The Budding Filmmaker

Most of my day was spent in the office, getting very frustrated again, but today will always be remembered for the cricket, first the test match from Trent Bridge, and second, the local Twenty-20 cup final, in which Ben Rhydding triumphed over Otley. Forrest was playing but tonight Roam was filming. He's very good at editing the highlights of these big games and putting the action to a soundtrack. It's great to see him so focussed. The only other time I see him so concentrated is when he has a ball in his hand, running into bowl.

It was a great night for the club, but the day belonged to an Australian teenager, someone whose name I only discovered for the first time a couple of weeks ago. He was thrust into the national side as a slow left arm bowler, but completely turned the match today as a batsmen. The enormity of his achievement will likely be lost on those who don't understand cricket so I've been wracking my brain to think of a football analogy.

It's a bit like England being on tour in South America and playing Brazil, when a string of injuries leaves the national team one player short. There are no reserves other than a talented teenager who has come on tour as a second reserve goalkeeper, just for the experience and to help with practice. He gets drafted in on the substitutes bench but more injuries force him to to be used on the field in the second half as a striker with England losing 0-4, whereupon he promptly scores 5 goals to win the match, running rings around one of the best teams in the world.

That sounds ridiculous but in terms of being thrust from obscurity to legend it's close to what happened today in the Ashes. Truth is so often stranger than fiction. Nobody would ever dare to script any cricket story quite as outrageously improbable as that of young Ashton Agar. I could only follow at work by dipping into the text commentary. I've now watched the highlights and it was still hard to believe my eyes. The only disappointment was that he was finally out just two runs short of a century. I think almost all English cricket fans were willing him to get that hundred. We love a fairy-tale. We also have a bit of a soft spot for the underdog - even when that underdog is our arch enemy.

He came into bat as last man with 5 wickets having just fallen for a handful of runs. Anderson and Swann, two of the very best bowlers in the game today, were rampant. Australia were on their knees. It was his first test match. He only got the call two days before and his family dropped everything to fly out to see him play. How he rewarded them. Three hours later it was England who were on their knees. And Agar had two world records to his name. The highest ever score as the last man in, and, with Phil Hughes, the highest ever last wicket partnership.

At lunchtime, walking into town with Forrest, I was bemoaning the uncompetitiveness of the cricket, thinking that England were going to roll the Aussies over way too easily. I thought it was going to be a damp squib of a series, with no excitement. How wrong could I possibly be. I think that innings today has been the spark the Aussies needed. It could define the whole series. I think we're going to get loads of excitement, and I'm really happy about that. Cricket truly is the greatest game ever created.