Talking sport

Given a table...

...some refreshment, and the right company, and the conversation might get onto the best type of delivery to bowl in the death overs. The Yorker? The slower ball? The slower ball bouncer?

And, given the right company, no-one will be asking what a death over is, no-one will need a definition of a Yorker. They will all have faced more than enough Yorkers, and worn them on their toes and insteps.

Given those happy circumstances, the discussion may turn to who the best death overs bowler is; or where in the order Bell should ideally be batting.

Or the conversation may turn to whether the number of Premiership clubs reverting to 4-4-2 is a retrograde step, or whether it's a great way to use playing resources and get some good wide attacking options when in possession.

They will not be regurgitating verbatim the rubbish the telly pundits and tabloid journalists produce. They will know who Bumble is. They will know what batsmen swinging like rusty gates means. They will know, unlike Karen Brady when she was something high up at Birmingham City, that at their local rivals, Atkinsons Ron and Dalian were, respectively, white and black, and not father and son.

These tables will not be fooled by, will not tolerate those pretenders who lack the real vocabulary and depth of knowledge.

They may have read...

CLR James

I've been saving this. I dipped into it recently.

The book seems widely accepted to be not just one of the best cricket books ever written, and not just one of the best sport books ever written, but to be one of the best books ever written.

Early on CLR James describes his boyhood reading habits. He read voraciously, and returned to Thackeray's Vanity Fair regularly, between other books. He says he never realised it was considered a classic, nor considered something that should be on everyone's reading list. He read it because he liked reading it. That's true of so many of those 'classics' that, as soon as there's no pressure to read them, leave you wondering why it took you so long to get around to them.