Cricket - England's answer to global warming

For two weeks now the sun has been cracking the flags, the mayfly have been hatching, I have even resorted to watering the lawn. Shoes and jeans have given way to shorts and sandals. Sun cream, sunglasses and straw hat have been essential in the garden.

And today? Today it's like winter again - rainy, miserable and perishing cold. The reason is obvious: today is the first day of the first test match of the season against New Zealand. Rain delayed the start of play.

So I'm getting my thermals, gloves, big jumper and furry hat and flask of soup ready for Saturday when I have a ticket for the third day at Lords. Worried about global warming? Just bring on the cricket.

A stone setting of ginnels and snickets

We're heading north once more for the fishing. This time it's the River Dee and I feel a bit more optimistic than I did about the Tay. I love the Dee. I love spring salmon. There is no finer fish on no finer river.

But first we have a 25th wedding anniversary party in Leeds for Gill's sister, Alison, and her husband Richard - the Whitakers. They're having the party at what used to be Dyson's jewellers - now the Georgetown Restaurant. It's a place I remember well.

I once spent many hours in an upstairs room with a photographer for a newspaper investigation, watching out for people coming out of a ginnel opposite. Or should I call it a snicket (pronounced in the same way that Geoff Boycott says cricket, i.e crickitt)? Either term would suffice in Yorkshire but for the rest of the world I suppose I should reveal that it is an alley or a cut-through or a passage.

My other memory of Dyson's goes back nearly 30 years when Gill and I went there to choose an engagement ring. I only had £200 to my name, just enough to buy a ring with the tiniest sparkly diamond. We could afford something more showy now but would never replace it. The ring was good for us then and it's good for us still, like our marriage. I wouldn't claim that it was set in stone, but this is the stone setting.

Football and the big stick

Why don't people learn? I'm not talking about just anyone here but about large organisations and people in influential positions. Specifically I'm talking about the football authorities but I know the question can be applied elsewhere.

In the UK the footballing authorities did not learn about the dangers associated with large stadiums and ground behaviour before a series of tragedies: Hillsborough, Heysel and the Bradford City stadium fire during the 1980s. There have been others: Rangers, Spartak Moscow, River Plate to mention just a few of them, but that cluster of disasters in the 1980s did much to concentrate UK thinking on remedies.

Big stick policing

In many of these situations crowd control measures relied on "big stick" policing and containment measures that viewed the people who watched football as little better than animals, hence the fences that caged-in football crowds throughout the 1970s and early 80s. I was shocked to see that the cage-like fences had been retained in the Lens stadium that hosted the Lille v Manchester United match last night.

Not only that, police at football matches, particularly in mainland Europe continue to treat football supporters as an unruly mob that can only be pacified by shields, batons, riot gear and tear gas. If you treat people like animals they begin to behave that way.

In the UK football clubs (because they had to do so after the Taylor report into the Hillsborough disaster) introduced all-seater grounds. That one remedy did much to reduce the mob-like behaviour that inflicted football in the 1970s. Family enclosures, supporters clubs and improvements in marketing have all helped to lessen football hooliganism immeasurably since the bad old days of the 1970s.

But not until football clubs are confident enough to mix-up home and away supporters will you get the kind of congeniality that exists in cricket and rugby grounds. Does anyone think that rugby supporters do not want their team to win? Of course they do. But they know that the game matters more than any team.

I have been going to rugby matches for years and the behaviour between rival supporters is always a matter of banter and nothing more. It's not unusual for a group of supporters to "adopt" a couple of rival supporters in the pub or on the way to the match. OK, the Welsh can get a bit uppity but they're sentimental people and their game means a lot to them. The English are still getting used to having a good rugby team (or they were).

The same applies to cricket. The banter between England and Australian fans can be incredibly cruel but it's almost always good natured and if it ever risks boiling over there are enough sensible supporters to police themselves.

Don't blame drink

Some have blamed drink for crowd violence. It's nothing to do with drink. The Guinness will be flowing this weekend in Dublin before the Croke Park match - and I will be having some myself - but there won't be any trouble. It's just as well because I have been in the thick of some real crowd squeezes at the old Lansdowne road. No one pushed. No one panicked.

Football hooliganism became a way of life for some young people in the 1960s and 70s. They grew up on the mean streets and took out their frustrations at weekends. Most of the people who watched rugby, on the other hand, played the game where the violence was confined to the pitch. Both codes have cleaned up their acts on and off the pitches. So it was a great shame to see police responding so inappropriately towards distressed fans when a crush happened at Lens. To fire tear gas at people struggling for space was inexcusable.

It was a shame, too, to hear the televised match commentator assuming that there was crowd trouble created by unruly supporters. If you assume the worst in people, expect them to repay you in kind. Any sports crowd should be a mixture of team colours. Segregating people, whether in sport or anywhere else, is a recipe for factionalism.

End segregation

Unfortunately this still goes in football. I have a good friend who supports Newcastle who took a friend from Manchester to St James's Park a little while ago for a Newcastle v Manchester United match. They were standing near the front of the Newcastle end when Manchester scored. The Manchester supporter cheered but it did not go down well. He might in fact have been tolerated by the crowd but the stewards were taking no risks and frog-marched him out of the ground. This a middle-aged chap in a respectable profession. This is one aspect of football that the clubs still need to tackle. But it has to be on a European scale.

There shouldn't be a ground left in Europe that still contains football supporters within fences. Opposing fans should be encouraged to mingle, not discouraged from sitting together. The days of police escorts for visiting fans should end. The people best placed to make these changes are not the authorities but older supporters who should set standards for the youngsters. Insults and obnoxious or aggressive behaviour should be stamped on through peer pressure. If clubs pass on this message the core support will understand.

Fanning the kipper

The best bit of Christmas is the games and the best game is fan the kipper. To play: Cut some sheets of newspaper into fat fish shapes. These are your kippers. Get two dinner plates and place them adjacent to each other but spaced apart at one end of a room. Clear furniture/people/dogs to the edges of the room. Get some magazines or newspapers; these are your fans.

Now draw up a list of all those there, put their names in to a hat and have someone draw them out to establish the order of play. On a sheet of a paper draw up a tree-style framework like those that are used for a knockout cup competition - finals, semis, quarters etc.

If you have 12 people, say, in your family group put four blank pieces of paper in the hat to signify byes in a draw of 16. In this way the competition will work itself fairly through the rounds. If you get the luck of a draw you have a bye through to the next round.

Choose your kipper and fan. Now you are ready to start. In each match two people "fan off" against each other. The object of the game is to fan your kipper down the room and on to your plate so that no part is touching the floor. The one that achieves this first is the winner.

Our family kipper trophy is a silver rabbit that was given to me many years ago as a corporate gift. As an employee of the Financial Times at that time, the policy was to hand over gifts for a charity raffle among staff. I handed in the rabbit, then won it back. This year I won it again.

I could never bat for England or turn a cricket ball but if fanning the kipper is ever granted international sporting recognition the manager of our national team could be comforted that in one small corner of this great country there is a pretty mean kipper wafter just waiting for the call.

Reality gaming - the next big craze?

Stop press for all enthusiasts of the Nintendo Wii console, the game that allows you to control on-screen action by using a hand-held controller to imitate a bat.

A new wave of development is expected to overtake the gaming world with news of "reality gaming", the closest the industry has come to emulating the virtual world of console play.

Still in their evolutionary phase, these "extra-virtual" games, to use the jargon, rely on the game developers' ability to exploit environmental conditions that can take conventional screen-based gaming out of the living room.

The games have harnessed "green resources" to create wooden bats and rackets that, when used with balls in fields, can reproduce realistic game play.

"The real-play games have an extra dimension, allowing scope for socialising with other players. They also help to build muscle tone, team work and leadership skills. We think they have a great future," said a spokesman for the International Cricket Council, promoting its own branch of real-play in a series of test matches.

Players, however, have pointed to drawbacks. "The chances of getting injured are high," says a member of one of the leading international teams. "There is also a problem with commercial exploitation and professionalism that has introduced wage structures to something we envisaged initially as a game."

So what can they do to ease the pressure? "Some of the boys are relaxing with old-style video games," says the player. "They don't involve you quite so much as the Nintendo Wii but there's a lower risk of the damage associated with console play. I've heard of a game called "space invaders" and one guy I know is experimenting with something called tiddly winks. But that's all in the future."

See wiihaveaproblem.com

This site is not very interesting. I include the link because it exists as, sadly, does the Wii. But not in my house.

A black day for England

A few years ago I was on the San Francisco waterfront outside the terminal where the tour boats take visitors to Alcatraz. If you have to beg - and quite a few people have to beg, even in San Francisco - this is the place to do it.

The San Francisco beggars are an enterprising bunch. I saw one chap at an intersection, his feet fastened to milk crates in order to get above the traffic, passing a child's fishing net in front of car windows in the hope of getting a few cents.

Down at the terminal one of the beggars was dressed in a cow suit. Round his neck hung a placard saying "I moo for cash".

There are echos of that placard as I start this blog (not a word I like) since I write for cash. It's how I make my living. Like the laughing policeman in a penny arcade you just show me the money and those words start spewing out. Yet here I am, four paragraphs into whatever this is, and every word you've read has been brought to you absolutely free. It's killing me.

So I don't want you to expect a work of art in these columns and please don't get shirty if you find the odd spelling mistake or grammatical error. Don't expect essays or long columns either. They're elsewhere on my website . No, I think this spot is going to be reserved for snippets: stuff about the work that I do, the way that I work, the way that I live, bits about my family, things that I'm thinking of, partly formed ideas, some general observations, maybe some quirky stuff and the odd snapshot.

Talking of snapshots, and seeing as this space is going to include some personal stuff, you might be interested in having a peep at my photography. Ignore the shopping basket symbols. Any picture can be downloaded freely by friends. But if you want to use them professionally in any way, then get in touch. I snap for cash.

Have you noticed how some days are good and some not so good, for no fault of our own? Today should have been great. The sun was shining. There was no sign of the heron that has been eating the fish in my pond. And yet there was something niggling away, something I couldn't quite articulate for myself until I saw Freddy Flintoff's picture on the front page of the Telegraph. That was it. We had lost the second test. It shouldn't have happened but it had. There must be cricket lovers all over England walking around underneath their personal little black clouds. Don't let anyone tell you it doesn't hurt when we lose like that. It really hurts. I have a friend, Charles, who is out there just now. He had to leave for the beach before the end of the first test, couldn't bear any more of it. God only knows how he's taken this one. Why do the English have to suffer for their sport? I suppose it could be have been worse had I been born a Scot. It's hard to raise the roof over Curling.