Concentrating at Lord’s

My friend Peter Quantrill recently took his eight year old son Alfred to his first first-class cricket match – at Lord’s no less. A success, he tells me.

It brought to mind my own first visit to that hallowed ground. I was nineteen or twenty, recently moved from small-town Nuneaton to London, invited by a school friend, Roger Guedalla. Privileged, we sat among the Members in the Pavilion.

The Gentlemen were playing the Players (don’t ask), and around noon that most elegant and powerful of batsmen, Ted Dexter, had scored thirty odd when he edged one to slip.

Irritated by his lack of concentration, an old codger among the Members growled to his neighbour, ‘Wally Hammond would have taken them to tea.’

The great Hammond had first played in that match in 1927.

Nothing to do with me, mate

My friend Peter Quantrill was a bit shocked by the inept response of the chairman of Australia’s cricket selectors, Andrew Hilditch, following his team’s drubbing at the hands of England in the Ashes series in Sydney.

“I think we’ve done a very good job as a selection panel,” said Hilditch, unable to shoulder any responsibility for the rout.

“I figure someone in his position would have undertaken a modicum of media training,” Peter wrote to me.

And yesterday we had MI5’s chief of staff, giving evidence at the inquest into the 7/7 bombings in London, saying that it would be “nonsensical and offensive” to suggest that the security service bore any responsibility for the 52 deaths. (Silly me. I’d thought it was their job to detect and forestall such things.)

It all puts me in mind of the recent BP fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico.

In fact, although I occasionally coach people in media relations, I'm rather ambivalent about the value of media training. For example, if BP CEO Tony Hayward (above) had been better coached, he might not have veered wildly between the inappropriate and the obstructive, and could well still be top dog there.

In the end, I’d rather leaders were just themselves in response to media interrogation. Better for everyone in the long run.

And always better to assume responsibility.