Over the weekend it was in the papers and well rumoured that Michael Vaughan would retire from cricket this week. It’s a shame to see one of the best English players of recent times and one of the best English captains of all time call time on his career, but if there’s something that cricketers have, it’s that sense of timing about when to leave. With footballers it’s all to obvious and known quite in advance, with cricketers they are often playing for their country one minute and the next minute they announce retirement.

Vaughan hasn’t played for England since he relinquished the captaincy last year, and it wasn’t looking too likely that he would be getting back into the team. Maybe this meant he has lost his drive as I can imagine being a competitive professional you need to know you are doing something for a reason, and maybe Vaughan lost his reason.

He was the most successful captain England have had in terms of test wins, and I look forward to reading some knowledgeable pieces about him in the papers over the next few days from those that knew him well. Enjoy your retirement!

Interesting news coming out of the USA and Antigua today about three of Sir Allen Stanford’s companies being effectively frozen temporarily whilst they are investigated for “fraud of a shocking magnitude”. Now, normally I wouldn’t talk about business on this little cricket blog, but given how the ECB have teamed up with Stanford it seems worth mentioning – although with it all happening today all the facts probably aren’t available yet.

I was a fan of the whole Stanford 2020 last year generally, although I know I’m probably in the minority with that view. It does seem inexcusable from the ECB though that they got into such a public relationship with an individual who has turned out to allegedely screw over a lot of his clients amongst other discrepancies- not good PR whichever way you look at it. It doesn’t matter that they had good intentions, as Mike Atherton put it “they need to to be made accountable for the consequences of their decision”.

Giles Clarke is doing a very good impression of someone trying to back away from it all right now, playing the “board” line, but he is the chair of that board and ultimately responsible. After the merry go round of captain and coach in January and now this in February, we are going to start to turn into the world’s laughing stock.

P.S – yes I know there is a test match on and I havn’t even mentioned the beach they tried to play on last week but hey, I’ll talk about all that soon!

Today is a momentous day, for the 1st February ‘09 marks the second year anniversary of this website! I started it up in Feb ‘07 having just returned from a nice long holiday in Australia watching us get hammered in the Ashes, and deciding to see what this blogging lark is all about. I’ve gone through moments of getting bored of cricket and therefore not writing about it, but generally I’ve been here either talking about the current news or equipment, or just moaning about something which has annoyed me!

In two years I’ve made 205 posts – in the early days they included talking about pink cricket grips (a highly commented post) and talking about the World Cup, followed up by my incredulity at Sidebottom making it back into the England squad (I admit it, I was wrong!).

Over the past 11 months, I’ve had analytics on this site and by far and away the most popular posts have been those surrounding cricket equipment, with the peak being the unveiling of the Adidas Cricket Equipment last October. It was so popular that one of the uk cricket retailers even “stole” my image of KP by linking directly to it – I therefore changed it so it made no sense on their website!

Going forward I fully intend to keep going – hopefully this summer will give us plenty to talk about with the Twenty20 World Cup, and of course the Ashes! I’ll try and keep stuff interesting to ensure you keep coming back – as always please get in touch with any ideas, items etc which you think I should be talking about. You can sign up to my RSS feed to make sure you get the latest posts as soon as they are published.

Its been a fun two years (mostly), and what I’ve learnt from here has stood me in good stead on other sites I run, so thanks to all of you for visiting and making writing it worthwhile!

Quite a lot has happened in the world of cricket since I last posted here – had a bit of time off the computer over Christmas, as I needed to recharge my writing batteries for all that 2009 brings!

I’m not going to go into too much depth right now since the test series against India is done and dusted, suffice to say there were signs that we were doing ok, without having the talent/belief to close a result out. Since then we’ve heard that captain KP and coach Moores aren’t getting along too well which doesn’t really bode well. It’s unclear how this will be resolved right now, but the ECB aren’t going to want to upset their captain and best batsman before the vital summer we face, and the Ashes series along with the Twenty20 world cup in this country.

Speaking of the Ashes, I’ve been delighted to see Australia beaten in their own back yard by South Africa! It looks like they might claw back the 3rd test, but with SA already 2 up they will win the series – the first touring side to do so in Australia for a long time. Australia really don’t look the same side they did when they beat us 5-0 in 06/07, so we could be in for a treat of an Ashes battle this summer.

Anyway, lots more to come on this blog over the next year, so keep coming back and let me know if you want to voice your opinion about any of it and I’ll be more than happy to post it here!

As you will no doubt notice I have gone for a new theme for this site! I last changed it back in November 2007, but I was never that happy with the theme I chose and I was waiting for the right theme to come along. I think it has now, and I hope you find this one as easy to read and follow! If I’ve missed anything out, please let me know!

Sky Sports have released some particularly brilliant adverts for the coming few months involving cricketers and golfers in places you wouldn’t expect them! A raccoon friend of mine brought the KP one to my attention first – and the second one is also class with Ernie Els playing at the MCG! Enjoy!