests and people, played county cricket between Test matches — a batsman could return to his county and play himself back into form. Now the poor blighters are denied this opportunity. Tough.

If Ben Stokes as captain can turn things around it might be a minor miracle. No matter, an interesting summer awaits. If it could be a successful one, even better.

On Thursday, The Times in its leader was in fine Eagle form: “The response of various bodies to the problem of Russian and Belarusian sporting participation has been patchy, ranging from the refreshingly robust, in the case of Wimbledon, to the pusillanimous, in the case of Uefa. Although European football’s governing body has suspended all Russian teams from its competitions, it has yet to expel the Russian Football Union from its ranks. The argument for doing so is overwhelming.” 

Really? This is treading on treacherous ground. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is abominable and indefensible. It would have been that even if there had been any substance to President Putin’s assertion that the Ukrainian Government was neo-Nazi. 

Yet whoever wrote that Times leader is inviting a “Tu quoque” response. In the eyes of many other states — of many people in Britain and the USA too — the American-British invasion of Iraq in 2003 was likewise indefensible, and its consequences abominable. 

It too, like Putin’s war, was justified by a lie. How, one wonders, would we have responded if, say, the Olympic Movement had expelled us from its ranks. 

UEFA has done what was right and necessary, but it has wisely stopped well short of what Wimbledon has done and barred individual Russian and Belarusian footballers from plying their trade with Uefa-member clubs.

Tennis players compete at Wimbledon as individuals. They are not representing their country, and this is the case even if their country may take pride in any achievement. 

Wimbledon’s decision, deplored by both the men’s and women’s player unions (the ATP and WTA) has come after what The Times calls “a mammoth rally between SW19 and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport”, and I think one can assume that pressure from the Government has been intense.

Perhaps the All-England Club was relieved to give way to this sporting boycott. It would, after all, have been embarrassing if the club’s Patron, the Duchess of Cambridge, had been required to present the Men’s Singles winner’s Cup or the runner-up’s shield to Daniil Medvedev, currently ranked two in the world, though I imagine she would have done so graciously.

Bans and boycotts have a chequered history. We have been here before. The 1980 Olympics were staged in Moscow. The Iron Curtain was still in place, and the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Most of us took less notice of that than of Putin’s war, perhaps because it wasn’t in Europe but in a faraway country of which we knew little. 

But Thatcher tried to persuade the British Olympic Committee (BOC) to boycott the Games. The BOC sensibly refused and left the decision to the athletes as individuals. Most went. 

The American Government was what The Times would call more “refreshingly robust”. So the USA boycotted the Games. (One result was that Scotland’s Alan Wells returned home with the 100 metres gold.) Four years later, the USSR boycotted the Games in Atlanta, a futile gesture.

The most celebrated and, in many people’s opinion, successful sports boycott was directed at South Africa and its deplorable apartheid regime. 

It lasted a long time, more than twenty years, almost half the duration of law-imposed apartheid. It was directed chiefly at rugby union and cricket, the two most popular team sports in white South Africa. 

It may be held to have begun in 1968 when the South African Government refused to accept an England team selected by the MCC because it included Basil D’Oliveira, himself a South African by birth and upbringing but classified as a Cape Coloureds. 

Many in Britain deplored and opposed the boycott, some because they weren’t greatly disturbed by apartheid, others because they believed that continuing friendly relations might, even would, in time, lead to the withering of the racist policy, euphemistically given the official description “separate development” of the different races.

Despite the rejection of that MCC team, the Springboks — that is, the South African all-white rugby team — toured Britain and Ireland that winter, playing some twenty matches and internationals against England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. All the matches were staged, successfully in rugby terms, but all were disturbed by mass protests, some of them violent. 

Though a South African cricket team was scheduled to tour in 1970, it was certain that this would lead to public disorder, close to rioting. Cricket grounds couldn’t by their nature — and the nature of the game — be defended in the same way as rugby grounds. 

The tour was called off, the cricket authorities and public yielding reluctantly to the Government’s decision. Soon afterwards, a Springbok tour of New Zealand met with such violent opposition that the New Zealand Government fell into line with the boycott.

That sporting boycott would last until Nelson Mandela was released from prison, apartheid dismantled, and Mandela was elected President. Nevertheless, it had never been quite complete. 

The British and Irish Lions toured South Africa in 1974 and 1980 playing Tests against white-only Springboks, and there were several so-called rebel cricket tours in the 1980s. These were financed by South African business interests and were designed to demonstrate that apartheid was beginning to wither.

So the visiting team included black players, and others of Indian descent, from the West Indies — who would find themselves barred from the West Indian Test team as a consequence. Several, however, continued to earn a living playing for English counties.

There is no question that the sporting boycott and South Africa’s isolation contributed to the ending of apartheid. Claims that it was the chief cause of this are exaggerated. It certainly helped to have South Africa branded a pariah nation in the eyes of many. 

But the fact is that even the governing National Party — or at least its leaders — came to recognise that apartheid, the separate development of the different races as originally envisaged, was unworkable. 

Despite its restrictions, a black middle-class had emerged, and South African business was increasingly colour-blind, as is the way with capitalism. Then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1989-90 meant that the American Government and, to a lesser extent, the British one, no longer regarded white South Africa as a bulwark of defence against Communism.

Who knows? The old buffers at Lord’s and Twickenham who deplored the boycott may have been right in thinking that gradual change might have come about without the boycott. Yet the idea was firmly planted: sporting boycotts can effect desirable change. There is little other evidence that they do, but the myth, based on the South African story, survives.

What they are effective in doing is in making many feel they are doing the right thing so that they can feel good. It is right that harsh measures should be taken against Russia and its governing class. It is right that its economy should suffer as a result of Putin’s folly and brutality. 

But what purpose is served by barring or boycotting individual Russian players and artists besides satisfying the desire that “something must be done”?

Not for Shane Warne were the hours in the gym or the puritanical diet prescribed by nutritionists and inflicted on athletes of all sports today. He was a hamburger, chips, ice cream and beer man, tubby and self-indulgent. 

His private life was a bit of a mess, and, though he was obviously bright and proved in recent years to be an astute, if a too loquacious, TV commentator, it was easy to believe that he had never read a book. Still, he read the game, read and bamboozled batsmen, and always seemed to be having a good time.

He was credited with reviving the dying art or craft of wrist spin. But this wasn’t altogether the case. It might have died or been moribund in England, the West Indies and South Africa, and pretty sick even in Australia, but there were still wrist spinners in India and Pakistan. 

Indeed, Pakistan’s Abdul Qadir, only a few years older than Shane Warne, who also died too early, was a batsman as hard to read as Warne was. 

He had a better googly, but if asked about his googly (or “Bosie”, as the Australians call it) Shane might have answered as S F Barnes did, “I never needed it.”

Warne took more Test wickets than any other wrist spinner, and many think this entitled him to be called The Greatest of All Time”. Well, he is undoubtedly a candidate for this accolade.

One should remember that if he has taken many more wickets, he has also played many more Tests than his predecessors. Likewise, one might remark that James Anderson has taken more than twice what was at the time (1965) Fred Trueman’s world record of 307 Test victims, but Anderson has played much more than twice the number of Trueman’s 67 Tests.

Shane Warne had four great Australian wrist-spinning predecessors. There were other good ones, but only Arthur Mailey, Clarrie Grimmett, Bill O’Reilly and Richie Benaud challenged his pre-eminence.

Mailey, a cheerful soul who made his living as a newspaper cartoonist, played like a careless millionaire. He tossed the ball up, spun it sharply, had a well-disguised googly and top-spinner and was happy to concede runs if it could tempt the batsman to commit an indiscretion.

A generous and sensitive man who had grown up in poverty, he was also a Romantic. When, as a young man, he dismissed the great Victor Trumper, he felt ashamed. “It was as if I had shot a dove.”

If Mailey bowled like a man on a spree, his successor, Clarrie Grimmett, was more like a miser. A New Zealander by birth, he had failed there and failed at first in Australia before moving to Adelaide.

A small gnome-like man, prematurely bald, he was thirty-two when he played his first Test and had accustomed himself to bowl like a miser. His arm was low, and hours of practice in his back garden, where his fox terrier was trained to retrieve balls for him, had made him the most accurate of wrist spinners.

This proved especially effective in England, where the softer wickets suited him better than the then brick-hard Australian ones. He played Test cricket into his middle forties and finished with what was then the world record of 216 wickets in only 37 Tests.

In the 1930s, he found a spin partner in Bill “Tiger” O’Reilly, though wrist spin was almost all they had in common. Grimmett was small. O’Reilly stood 6ft 3″. Grimmett took wickets by stealth; O’Reilly, bowling his leg-breaks, top-spinners and googlies at a medium pace, imposed himself on the batsman.

He proved the master of England’s champion, Wally Hammond, and Don Bradman thought O’Reilly was the best bowler he ever faced. This was generous of him since they were very different, the Don of English Protestant stock, the Tiger an Irish Catholic.

There was a crop of very good Aussie wrist-spinners when cricket resumed in 1946, but with a new ball available after 50 overs and fast bowlers such as Ray Lindwall, Keith Miller and Bill Johnston, they were hardly needed.

It was sometime before Richie Benaud established himself as the heir to Grimmett and O’Reilly. Despite being hampered by a shoulder injury, he would take what was then an Australian record of 248 Test wickets while also being a fine attacking batsman, a magnificent close fielder and arguably the most astute of all Australian captains.

So who was the best of these Australian bamboozlers? I guess it is probably Warne for his total wickets and his influence on the game. Yet if he was rarely mastered, except by some Indian batsmen —Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman — O’Reilly never was, except on the deadest of wickets at The Oval in 1938 when the young Len Hutton made the Test match record score of 364 surpassing the Don’s 334.

Of course, speculation of this sort can rarely be more than matter for an idle moment. What is certain is that these very different exponents of the same demanding craft all, at times anyway, established a moral ascendancy over their Test match opponents — especially, perhaps, the English ones.

Compare football and rugby union. In many respects, football, at the top level anyway, is very different from the game I first watched more than 70 years ago. Pitches are better, even when not synthetic. Anyone watching clips of a George Best masterclass sixty years ago is likely to be amazed by the sight of the mud patches on which he displayed his wizardry.

Yet the laws of the game have scarcely changed. Even the still-controversial use of VAR is no more than an attempt to make the adjudication of the law relating to a penalty kick more consistent. Even when a law might be changed for the better — that relating to offside, for example — nothing is done. Football is a very conservative game, and it can afford to be so because it is a very simple one.

Compare this with Rugby Union. Here the game is so complicated, with so much that can go wrong, that frequent amendments to the laws are deemed necessary. Things that used to be legal are now outlawed.

Other things that used to be illegal, passing off the ground after being tackled, for instance, or lifting in the line-out, are now permitted. Few spectators and, let us be honest, few of us who write or broadcast about the game, understand the laws relating to what is lawful and what is unlawful in the set scrum.

Sometimes we suspect that the referee is likewise puzzled. Law changes are made seemingly without consideration of the great unwritten law — the unforeseeable or at least possible unforeseen consequences.

When long ago the law requiring the ball to be played with the foot after a tackle was repealed, the foot rush — forwards keeping the ball at their feet and operating in harmony — soon disappeared from the game; but I doubt if this was the intention of the lawmakers. A shame. The foot rush required skill and hours of practice to be effective; it is a long lost glory of the game.

Tennis (Lawn Tennis, as it was once called) is another very simple sport, so simple that it has required little in the way of change. Perhaps some is needed now. Players are bigger, stronger and faster, but they still play on a court the dimensions of which were fixed rather more than a hundred years ago.

This is one reason why 5-set matches now sometimes last for five hours; shots that would have been winners in the past are now retrieved and returned. Perhaps the court should be enlarged?

But perhaps everyone is happy with things such as getting the ball into the service box. It’s understandable of course that children and amateur players need this; without getting a second chance, so many games would consist only of double faults.

But professionals? Do the likes of Federer and Djokovic really need a second chance when they serve wide or long? Still, tennis is a simple game, made gripping, especially by its intelligently devised scoring system which ensures that there may be a succession of key moments and, remarkably, means that no match is irretrievably lost until the final point is played. Experiments with using the format employed in Table Tennis have demonstrated just how much duller this is.

If tennis is simple, cricket is devilishly complicated. Accordingly, its long history is one of repeated revision of the laws. Yet, astonishingly, it is still recognisable as the game which took its present form in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Moreover, almost all revisions of its laws have been intended to ensure that a fair balance between bat and ball is maintained. Nevertheless, the need for adaptation has repeatedly been recognised. Today, for instance, many are perturbed by what seems the excessive amount of fast short-pitched bowling directed at the batsman’s body or head rather than at the wicked.

There is more of it partly because there are many more very tall fast or fastish bowlers who can achieve sharp and threatening bounce without pitching the ball halfway down the wicket, indeed from not much short of what has conventionally been called a “good length”.

Certainly, more batsmen are hit on the head more often than used to be the case. Almost a hundred years ago, in the famous “bodyline” series of 1932-3, only two or three batsmen in these pre-helmet days were dangerously struck in the five Tests, far fewer than is quite normal in one day of Test cricket today.

What’s to be done about it. No one, happily, has suggested lengthening the pitch. However, the fact that the average height of fast bowlers has risen by six or eight inches or even more since Harold Larwood (5 feet 8 inches) bowled bodyline against Don Bradman, might seem to make the case for doing so.

However sensible, this would also be rather sad. The length of the pitch — 22 yards (not metres of course) links today to its eighteenth-century Hambledon days. Twenty-two yards: it’s a “chain” — an agricultural measure, a tenth of a furlong.

Sometimes, as a conservative knows, no matter how apparently persuasive the ground for change may be, it is right to say “no”.