Rishi Sunak was at Lord’s on Saturday, perhaps attracted by a sense of kinship with a team that effectively represent just one of the UK nations and got in trouble (in their first innings here, at least) by relentlessly and aggressively pursuing an evidently malfunctioning and self-defeating policy. At lunch, he spoke at length to the BBC’s Test Match Special, revealing that his constituency home boasts not just the much-publicised swimming pool, tennis court and gym but also a cricket net and bowling machine, and lavishing praise on the Guardian – “I love the text ball by ball. Whoever does that, they’re so funny. You feel part of a community, the way they do it. It’s brilliant,” he said (he didn’t specify that he was referring to our over-by-over coverage and other websites are available, but we’ll draw our own conclusions).
But his praise for Bazball was particularly interesting, given his own political situation. “You’ve got to give it to the team for what they’ve done, especially when they’re essentially the same group of players with a different approach to playing and leadership,” he said. “As someone who has to also lead in a different way it was just an interesting case study, how you take the same group of people and get so much more out of them.”
