England's all-time Test best

Go down to the bottom of this story, and you'll see England's All Time Greatest Test Match XI, as voted for by BBC viewers/listeners/readers.

My first thought was that, as usual with these things, it's far too slanted towards current and recent players.

I can't see how Jack Hobbs and Wally Hammond could not be in there, if they were even half as good as their records suggest. And that's before you start wondering at the absence of May, Cowdrey and Compton - wouldn't one of them be worth a spot? And Ken Barrington? His test record was right up there with the best ever, and he had a particularly good record against the Aussies.

The bowling is a bit less contentious, but great as Swann was, was he really better than Hedley Verity, or Wilfred Rhodes, or Jim Laker?

On second thoughts, I suppose it's inevitable. No-one voting will have seen much of most of those players, so perhaps the real surprise is that Hutton and Trueman make the cut, presumably based mainly on their records and what voters have been told about them, rather than what they've actually seen.

So, I got to thinking, and compiled my All Time England XI, and then my Lifetime England XI, purely from players I've seen. In fact, I added a twelfth man for each, so that the captain would have a choice of playing one spinner or two. Here they are:

All Time England XI
Jack Hobbs
Len Hutton
Wally Hammond
Ken Barrington
Denis Compton
Ian Botham
Alan Knott (WK)
Fred Trueman
Hedley Verity
Sydney Barnes
Alec Bedser
Wilfred Rhodes (12th man)

Lifetime England XI
Graham Gooch
Geoff Boycott
Alastair Cook
David Gower
Kevin Pietersen
Ian Botham
Alec Stewart (WK)
Graeme Swann
Stuart Broad
Jimmy Anderson
Bob Willis
John Emburey (12th man)

In the first, it was a hard choice as regards the spinners, but Verity was reputedly the only bowler that Bradman felt he could never wholly master, so he gets the nod. Rhodes would offer flexibility as 12th man, given that as well as his bowling, he could bat pretty much anywhere. Compton and Bedser get in there because their records would be even better had they not played in weak sides for large parts of their careers (and because World War Two got in the way, too).

In the second, I went for Stewart as keeper because he was far better there than he was ever given credit for (and had a great batting record as well), and because I can't really remember Knott at his best. Matt Prior was unlucky, though.

Poetry and translation

Over at Poetry Wales, there's a very interesting review of Matthew Francis's The Mabinogi, which considers wider questions about translating medieval poetry and prose.

The reviewer, Eurig Salisbury, says: "Pointing out that he is ‘neither a Welsh speaker nor Welsh-born’, Francis admits he cannot ‘claim the Mabinogi as part of my personal heritage’. His brief pitch for validation, however, ‘in the sense that the greatest products of the human imagination are the heritage of us all’, seems rather glib. A lack of natural affinity with a language or a country certainly does not disqualify anyone who wishes to get to grips with its literature, but an awareness of the wider factors involved is key. In the case of the Welsh language, it is essential, for its position as a minority language in relation to dominant English in its own land warrants understanding in any form of cultural exchange.

"The fact is that Francis’s version is no translation – it is not described as such except in Gillian Clarke’s quoted review on the sleeve – but rather a retelling. It was based solely on a recent English prose translation, and a casual reader might be excused for failing to realise that the language of the original is still spoken."

Is that fair? The Armitage versions of medieval poems mentioned don't seem that different, to me, being closer to retellings than actual translations, although maybe the Heaney version of Beowulf is a bit different.

Robert Minhinnick wins Wales Book of the Year

Good to read that Robert Minhinnick's Diary of the Last Man, published by Carcanet, has won Wales Book of the Year 2018.

He's a poet who too often seems to pass under the radar outside Wales, but hopefully this volume is getting the wider attention that it deserves.