Baseball on valium

In a piece in the Times, Aki Riihilati talks us through a heady period in English sport through a foreigner's lens:

Excitement, big personalities, drama, sportsmanship, skill and a highly competitive mentality — the series offered everything that is good in sport. Most of all it made so many people happy and enthusiastic. From my car window I could see these people didn’t think of their mortgages or were worried what their bosses were going to say the next day at work. It was pure joy.

But Michael Parkinson, in The Daily Telegraph, warns that the future is not all hunky-dory. "[The ECB] exist to support a county system which is as wasteful of money as it is inadequate in providing cricketers of Test calibre ... Which is why it will take Australia considerably less time to find a team capable of winning back the Ashes than it took us."