Elsewhere on Planet Cricket

With the Ashes series going on (and the World T20 before that) I've barely written about anything else this summer. Whole Test series have come and gone, the West Indies have lost to Bangladesh twice over, the ODI record individual score has been equalled, but, although I've been aware of it all, I haven't passed a single comment about any of it.

However, I've just caught up with the scores from the first Sri Lanka-New Zealand Test, which started yesterday, and it was fantastic to discover that, not only was Mahela Jayawardene back in the runs (so far so expected), so was Thilan Samaraweera, some five months after he was seriously injured in the Lahore terrorist attacks.

With the eyes of the cricket world trained on The Oval, it's a timely reminder that some things transcend the game.