England's Ashes triumph as seen by cricket's finest writer
Newspaper writers are an underrated breed. Where the polished prose of a literary novelist might correctly be applauded, chances are it has been rewritten, rewritten and rewritten again before it was allowed anywhere near a publisher, whose editors will then have subjected it to their own revisions. By contrast, the newspaper journalist generally files his (or her) first draft, which may have been tinkered with a little if there was time but essentially is the product of unprocessed thoughts, transferred from mind to screen in the time it takes to hit the relevant keys. It should be seen as remarkable, then, that the serious newspapers -- and some deemed as less so -- offer much writing of extraordinary quality. The sports pages, moreover, should not be regarded as an exception. James Lawton, Hugh McIlvanney, Simon Barnes, Martin Samuel, Paul Hayward, Richard Williams…these names make an incomplete list. It excludes, for example, Gideon Haigh, the Australian journalist who is wi