Test cricket is the only sport where the boring bit is the point and I will not be taking questions.

Watching your team lose is a better test of whether you like the sport than watching them win.

Money has ruined more sport than it has rescued. Every competitive balance measure in every major league has got worse since it arrived, and that is the table, not nostalgia.

Sport is the only place left where we are collectively fine with someone being obviously, measurably better than everyone else, and I find it interesting that we cannot tolerate that anywhere else.

Football was better without VAR and I will not be moved on this. You cannot celebrate on a three minute delay.

Football fans do not want their club to be successful, they want it to be theirs. That is why every ownership row goes the way it does.

Try watching a match with the commentary off. It is a completely different sport and you notice about twice as much.

Youth sport got professionalised and the result is ten year olds with strength programmes and nobody left to make up the numbers on a Sunday.

Lower league football is better to attend and worse to watch, and the people who only do one of those never believe the other.

Cricket is the only sport where you can go for lunch, come back, and nothing has happened, and that is a feature.

Home advantage is mostly the crowd, and the empty-stadium seasons proved it — it shrank, it did not vanish, and what was left was travel and the referee.

Olympic sports get worse as they get more professional. What people actually miss is the amateurism, and it turns out that was most of the charm.

Sport is the last mainstream thing where the outcome is genuinely unknown to everyone watching, and that scarcity explains most of what it costs. Everything else in the culture now arrives pre-summarised, already reacted to, and with the ending available before you start. The live unknown is what the broadcast money is really buying.

T20 made Test cricket better, not worse, and the people who say otherwise have not watched a fourth innings run chase lately.

A cricket match that ends in a draw is a better result than most wins and this is the single hardest thing to explain to anyone who did not grow up with it.

Nobody plays anything until it goes dark any more and I cannot work out whether that is the traffic, the phones, or the parents.

Cricket commentary has got unbearable. Nobody describes anything any more, they just wait for a stat to read out.

Football has too much football now.

The best thing about going to a match is the twenty minutes before anything happens, and no broadcast has ever worked out how to show it.

Every sport eventually optimises the fun out of itself, because the people playing are trying to win and nobody is trying to make it enjoyable to watch.

F1 drivers are athletes in exactly the same sense footballers are, and the people who scoff have never held their neck steady at 4g for two hours in fifty degree heat.