In 2006 I began writing at Different Shades of Green.

People occasionally ask about the title.  It came to me in a rare moment of creative inspiration which stemmed from reading the collected works (Green Fading Into Blue, André Deutsch, 1999) of my favourite  English cricket writer of the early post-war period, Alan Ross.  When I started I was planning to write about rugby as well as cricket, and I was visualising the different shades of green that colour the different sports’ pitches at different times of the year.  The rugby writing never came to pass, which is a pity as I’d love to be able to look back now on what I thought about rugby at different times in the last couple of decades as I can with cricket.

Here we have thoughts, after their deaths, on Graham Dilley and on Ben Hollioake; on Michael Clarke; on Rahul Dravid; on the young Joe Root; on KP; on Steve Harmison; on Sachin Tendulkar; and on two players whose England careers briefly coincided, Alastair Cook and Marcus Trescothick.

If any of the views I expressed here appear naive or odd, it must be remembered that they reflect the world of cricket and some of its most prominent people as they were at the precise time the posts were written, not through the rose-tinted perspective of 20:20 (or even Twenty20) hindsight.