A cricket interlude

As blog readers may know, I quite enjoy a spot of cricket. I've followed it with the kind of sad, all-consuming passion that only a person who in his own cricketing life batted at 9, fielded at long leg and rarely bowled, can.

So it has given me and other cricketing tragics the world over great pleasure these past couple of days to see one of England's greatest but seemingly most underappreciated players, their opening batsman Alastair Cook, finish up his England career by scoring 71 and 147 in his final test, after having struggled to reach 20 in the tests preceding it.

As cricinfo writer George Dobell put it regarding the ovation given for Cook reaching his hundred:

Well done to Alastair Cook for hewing himself two last monuments to greatness, and well done to the crowd for giving him something that no embittered columnist, ex-player frenemy or twitter big mouth will ever be able to take away from him.