Press Tent: The ‘Who’s a clever boy?’ Edition

Blog Opinion

It’s Press Tent time. In this column we wind our way through the wonderful world of cricket’s media and do a bit of laughing at, and occasionally praise, those covering the great game. Our parents are so proud.

Disappointingly, Oliver Holt of the Mail on Sunday has called off his vendetta against Eoin Morgan – for now – so we have had to so some actual work to put this together this week.

Zafar Ansari is clever, did you know?

In case you didn’t know, Zafar Ansari is a bright bloke. If you read the press about his Test debut you would be forgiven for his full name is Zafar ‘Double First From Cambridge’ Ansari.

Although according to The Sun he should be known as “one of the biggest brainboxes to play cricket for England since Mike Brearley took off his gown and mortar board.”

Over in the Mirror, the award-winning Will Macpherson was talking about Ansari’s recently submitted 40,000 word Masters dissertation on the American Civil Rights movement and getting excited about his heroes.

“When asked for a fantasy slip cordon by the 2015 Cricketers’ Who’s Who, Ansari – who has a double-first from Cambridge – selected Civil Rights Activist Malcolm X, Nigerian novellist Chimamanda Adichie, MacArthur Fellowship Recipient Angela Davis, and Rosa Luxemburg, a communist theorist.

“David Beckham and Kim Kardashian eat your heart out.”

The highlight of the Macpherson piece was that Beckham and Kardashian had links to their celebrity pages on the Mirror’s website but there was no corresponding page available for Luxemburg, Adichie or Malcolm X.

Shane Warne’s TV Movie

Shane Warne is a cottage industry of pop-psychology and unauthorised biographies. The latest news on this front is that Channel 7 in Australia are going to do a TV movie based on Spun Out by Paul Barry which one Amazon reviewer described as ‘a ‘cut and paste’ tabloid style stitch up.’

Shane has been so upset about these kind of books that according to Russell Jackson in the Guardian he is on record as saying that it should be illegal to write an unauthorised biography,

That piece from Jackson has some wonderful gems in it. Such as:

“The TV production basically writes itself, and if it’s only movie-length, you sense the main problem for producers (and a relief for Warne) will be the process of omission. ‘OK, we need John the Bookie in there, yep, and the diet pills, for sure, but when will the inflatable penis scene take place?’”

The endless fascination with Shane by the media is not going away any time soon, and the man himself does little to calm the flames. More often than not his actions are the public relations equivalent of a can of kerosine.

Back in September Warne was being questioned for his habit of liking and commenting on photos of models on social media. On Channel 9’s Today Show, Michelle Stephenson said:

“It’s all a bit creepy. He’s like that guy that sits at the end of the bar and has those really cheesy lines hoping that one of them will work and I don’t think they’re working anymore.”

Shane was not happy, tweeting, “I’ve been employed by Ch 9 for 23 years & have gone out of my way to give the today show my time, not anymore, lawyer time I think…”

He has deleted the tweet it seems, and it is doubtful that this episode will make the TV movie, but it is another example of Shane being Shane.

When the show airs we will bring you more news of what it is like and Shane’s reaction to it. This is the public service that we provide here at Cricket365.

The star of the show

The Cricketer magazine is an august publication that is known the world over, and it recent times it has been headed up by Simon Hughes as ‘Editor-at-Large’.

One of the more entertaining ways that Hughes has changed things up at the publication is to be in the middle of as many stories as possible.

Now that this month’s magazine has been published, an email was sent out to advertise it. Hughes has interviewed England’s all-round superstar Ben Stokes for this month’s issue, a massive get for the magazine.

The email that was delivered to potential customers arrived with the subject line ‘Simon Hughes bowls to Ben Stokes in the Nets.’

Perhaps that is the correct way to describe the encounter due to their relative positions on the Power List of the most influential people in English cricket… as compiled by Simon Hughes.

If you see anything that you think is worthy of making the next edition of this snarky nonsense of a feature then please let us know via Twitter, Facebook or by tweeting using the hashtag #PressTent.

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