EDITOR’S LETTER
Fever pitch
Well, we wanted something to get our teeth into! Two Tests in, and minds collectively lost. A brace of objectively great games that roared and rattled along, swinging back and forth between one lot high on their own supply and the other lot – ateam that, as of now, hours before the toss at Leeds, appears to have forgotten how to lose. England: mercurial, hubristic, compelling – which is just how they like it. Australia: cleverer, faster, smarter. The grown-ups in the room; for the most part. Meanwhile, all around us: wildness. I wonder if the feverish nature of the cricket on the field feeds the lunacy off it. Who’s to say (hear me out) there’s not some subliminal causal link between, say, Stokes’ declaration on day one of the series – day one! – and a farage of chinless duffers hurling abuse at a mild-mannered Asian cricketer in a baggy green cap for having the temerity to walk past them in their pavilion? Perhaps when Rishi Sunak makes an actual official statement regarding Australia’s embrace of the dark arts, it’s actually more projection than condemnation? (Relax. I’m only joking. Still, it’s not untrue that I had to be held back from hurling an iPad in the Mediterranean after Stokes pulled them in at Edgbaston. Look, it’s the Ashes. It sends us all doolally.)