The Revolution Will Not Prevail

English cricket is drunk on "Bazball" hubris; test cricket will have its revenge

Warning: this edition of The Debatable Land concerns cricket. I am keenly aware this will not be of much interest to some of you. Political service will resume shortly though this newsletter should in any case really be thought of as some kind of miscellany. Anyway, thank you again for being here, whatever your own particular interests.

Can a completely unsurprising, indeed thoroughly expected, outcome also be a disappointing one? This is the first question arising from English cricket’s latest capitulation overseas. It is a dozen years since India last lost a test series at home and even though England pulled off an improbable victory in the first match of this renewal I never for a moment doubted that India would recover and win the series comfortably.

But there is comfortably and then there is the margins by which England were defeated on the subcontinent this winter: 106 runs at Visakhapatnam, 434 runs at Rajkot (England’s heaviest defeat in terms of runs since before the Second W…