“Morning everyone.” [to be said in a crude Australian accent attempting to impersonate the late Richie Benaud – come on, you’ve all tried it at least once…]

It was always going to take something like a global pandemic for us to have enough time to write about cricket again. Fortunately, our focus was never fixed solely on live matches as they happen or modern cricket (after consultation with blockeverythingmolesworth over a decanter of vintage port, we’ve agreed that ‘modern cricket’ includes anything after The Great War, and should, in general, be regarded with rank suspicion).

As such there’s still plenty to write about, and quite a bit has happened since we last wrote in February 2017 (plus, you know, 200-plus years of interesting cricket before that – just wait until you hear about “Silver Billy” Beldham!).

All of which means that we don’t need to dust off and fire up our copy of International Cricket Captain 2000 to emulate the kick of live cricket, but can instead delve into the vaults, from both the recent and more distant past.

And if nothing else good comes of Covid-19 (not the name of a new ECB odd-numbered over competition), it’s the fact that it’s put the kibosh on the inane ‘The Hundred’, at least for this year, and perhaps forever. The cricketing gods work in mysterious ways…

Writing again after such a long lay-off is much the same as the first winter net of the year – aside from not being able to walk properly for several days afterwards, one needs to ease back into it. Therefore, our treatise on the evolution of the quarter seam since the eighteenth century isn’t quite ready (in fact, we’re not sure the cricketing world is quite ready for something quite so earth-shattering).

To start things off, we’ve been back through the archives and have dug out some of our favourite and more popular posts and series, including the one where a friend of Bryan “Bomber” Wells confirmed a story we’d speculated might not have happened; the one where Jack Russell’s son popped up in the comments of a post about his dad; and the one about David Boon that accounts for about 90% of all our views. You can read some of these by clicking the links below:

Great Cricket Drinking Episodes
No. 1: Headingley 1981
No. 2: David Boon
No. 3: The Ashes 2005

English Cricketing Eccentrics
No. 1: Bryan “Bomber” Wells
No. 2: Colin Ingleby-McKenzie
No. 3: Jack Russell

Odd XIs
The Useless XI
The Topsy-Turvy XI
The Yips XI (now with newer, sometimes HD clips, as most of the original ones had been taken down)

And with any luck and sufficient coronavirus-induced absence of other things to do, we’ll have some new posts for you in the weeks to come…

Those of you sad and committed enough to read our musings over the years (just me, then…) will have noticed our output going from a chaotic but rapid three to a well-judged two and finally to a strolled Inzamam single in the past couple of seasons.

We still love watching, listening to, reading and writing about cricket, but life has moved on a bit and the time and desire to write as much as we did has waned somewhat. There’s a nice circularity to the timing: we started writing as England were getting absolutely humiliated on the subcontinent; five years on, naff-all has changed really.

We hope that we’ve given plenty of you a brief chuckle or two over the past few years (our most-read post has had well over 20,000 views, so someone must be reading this stuff) and provided a slightly different and occasionally interesting look at the game.

(This’ll definitely relegate Alastair Cook to the second or third most important cricket-related announcement today. And with DRS likely to come in across the board soon, there’s almost nothing left to complain about.)

We are certain that this is not the last cricket writing we will do, perhaps even on this blog, but for the time being the players are off the field and there’s no prospect of an imminent resumption…