Ashes bloggers open new chapter for cricket

encountered them, they were no longer in the bishop’s house, or even his palace. They were lining two long shelves of Blackwell’s book depository. How they turned up there, I don’t know. How my father found himself there is even more mysterious and certainly lost in the mists of time.

But although dad is no longer around, the bishop’s books are and now fill two long shelves of my brother’s home. Some are by this paper’s venerable former cricket correspondent E W Swanton; many concern the controversial 1932-33 ‘Bodyline’ tour; all sport vividly designed covers and clipped, direct titles such as Just My Story by Len Hutton or My Life Story by Sir Jack Hobbs, or The Larwood Story by Harold Larwood.

The books were worth their weight in gold to my father. He pored over them, imbibing every drop of the fascinating mixture of self-aggrandising heroics and self-deprecating description that poured from their pages.

I found myself thinking about their measured tone and how different it is from the sports coverage of today when, by some inexplicable oversight in forward planning, I discovered I had managed to book my summer holiday in Sardinia during not one, but two Ashes Tests – and, to make things even worse, the Open.

Italian TV – or at least the bit we got in our holiday rental – does not believe in cricket. Or golf for that matter. Possibly because Italians excel in neither sport.