In fact, the entire tone of the article is somewhat wrong-footed to me: cheery, breezy and didactic.  Indeed there’s something about the language of the current government’s new initiative – the Dance Champions Group – that sets my teeth on edge.  Somehow, and yet again, I have the uncomfortable feeling that a basically good idea is being handled in an unfortunate way.

This feeling is only reinforced by Phillips’ article, which presumably is supposed to be representative of this new initiative (and while I have a great deal of respect for Ms. Phillips, it’s an uncomfortable read).  Starting with a brief mention of the obvious things – Arlene loves dance, dance is good for you – it immediately goes into PR mode:

Andy Burnham is right to be concerned about the fact that we don’t do very much exercise. We’re way down in the international league tables for health and physical activity. The aim is, over the next few years, to change that completely. So we’ll be running a national campaign to boost participation in dance in the run up to 2012 and the Olympics. Our priority is to find ways of making dance accessible and above all making it easy for people. Dancing should be as much a part of our daily routine as brushing our teeth.

That’s a lovely sentiment, but precisely what are Ms. Phillips and the Dance Champions Group advocating the people of Britain do?

Well, that part is rather unclear.  There’s an explanation that (essentially) sitting down and eating too much is bad for you, a mention of how “wonderful” it is that people in China do tai chi every morning.  And, of course, the fairly obvious point that people might want different things from dance:

I’m not just talking about ballroom or Latin dancing here – although when I was a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, all of the contestants (the ones that weren’t already professional dancers) lost weight and saw their health improve. That type of dancing isn’t for everyone, as much as I love it. It can be quite difficult, and involves a partner. Not everyone wants to dance with a partner, and that’s fine. What we want to do is encourage people to dance for themselves.

After this point, however, the article stops being merely platitudinous and moves on to being confusing as well.  We’ve established that not everyone wants or needs to be a ballroom dancer, and Ms. Phillips goes on to explain that music and movement is not only healthy but “makes you feel good, too”; something with which I can’t argue.  She speaks of the desirability of getting children dancing (can’t argue with that either) and outlines the government’s aim of getting more of the British population dancing by the time of the Olympics in 2012, ending with this gem-like thought:

It’s surprising how easy it can be: swaying from side to side, moving forward and back but making it constant and moving the arms. That’s the way to raise people’s spirits, to make us all a bit healthier and happier.

Happier, yes, but substantially healthier?  It seems to me that Ms. Phillips is conflating two things here: dance and dancing.  And if the aim of this initiative is to bring about a real improvement in the general health of the population, this distinction needs to be elucidated.

Putting on your favourite song and dancing around the living room is one of the great joys of life.  So is going out and having fun on the dancefloor with friends.  But neither of these constitutes – or even ought to constitute – a fitness routine.  They’re great for the soul and certainly give you a cardiovascular workout, and they could definitely help develop your ear and your feel for music.  But this is dancing, not dance.  A short burst will get your heart beating and your spirits up, but were you to do this in a sustained, regular manner over a long period of time – with no warmups, no stretches, no work routine, no technique, no informed eye monitoring your work and your progress – it’s very likely your body would suffer more than benefit.  Muscle strain would be the least of it; you would be lucky to escape a more lasting injury.

Add the warmups, the stretches, the programme of work, the technique, the instructor and preferably a really good pair of shoes and you have dance.  And it’s dance that truly changes your health and fitness for the better; presuming, of course, you go about it properly.  Posture, strength, cardiovascular fitness, flexibiity… learning any form of dance really well will at least improve all these things.  What’s more, dance is also an exercise in musicality, improvisation and a certain degree of theatre.  You may even need to acquire – as I did with Cuban salsa – a body language and a physicality entirely different from the one with which you were raised.  Dance is a wonderful thing and highly beneficial, but it’s not easy, and to dance to the level that reaps a real physical benefit requires a body that is already basically sound.  Dancing for fun is truly something for everyone – everyone who wants to and can – but that doesn’t mean that dance is.

It seems to me that Ms. Phillips is advocating two quite different things – dancing, and dance – as if they were a single solution to Britain’s health problem.  I absolutely do agree with the basic idea here: dancing for yourself is both fun and good for you, and dance training properly undertaken will indeed provide you with a whole body exercise that will greatly improve your strength and fitness. But the two are not synonymous, and, what’s more, the latter may not be the most suitable or enjoyable option for those who do want to work on their health and fitness.  Dance, I say; dance at home; dance at parties; dance in studios and clubs and on stages if that is what you want to do.    Strictly Come Dancing is a wonderful thing for the interest and excitement it has stimulated around dance in general, and I absolutely applaud the initiative of making dance classes more available and accessible.  But I don’t think that dance, that demanding and difficult and wonderful discipline, should be presented as an easy peasy remedy for a complicated problem.  Perhaps we could enable and encourage individuals to find the exercise routine that best suits their bodies and lifestyles rather than embarking on this rather gimmicky campaign.

Turnberry is a course that will forever be associated with Tom Watson. In 1977, he played the final round of The Open with Jack Nicklaus. In what has since become known as the ‘Duel in the Sun’ the two went blow for blow around the course, Watson eventually prevailed. Nicklaus, who should still be regarded as the greatest of all time, later admitted it was the only time he felt he had been beaten when he played at his peak. The image of Nicklaus placing his arm around Watson’s shoulder is one of the iconic images of golf.

My memories of Watson come from another age. In 1994, Watson made another unlikely assault on the leaderboard – with enough success to head the field after two rounds, and to remain in contention as he entered the back nine. Even though it was 11 years since he had won the last of his 8 major championships.

Some events have a special place in my heart. The Open is one of them. Not for the history of the event itself, though its pedigree is unrivalled in its list of former champions and in its origins as the first competition to attempt to identify the finest golfer in the world. The meaning of The Open comes to me instead as a family event. Come mid-July, our TVs were tuned in to the BBC as they broadcast the tournament. The memory of the golf that I saw in any given year has long since lost its clarity. But the memories of sharing the experience with my family remains as strong as ever.

1994 was the last Open that I watched with my granny. She had been a golf enthusiast all her life; a couple of years earlier, too old to play herself, she had some of her old clubs cut down so that I could learn the game. And it clearly gave her great pleasure to know that the game that had been such a large part of her own life interested myself and my brother so much. By July 1994 she was living in an old people’s home, too frail in the end to look after herself. When we came to visit, there was no question that the golf would be on in the background.

Come the Saturday, my brother and I were captivated by two different personalities. The old sentimentalist that I am (and, clearly, was at the age of 9), I was drawn to Watson and the rekindling of memories that my parents and grandparents had but that I would only read about. My brother, on the other hand, showed his brasher character in rooting for Jesper Parnevik, the unconventional Swede with an unconventional dress sense. Keen to foster our enthusiasm in whatever way she could, I clearly remember Granny turning to us and asking me who I wanted to win. “Tom Watson”. “Well, if he does, I’ll give you a pound”.

As it turned out, Watson didn’t win. His nerves got the better of him, and though he held the lead as he started the back nine, he dropped down the leaderboard like a stone. I guess not winning the pound at the time was a little annoying, if softened somewhat by the fact that my brother backed the wrong horse, too. But now I realise that the value of that moment didn’t come from the possible reward. It came through the bond between grandmother and grandson, many decades apart in age but still able to share moments and memories.

Little over a month later, my granny passed away. Golf was not the last memory I had of her. That came from a different sport, cricket, as she sat in our back garden watching us play in the late summer sunshine on what must have been one of her last trips outside. Another one of the myriad ways in which sports – professional, organised, or decidedly amateur – have helped form strong bonds among my family.

So while the rest of the sporting world looked on in amazement as Watson rolled back the years, evoking memories of his former glory, I watched the TV through different eyes. In fact, the intensity with which I recalled the past came as quite a shock. For when Tom Watson stood on the 18th green, I saw something else. I saw my granny, alive again, sharing a sporting moment with me once more.

Here’s my not entirely serious and completely schematic outline of the process as I tend to experience it.

STAGE ONE:  The language is entirely new to you, although you may be familiar with a related one and therefore find it comparatively easy to figure out.  You learn to express basic wants and needs, to give simple directions and talk about your identity.  Speaking (or – worse yet – writing) is fraught with basic errors and you often get hold of some fundamental grammar misconception which your teacher has to persuade out of you.  You are delighted when you successfully navigate a story about a dog and a cat.  Linguistically, you are at the level of an extremely polite small child.

STAGE TWO:  Having got through the worst of understanding and internalising the basics of grammar and syntax and acquired a vocabulary, you suddenly gain a huge lease of energy.  Overjoyed at being able to express something more complex than hunger or thirst and possibly carried away with being able to give directions (as long as the town has one main street, one set of traffic lights and one of each kind of shop), you begin to aim higher and higher.  You tell any native speaker who will listen about your existential state, ambitions and philosophical inclinations.  Generally they understand you, and you acquire considerable confidence in your language skills.  My past experience as HR assistant at a translation agency suggests that many learners are so overjoyed at reaching this stage that they begin recklessly flinging around the F word (fluency).

STAGE THREE:  Your estimation of your own language skill takes a massive hit as you suddenly realise that there are any number of mistakes you can make in the most basic sentence, and you just made at least six of them.

STAGE FOUR:  You continue to read, listen, practice and acquire.  If you are like me, this is the stage at which you’re forever listening in on conversations in your target language.  Your poor brain is stuck in auto-translate mode and you wander round the supermarket in a frazzled state trying to remember the word for turnip, even though you don’t need a turnip and certainly don’t have to ask for one even if you did.  Speaking becomes a stressful exercise as you are terribly aware of your own mistakes, and if you have already learnt another language it is entirely likely that your brain will try to trip you up by defaulting to that language (or whichever of your foreign languages is the most advanced) whenever it gets stuck.  If you are learning Spanish and your primary foreign language is Italian, this is not so hard to work around.  If you are learning Spanish and your primary foreign language is Russian, you are screwed.

STAGE FIVE:  You can speak fluidly and without hesitation on most topics, employing a range of vocabulary and registers befitting the conversation.  That is on a good day.  On a bad day, you are capable of mispronouncing a simple greeting and getting all of your adjective endings wrong.  You understand just about everything you read or hear, which is frustrating on the bad days as you struggle to put together a sentence while people are discussing vastly interesting things all around you.  You spend a lot of time assuring people that you do indeed speak the language, but are just tired.

STAGE SIX:  At last, your active command of your chosen language is no longer dependent on your energy levels/the weather/the cricket scores.  With time and practice, you are eventually able to express just about anything you can in your native language and with a similar degree of nuance; you command a variety of registers and considerable word choice.  Any errors are minor and occasional.  This (to my mind) is fluency, and it is a relatively rare and precious thing.  It also needs maintenance; acquired fluency will rust a little with lack of use, although it takes little time to restore.  The flip side of your hard earned knowledge is that you may be hyper aware of your own mistakes (or even just your word choice) if you do resume speaking the language regularly after a little time away. Don’t sit there and obsess about it though (and I speak from experience here); talk, write and enjoy the language you have worked so hard to acquire!

Flintoff’s retirement means that at the end of the summer, there will be only two men left standing from the England team of 2005. Four have retired through injury (Vaughan, Flintoff, Giles, Simon Jones); three have been deemed not up to scratch (Bell, Hoggard, and Geraint Jones); another two sidelined for a lack of mental toughness (Trescothick, Harmison). Only Andrew Strauss, now captain, and Kevin Pietersen remain. The best days of English cricket were not yet to come – they had already passed.

The disintegration of the 2005 team started remarkably swiftly. Simon Jones, an important part of England’s vaunted pace quartet, didn’t even make it to the end of the Ashes summer. Michael Vaughan’s injury woes ruled him out of the first post-Ashes test, and made him an infrequent player thereafter. Results were going downhill, too – the Pakistan series saw England lose Tests from seemingly impossible positions. A second winter tour was notable for the withdrawal of Marcus Trescothick – whose absence, though originally blamed on a virus, later was shown to be the result of stress or depression. Ashley Giles’s hip injury, which would eventually end his career, was also starting to keep him out of the side. Later that summer, despite a heroic performance in India to draw a Test series there, Flintoff would suffer a recurrence of the ankle injury that ultimately prevented him from playing regularly again.

By the winter tour of 2006-7, the team that had seemed all-conquering in the Ashes was coming under serious strain – lacking its captain, one of its most dangerous batsmen, and two of its five bowlers through injury, without mentioning Geraint Jones, who had by this point been dropped. And if there was any notion of England being a world-class outfit at the start of the Ashes in Australia, by the end of the second Test those questions had been washed away, the team collapsing to an abject defeat despite scoring 550 in the first innings.

The team that faces Australia this summer, then, is almost entirely different to the team of four years ago. (Australia’s side is similarly green; their transition, however, seems to have occurred in a somewhat more ordered fashion). England are not close to being the best side in the world; though they may beat Australia this summer, most observers of the game would reckon South Africa and India to be considerably better sides. In this perspective, then, the Ashes of 2005 takes on a different tinge. A glorious burst from a team that only really played together once, rather than the foundation of future dominance.

How different that seems to the way that the Ashes of 2005 passed into collective memory. England won, and did so having largely outplayed Australia throughout the whole summer. We forget just how many pieces of luck went England’s way, however. The wrong decision to give Mark Kasprowicz out on the fourth morning at Edgbaston – three more runs and Australia would have been 2-0 up, and more or less home and dry. The failure to bowl Shane Warne earlier in the fourth innings at Trent Bridge. The four dropped catches in Michael Vaughan’s century at Old Trafford. The three dropped catches in Kevin Pietersen’s innings at The Oval. Heck, even the intrusion of a cricket ball in a touch rugby game that ruled Glenn McGrath out the next three matches. England may have played the better cricket over the summer – but by God, it was a close-run thing.

There is a tendency among the sports media to assume that sporting careers always run in the same arc – a young buck learning his trade at the start of his career, followed by a peak in the middle years, only for performance to trail away as time catches up. “He’s only 20,” said the media of Wayne Rooney in the 2006 World Cup, “he can only get better.” Actually, he could get quite a bit worse, too. The reason Rooney is so vaunted is because he is unnaturally talented. Just because the peak of most athletes lies in the mid-20s does not mean that all progress on the same linear path. We need only think of Jack Nicklaus’s golden victory at the 1986 Masters to show that unlikely skill can be demonstrated late in a sportsman’s career; similarly, we need only think of the injuries that ravaged Michael Owen to show that even the most outstanding talents can have bumpy career paths.

If that is true for a player, then it is even more so for a team – a complex web of different personalities, and complimentary strengths that have to be brought together to achieve a common goal. Even when it seems like the stars are all aligned for a set of players to perform at a high level together, there are too many contingencies for it to be certain. The reason we remember teams who are as successful as the Australian cricket team has been over the last decade is because they are the exception, not the rule. While it may fit a nice narrative arc to see sports as the ebbing and flowing of different eras of dominance, all too often that is trying to fit an analysis on the past that the facts will not hold.

While the triumph of 2005 should have been celebrated, then, it would have served England well to remember that getting to the top of the world is one thing, but staying there is another entirely. Like the rest of history, events do not follow a convenient, pre-defined pattern. Attempts to view the future of sports teams through a teleological lens can only set fans up for disappointment. For the fortunes of any sporting team are subject to contingencies within and without their control. The moral of the story – enjoy success while it lasts; there is no guarantee of its permanence.

In many ways, Flintoff’s England career has been a charmed one – indulged on account of his larger-than-life personality and his huge reserves of natural talent, rather than in relation to results on the field. A county cricketer who helped out with coaching at my school once described him as ‘the luckiest man alive’ after selection for one winter tour early in his career; a look at his series-by-series statistics bears this analysis out. Not until his 6th international series did he average above 25 with the bat; his bowling was characterised by meagre returns. Of course, in time, he justified the faith of the selectors – and for a period between 2003 and 2005 he was one of the most crucial players in the England line-up, adding valuable runs with the bat while being a key contributor through the ball.

His contribution in those years came through more than mere statistics. Flintoff has a personality which imposes itself on the game, never more memorably than in a 2004 Test match against the West Indies. Standing in the slips, he goaded tail-ender Tino Best into attempting to hit Ashley Giles into the stratosphere, telling him to ‘mind the windows’. Sure enough, Best came charging down the wicket, flailing wildly, only to be comfortably stumped. Flintoff responded with a wide grin and a chuckle as he went to celebrate – in the full knowledge that it was his personality that had achieved the wicket.

And, of course, he could play a bit, too. In the course of one over at Edgbaston in 2005, he took the wickets of Justin Langer and Ricky Ponting – an over which helped shift the balance of a whole Test series. In the next game, at Old Trafford, he bowled five consecutive outswingers at Simon Katich. Confident that the next ball would do the same thing, Katich refused to play a shot at the ball as it started out wide of the off-stump – only to see it reverse direction and clatter into his wicket. Flintoff made Katich look stupid that day; while Katich may not be the greatest batsman the world has ever seen, his performances this year have demonstrated he is no fool.

But in both those series, Flintoff showed off the less appealing aspects of his character, too. Against the West Indies, he was involved in a verbal spat with Dwayne Bravo, telling him ‘this game has a funny way of biting you in the arse’, and saying ‘I bet you won’t be here in three years time’. At the end of the Ashes series, the iconic image of the celebrations was a bleary-eyed Flintoff, still drunk from the excesses of the night before. Both incidents perhaps excusable from a superstar at the height of his powers – but more worrying when they become the defining pattern of someone’s behaviour.

Since the Ashes of 2005, Flintoff has in many ways been more of a burden than a blessing for the England team. He seemed as likely to hit the headlines for heavy drinking as heavy scoring. His performances with the bat, in particular, were out of keeping with a selectorial policy that indulged him in batting in the position of an all-rounder. But even when it came to his bowling, he lacked the destructive edge that you would hope for from a true great of the game. His five-wicket haul at The Oval in 2005 – so crucial in holding England’s edge and winning the series – proved to be his last in Tests, and only his second in total. For a man with such destructive potential, he remained frustratingly inconsistent. As part of a bowling unit firing on all cylinders, he was a weapon that any captain would love to have at his disposal. Yet as someone who was expected to lead the line for England – particularly following injuries to Simon Jones and a loss of form from Steve Harmison – he never really justified his position.

Part of the problem, of course, was that he started to believe in his superstardom. Granted, he had excessively bad luck with his injuries. Yet one can only suspect, given the stories of his drinking escapades, that he did not do his utmost to ensure a safe recovery from them. His fearlessness and his self-belief was an integral part of his success; it was similarly an integral part of his downfall. It is often said that truly great players make lousy coaches – for they simply cannot understand why others cannot achieve a level of competence that came so easily to them. With Flintoff, that seemed almost to be happening within his own career – as if he could not quite understand why a body beaten by the grind of so much cricket and good living was not able to perform the heroics that had been delivered before.

One of the signature images of Flintoff is him celebrating a wicket, arms outstretched, standing in the middle of the field like a colossus bestriding the earth. That seemed to encapsulate his cricketing personality – someone who was prepared to shoulder all the responsibility himself. The only difficulty was that at times, this showed a sad lack of self-awareness. Hence the disastrous failure of his captaincy in the Ashes of 2006-07 – there were some tasks Flintoff simply could not perform. And when a man with his imposing personality is out of sorts, it can have a negative impact on all those around you.

I feel mean writing about Flintoff in so negative a manner. Partly because I recognise just how important he was to the England side when they could lay serious claim to being the best side in the world. Partly because at the height of his powers, he was a real joy to watch, and deserving of the plaudits that he received. And particularly because he seemed such a genuinely pleasant person – someone who would take time out to comiserate with a defeated opponent before celebrating a great victory; someone who clearly enjoyed every minute he spent playing cricket – and who would have done so just as readily were there not lavish spoils on offer, too.

Why, then, am I suspicious of his motives in announcing his retirement so early in this Ashes series? Because I can’t help but shake the feeling he is asking the England selectors to put him above the good of the team. In the past, his injuries have been a constant concern to the selectors – do we risk his ankle now when it might put him out of action for a much longer period of time? Now, of course, they can go for broke. There are no long-term consequences to Flintoff’s injuries – once the summer is over, he can ride off into the sunset.

What Flintoff is essentially asking for with his announcement is to be picked when he isn’t fully fit. The newspapers this week have been full of stories of fitness tests and a dodgy ankle. How else are we supposed to interpret his announcement today except as to say “no need to drop me, lads, it’ll all be OK – my ankle doesn’t matter any more”? Flintoff has rightly seen that he has one last shot for glory. Regardless of how this summer ends up, there will be no further chance for Flintoff to cast himself in the role of national hero. It is a measure of his larger-than-life personality that he has put his hand up for the opportunity to lead his country to victory in the Ashes. I desperately want this last throw of the dice to work. It is far more likely, however, that we will see Flintoff flailing against the shadows of his past, his captain and coach entranced by the myth, not the man.

Now, as a Latin dance instructor who far prefers the culture of Cuban street salsa to Latin ballroom or cabaret, I absolutely do not believe that my favourite form of salsa should be treated as a get-fit strategy any more than I believe it should be crowbarred into the parameters of ballroom dance.  Whenever I see people jogging and skipping through the basic steps as if they’re taking part in a particularly cheerful aerobics class, my heart sinks a little.  Dancing correctly is all very well, but to dance Cuban salsa well one needs to internalise at least some of the African physicality at its roots.  Moreover, while mastering technique is necessary, it isn’t everything; salsa is about improvisation, individuality, making the steps and turns your own and adding your own flavour.  So in this respect, salsa as I see it is very far from being another kind of sport.  It is in fact a deeply social dance.

However…

Just because it is a social dance does not mean that it is not also a form of athleticism.  Cuban dance involves the whole body: the characteristic salsa movement involves shoulders, torso, hips, knees and feet, all working together or in opposition.  It is potentially very hard on the dancer without the proper training and physical maintenance; and it’s no surprise that many people who dance for fun still end up with plantar fasciitis, metatarsal problems, worn out knees or ankles and rusty hip joints.  And yet so few dedicated amateur salsa dancers seem to take the time to warm up before dancing or cool down afterwards – indeed, relatively few instructors seem to provide the opportunity – and you can frequently see people dancing in clubs for hours on end on impossibly high teetery shoes or worn out trainers, both of which are potentially very harmful things in their own ways.    Surely one thing that we salseros and salseras can take from our friends in ballroom is the emphasis on posture, supportive shoes and care of the body.

Even if you do have the right shoes, the right attitude to warmups and cooldowns and the right respect for your own physical fitness, dance injuries still happen; as demonstrated by my unfortunate metatarsal.  However, being physically fit and equipped with good footwear – not to mention being wise enough to rest when your body needs you to – can make dance injuries a passing inconvenience rather than a potentially permanent problem.  Ballet and jazz technique are also instrumental in ensuring that your posture and movements are healthy.

Fellow dancers, I advise you to eat well, sleep well, stretch well and ensure that you’ll be in good form to enjoy dancing for years to come; even if your passion is “only” social dance.

Pietersen’s dismissal in the first innings against Australia was the sort of let-down that England fans have become all too accustomed to. A desire to keep scoring runs led Pietersen to pre-meditate a sweep to a ball that should have been left well alone, resulting in a simple catch being looped up to short leg. What was most frustrating about it was the sheer needlessness of the shot. Pietersen’s dominant personality leads him to want to hit bowlers – particularly spinners – out of the attack. Blasting the ball over long-on or mid-wicket for six gets into a bowler’s head. But his dismissal on Wednesday was nothing of the sort. Instead, he was out playing a paddle sweep, a shot that would result in two runs at best. We saw the risky part of his batting on show – but without the potential for lavish rewards.

The problem with Pietersen is that he is all too aware of his natural talent. He is a man who knows how good he is, and he wants to be recognised as such. As a result, he cares far too much about what other people think of him. Last summer, England fans across the country were cursing him as he got himself out on 94 by trying to bring up his century with a six – conveniently ignoring the fact that it was his panache and his belief in the big shot that makes him such a fearsome part of England’s order.

There has always been that element of risk and reward in Pietersen’s batting. We lionise his innings against Australia in the first Test of the 2005 Ashes for the audacity of him hitting Shane Warne, possibly the greatest legspinner ever, for six. What we forget is that the very next ball, he tried the same shot again, only to be caught out on the boundary. Was it implausible to expect to hit Warne over mid-wicket two balls running? Yes. But, in many ways, it was just as implausible to imagine it happening once. Pietersen’s onslaught that morning, following as it did another breathtaking over where he clubbed 14 runs off 3 balls from Glenn McGrath, sent the rest of the side a message. There wasn’t anything to be feared from the Australian bowling attack. Quite a statement, when half the attack consists of two all-time greats.

What did Pietersen’s paddle sweep to Nathan Hauritz on Wednesday signify? That he was content to sit back against an average spinner – Hauritz will be forgotten long before people tell stories of the day they saw Shane Warne bowl – and milk him for simple runs. That may be effective for a while. But it sells short Pietersen’s greatest skill, the ability to change the tenor of a game. For when Pietersen is at his most effective, he scores his runs faster, and more devastatingly, than almost any other batsmen in world cricket. Others, like Ricky Ponting, may have a higher average. Others, like Virender Sehwag, may have classier shots that live longer in the memory. But when Pietersen is in full flow, you get the impression that any ball he faces might be dispatched to the boundary. And, speaking as a bowler, that is a frightening thought.

That threat only works, of course, if you let Pietersen be Pietersen. Those who demand that Pietersen knuckles down and makes boring scoring miss the point. His batting works on his personality trait that insists that you can always get more than seems to be available. That just sitting back and pushing for the easy runs is an affront to his character – why do all that running when you can smash the ball back over the bowler’s head?

He may not have the grace of a Gower, or the languid strokes of a Lara, but there is a power about his game that few cricketers are fortunate enough to possess. It is pointless hoping to see him accumulate runs with the effortlessness of past masters. But the world of cricket is a changing one; more brash and aggressive than in the past, and Pietersen is a man who does not want to shirk from that challenge. The problem, of course, is that the English purists don’t see Pietersen fitting their mould of a batsman. It isn’t the done thing to be caught on the boundary when something less flamboyant might be the more secure path. Much better to nudge and nurdle the singles and only take the bad ball to the boundary. Except, of course, when you try and nudge the wrong ball and end up getting out anyway.

So how will the Heaven’s XI selectors end up judging Pietersen? They’ll have no doubt that he has the talent the equal or the better of any of his competitors. At the end of the day, though, he’ll probably be confined to the second eleven, getting his moment in the sun only when one of the firsts pulls up with a hamstring injury. And when he’s there, everyone will watch in wonder and ask why he never made it on a more regular basis. The reason, of course, being that the risks Pietersen takes keep him out of the top rank. But, believe me, the risks he does take are far more valuable to England than the risks he doesn’t.

When I’ve run afoul of the blogging time management demons before, it’s inevitably been for some external reason: a sudden onrush of paid work (in the best case scenario) or internet access problems or being ill.  And I can’t count the number of times that I’ve ended up writing a piece the night before because that’s simply the point at which it came together; in fact some of my best work’s been done like that.  But in this case it was absolutely none of the above.  I spent over a week trying to figure out how to write about Alma Guillermoprieto’s Dancing with Cuba and by the time I’d nailed down an approach that might work, it was already the night before and I had no time and more crucially no energy left to formulate the review.

What made this particular book so difficult?  Well, I did not particularly enjoy reading it, and it contained a great deal I wanted to contest in one way or another.  Now, this has never been a problem before, or at least when it comes to a topic in which I have the necessary footing in order to explain just how and where I differ with the work in question.  But I generally keep my more interrogatory reviews for non-fiction; I’m a historian, not a novelist, and if I dislike a novel I simply tend to leave it aside.

Dancing with Cuba describes itself as “a memoir of the Revolution” and for this reason I thought it would be at least an interesting jumping-off point for a discussion about the ways in which writers imagine Cuba.  However, in reality it’s not a memoir of the Revolution or even of Cuba, but of the author’s nervous breakdown.  This places me on a much more precarious footing because frankly, criticising the perspective really boils down to interacting with the author’s state of mind as a young dancer in a strange country, a young dancer who is obviously not mentally healthy.  Much of what I find difficult or unpleasant in the book stems from this: the implicit central assumption that every external happening, from the failure of the ten million ton harvest to the death of Che, the torture of the Moncada rebels and even the Vietnam War was and is significant primarily insofar as it feeds into the protagonist’s state of distress.  But I would be the last person to imply that this is not a perfectly real and valid perspective, at least while you are living it.  That (in my experience at least) is simply the nature of depressive and anxious mindsets.  So while I have my questions about the way the mature Guillermoprieto writes her experience, not for a moment do I wish to appear to criticise the experience itself.

I originally thought that I could, with a great deal of care and rigour, write a piece that would make it absolutely clear that any issue I have with this work is with its structure and language, and not with its subject matter.  I still think that I could, but it would require far more time and thought than I currently have at my disposal.

I toyed too with concentrating on the Cuban folkloric dance described in the text – as Afro-Cuban dance is a beloved thing to me and any mention of it is always significant – but that’s really a minor part of the story at best, and I don’t have the expertise to engage with the much more dominant theme of modern dance and the attempt to implement its techniques and theories in Cuba.

Finally I realised that the only way to write a review of this book was to pick the one topic that Guillermoprieto and I have in common: Fidel.  Her portrayal of Fidel says a great deal both about a certain part of her generation and also about the things that drew her younger self to, and repulsed her from, Cuba and its Revolution.  And Fidel is a topic on which I hope I can reasonably claim some knowledge.  So Fidel it will be.  The piece should appear on VL towards the end of the month, and I very much hope to do justice to at least some of the questions raised by Guillermoprieto’s narrative.

That observation, in many ways, may be considered quite trite. 2005 saw two international sides almost at the top of their game go blow for blow in high quality cricket. Australians like Shane Warne, Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist may have been past their peak – but only just. Similarly, while England’s vaunted pace quartet of Harmison, Flintoff, Jones and Hoggard have since flattered to deceive, struggling with both form and injury, the quality of their bowling for that summer was nothing short of world-class. The Ashes of 2005 was that rarest of things in sport – a drama that played out because both sides were equally matched and equally good.

So why am I particularly concerned about the attention that will be paid to the Ashes this summer? They will only be broadcast on Sky.

One of the reasons that Andy Murray attracted so much media coverage in the last fortnight was that Wimbledon is broadcast on the BBC. Most Britons are not tennis fans; they may be loosely aware of the performances of Andy Murray, Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal in the four grand slam tournaments. But even major ATP competitions such as those at Indian Wells largely slip past the casual sports fan’s attention.

Things are different, however, when you come home after a day’s work to find the tennis on the television. There is something to be said for sports as a shared experience in this way. I was at a conference that started on Friday evening; the semi-final between Murray and Andy Roddick provided a useful focal point for all the attendees, and was something of a communal ice-breaker for those of us who had never met others before.

My research has demanded that I take numerous trips to America, and one thing that never ceases to amaze me is the role that sports play in community cohesion over there. To walk through Philadelphia wearing an Eagles hat or a Phillies t-shirt is to invite conversation on the latest sports news. Even back in Britain, I am regularly stopped on the street by visiting tourists to ask how certain teams are doing should I happen to be wearing team colours. The point is, sports help bring people together. They form an instant connection among people who move together but otherwise might not pass the time of day.

Now, the historic rivalry between England and Australia, with all its connotations of empire and national identity, is enough to ensure that there will be a large amount of interest in the Ashes this summer. But by restricting its audience to a pay-only platform, I can’t help  but think that the public reaction – should the cricket, improbably, surpass the heights of 2005 – will be somewhat more muted than the exuberance of the past.

After all, those who pull on the three lions tomorrow are representing England – the whole country, not just its cricket fans, or those who can afford to shell out for Sky Sports. That’s why we worry when our cricketers start messing about with jellybeans on the wicket; that’s why the Bodyline series caused a diplomatic ruckus between England and Australia. As silly as it sounds, our communal pride is reflected in the teams that represent us. What happens over the course of the summer in five cricket matches adds a little part to the fabric that helps keep a community together.

What a shame, then, that the chance for a classic cricket series to truly pass into the national psyche seems likely to be wasted. I could write about how this is a missed opportunity for English cricket – after all, the business and the survival of sport depends in no small part on heroes and on inspiration, and the more people who are gripped by the action they see on the TV, the better the chances of some of them picking up a bat and a ball themselves. But actually, I think the importance is greater than that.

For better or for worse, there is a special meaning for sports within our culture. That, on the whole, is a force for good. Where it is not, a careful reading of the sporting culture can often help reveal where tensions in the rest of society lie, and perhaps even methods for their resolution (no doubt a subject that I will return to frequently on these pages). The Ashes are a living, breathing part of our national heritage. And they deserve as wide an audience as possible.

Anyone who has read my articles on Vulpes will be familiar with my views on Fidel.  Well, not necessarily my personal views on Fidel; I don’t think those are particularly relevant.  But certainly with my conviction that people ought to read Fidel themselves, partly for the prose and partly simply because when it comes to formulating your own opinions about such a well known and controversial figure, nothing can quite substitute for reading the primary sources yourself.  Of course, a range of secondary sources is absolutely necessary (although it is extremely hard to find balanced and useful writing on Cuba, no matter where one looks).  But it seems that very few of the people I meet who have a very categorical opinion on Fidel, positive or negative, have read him.  Something’s missing there, surely?

To this end I am currently re-reading Biografîa a dos voces by Castro with Ignacio Ramonet, a book which incorporates one hundred hours of interviews between the journalist and the former Cuban leader.  Reading it the first time was like being bombarded with information; due no doubt in part to the conversational nature of the interview and el Jefe’s tendency to wander from topic to topic, frequently falling as people do into his own areas of preoccupation.  The second time around is far more illuminating, and with Ken’s permission I’ll be returning with some of the things I have found out later on.

In the meantime, welcome to The Bear’s Arms.

Fidel Castro: Biografía a dos voces, Debate, ISBN: 978-0307376534
Published in English as Fidel Castro: My Life (trans. Andrew Hurley), Penguin, 978-0141026268