This blog comes to you from darkest Sri Lanka, literally. I am sitting up in bed with a head-torch on, baby asleep (I hope) in her travel bed on the floor next to me and PC Tango next door with mini-Jos (what a start in the T20s for big Jos, hey?!). We are currently in Jaffna, which some readers may have experienced but I would guess most have not. Once we have completed our circuit by heading back down south next week, my next blog will examine what’s changed and what’s stayed the same, plus a whole load of compelling reasons to travel here asap (whilst full in the knowledge that barely a single-hand of my friends would consider our current trip a ‘holiday’ in any sense of the word!).
Taking the chance for some light reading, I ploughed through Ed Smith’s latest book Making Decisions: Putting the Human Back in the Machine. Half on the Colombo-Anuradhapura train with children (miraculously) both sleeping and half on the way to Jaffna. So it’s definitely a light read!
I love Ed Smith as a broadcaster: I find him erudite and interesting and considered – not necessarily common traits in the 24-hour-news-cycle era of sports broadcasting. I have already read a few of his essays and found them illuminating, perhaps because they often deal with academia and as a school leader I find their relevance to education inviting and thoughtful.
This one feels a bit rushed, though. In the whole thing there were maybe 3 passages I highlighted for future reference (nerd alert!). Having just read Justin’s blog about Dan Lawrence’s lack of central contract, I would urge more England supporters to read Smith’s offering, though it is not we who are the target audience. The book seems to be an attempt to study decision-making as it applies to England cricket but it is more a set of (interesting) selection anecdotes set against a loosely offered theoretical background. Probably, as a work it pleases no reader entirely but offers enough for Smith to remain relevant. His certainly is an interesting mind to listen to, as it were.
Why keep batting Keaton Jennings so long? Why call up Sam Curran when he did? Why recall Adil Rashid to the Test side? All of these are interesting questions (there must be a reason, besides the darkness and the 4 Lion lagers, that this is the word to which I cannot help return) and yet the answers that are offered are surprisingly limp. Weighted averagely…..swarm harmoniser…..likely success. I suppose I just wanted….more.
Maybe about how to make the decision to drop someone which is surely much more difficult than whom should be selected next? Maybe more about the decisions which had gone wrong: whether the process or other circumstances were to blame.
I am keen to read Luck, Smith’s earlier offering, and hope it will please me better (not that it is Smith’s job to write the book I want to read). For now, I remain slightly dissatisfied yet equally keen to hear him muse on TMS again. Apologies for the on the fence ending – an ambivalent book gets an ambivalent review!