I don't know any of the players these days.
There was a time when I was very knowledgeable about the minutiae of first class cricket, to the extent that I was invited to quizzes to answer cricket questions. But then Brian Lara happened and a lot of the records I had spent my formative years memorising weren't records any more. You can't reprogramme your brain to accept this new data with such facility when you are in your forties.
The funniest example of this was when I was working for Customs - 1994 or 95 I think. A colleague and I were due to go to Scotland for work purposes and since we were both involved in VAT computing, and enforcement law in Scotland is quite different from that in England, we arranged a trip. We shared a boss, so we told him about our plans to visit Aberdeen and Elgin in June. "Oh!," said he, "This needs a management check!" His boss got to hear about it and he decided it needed a management check as well, so four of us got on the plane at Stansted. We'll call our boss's boss Brian, as that was his name.
We were staying in Dufftown and at breakfast, Brian was reading the Independent. Suddenly he exclaimed "Good grief! Good grief!"
"What's up Brian?" we enquired.
"Brian Lara has just scored 501 in a test match!"
"Crikey!" I replied, quick as a flash, "That beats Hanif Mohammed's 499 for Karachi against Bahawalpur in 1959!"
Second look of utter incredulity on Brian's face in as many seconds.
"How did you know that?"
