News from Jamaica

England have just made a monumental cockup of the fairly simple task of batting for a day and a bit and setting the WIndies some sort of target. OK it's Sabina Park but they are quite beatable these days and we scored 318 in the first innings. Oh, the memories. For my generation, cricket was Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Clive Lloyd, Joel Garner, Andy Roberts and the incomparable Malcolm Marshall. (It was also Jeff Thompson and the equally incomparable Dennis Lillee, but we don't admit that. For the benefit of non-British readers I should point out that the whole purpose of cricket, if not of life itself, is to beat Australia, not to sit back and admire them.)

The blackwash of 1984, Tony Gregg failing to make them grovel in 1976 (was that a long, hot summer?), the abandoned match at this ground in 1998, Courtney and Curtley taking over from the older boys, two World Cup finals at Lords, and a hundred other memories of watching very magnificent cricket reform in the mind, usually with England on the other end looking like naughty schoolboys. We thought those days were gone, but it seems we can still do it when we try.