NOT FINISHED JUST YET: England Autopsy, Shield Final, IPL & PSL

·57 min·3 clips

Ben Stokes says, "I fucking love cricket" three times in one post.

Gideon Hague and Peter Lawler begin by welcoming listeners to Cricket Et Al and immediately treating the latest Ashes review as a carefully managed non-event. The ECB has, in their telling, answered a question nobody really asked. Nobody ends up paying a price. That is the joke. The larger point is that the review does not feel like a search for a single point of failure so much as a way of softening the landing. From there, they pull on the thread that matters more: governance. The conversation keeps returning to the old and familiar problem of who cricket officials are actually working for when they sit on a board. John Baird becomes the example in front of them, with New South Wales watching on and Cricket Australia trying to act as though those lines are clear. They do not think they are clear. They think the whole setup is muddled by design. That muddle opens into a broader argument about private investment. One side of the conversation treats it as something that can no longer be ignored. The other side keeps asking what gets lost when cricket starts talking like a company that needs capital rather than a game that needs stewardship. They do not sound rushed to settle it. They sound like people who know every version of this argument has already happened in a corridor somewhere. Todd Greenberg comes into view as the person pushing the case for outside money as hard as a CEO can. The phrase that keeps hanging in the air is that there is no alternative. Hague and Lawler are not convinced by the confidence. They come back instead to the uncertainty around the projections and the broader lack of information. Their resistance is not theatrical. It is procedural and practical. They want to know what is being given up before anyone starts talking about what is being gained. The board structure itself becomes part of the problem. They discuss the half-pregnant nature of directors who are meant to represent a state while also acting in the wider interest of the game. That tension is not a side issue for them. It is the story. They point out that these are the kinds of arrangements that produce exactly the outcomes everyone later complains about. The argument is less about one man than about a system that keeps forcing men into contradictory roles. There is a lot of revisiting and rechecking as they talk through who stood where in earlier fights over resignations and power. That repetition works rather than drags. It shows how long these disputes have been running and how little cricket ever really escapes them. The same names recur because the same institutional habits recur. Nothing feels resolved just because a report has been written. The tone stays dry, a little exasperated, and still willing to laugh at the absurdity of it all. They have room for a joke, then another, then a correction, then back to the serious bit. That rhythm is part of the appeal. The episode does not clean up the mess of cricket governance; it walks around it, points at the worst bits, and keeps talking until the shape of the thing is hard to miss. By the close, the conversation turns outward to readers who have bought the Imran Khan T-shirt and sent in photos wearing it. They ask for more of those pictures so they can be collected into a post on the site. Then they end with a very plain announcement that there is no saley read to be found here. It is a neat final joke because it also feels like a promise kept: the episode would rather stay with the cricket than fake a sales pitch. The result is a cricket conversation that starts with the Ashes review and ends up somewhere more revealing about power, loyalty, and the awkward business of running the game. It is not polished in the way a media training session would be polished. That is exactly why it works.

As heard by us

A cricket governance conversation that keeps circling the question administrators would rather not answer.

The Ashes review reads less like a straight cricket recap than a conversation about who actually carries the can. Gideon Hague and Peter Lawler keep returning to the same knot: the ECB says there was no single point of failure in the Ashes summer, yet the bigger issue is the…

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Why you'd press play

Press play for the Ashes review, the governance tangle, and the private-investment debate.

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