Some Cricket Is About To Happen

There’s been a nostril-stinging amount of newsguff already written about the Ashes. The nadir of which was probably the dispiriting headline on the BBC Sport which revealed that ‘Strauss thinks England can win Ashes’. A sentence so tedious and obvious that it actually made me not like cricket for a minute.

Amid all the sportbumf that has been typed so far, not much has actually happened. The England side got on a plane. They are now in Australia. Graeme Swann has hurt his thumb a bit. Oh and a hardy troop of Australian projectionists desecrated St. Stephens Tower (the bell-tower that houses Big Ben) with a weak joke about them bringing back the urn or something.

The only properly amusing aspect of this incident was the reaction of one local councillor, Robert Davis: ‘The Palace of Westminster is part of a Unesco world heritage site, and it’s both inappropriate and insulting for this important location and its buildings to effectively be abused in this manner. It’s also a criminal offence”. I don’t know what a po-face looks like, but Davis definitely has one. He probably prowls around Parliament Square with a clipboard reciting bylaws to tramps and bewildered Italian language students.

Given his humourless response you’d have thought the Australians had demolished the beloved landmark and replaced it with a similarly-sized statue of Stuart Clark. That would probably be something worth writing about.