G&C 280
GOOGLIES & CHINAMEN
An Occasional Cricketing Journal
Edition 280
April 2026
Spot the Ball
Out and About with the Professor
Last week the ECB completed its review of the Ashes tour in the winter. The review was held to be an internal one and thus not for publication. I suppose many (perhaps almost all) large organisations have internal reviews from time to time which are not made public largely, one suspects, because no one in their right mind would want to read them.
But the Ashes review? I can think of at least 40,000 people who would want to read this document, they being the ones who travelled to Australia to watch England lose 4-1 against one of the poorer Australian sides of recent years. We might add to that all those who stayed awake in the early hours to watch on TV, all those who checked the scores next day in the newspapers, on the radio…anywhere. All those just vaguely interested in cricket. In sum, quite a large audience. The reason given by Richard Gould for non-publication is that it would give an advantage to future opponents. Now this is too bizarre to be credible: are we to believe that the ECB has now come up with some future plans and stratagems so detailed and specific that were they to fall into the hands of the enemy any advantage would be lost. By analogy, if Villeneuve had only got advanced copy of Nelson’s tactics for Trafalgar, the outcome would have been different (in fact he probably did, and anyway the outcome would have been the same…as Villeneuve himself correctly predicted). If this is true (the ECB bit…not Nelson) then why were not these highly sensitive tactics actually used during the winter? Indeed, for virtually everything that Gould, Key and McCullum have said since the Ashes defeat, the obvious question is: why didn’t you know that beforehand?
And what have they said?
Well, in place of publication, the ECB invited some cricket journalists to a meeting at Lord’s where they were shown two slides of a powerpoint “presentation” and invited to ask questions. From their reports it seems unlikely that much was discovered. Gould is quoted as having said that it had been important “to take time to reflect” and that the ECB “have put issues in place”. Pressed as to what might have emerged from the “reflection” and exactly what “issues” were now positioned (and indeed what on earth do statements like these actually mean), he came up with three headings: “alignment with the domestic game”, “planning and preparation”, and “culture”. Clearly a qualification for ECB employment is an ability to say only the anodyne. One can imagine a new recruit being sheepish about an ability to speak foreign languages but being calmly confident in his/her full fluency in “Platitudinous”. It is also important, of course, to be able to say, at any moment, as a Pavlovian instinct, that “lessons have been learned” and changes will be made “going forwards”.
These three “reflections” (or are they “issues”?) do actually have meaning… as we all know:
1 “Alignment with the domestic game” means: “Talk to the counties”. Darren Lehmann was widely quoted as saying that no one, no one, from the England set-up had spoken to him last season about the upcoming Ashes tour (or indeed anything else). Lehmann is a former Australian coach (and an unsuccessful one…which in itself might have been useful). And anyway, why aren’t such conversations a matter of course. In other words, why don’t they already do this?
2. “Planning and preparation” means: “We should have done some”.
3. “Culture” (was ever a word more misused?) means: “stop the players getting pissed and into fights”.
Now, on the face of it, this doesn’t feel like information which would be dangerous were it to be leaked to other national sides. Can you imagine this summer’s tourists thinking: “Oh we are going to be up against it this year - England management are talking to the counties”.
One suspects that the real reason for non-publication is that the content (if it has indeed been a thorough review) is embarrassing – quite possibly to all parties – and they can’t say so. So, let’s say “lessons have been learned” as often as possible and hope that will do.
But it won’t.
There are, as always, demands for sackings following defeat and some writers have seen the collective embarrassment as saving the jobs of all. Key said that “people want punishment”. I’m not sure that’s true, although it might seem so from his position. Personally, I would settle for honesty and straightforwardness…rather too much to ask for, it seems.
But what could they say? Well, how about starting with “sorry” and then going on to admit that the planning was all but non-existent; that the white ball series against New Zealand was close to no preparation at all; that the selection of Pope and Crawley were poor decisions; that the absence of a fielding coach might have a causal link to the dreadful catching in a couple of Tests; that Smith is a fine batter but his ‘keeping was awful and he played some truly stupid shots; that Potts should never have been selected for the final Test, went for a near record number of runs in the first innings and was unbowlable in the second; that being drunk is poor preparation for any sporting event; that…well, add your favourite here………
The whole thing is compounded, of course, by the fatuous excuses that they have (presumably collectively) come up with; thus, selecting Pope was, for Key, “overvaluing loyalty”. Also overvalued was having a “settled team”. Why did they “overvalue” these things? Are they not supposed to know what they are doing in these matters? Key’s response was that “we need to be more ruthless in selection…that we’ve created an environment where there are not enough consequences”. Why, again, would they (why would anyone) do that? We, “need the protection of a four to six weeks window before an Ashes tour”. Good idea…why wasn’t one in place? And on and, drearily, on. Gould said on camera that, “we need to ensure that we have the right space and time to enable our players to perform at the highest level”. Indeed, that is called preparation. So why wasn’t it done? Perhaps the nadir of all this tosh was Gould’s reaction to the drunkenness. What he actually said was: “We want to give people the freedom to make their own decisions, but sometimes we need to provide them with more strict parameters”. As oxymoronic statements go, you have to admit it was pretty good.
Would sacking either of this platitudinous pair make any difference? Would getting rid of McCullum help? McCullum might be excused from the accusation of puerility, principally because he hardly ever speaks. More to the point, if all three left, who would replace them and what are the chances that their replacements would not imbibe the same thesaurus of empty statements? I think we all probably know the answer to this question.
This & That
Northamptonshire head coach Darren Lehmann has said England players do not play enough county cricket and selectors have overlooked talent in the domestic game. Lehmann, now in his second year at Wantage Road, is hopeful the ECB will have a better link with the first class counties this season following the humiliating Ashes series defeat this winter.
Lehmann has spoken with England managing director Rob Key and Test captain Ben Stokes after claiming he had not seen an English selector during his first year in charge. Northamptonshire's 27-year-old left-hander Saif Zaib was the leading run-scorer in the country last season with 1,425 at an average of just under 65, including six centuries, but was overlooked for a place on the England Lions' winter tour.
"I think you will see a really marked improvement in that regard from the ECB," former Australia batter Lehmann told BBC Look East. "The [England] players don't play enough county cricket. They should play more but that's not my call. "I think the ECB wants to get close to the counties, they don't want to be that matriarch, you feel like they want to make sure all the counties are listened to and that they're getting around to watch as much as they can.
"There's a lot of good county players that could have been on the tour if they'd probably seen and took notice of them a little bit more."
Former England captain Mike Gatting and a group of high-profile former Middlesex players have written to members after calling on the club's chair to resign, saying the club has been "poorly led for too long". Gatting and former England and Middlesex players Mark Ramprakash, Mike Selvey, John Emburey and Clive Radley, plus West Indies legend Desmond Haynes, say chair Richard Sykes has rejected calls to commit to standing down.
Middlesex begin their campaign in Division Two of the County Championship against Gloucestershire at Lord's on Friday. The 11-time county champions have been in the second tier in five of the past six full seasons. "As former players of Middlesex, we have become increasingly disturbed at the way the club has been allowed to sink to its current level," the letter says."The players are a product of their environment and in areas where the standard of coaching has been poor, the players have not been sufficiently challenged resulting in inadequate standards becoming the norm, insufficient to compete at the level to which we should aspire."
Middlesex have appointed former New Zealand player Peter Fulton as men's head coach. The 47-year-old, who played 23 Tests for his country, has agreed a three-year deal and joins from Canterbury. He comes in to replace Dane Vilas, who had been in interim charge of the county side since Richard Johnson left last June. Fulton has been in charge of Canterbury since 2020 and led them to the Plunkett Shield - New Zealand's equivalent of the County Championship - in his first year in charge. He takes over a Middlesex side that finished fourth in Division Two of the County Championship in 2025 and made the quarter-finals of the One Day Cup.
The IPL got off to a cracking start last week. The Sunrisers Hyderabad top four having a fearsome look about them: Abhishek Sharma, Travis Head,
Ishan Kishan, Heinrich Klaasen (wk) but in the first match only Ish Kish with 80 from 38 balls made a strong impact taking his side to 201 for 9. But RCB strolled home with four overs to spare with Kohli and Paddikal leading the way. In Match 2 KKR rattled up 220 for 4 but this proved a straightforward task for the Mumbai Indians with Rohit Sharma and Rickleton leading the way.
New Zealander Brett Randell has become the first bowler in the 254-year history of first-class cricket to take five wickets in five balls. The 30-year-old created the piece of cricket history playing for Central Stags on day two of their match against Northern Districts in New Zealand's Plunket Shield. Randall took the first wicket of his five in a row at the end of his second over before taking the rest from the start of his third over as Northern Districts slumped from 4-0 to 9-5. The right-arm medium pacer had figures of 5-2 at that point and took a wicket with the first ball of his fourth over to make it six wickets in eight balls.He later dismissed another batter and finished with figures of 7-25.
Thompson Matters
Who said this and to whom?
‘I have a hundred more important things to do than speak to you.’
Was it a) Trump to Kier Starmer
b) Kier Starmer to Trump
c) England’s Director of Cricket, Rob Key, to Liam Livingstone
or d) King Charles III to Trump
No prizes, although b) or d) would be perfectly plausible.
It would seem that one of the hundred important things Key has to do is organise his new County Insights Group who will be charged with repairing the relationship between the England set-up and the County game. The first of these four meetings with Baz will take place remotely as McCullum is in New Zealand until some unspecified date, returning just in time for the Test Series against the Black Caps. So more of a County Out of Sight Group then.
There will be two coaches/Directors of Cricket from each division who will feed back to Key and Baz. The meetings are due to be quarterly which, if true, means it’s quite likely two of them will be in the close season. It will be fascinating to see how many new faces appear in the England Test team as a consequence but the likes of Haseeb Hameed, Saif Zaib and Jack Leach are unlikely to be holding their breath.
McCullum has said, ‘County and Test cricket are probably slightly different games.’ In that he is probably right since these days County games generally last a day longer than many England Test Matches. Key on the other hand recently gave an interview with Sky Sports singing the praises of McCullum. In a four-minute rant he hardly drew breath and despite admitting recently that he had not given the County game sufficient attention there was little to suggest that anything will change and that if you’re in you’re in and if you’re out, you’re out.
Rangers Blues
George, like me, is in his eighth decade as a Rangers supporter and is even more worried than me that they might find themselves in the playoffs and get promoted to the misery of the Premiership. It would subject us to another season of going round the country getting duffed up by all and sundry and probably losing most of the home games as well. Following the good spell at the end of 2025 and over Christmas his emails were progressively more panicky. I had to keep assuring him that everything was in hand and their essential inconsistency would prevail.
Last weekend he sent me this:
Last 6 results, in order, as you probably know:
0-5
0-2
0-4
0-1
3-1
6-1
Any explanation?
I replied: Those four defeats will prove critical to avoiding the Play offs.
He seemed greatly relieved and acknowledged that “mid table obscurity” is now guaranteed.
But his golfing chums have now got him worried about the proposed eight play-off places for next year and fears that Mid Table Mediocrity will be even harder to achieve.
Crocks Corner
In this era when bowlers have to carry out inappropriate fitness regimes and then spend more time on the treatment bench than actually bowling this feature celebrates the manifold complaints of these elite athletes. Feel free to submit anything you notice
You couldn’t make this stuff up:
“England captain Ben Stokes is still recovering after surgery on a broken cheekbone and will not play for Durham next week as planned. Stokes, 34, was hit by a ball when working in the nets with Durham's academy players in early February and had surgery a week later. Coach Ryan Campbell said Stokes was scheduled to play the season opener against Kent starting on Friday, but the club are still awaiting clearance from specialists.
Campbell said he does not expect the all-rounder to feature until matches against Worcestershire from 8 May and the reverse fixture against Kent at Beckenham from 15 May. If Stokes does not return sooner, those fixtures would be his only red-ball county matches before England's first Test of the summer against New Zealand from 4 June.”
Surely no one thinks the selectors could possibly pick this guy:
“Fast bowler Mark Wood has admitted life after cricket is in his thoughts if recovery from his latest injury "doesn't go well". The 36-year-old returned to Test cricket in the 2025-26 Ashes series after 15 months out with an elbow injury followed by knee surgery. He returned to bowl just 11 overs in the first Ashes Test in November, which England lost inside two days.
He then missed the second Test with swelling in the knee and was subsequently ruled out of the tour. "It's real slow going with the stage I'm at in my career," said Wood as he gave an update on his recovery to the Tailenders podcast. "It's quite a fine balance, where if I push this too hard then that could be it." The Durham bowler explained there had been improvement in the condition of his knee, with his recovery split into two phases "It's six-week blocks, it's not day by day, it's specialists and rescans every six weeks. It's been improving since what I got told had been an explosion in my knee in Australia."So every six weeks has been an improvement. I've started running now and I'm hoping by the next block it's in a position where maybe I can start lightly bowling."
King Cricket Matters
King Cricket is never shy about speaking out
We are absolutely adamant that England cannot possibly withstand public and media appetite for change in the wake of the Ashes drubbing. (Does 4-1 actually qualify as a drubbing given the three previous scorelines Down Under were all worse than that?) One way or another, rightly or wrongly, action must be seen to be taken and if the captain, coach and managing director of men’s cricket are all keeping their jobs then other heads will have to roll instead – players’ heads.
This is the way it has to work. If people want skulls and you explain that, “actually, sorry, no skulls – we’re just going to do things slightly differently instead,” then you absolutely cannot just carry on much as you were doing previously. England have to demonstrate how they’ve changed. They have to put forward clear, visible differences.
In short, there still have to be skulls.
“We’ve overvalued loyalty and overvalued having a settled team”
That’s what Rob Key apparently concluded recently.
“We thought what we wanted to do is make sure we have a team that is settled out there. But what that does is it creates an environment where there’s not enough consequence. We need to be more ruthless with our selection.”
It’s time to unsettle everyone with disloyalty, basically. So who’s in the firing line?
Zak Crawley – OUT
Honestly? We think he’s out. After all these years of Teflon mediocrity, there are visible holes in Crawley’s protective coating now. If the loyalty threshold truly has moved then he surely now finds himself on the wrong side of it as an exemplary victim.
Unless he makes a million runs in the early weeks of the County Championship – which unfortunately for him is a thing he’s never before been able to do – then Crawley will surely become a warning to all of the England players that actually, you know what, we’ve decided there should be consequences.
This would be quite a peculiar development given the batter’s been such a fixture of the side and it could also prove terminal for his Test career. While he is still young for a Test opener – during the Ashes we pointed out that Mike Carberry, Nick Compton, Mark Stoneman, Jason Roy, Rory Burns and Alex Lees were all older than he is now when they made their debuts – it’s quite hard to go back on dropping someone who has already amassed such a sizeable body of so-so work.
See, told you Zak Crawley was the very best batter in the whole wide world
Crawley has been given a great many opportunities to prove himself – enough, you could argue, that he has already done precisely that. For years and years, he has generally done just enough to maintain the idea of Zak Crawley, without ever really managing to move things beyond that.
Crawley’s upcoming task is therefore not really to prove himself, but to disprove himself.
Ollie Pope – STILL OUT
Technically, Pope’s been dropped already, which is just one of several reasons why it’s probably a little unfair that he’s so often lumped in with Crawley as a batter who deserves to face sterner judgement.
While the two men have played the same number of Tests and roughly the same number of first-class matches, Pope has hit nine Test hundreds to Crawley’s five and also averages almost 50 per cent more than him in first-class cricket with twice as many three-figure scores.
He is, in short, a far better batter and could probably do okay if someone could prevent him falling victim to some of the more broad brush team messaging that doesn’t really benefit him.
Jamie Smith – NOT OUT
Jamie Smith played the worst shot of the winter, but the brain of many an otherwise excellent cricketer has momentarily melted in the Ashes environment before now and Smith had also been shouldering a sizeable workload in the field.
His first Ashes went wrong, but that alone shouldn’t see him ejected from the side, should it? He might need to find a bit of early season form, but England want to do well in five-Test series and in the one before the Ashes, less than a year ago, Smith made 184 not out against India as well as several other useful scores.
Will Jacks – OUT
If anything Will Jacks’ fantastic T20 World Cup performances served only to better highlight the utter pointlessness of his presence in England’s Test team.
Did you see… Steve Smith backed into a corner by the legendary finger spin of Will Jacks?
With the red ball, he is not a spin bowler, but a cricketer who sometimes bowls spin. This would be a lot more useful to England if he also happened to be a Test batter, but unfortunately, as things stand, he is not.
In the longest format, Jacks is a buyer of wickets and a scorer of meaningless consolation runs. England need more than that.
Brydon Carse – PROBABLY NOT OUT
Brydon Carse had a terrible Ashes in which he was the second-highest wicket-taker. This combination of facts is still hard to make sense of. We feel we summed up the essence of his experience in the article linked below.
Someone tell Brydon Carse he’s getting tonked – we’re not sure he’s noticed
If England can avoid giving him the new ball, we’d guess Carse is probably still in the team? Isn’t he? Maybe not. We have no idea.
Matt Potts – A BIT FURTHER OUT
Matt Potts is in that age-old position where he shouldn’t really be judged too harshly based on one hospital pass appearance at the arse end of a disastrous Ashes tour, but he also unavoidably will be.
England had worked their way down the pecking order when Potts played in Sydney but you feel they’ll have to get a little bit lower still before he gets to play again.
Jofra Archer and Mark Wood – NOT OUT, BUT ARE THEY EVER TRULY IN ANYWAY?
It seems faintly insane to suggest Jofra Archer or Mark Wood might be members of England’s first XI given the availability disclaimers inherent in such an assertion. In that respect, it’s business as usual really.
Wood is currently recovering from what he was told was “an explosion” in his knee during the Ashes. Archer is in the equally familiar position where he’s fit enough to bowl four overs but no-one seems much inclined to engineer a situation where he might prove himself capable of bowling a greater number.
So what are we looking for then? One opener and one spinner, plus maybe an opening bowler if they conclude that a Gus Atkinson, Brydon Carse and Josh Tongue attack is a bit too first-changey?
Old Danes Gathering
The biennial Old Danes Gathering has come round again and, as usual, it will be held at Shepherds Bush CC on the Friday of their Cricket Week - July 24. Old Danes their wives and friends will all be welcome. The clubhouse and bar will be open from noon and visitors normally arrive around 2pm. Please advise me at the email address below if you plan to attend so that I can add you to the attendees list which I will circulate to encourage others to come.
Googlies Website
All the back editions of Googlies can be found on the G&C website. There are also many photographs most of which have never appeared in Googlies.
www.googliesandchinamen.com
Googlies and Chinamen
is produced by
James Sharp
Broad Lee House
Combs
High Peak
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An Occasional Cricketing Journal
Edition 280
April 2026
Spot the Ball
Out and About with the Professor
Last week the ECB completed its review of the Ashes tour in the winter. The review was held to be an internal one and thus not for publication. I suppose many (perhaps almost all) large organisations have internal reviews from time to time which are not made public largely, one suspects, because no one in their right mind would want to read them.
But the Ashes review? I can think of at least 40,000 people who would want to read this document, they being the ones who travelled to Australia to watch England lose 4-1 against one of the poorer Australian sides of recent years. We might add to that all those who stayed awake in the early hours to watch on TV, all those who checked the scores next day in the newspapers, on the radio…anywhere. All those just vaguely interested in cricket. In sum, quite a large audience. The reason given by Richard Gould for non-publication is that it would give an advantage to future opponents. Now this is too bizarre to be credible: are we to believe that the ECB has now come up with some future plans and stratagems so detailed and specific that were they to fall into the hands of the enemy any advantage would be lost. By analogy, if Villeneuve had only got advanced copy of Nelson’s tactics for Trafalgar, the outcome would have been different (in fact he probably did, and anyway the outcome would have been the same…as Villeneuve himself correctly predicted). If this is true (the ECB bit…not Nelson) then why were not these highly sensitive tactics actually used during the winter? Indeed, for virtually everything that Gould, Key and McCullum have said since the Ashes defeat, the obvious question is: why didn’t you know that beforehand?
And what have they said?
Well, in place of publication, the ECB invited some cricket journalists to a meeting at Lord’s where they were shown two slides of a powerpoint “presentation” and invited to ask questions. From their reports it seems unlikely that much was discovered. Gould is quoted as having said that it had been important “to take time to reflect” and that the ECB “have put issues in place”. Pressed as to what might have emerged from the “reflection” and exactly what “issues” were now positioned (and indeed what on earth do statements like these actually mean), he came up with three headings: “alignment with the domestic game”, “planning and preparation”, and “culture”. Clearly a qualification for ECB employment is an ability to say only the anodyne. One can imagine a new recruit being sheepish about an ability to speak foreign languages but being calmly confident in his/her full fluency in “Platitudinous”. It is also important, of course, to be able to say, at any moment, as a Pavlovian instinct, that “lessons have been learned” and changes will be made “going forwards”.
These three “reflections” (or are they “issues”?) do actually have meaning… as we all know:
1 “Alignment with the domestic game” means: “Talk to the counties”. Darren Lehmann was widely quoted as saying that no one, no one, from the England set-up had spoken to him last season about the upcoming Ashes tour (or indeed anything else). Lehmann is a former Australian coach (and an unsuccessful one…which in itself might have been useful). And anyway, why aren’t such conversations a matter of course. In other words, why don’t they already do this?
2. “Planning and preparation” means: “We should have done some”.
3. “Culture” (was ever a word more misused?) means: “stop the players getting pissed and into fights”.
Now, on the face of it, this doesn’t feel like information which would be dangerous were it to be leaked to other national sides. Can you imagine this summer’s tourists thinking: “Oh we are going to be up against it this year - England management are talking to the counties”.
One suspects that the real reason for non-publication is that the content (if it has indeed been a thorough review) is embarrassing – quite possibly to all parties – and they can’t say so. So, let’s say “lessons have been learned” as often as possible and hope that will do.
But it won’t.
There are, as always, demands for sackings following defeat and some writers have seen the collective embarrassment as saving the jobs of all. Key said that “people want punishment”. I’m not sure that’s true, although it might seem so from his position. Personally, I would settle for honesty and straightforwardness…rather too much to ask for, it seems.
But what could they say? Well, how about starting with “sorry” and then going on to admit that the planning was all but non-existent; that the white ball series against New Zealand was close to no preparation at all; that the selection of Pope and Crawley were poor decisions; that the absence of a fielding coach might have a causal link to the dreadful catching in a couple of Tests; that Smith is a fine batter but his ‘keeping was awful and he played some truly stupid shots; that Potts should never have been selected for the final Test, went for a near record number of runs in the first innings and was unbowlable in the second; that being drunk is poor preparation for any sporting event; that…well, add your favourite here………
The whole thing is compounded, of course, by the fatuous excuses that they have (presumably collectively) come up with; thus, selecting Pope was, for Key, “overvaluing loyalty”. Also overvalued was having a “settled team”. Why did they “overvalue” these things? Are they not supposed to know what they are doing in these matters? Key’s response was that “we need to be more ruthless in selection…that we’ve created an environment where there are not enough consequences”. Why, again, would they (why would anyone) do that? We, “need the protection of a four to six weeks window before an Ashes tour”. Good idea…why wasn’t one in place? And on and, drearily, on. Gould said on camera that, “we need to ensure that we have the right space and time to enable our players to perform at the highest level”. Indeed, that is called preparation. So why wasn’t it done? Perhaps the nadir of all this tosh was Gould’s reaction to the drunkenness. What he actually said was: “We want to give people the freedom to make their own decisions, but sometimes we need to provide them with more strict parameters”. As oxymoronic statements go, you have to admit it was pretty good.
Would sacking either of this platitudinous pair make any difference? Would getting rid of McCullum help? McCullum might be excused from the accusation of puerility, principally because he hardly ever speaks. More to the point, if all three left, who would replace them and what are the chances that their replacements would not imbibe the same thesaurus of empty statements? I think we all probably know the answer to this question.
This & That
Northamptonshire head coach Darren Lehmann has said England players do not play enough county cricket and selectors have overlooked talent in the domestic game. Lehmann, now in his second year at Wantage Road, is hopeful the ECB will have a better link with the first class counties this season following the humiliating Ashes series defeat this winter.
Lehmann has spoken with England managing director Rob Key and Test captain Ben Stokes after claiming he had not seen an English selector during his first year in charge. Northamptonshire's 27-year-old left-hander Saif Zaib was the leading run-scorer in the country last season with 1,425 at an average of just under 65, including six centuries, but was overlooked for a place on the England Lions' winter tour.
"I think you will see a really marked improvement in that regard from the ECB," former Australia batter Lehmann told BBC Look East. "The [England] players don't play enough county cricket. They should play more but that's not my call. "I think the ECB wants to get close to the counties, they don't want to be that matriarch, you feel like they want to make sure all the counties are listened to and that they're getting around to watch as much as they can.
"There's a lot of good county players that could have been on the tour if they'd probably seen and took notice of them a little bit more."
Former England captain Mike Gatting and a group of high-profile former Middlesex players have written to members after calling on the club's chair to resign, saying the club has been "poorly led for too long". Gatting and former England and Middlesex players Mark Ramprakash, Mike Selvey, John Emburey and Clive Radley, plus West Indies legend Desmond Haynes, say chair Richard Sykes has rejected calls to commit to standing down.
Middlesex begin their campaign in Division Two of the County Championship against Gloucestershire at Lord's on Friday. The 11-time county champions have been in the second tier in five of the past six full seasons. "As former players of Middlesex, we have become increasingly disturbed at the way the club has been allowed to sink to its current level," the letter says."The players are a product of their environment and in areas where the standard of coaching has been poor, the players have not been sufficiently challenged resulting in inadequate standards becoming the norm, insufficient to compete at the level to which we should aspire."
Middlesex have appointed former New Zealand player Peter Fulton as men's head coach. The 47-year-old, who played 23 Tests for his country, has agreed a three-year deal and joins from Canterbury. He comes in to replace Dane Vilas, who had been in interim charge of the county side since Richard Johnson left last June. Fulton has been in charge of Canterbury since 2020 and led them to the Plunkett Shield - New Zealand's equivalent of the County Championship - in his first year in charge. He takes over a Middlesex side that finished fourth in Division Two of the County Championship in 2025 and made the quarter-finals of the One Day Cup.
The IPL got off to a cracking start last week. The Sunrisers Hyderabad top four having a fearsome look about them: Abhishek Sharma, Travis Head,
Ishan Kishan, Heinrich Klaasen (wk) but in the first match only Ish Kish with 80 from 38 balls made a strong impact taking his side to 201 for 9. But RCB strolled home with four overs to spare with Kohli and Paddikal leading the way. In Match 2 KKR rattled up 220 for 4 but this proved a straightforward task for the Mumbai Indians with Rohit Sharma and Rickleton leading the way.
New Zealander Brett Randell has become the first bowler in the 254-year history of first-class cricket to take five wickets in five balls. The 30-year-old created the piece of cricket history playing for Central Stags on day two of their match against Northern Districts in New Zealand's Plunket Shield. Randall took the first wicket of his five in a row at the end of his second over before taking the rest from the start of his third over as Northern Districts slumped from 4-0 to 9-5. The right-arm medium pacer had figures of 5-2 at that point and took a wicket with the first ball of his fourth over to make it six wickets in eight balls.He later dismissed another batter and finished with figures of 7-25.
Thompson Matters
Who said this and to whom?
‘I have a hundred more important things to do than speak to you.’
Was it a) Trump to Kier Starmer
b) Kier Starmer to Trump
c) England’s Director of Cricket, Rob Key, to Liam Livingstone
or d) King Charles III to Trump
No prizes, although b) or d) would be perfectly plausible.
It would seem that one of the hundred important things Key has to do is organise his new County Insights Group who will be charged with repairing the relationship between the England set-up and the County game. The first of these four meetings with Baz will take place remotely as McCullum is in New Zealand until some unspecified date, returning just in time for the Test Series against the Black Caps. So more of a County Out of Sight Group then.
There will be two coaches/Directors of Cricket from each division who will feed back to Key and Baz. The meetings are due to be quarterly which, if true, means it’s quite likely two of them will be in the close season. It will be fascinating to see how many new faces appear in the England Test team as a consequence but the likes of Haseeb Hameed, Saif Zaib and Jack Leach are unlikely to be holding their breath.
McCullum has said, ‘County and Test cricket are probably slightly different games.’ In that he is probably right since these days County games generally last a day longer than many England Test Matches. Key on the other hand recently gave an interview with Sky Sports singing the praises of McCullum. In a four-minute rant he hardly drew breath and despite admitting recently that he had not given the County game sufficient attention there was little to suggest that anything will change and that if you’re in you’re in and if you’re out, you’re out.
Rangers Blues
George, like me, is in his eighth decade as a Rangers supporter and is even more worried than me that they might find themselves in the playoffs and get promoted to the misery of the Premiership. It would subject us to another season of going round the country getting duffed up by all and sundry and probably losing most of the home games as well. Following the good spell at the end of 2025 and over Christmas his emails were progressively more panicky. I had to keep assuring him that everything was in hand and their essential inconsistency would prevail.
Last weekend he sent me this:
Last 6 results, in order, as you probably know:
0-5
0-2
0-4
0-1
3-1
6-1
Any explanation?
I replied: Those four defeats will prove critical to avoiding the Play offs.
He seemed greatly relieved and acknowledged that “mid table obscurity” is now guaranteed.
But his golfing chums have now got him worried about the proposed eight play-off places for next year and fears that Mid Table Mediocrity will be even harder to achieve.
Crocks Corner
In this era when bowlers have to carry out inappropriate fitness regimes and then spend more time on the treatment bench than actually bowling this feature celebrates the manifold complaints of these elite athletes. Feel free to submit anything you notice
You couldn’t make this stuff up:
“England captain Ben Stokes is still recovering after surgery on a broken cheekbone and will not play for Durham next week as planned. Stokes, 34, was hit by a ball when working in the nets with Durham's academy players in early February and had surgery a week later. Coach Ryan Campbell said Stokes was scheduled to play the season opener against Kent starting on Friday, but the club are still awaiting clearance from specialists.
Campbell said he does not expect the all-rounder to feature until matches against Worcestershire from 8 May and the reverse fixture against Kent at Beckenham from 15 May. If Stokes does not return sooner, those fixtures would be his only red-ball county matches before England's first Test of the summer against New Zealand from 4 June.”
Surely no one thinks the selectors could possibly pick this guy:
“Fast bowler Mark Wood has admitted life after cricket is in his thoughts if recovery from his latest injury "doesn't go well". The 36-year-old returned to Test cricket in the 2025-26 Ashes series after 15 months out with an elbow injury followed by knee surgery. He returned to bowl just 11 overs in the first Ashes Test in November, which England lost inside two days.
He then missed the second Test with swelling in the knee and was subsequently ruled out of the tour. "It's real slow going with the stage I'm at in my career," said Wood as he gave an update on his recovery to the Tailenders podcast. "It's quite a fine balance, where if I push this too hard then that could be it." The Durham bowler explained there had been improvement in the condition of his knee, with his recovery split into two phases "It's six-week blocks, it's not day by day, it's specialists and rescans every six weeks. It's been improving since what I got told had been an explosion in my knee in Australia."So every six weeks has been an improvement. I've started running now and I'm hoping by the next block it's in a position where maybe I can start lightly bowling."
King Cricket Matters
King Cricket is never shy about speaking out
We are absolutely adamant that England cannot possibly withstand public and media appetite for change in the wake of the Ashes drubbing. (Does 4-1 actually qualify as a drubbing given the three previous scorelines Down Under were all worse than that?) One way or another, rightly or wrongly, action must be seen to be taken and if the captain, coach and managing director of men’s cricket are all keeping their jobs then other heads will have to roll instead – players’ heads.
This is the way it has to work. If people want skulls and you explain that, “actually, sorry, no skulls – we’re just going to do things slightly differently instead,” then you absolutely cannot just carry on much as you were doing previously. England have to demonstrate how they’ve changed. They have to put forward clear, visible differences.
In short, there still have to be skulls.
“We’ve overvalued loyalty and overvalued having a settled team”
That’s what Rob Key apparently concluded recently.
“We thought what we wanted to do is make sure we have a team that is settled out there. But what that does is it creates an environment where there’s not enough consequence. We need to be more ruthless with our selection.”
It’s time to unsettle everyone with disloyalty, basically. So who’s in the firing line?
Zak Crawley – OUT
Honestly? We think he’s out. After all these years of Teflon mediocrity, there are visible holes in Crawley’s protective coating now. If the loyalty threshold truly has moved then he surely now finds himself on the wrong side of it as an exemplary victim.
Unless he makes a million runs in the early weeks of the County Championship – which unfortunately for him is a thing he’s never before been able to do – then Crawley will surely become a warning to all of the England players that actually, you know what, we’ve decided there should be consequences.
This would be quite a peculiar development given the batter’s been such a fixture of the side and it could also prove terminal for his Test career. While he is still young for a Test opener – during the Ashes we pointed out that Mike Carberry, Nick Compton, Mark Stoneman, Jason Roy, Rory Burns and Alex Lees were all older than he is now when they made their debuts – it’s quite hard to go back on dropping someone who has already amassed such a sizeable body of so-so work.
See, told you Zak Crawley was the very best batter in the whole wide world
Crawley has been given a great many opportunities to prove himself – enough, you could argue, that he has already done precisely that. For years and years, he has generally done just enough to maintain the idea of Zak Crawley, without ever really managing to move things beyond that.
Crawley’s upcoming task is therefore not really to prove himself, but to disprove himself.
Ollie Pope – STILL OUT
Technically, Pope’s been dropped already, which is just one of several reasons why it’s probably a little unfair that he’s so often lumped in with Crawley as a batter who deserves to face sterner judgement.
While the two men have played the same number of Tests and roughly the same number of first-class matches, Pope has hit nine Test hundreds to Crawley’s five and also averages almost 50 per cent more than him in first-class cricket with twice as many three-figure scores.
He is, in short, a far better batter and could probably do okay if someone could prevent him falling victim to some of the more broad brush team messaging that doesn’t really benefit him.
Jamie Smith – NOT OUT
Jamie Smith played the worst shot of the winter, but the brain of many an otherwise excellent cricketer has momentarily melted in the Ashes environment before now and Smith had also been shouldering a sizeable workload in the field.
His first Ashes went wrong, but that alone shouldn’t see him ejected from the side, should it? He might need to find a bit of early season form, but England want to do well in five-Test series and in the one before the Ashes, less than a year ago, Smith made 184 not out against India as well as several other useful scores.
Will Jacks – OUT
If anything Will Jacks’ fantastic T20 World Cup performances served only to better highlight the utter pointlessness of his presence in England’s Test team.
Did you see… Steve Smith backed into a corner by the legendary finger spin of Will Jacks?
With the red ball, he is not a spin bowler, but a cricketer who sometimes bowls spin. This would be a lot more useful to England if he also happened to be a Test batter, but unfortunately, as things stand, he is not.
In the longest format, Jacks is a buyer of wickets and a scorer of meaningless consolation runs. England need more than that.
Brydon Carse – PROBABLY NOT OUT
Brydon Carse had a terrible Ashes in which he was the second-highest wicket-taker. This combination of facts is still hard to make sense of. We feel we summed up the essence of his experience in the article linked below.
Someone tell Brydon Carse he’s getting tonked – we’re not sure he’s noticed
If England can avoid giving him the new ball, we’d guess Carse is probably still in the team? Isn’t he? Maybe not. We have no idea.
Matt Potts – A BIT FURTHER OUT
Matt Potts is in that age-old position where he shouldn’t really be judged too harshly based on one hospital pass appearance at the arse end of a disastrous Ashes tour, but he also unavoidably will be.
England had worked their way down the pecking order when Potts played in Sydney but you feel they’ll have to get a little bit lower still before he gets to play again.
Jofra Archer and Mark Wood – NOT OUT, BUT ARE THEY EVER TRULY IN ANYWAY?
It seems faintly insane to suggest Jofra Archer or Mark Wood might be members of England’s first XI given the availability disclaimers inherent in such an assertion. In that respect, it’s business as usual really.
Wood is currently recovering from what he was told was “an explosion” in his knee during the Ashes. Archer is in the equally familiar position where he’s fit enough to bowl four overs but no-one seems much inclined to engineer a situation where he might prove himself capable of bowling a greater number.
So what are we looking for then? One opener and one spinner, plus maybe an opening bowler if they conclude that a Gus Atkinson, Brydon Carse and Josh Tongue attack is a bit too first-changey?
Old Danes Gathering
The biennial Old Danes Gathering has come round again and, as usual, it will be held at Shepherds Bush CC on the Friday of their Cricket Week - July 24. Old Danes their wives and friends will all be welcome. The clubhouse and bar will be open from noon and visitors normally arrive around 2pm. Please advise me at the email address below if you plan to attend so that I can add you to the attendees list which I will circulate to encourage others to come.
Googlies Website
All the back editions of Googlies can be found on the G&C website. There are also many photographs most of which have never appeared in Googlies.
www.googliesandchinamen.com
Googlies and Chinamen
is produced by
James Sharp
Broad Lee House
Combs
High Peak
SK23 9XA
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