I’m not sure how many of us remember the tales of Jennings and Darbishire, written by Anthony Buckeridge in the last century. I read them, or at least the first few, in the ‘50s, enchanted by, and jealous of, the idealized version of my own prep school.
 
A large part of the appeal of the stories was the wordplay and jokes, and I remember one to this day. Jennings has a pet rat, which he keeps in a shoe box as I recall. He is discussing the rat with his amiable housemaster – Mr Carter? – and tells him, “I call it Gloucestershire, sir, because it’s got a long tail.”
 
If you are not smiling, I should explain that, in the cricket county championship of that year, Gloucestershire was noted for its poor batting. Batsmen 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 were incapable of reaching double figures and this was known, in cricketing parlance, as a “long tail”.
 
Don’t worry if you don’t get it; I haven’t heard the expression in years. But my point is that, back in 1957, I and all my fellow 8 year old chums did get it, just as we also got Buckeridge’s Latin puns! Cricket was part of our lives. We knew the scores each day; we knew who was top of the championship, and who was top of the averages.
 
I don’t know any of these today. The county scoreboards are not easily come by. Most of the time, one is not even aware that games are being played. There is no structure to the season. A four day county game or two is followed by a random assortment of one day games, one night games, and day-night games. And we are told that, next year, we shall have yet another competition of 10 overs of 10 balls. Or something like that anyway.

Even the test series is being subjected to the same cavalier treatment of the schedule. Starting today is the second test. And then, nothing until August – apart from ODIs. It’s madness. 

Matthew Engel, once the editor of Wisden, the cricketing bible, wrote recently about this lack of a season-long narrative, attributing his falling out of love with cricket to this vandalism. He used a religious metaphor: he still believes, but no longer attends church with any regularity or enjoyment. And he contrasts cricket with baseball, referring to his daily check on the box scores from St Louis (unaccountably he is a Cardinals fan) and wondering whether next year’s proposed two game series between the Sox and the Yankees may remind English sports fans of what they have lost, certainly what they are missing.
 
I suspect it will. Like Engel, I have embraced the game of baseball. And although I am currently listening to Test Match Special from Headingley, and although I managed a day the Oval test last year, it is baseball that keeps my summer on the daily straight and narrow.

The prospect of rain at Headingley could well England’s best chance of avoiding defeat in the test match.
 
But whatever happens, I fear that English cricket is already facing an innings defeat.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Been listening to the Dead’s run at the Warfield in October 1980. Not my favourite period by any means, but these are very good shows and the work of the digital engineers has worked wonders with some iffy SBDs and audience recordings. Also, on the 11th, John Cippolina makes a guest appearance.

It was midnight UK time when the Sox surrendered the last out and an Opening Day defeat to the Rays.
 
It had all started so well. The Sox arrived in St Petersburg after a short bus ride from Fenway South, with a 22-9 record in the pre-season. They were looking good. And they continued to do so for seven and half innings. Sale was awesome, nine strike-outs, six shut-out innings. The hitting was fine. A Laurel and Hardy moment in the Rays’ outfield gave Nunez an inside-the-park home run. Barnes pitched a 1-2-3.
 
To be honest, it was all pretty routine. A good day at the office. What could possibly go wrong?
 
Pretty much everything. This is why we watch sport, because you couldn’t predict what happened. No-one could expect the implosion that followed, not even the Red Sox Nation, and we’ve seen it all over the years.
 
Kelly couldn’t throw a strike. He walked three. Carson Smith was no better, unable to get what he’s paid for, ground ball double plays rather than the triple that he did manage. Suddenly, we had conceded six runs. All the walks came home to roost. Why was the outfield so shallow?
 
Should Cora have called up young Bobby Poyner, a lefty but someone who has never pitched outside of Double A? Should he have brought in Kimbrel, the best closer in the MLB who he had talked about using in non-save situations?
 
By the time he had Poynter warming up, it was too late. We’d lost the game. Kimbrel never got up from the bench.
 
So far, so Red Sox. Defeat from the jaws of victory. Criticism of the coach for in-game decisions. Relief pitchers blowing a lead. It’s happened before, back on Opening Day 2003, against the same club. The same 4-0 lead from Pedro. The same final score. I remember it well, as I will remember this Opening Day.
 
But there are 161 games to go. And I like the look of the Town Nine this year. I’ve watched a fair number of the Spring Training games, and although I have to keep telling myself that it is only Spring Training, the record was good and the way we won those 22 games was even better.
 
I know that I will have issues with some of Cora’s decisions. It’s all pretty obvious from where I’m sitting, on my sofa, with a glass of wine at hand. It’s a great deal harder from the dugout.
 
Kelly has never walked more than two in his whole career. Smith will get his command back. Cora had every right to expect better than they gave him.
 
So do we.
 
And we’ll get it. We have a powerful line-up. We have a great defense. When they’re all fit, we have a great rotation. And we have JD.
 
What could possibly go wrong?


Today from the everysmith vaults: The Dead on their first 'trip' to the UK and a crazy weekend at the Hollywood Festival outside Newcastle under Lyme. I've had a couple of AUDs for a while, but this is primarily SBD and it seems that the sound guys managed to keep their heads while all around them (including me) were losing theirs!

There are few sportsmen for whom my admiration extends beyond their skills and athletic ability. In fact, there are many whom I am sure I would positively dislike outside the football field, the baseball diamond, the cricket square. We would have nothing in common beyond the fact that they possess a talent I'm in awe of.
 
As fans, we seldom get the opportunity to put this proposition to the test. We don’t meet our sporting heroes, so they remain heroes. Even when we read of some particularly egregious behaviour or political opinion, they are still superstars. Our memories are of that superb goal, that home run or no hitter, that exquisite cover drive.
 
The exceptions prove the rule: Ali, David Ortiz, Garfield Sobers, Learie Constantine, Brian Clough, Romario.
 
To this off-the-top-of-my-head list, I wish to add the name of Cyrille Regis MBE.
 
Together with Laurie Cunningham and Brendan Batson, Cyrille was instrumental in achieving acceptance for black players in British football. When ‘the three degrees’ first played together, some season ticket holders at The Hawthorns sent back their tickets in protest. But the football that they played, and the way that they played it, appealed to the vast majority of fans, whatever their club allegiance and in so doing contributed immeasurably to defeating racism and bigotry on the terraces.

So I was over the moon, Brian, when Bobby Gould signed him for the Sky Blues in 1984. He played seven years and more than 200 games for Coventry and his strength and elegance and goals made him an instant favourite. But it was not solely that wondrous talent. He was, on and off the field, a perfect gentleman.
 
I heard Ian Wright quoted this morning: “My generation of black players were like Malcolm X. But Cyrille was Martin Luther King”.
 
I know this from personal experience. I met him socially only after he had moved on from the City. He would meet up from time to time with his City team-mates in Wilde’s, where he stood apart. Not literally – he would be as much part of any conversation as anyone else present; but his demeanour marked him out.
 
He was tall, slim, always well-dressed and very good-looking (when I introduced him to Jill, she looked up at him and said “No wonder my husband worships you!”).
 
He had that air of self-confidence and calmness which the rest of us  envy. He knew who he was and was content to be what he was.
 
He was a gentleman and a gentle man.
 
I am privileged to have seen him play the beautiful game so beautifully, and proud to have known him, if only a little.

The season ended after 166 games with another American League East title but also another ignominious exit in the divisional series. Marginally better than last year (we won a game!) but still not what we expect. For many clubs, it would have been an acceptable season. Not for us. In the Red Sox Nation, we expect more and better even if we accept each pitching failure, each inability to convert a bases loaded, no outs situation into runs, with a sense of resignation which is born of long and bitter experience.
 
It’s an essential part of our culture, almost a tradition. And, as tradition dictates, the knives must now come out.
 
Last night, my twitter feed was almost exclusively red: red pepper, red labour, red sox, red sox nation; the former preoccupied with changing the course of Brexit, the latter with changing the structure of a club which, put simply, isn’t good enough.
 
There are calls for the firing of Dave Dombrowski and/or John Farrell: “a fish rots from the head down” said one tweeter. There are attacks on David Price: “a sullen presence in the clubhouse”. There are references to our inability to replace Papi and incredulity that Dombrowski believed that Sandoval and Ramirez could do so. There is criticism of Porcello’s reversion to type after a Cy Young season in 2016, together with Sale’s decline in the final weeks of the regular season and, related to this, concern about the effectiveness of Carl Willis as pitching coach.
 
There’s a great deal more, but these are the principal issues, at least on my twitter feed. And I haven’t made it to Boston this year, so I haven’t picked up a sense of the zeitgeist in the city itself. But here’s my long distance view from the baseball desert that is Leamington Spa, England:
 
Farrell should go.
 
I know he has a World Series and two ALE titles. But he also has two last places. I know he’s a nice guy – a friend of Tito’s is a friend of mine – and the bar staff in the Island Creek Oyster Bar speak highly of him. It’s also clear that he has the back of his players, as we saw last night with Pedroia and as we recognized, with some embarrassment, during the Pricegate affair.
 
But I’m not convinced that he is the man to handle Dombrowski’s “win-now” line-up. (Actually, I’m not convinced by the Dombrowski approach at all, but that’s another issue.) As readers of my baseball posts know, I was not in favour of his appointment in the first place and regret Lovullo’s departure deeply. He was a great bench coach under Farrell, and there was a real buzz in Boston when he took over as Farrell recovered from cancer. This year, Lovullo has taken the unfancied D-backs to the play-offs, achieving pretty much the same record as the Sox with significantly fewer resources.
 
We can all second guess specific decisions – why did Sale come out for that final inning last night? – and it’s not Farrell’s fault that Price got injured.
 
But my sense is that the Sox need a shake-up to succeed next year. And the departure of Farrell would be the catalyst for that shake-up.
 
And his replacement?
 
The man for whom we all have total admiration and respect: the awesome legend that is Jason Varitek.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Jorma and Rick Danko playing together in a show from 1987. 

Yes, I know I promised to talk baseball this time, and I will very soon; but the season is only a couple of games in (Sox 2 for 2)  and right now I have to tell you about a couple of wonderful Sunday performances that I’ve been fortunate enough to witness in the last couple of weeks: first, Bach's St Matthew Passion and, a week later, Coventry City’s first appearance at Wembley since 1987.
 
For many years, in a different lifetime, Good Friday was the day on which Jill and I would schlep to Birmingham's magnificent Symphony Hall to see and hear this combination of religious mass and secular opera performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, with Willard White (now Sir Willlard White) as Christus. The sheer brilliance of the CBSO, rigorously rehearsed by Simon Rattle (now Sir Simon Rattle), the superb acoustics of the hall itself, and the power of the Symphony Hall organ (featuring a couple of pipes donated by everysmith – a different lifetime indeed!) made these afternoons among the highlights of my extensive experience of live music: right up there with Dylan in 1966, Kyril Kondrashin and the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1971 and the the Dead in 1972.
 
So when it was announced that the Armonico Consort & Baroque Orchestra directed by Christopher Monks was to perform the Passion on period instruments and that Ian Bostridge was to sing the role of evangelist, there was no doubt where we would be between 3pm and 6pm. We were not disappointed. Fortified with a glass of indifferent Chilean Merlot, we were transfixed - is that the right word for a performance of the Passion? – by an extraordinary performance, closer to what one suspects was the original sound than the power and magnificence of those Symphony Hall concerts.
 
Not necessarily better, but different in kind, in style, in its religiosity.

And there was a similar sense of religious fervour the following week, when I was one of more than 43,000 Coventry City supporters travelling to London on a pilgrimage in search of salvation from a season, indeed a decade, of disappointment.
 
It was a wonderful experience, although stressful in the extreme. Only the goals and the final whistle provided exhilaration. But we did it. And the joy in the City half of the ground – rather more than half actually – was palpable.
 
Owners SISU have destroyed the club, in the search for mammon, but Sunday showed that there is still a Coventry City Football Club and it exists in the hearts and minds of those players and those 43,000 fans.
 
It’s a broad church and its breadth and depth will not be diminished nor destroyed by a hedge fund.

​My special commemorative scarf has been passed to my grandson, who wears it with pride. He’s only 6. But quasi cursores vitae lampada tradunt.


Today from the everysmith vaults: A show from last year, at Asbury Park NJ, featuring members of the Dead and Airplane families, including children of the original bands. Another wonderful example of the torch being passed. 

Who would have thought that a referendum could be “divisive” and “cause huge economic uncertainty”?
 
Those are the terms used by Theresa May to describe a second referendum on the issue of Scottish independence. It is of course completely different from the Brexit referendum which was clearly and unequivocally “decisive”; not to mention “the will of the people”, and certainly not to mention “a clear mandate”.
 
As anyone who saw me punching the air as England scored their final try against the hapless Scots last Saturday will confirm, I am English (albeit with a weird mélange of international DNA). But as the shambles of the Brexit process unfolds, Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement yesterday gave me hope.
 
Is it, as our Prime Minister stated, “playing politics”? Or is it a perfectly reasonable response to what is going on in Downing Street and Parliament?
 
It’s the latter. Because, as that exceptional woman Mhairi Black, our youngest MP, has claimed, Westminster is “depressing”, “a waste of time”, “so old and defunct in terms of its systems and procedures”. It can drag down the best of us and raise to the heights the worst of us.
 
In my last post, I remarked that Corbyn is devolving from a man of principle into a politician. Black has intimated that she will not stand again: she is apprehensive about becoming institutionalized or helpless. This, I fear, is happening to Corbyn. 
 
No, Mrs May, politics is a game, and Corbyn and so many others are being forced to play it.

In this parliamentary hangover from the worst of the public school system, games are compulsory.
 
I suspect and hope that Nicola Sturgeon’s determination to allow the Scottish people an opportunity to remain in the EU is the equivalent of the apocryphal action of William Webb Ellis at Rugby School back in 1823.
 
I believe it demonstrates “a fine disregard for the rules of the game”.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I'm listening to an old (1967) John Peel show, featuring Pink Floyd, a band by which I have never been totally convinced, even though they played a great free show for The 1/- Paper at the Cambridge Corn Exchange in ... probably '68 or '69. Anyway, in the middle of the show, randomly, Peel plays a great song called The Red Sox Are Winning by a band called Earth Opera. There's some stuff on YouTube. Anyone got anything else? They're good.

​Two postponements and two games in and we are .500 - won one, lost one.  Game one was excellent in every respect. Price pitched well. Papi hit a homer. Mookie hit a homer and pulled off a great defensive play. Game two was marred by the starting pitching: Buckholtz blew it. But that’s Buckholtz being Buckholtz.
 
The important thing is that we are underway. This is real. So what follows is not my belated season projections. I’ve done those for the last ten years and, to be honest, they have been more an expression of hopes and aspirations than detailed statistical analysis. There are guys who can do that sort of thing a great deal better than I can, and their projections are as wrong as often as my dreams.
 
Watching the first two games here in Europe was exhilarating and, despite the loss, my dream of the play-offs is intact. It may be all about the pitching, but these guys can hit. We out-hit Cleveland in both games and, in each game, scored six runs against good pitching. The Sox are hitting .288 with an .896 OPS. And that’s without any contribution from Xander who is 0 for 9 as I write.
 
I predict that he will get his first hit tonight, backing up the power sinkers of Joe Kelly who had a great spring training. It’s a midnight start for those of us over here but, if the games against Toronto in Montreal are anything to go by, it will be worth the sleep deficit. One of my favourite non-Sox players, Josh Donaldson, will be back to add a frisson to the occasion and anyway the next two games are scheduled for lunchtime. Which is 6pm in the UK and 7pm in France. I’ll be watching the NESN feed on mlb.tv and despite my total admiration for Don Orsillo, I am beginning to warm to OB, even if he hasn’t yet learned that on television rather than radio, sometimes you don’t have to say anything.
 
But all this will pale into insignificance next week when I land at Logan, dump my bag at the Parker House and head up to Fenway Park. I’ve schlepped across the Common and down Commonwealth Ave many times, but 'fanatics have their dreams' and arriving at Fenway is still a dream come true for someone isolated in the baseball desert that is Europe.
 
In my dream, the Sox win their fourth Series this century; Papi has a 30+ HR year (he’s already ahead of schedule!); Price performs consistently like the ace we know he is and is backed up the rest of the rotation; Hanley settles into competence at first and hits for power; Mookie continues to demonstrate that he is potentially one of the greats; Xander comes good; JBJ shows on a daily basis that he is one of the great defensive outfielders in the game today; and the bullpen does its job – don’t think my heart could manage another season like 2015.
 
As for Sandoval, well - sorry Pablo. I really want to be wrong about you, but you don’t figure in my dream at all right now.
 
Realistically? I think we will make the play-offs and then who knows?
 
Not me. I just dream.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Some Merle Haggard, Melancholy Mood from the forthcoming Fallen Angels, but primarily Peter Green and the 1970 manifestation of Fleetwood Mac. Whatever happened to that band? They were good ...

When Tito went, I wasn’t happy, but I understood. It was the right decision from the point of view of both parties. When Theo went, I recognised that it was time. When Nomar went, I was distraught but accepted that it was the right trade, and so it proved. Even when we failed to sign Lester, I acknowledged the thinking behind the decision.
 
But there is no logic, no reason, no justification for the sacking of Don Orsillo.
 
Before the introduction of mlb.tv, being a baseball fan in Europe was a lonely and frustrating life. Box scores were almost our only information and sometimes even they were unobtainable. The International Herald Tribune would give the scores from games played the day before yesterday, leaving us to do the sums on standings and stats.

But the internet changed all that. Suddenly, and for the cost of a seat in a loge box down the first base line, we could watch every game, home and away, regular season and post-season. We could tune in at midnight and be taken to Fenway or the Busch Stadium or Camden Yards or Yankee Stadium to watch our beloved Sox.
 
And the voice of the NESN feed on these broadcasts was Don Orsillo, the doyen of play-by-play announcers. His is the only voice I have known in this context. It was a voice which was full of wit and wisdom and warmth. It was a voice which perfectly complemented the gravelly Marlborough Red tones of Jerry Remy.
 
I watched and listened to their final broadcast together, from Progressive Field in Cleveland, on a rickety wi-fi feed in a budget hotel in the centre of France. The Sox lost, but for once, this was not the focus of my attention. I wanted to be present when Don made his last call. And I was, in spirit, even though I was physically located nearly four thousand miles away. He had been dignified and silent over the long weeks since the abrupt announcement. He had acknowledged the fans and the players at his final Fenway broadcast, but this was the finale.
 
To be fair to NESN (although why should we be?), they peppered the breaks with classic moments. Jerry Remy appeared the more emotional. The game itself – actually not a bad game despite the result – took second place. And then it happened.
 
As the Sox saluted him, he said: “Orsillo rounding third and heading home. Unbelievably, I wave to the Red Sox for a final time. Thank you, boys.”
 
Unbelievably is right.

The 2016 season is going to be very different. I can see some real reasons for optimism next year: Xander, JBJ, Mookie, Castillo, Eddie Rodriguez. I have enjoyed the second half immensely. On the field, it’s been fun. But in the booth and on my iPad screen, this cloud has been hovering. I admire Dave O’Brien a great deal. I am sure he will do a great job. But it won’t be the same.
 
Jerry was speaking for every fan and especially those of us the baseball desert which is Europe when he said: “I want to thank you for all the fun moments we’ve had and the friendship.”
 
Me too. Thank you, Don, for your professionalism and your vicarious friendship.

​Next year, once in a while, I will tune into mlb.tv and click on the San Diego game. Just to hear your voice and remember the last dozen years.

Today from the everysmith vaults: I am gearing up for the imminent release of the Bootleg Series Volume 12 by listening to an extraordinary boxed set of 14 CDs entitled 1965 Revisited. It includes everything Bob recorded in that annus mirabilis. Much will doubtless be incorporated into the The Cutting Edge but I can't be sure I will win the lottery to buy it.

I can’t remember precisely when my love affair with football started to wane. It must have been sometime after the 1997-1998 season, because I remember the events of that campaign vividly, even without being reminded by Rick Gekoski’s excellent Staying Up: A Fan behind the Scenes in the Premiership. I remember particularly our win at the Villa on the 14th February in the FA Cup, the goal scored by Moldovan, and that dreadful penalty shoot-out at Sheffield United which ended our hopes of another 1987 Cup triumph.

So I’m guessing that I stopped going to every game sometime in the early 00s, and my attendance since has been limited to special games and those to which I was invited to share rare roast beef and red wine in the Directors’ Box. I think this is partly because Guy went off to university and Rick Gekoski himself to London, but it is also because of a growing disenchantment with the way football was going: cheats on the park and crooks in the boardroom, as someone – maybe me - has said.

But I still get it. I still get the extraordinary euphoria that football can generate. And I still get the sense of identification of a fan with a club.

Hell, as readers of Staying Up will know, I was part of it. Rick reports my lachrymosity on one occasion and my anger and depression on many, so it must be true. Or at least accurate. And his book records the travails of fans who live for results over which they have no control. It produces the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.

Staying Up is one of the few books which chronicle this from the inside. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch is more personal but has the same resonance for fans of any team. A Season with Verona by Tim Parks has a slightly different agenda, using his away trips to develop a theory of national character. And The Miracle of Castel di Sangro by Joe McGinness is about passion and corruption and, incidentally, about the growing involvement of the author in the affairs of the club: from objective reporter to passionate and ultimately disenchanted supporter.

Now, there is a new (or newish) book which addresses these issues. It is by Nick Davidson and it is entitled Pirates, Punks & Politics: Falling in Love with a Radical Football Club. It is a football book but it is primarily a political book, about a club which is a creation and reflection of a left-wing, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-fascist and anti-homophobic community from the wrong side of the Hamburg tracks.

Nick Davidson was a Watford fan who, before finding true love with FC St Pauli, looked to non-league football (in the same way as I – somewhat desultorily – tried out Leamington) but found the same kind of squabbles and pettiness in the lower levels as he had identified at the top of the game.  In St Pauli, he found a warm welcome from a club and, more importantly, fans (pirates, punks and street politicians) who shared his purist and non-commercial hopes for the beautiful game.

I am late to this bandwagon and, to date, my interest and involvement is limited to checking St Pauli’s result every weekend and watching Youtube footage of the antics of the club’s extraordinary fan base. But one day, I will get to Millerntor.

And I will get there before it’s too late, before St Pauli goes the way of almost every club; its values lost as it finds that the game is merely another cog in the machine.

As all political lives end in failure,  so all fans’ lives end in disillusion. But in the meantime, I commend to you all the volumes mentioned above, especially Nick Davidson and Rick Gekoski. While you are reading them, you will be reminded – however briefly – why the beautiful game is, well, beautiful.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Still with Yo La Tengo. This isn’t Mozart – it needs time to appreciate fully.

Just as, in the States, American football is simply football, so, in France, Le Lour de France is simply Le Tour. It shows on screens in bars, it dominates conversation, it is the subject each day of the front page headlines in L’Equipe, the national sports daily. And it also features on my iPad between 2.30 and 5.30 each afternoon. You’re right, Le Tour has become yet another obsession. When I saw at first hand the riders taking a 90 degree left turn at around 50 kilometres an hour in Uzès a few years back, I was fascinated and full of admiration. And when, on the 14th of July three years ago, Le Tour came through our village, with Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome at the front of the pelaton, I became a real fan. (See, if you are minded, Lettres d’Uzès #26.)

Le Tour fits neatly into my self-appointed schedule. La canicule, the heatwave, has been dominant for several weeks now, keeping the temperatures up in the high 30s, or close to 100 in old money. Which sounds idyllic, but can be too much of a good thing. Domestic chores must be completed early in the morning before it becomes too hot to attempt them or even contemplate doing so. And my determination to write the final 100,000 words of this damn thriller can wane as quickly as the temperature rises.

But I am persevering. Two of the three planned murders have been committed. The protagonist has assembled his team of co-conspirators. And the location of the action has been successfully moved across the Atlantic. It’s going well.

I try to work at it from first thing until TV coverage of Le Tour begins, when I stop pondering the fate of ‘60s radicals and instead marvel at the power of Froome and Quintana, Contador and – our new hero – Geraint Evans.

Are they doping? I think not and I hope not. In my capacity as a member of IBWAA, I have refused to vote into the Hall of Fame the likes of Bonds and Clements, Sosa and McGuire. I am totally opposed to PEDs in sport. But I am also conscious that, because most of us have no access to hard evidence either way, our reaction tends to be based on whether or not we like the individual concerned.

I like Big Papi. I don’t like A-Rod. I like Froome (although not as much as I like Bradley Wiggins) but I didn’t like Armstrong.

I am aware of the parallels between Team Sky and US Postal. I find the ranks of Team Sky, riding en masse in their black uniforms, unfortunately reminiscent of a Panzer brigade powering through Belgium. I am also, of course, instinctively antagonistic to anything funded by Murdoch.

But I do believe that extraordinary burst of power on the first day in the Pyrenees was the result of innate talent and very hard work. It was unexpected. It was exhilarating. It was sporting in every sense.

Vive le tour!

Today from the everysmith vaults: There is something of a Nashville fest going on at the moment, inspired perhaps by the anniversary of Blonde on Blonde. I have been listening to The Dead in Nashville in ‘78, now the latest official release, although I listened to the excellent Charlie Miller AUD recording. But right now, I have playing Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats. The Dylan and Cash tracks are less interesting(because more familiar) than the work of Nashville cats themselves. I commend it to you.