Cricket: Follow the Second Test Between England and West Indies at Headingley With Our Live Over-by-over Report

A symphony orchestra. there is a thunderstorm, they are playing a Wagner overture and the people leave their seats under the trees and run inside to the pavilion the women giggling, the men pretending calm, wet cigarettes being thrown away, Wagner plays on, and then they are all under the pavilion. the birds even come in from the trees and enter the pavilion and then it is the Hungarian Rhapsody #2 by Lizst, and it still rains, but look,
one man sits alone in the rain listening. the audience notices him. they turn and look. the orchestra goes about its business. the man sits in the night in the rain, listening. there is something wrong with him, isn't there? he came to hear the music.


And many thanks to Charles Bukowski for providing me with an easy entry to today's OBO. It's raining in Yorkshire. Undoubtedly there is more than one old man sat, flat capped, in the stands saying "I came to watch the cricket", but, unlike Buk's musicians, no one is going to play for him, because everyone's 'under the pavilion'.


England have three days to take seven wickets, allowing me to say, quite genuinely, "maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but probably by Tuesday" which isn't quite John Wayne but hey you take what you can get, no? So, it is still raining in Yorkshire, and we've no word on a possible time for the start of play. But there seems to be some genuine optimism that by the time we're a little way into the afternoon, we'll have some cricket.


A small piece of broken news: ICC President Percy Sonn has this morning passed away at the age of 57. And I'll nod my head to the good people at cricinfo for providing this brief profile of the man: "Percy Sonn, the ICC's president since July 2006, is a straight-talking, hard-drinking bull elephant of a cricket politician, whose pronouncements and actions rarely stray from the controversial. His most infamous antics occurred at Paarl during the 2003 World Cup, when he drank himself into such a state of inebriation while watching India take on Holland that he was reported to have "almost fallen out of his trousers". An experienced Senior Counsel, Sonn was in charge of the Scorpions - South Africa's equivalent of the FBI - and served as the deputy national director of public prosecutions before moving into cricket administration." RIP Percy.