Ashes to ashes

So, England (well, nine Englishmen and two South Africans) won The Ashes again? Thankfully, we seem to have been spared the mass hysteria of last time (and hopefully the MBEs that went with it). Let’s face it, being a two team series, even before a ball was bowled England had a 50% chance of winning (increasing to something like 84.6% if they happened to win three of the five tosses!).

Now, I have nothing against cricket – I can see why people enjoy an informal knockabout on the village green, I just can’t fathom why people would want to pay serious money to see the likes of test cricket and one day finals where the result is largely determined by the toss of a coin. Sorry, until cricket introduces a more reasonable, less fairground system of deciding who bats first, I’m afraid I won’t be able to take the sport seriously.

Either that or Lords replaces the entire 25-day Ashes series with a ten minute ‘best of five’ toss-up, with the winning captain taking home The Ashes, removing the need for any of this increasingly unnecessary cricket mullarkey. Sounds fair enough to me.