A tale of two Sidebottoms

Angus Fraser in the Independent looks at the different face of cricket from the time Arnie Sidebottom was playing to his son Ryan’s era.

The careers of Arnie and Ryan top and tailed my own but it is the cold, overcast days at Headingley in the late Eighties on pitches where the ball nipped around, when Middlesex used to regularly get the better of a grunting, disharmonious Yorkshire, which bring back the fondest memories. A day of hard cricket was followed by a short drive to the Three Horseshoes pub in Headingley, where Bairstow, Sidebottom and Mike Gatting would trade banter next to the bar over a couple of pints of Tetley. Gatting would then lead his Middlesex team next door to Bryan's, a wonderful fish and chip restaurant, where baby haddock, chips and mushy peas were consumed by everyone, washed down by a pot of tea.

By the time Ryan came on the scene in the late Nineties attitudes had changed dramatically. Fraternising with the opposition was no longer encouraged and very few evenings were spent in the pub. Pasta, rehydration drinks and ice baths were in vogue. Undoubtedly cricketers are now better prepared when they turn up for a day's play but it seems a far duller existence.

Over in The Guardian, Mike Selvey says it's too early to write off Michael Vaughan but he needs to build some big innings, not just pretty 30s and 40s.

And thus does the spotlight fall on the England captain, who promised anew with an incredibly determined century last May, on his return to the Test side after yet another operation on his dicky knee, but who has gradually allowed the curve to dip. He averaged 62 against West Indies a year ago, 49 against India with another hundred at Trent Bridge, but then 35 in Sri Lanka and 20 in New Zealand. As declines go it looks pretty convincing.

Yet with the first Test due to start at Lord's today, weather permitting, these are early days to be writing him off, as some have done. He is still 33, young by the standards of today's career cricketers, looks slenderly fit, although in his very best years he appeared to weigh significantly more, and - you could put the inheritance on it - is hitting the ball sublimely in the nets.