Red ball rampage

England won another test match making it ten out of the last eleven and spanking a very good home team, this highlighted by the stat it’s our first win in New Zealand since the tour when Anderson and Broad first bowled in tandem fifteen years ago.  It’s all going so well there’s very little to write, the team picks itself and everyone is contributing at some stage.  Or to put it another way, they’re all doing their jobs.  It seemed bizarre that England had virtually no practice but could still come out and impose themselves on decent opposition but there was no point when I could imagine anything other than an England win.  Was this because I was asleep for most of the play or am I starting to believe?  A year some people were talking about a ‘red ball reset’ now we are enjoying a red ball rampage, by this time next year test cricket could be changed forever.

McCarthy’s bar by Pete McCarthy.

Pete McCarthy is an Englishman with Irish heritage and family in Ireland’s wild west.  Here he takes a Bryson style tour of west Ireland trying to make sense of himself, is he English or Irish?  The book was written in 1999 and describes a country I knew well at that time and I loved that I could recognise familiar characters and scenes.  The names and towns may have been different but I’ve experienced almost identical scenarios.  One of McCarthy’s rules of travel is to never pass a pub that bears his name (and very many with other names) of which there are very many and his liking for a pint is the start of many amusing stories.  The Irish pub experience and the unlikely course these evenings can take is something else I’ve enjoyed many times.

The late nineties were a boom time for Irish tourism and McCarthy laments the fake Oirishness creeping into and spoiling the towns he knew in childhood.  In trying to give tourists an Irish experience the country is in danger of losing its identity.   Certainly by the end of the twentieth century Ireland as he knew it seems to be in the process of changing forever.  This would be the only Ireland I’ve ever known, did I experience the real Ireland?  Yes I believe I did.  But how much more has it changed in the two decades since I last visited?  Maybe I should find out some time or will I not like what I find?  Either way I liked this book.