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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 26/03/2018 09:59 by BarmierKev.

Thanks for sharing. I would have loved to have gone, but the weather beat me.

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Barmy Kev
I'm only here for the tele

Wish I could have been there. Always been my ultimate Middx idol. Future of the CC is a worry but it has been written off regularly over many years. I think we will see more players become s

Sounds like a good evening. Sky have a programme in which Atherton chats with Bearley for an hour, where as ever he is interesting and does not trot out the clichés of most sports interviews.

Intended to say become specialists. In reality it’s already happening now.

Thanks, LL. As a teenager I was passionate about both current affairs and cricket, and the MCC's role in the D'Oliveira affair led to me becoming disillusioned about cricket for some time. It was only the stand taken by the likes of Mike Brearley and John Arlott that provided any hope that there actually were some people involved in cricket who recognised that the sport could not exist in isolation from the wider world. Great to see that he's still going strong.

Thank you for this, an evening I wanted attend but was unable to due to a present booked event. A good review!

As an aside on the South Africa boycott issue, I note that all twenty Australian wickets in the Test just completed were taken by bowlers who would not have been allowed to play in the 1960s.

As it happens, the argument about sport and politics is very much with us again this week.


Adelaide

Many thanks, an interesting evening. I have the book; it's interesting and thoughtful, but not bedtime reading. You need to be wide awake to follow the trains of thought!

I thoroughly recommend the Peter Oborne book on Basil d'Oliveira and the entire episode that led to apartheid - era South Africa being ostracised by the worldwide sporting community.

It reads like a spy thriller at some points, with a bit of cricket thrown in as well!

Brears' latest is a weighty tome, and I am a third of the way through it. It does fall back upon some anecdotes told in a different light than in "The Art of Captaincy", but now that I have got the pace of it, I am enjoying this as a more cerebral approach to the whole art of playing sport or life and feeling at one with the subject.