England players are weighing up what a Covid-affected Ashes tour would be like, with the prospect of being locked down for 10 weeks
At first glance it seems a minor oddity that the two longest-serving England men’s Test cricket captains of all time are the current one and the one before him. Every linen-shirted custodian of the Golden Age, every hair-oiled gadabout, every ringlet-tossing 1980s fancy-boy: Joe Root and Alastair Cook have got them all covered.
There are of course some important footnotes to this. Firstly, this has been an era of unprecedented stability. The sacking of the England captain, once an annual committee room power play, the high-summer burning of the wicker man, has been swallowed up by the move into more corporate structures. We deal in eras now.
