“Up until around the age at which one discovers girls and intoxicants, I was an okay cricketer. I captained my town, and had an unsuccessful trial for Sussex. I remember my grandfather at my games: a gently prowling presence, slouched for spells in a camping chair, usually alone, an outstretched leg away from the boundary.”
“Virat Kohli is staying on my floor – in what I assume is the room with a burly Sikh gentleman stationed outside it at all hours – and in the two days before the game, the K-word is on the air, like a mantra.”
“All great moments of football are fundamentally unlikely, their execution Promethean. To be brilliant with the body is to shake your first at Zeus’s wrath, and to witness it is to discover what Camus thought made the game worth the candle: moments of glorious, earthbound, vanishing transcendence.”