Mike Holmans

A little World Cup involving twelve teams does not need an opening ceremony to kick it off – a thrilling cricket match was all that was needed, and that is what we had.

Over the next three weeks we will see brilliance and incompetence, thrilling games and bad ones, beauty, courage, comedy, athleticism, determination, clumsiness, impudence, passion, triumph and despair

The novelty value of Twenty20 seems to be wearing off

The West Indies turned up like teenagers to a cinema showing “Bowlers of the Living Dead”, expecting to be scared out of their wits

The conventional batsman does no more than go forward or back, and possibly move his front leg outside off stump to prevent the lbw, but when the ball is delivered, these four go a-roaming in search of the best place to play the shot they intend.

For a team which was in turmoil five months ago, this is an impressive tribute to the management skills of Strauss and Flower

This is a very small sample from which to try and draw any conclusions, but the obvious one is that form is continuous from one form of the game to another

England deserved their win, and it is a significant step forward for them to be one-nil up rather than one-nil down after the First Test of a series, but they will have to improve their batting considerably if they are to challenge Australia later in

Interpreting anything that happens through the prism of the coach being Lord High Everything does us all a disservice

Having captained Yorkshire to their first championship in thirty years, Australian Darren Lehmann has a plaque in his honour on the West Stand at Headingley

The truth of “class is permanent” is nowhere better demonstrated than on the county grounds of England

The central question Buchanan raised is a valid one

The plan must be that the series win sufficiently blinds them to their own uselessness to allow the rest of the world to laugh at them come June

Dwayne Bravo does not take as many wickets as the other bowlers, nor does he score as many runs as those higher in the order, but then his contribution is more qualitative than quantitative

There is clearly a distinct risk that several England players will be unavailable for training tomorrow, being on sick parade with sides split through laughing manically at their good fortune

This is the same ECB which arranged an England Performance Squad tour of India to coincide with the senior team’s tour before Christmas, a transparent way of making sure they would have a pool of reserves fit and acclimatised if they suddenly needed

It was a mighty effort of collective will for West Indies to hold firm and win the series

Pitches which so effectively extract the teeth of bowling attacks that batsmen are only in danger of being gummed to death make Test cricket a test only of endurance

West Indies on song bring joy, the pure joy of exulting in excellence, the feeling that nothing can be so much fun as being good at cricket, and that is a joy we need in these otherwise depressing days

It is easy after the fact to say that the ECB should have seen through statements about fantastic rates of return on investments as being impossible, but a year ago the press were still running gosh-wow stories about hedge fund managers who made