When the England chairman of selectors, David Graveney, referred to Graham Thorpe's inclusion in the Ashes squad as a "risk", his main worry was that Thorpe would walk out on the tour halfway through. This morning came the news that he has walked out before the tour has even begun. Just when it looked like the dust was finally settling on a harrowing battle for custody with his wife over their two children, Henry and Amelia, Thorpe has changed his mind again and will not now go to Australia.
This is good news for the Thorpe children, and bad - but not disastrous - news for England. Yes, Thorpe is England's best middle-order batsman and canniest one-day finisher, when the mood takes him. Yes, the Aussies respect him, because he is a scrapper and averages nearly 46 against them. Yes, England will miss his acrobatic leaps at third slip.
And yet. There is nothing worse than a moody tourist, who is capable of unsettling the whole side, and Thorpe is notorious for being unable to leave his personal problems off the field: witness his lame performance in the first Test against India at Lord's. A half-hearted Thorpe is usually a liability, and the door could now be open for Mark Ramprakash to return.
Thorpe has already announced his retirement from one-day internationals, and you wonder whether this decision is the precursor to the end of his England career full stop. If it is, he will go down as one of the most unfulfilled batsmen in England's history. The stats are very good: 5109 runs in 77 Tests at 41.88 with 11 Test hundreds and a one-day average of 37.18. But how many more runs would he have made if injury and abstention hadn't prevented him from playing in 28 of England's last 53 Tests, including nine of the last ten against Australia? Based on his Test average, the answer is nearly 2000 runs. It may be too early to write his obituary, but in an era when England have struggled to produce top-quality middle-order players, that really is a crying shame.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"Nass wandered up from mid-off to politely shake Hoggy by the hand [...]. I thought I was playing with Peter May and Trevor Bailey" - Ronnie Irani explains how the new system of referring lbw appeals has really excited the players.
SILLY POINT
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true," blathered James Branch Cabell, a 20th-century American novelist and essayist who had completely passed Silly Point by until we opened the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations in a gratuitous attempt to appear erudite.
Cabell never met Alec Stewart, possibly because he died six years before the Gaffer uttered his first cliché. But Stewart clearly hasn't been reading his Cabell either, because recent statements suggest that Stewie has turned his nose up at the best of all possible worlds and barged straight into the realms of cloud cuckoo land. With thoughts turning to next year's World Cup, Stewart, who lost the England captaincy after the disastrous 1999 campaign, was in no mood to let reality get in the way of blind optimism. "The 1992 side was the best I've played in. It reached the final and could have won it. I'd like to think the 2003 side can go one better than that," he droned, as a flying pig took a chunk out of a blue moon on a month of Sundays.
So how come Alec was feeling so smart about England's prospects? "We are just beginning to get the hang of one-day cricket," he said, in a phrase that will send shivers down the spine of Australians, South Africans and Bangladeshis the world over. Stewie was pumped up now and even indulged in some hard-nosed Stalinist revisionism to keep the juices flowing. "The records show I've played in three World Cups," he stated, "but we hardly turned up for the last two, so I don't count them." In which case we wish Alec all the best as he heads off to Australia in October for his first ever crack at winning the Ashes.
COW CORNER
Dressing-room pranks are part of cricket's folklore, but they tend to be a little one-dimensional. Pick any combination of Allan Lamb's mobile phone, an implausible rubber viper, shaving foam and Dickie Bird, and you've just about covered all the possibilities. Press-box pranks, though, are a more spiteful beast, partly because journalists tend to be a little more devious than players, and partly because some newspaper editors get a little tetchy - the picky sods - when their writers file a load of old cobblers.
In most cases, one journalist won't deliberately mislead another. A few years ago, a wet-behind-the-ears reporter for a local paper was on the verge of filing an exclusive about the previously unknown blood-tie between Darren Cousins, the Northamptonshire seamer who was playing for Essex at the time, and Robin Cousins, the former Olympic figure-skater. They were, his colleagues assured him, cousins. But conscience is a strong thing, and the reporter was spared humiliation at the last moment.
Martin Rogers of the Mirror wasn't so fortunate. Some of Rogers' story-gathering tactics had started to irk his fellow pressmen, so a few of them decided to set a little trap during the recent Headingley Test between England and India. A tale was concocted that Mick Jagger was all set to ease the cash-flow problems of one of the minor counties, Berkshire. Peering at the story on a laptop that wasn't his, Rogers made matters worse by misreading Yorkshire for Berkshire and promptly filed what must have seemed like a pretty tasty, and wholly believable, story. The hoax was eventually revealed to him, but not before the Mirror had already decided to lead with the news on next day's back page. The Yorkshire Post then followed it up as well. News travels fast, especially when sneaky journos want it to.
THE WEEK IN CRICKET
Brian Lara pulls out of West Indies' tour of India with suspected hepatitis ... Shane Warne to captain Hampshire for next two seasons after Robin Smith steps down ("I'm very soft") ... ICC's Anti-Corruption Unit satisfied that Pakistan didn't throw Champions' Trophy game v Sri Lanka ... Pakistan sack coach Mudassar Nazar ... England hammer Zimbabwe ... India hammer England ... Title-holders Yorkshire are relegated from Div One of county championship ... Former Aussie Test player John Inverarity signs two-year contract to coach Warwickshire ... Nasser Hussain and Ashley Giles named in BBC poll to select Most Fanciable XI at Champions' Trophy ... Players from the leading nine Test nations join FICA (the Federation of International Cricketers' Association) after the dispute with ICC over player sponsorship ... Zimbabwe captain Heath Streak breaks his shoulder in Sri Lankan tri-shaw accident.
THE WEEK AHEAD
Wed Sept 25: India v South Africa in 1st semi-final of Champions' Trophy ... Fri Sept 27: Australia v Sri Lanka in 2nd semi-final ... Sun Sept 29: the final.
