Words matter. These are the best Jonathan Agnew Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’ve known Stuart Broad since he was a child, living up the road from me.
We don’t cover too many draws in Test cricket and its great: it means the cricket is more interesting, more exciting.
You can’t now do county and international cricket and have a life.
I spend too much time away from home. I love travelling, but we can be away for as much as four months during the winter.
Word can spread quickly around the international circuit if a player is perceived to have a fault, particularly if it is against short bowling.
Divorce is something I think that children feel particularly hard and what’s sad about a lot of divorces, and certainly about my divorce, is that absent fathers who really want to play a part in their children’s lives but don’t live there, they have a pretty tough time.
Fairness matters.
It’s easy to throw mud at coaches because we don’t see – nor often understand – everything they do.
I wish I’d done better for England. I only played three Tests and three One Day internationals. You have to take your chances and, for whatever reason, I didn’t.
It is difficult to master the skill of scoring runs from a 90mph delivery that is dug into your armpit or is fizzing past your nose.
When you are captain at the same time, that’s when it gets difficult and when your own game starts to decay because you have other worries and pressures.
I love winding up Geoffrey Boycott.
Tillakaratne Dilshan is innovative and scores quickly, while Upul Tharanga is neat and well organised – and left handed.
Test cricket might seem to be slow and ponderous at times, yet it is capable of conjuring great drama from nowhere.
I love the individual characters that cricket produces and, more than most other sports, the unlikely heroes.
There’s little that’s subtle about Hardus Viljoen – he’s a broad-chested, broad-shouldered fast bowler, who simply trundles up to the wicket and hurls it down as fast as possible.
Virender Sehwag can tear any attack apart. He is audacious, takes risks and has fantastic hand/eye co-ordination.
I did three winters at BBC Radio Leicester while playing cricket in the summers.
There is no other job in major sport like a cricket captain. It is a huge job.
With new fast bowlers on the international circuit few and far between, it’s always good to see someone new coming through.
That is what Test cricket is about, adapting to different conditions around the world.
Test cricket is about respecting the opposition, the conditions and the circumstances.
Flying my own small plane is my escape. I learnt to fly in 2006 and share ownership of a Socata TB10.
No one means to drop catches. Everyone has done it.
As a batting captain, you do have to earn bowlers’ trust, especially when it comes to fields.
It’s an interesting education to listen to cricket commentary when you’re not at the game. When you’re there, which is most of the time for me, it flows over you. But when you’re not there, you look at it in a slightly different way. You pick up things.
As a player, when things are going against you, you look to the captain to inject some energy but I don’t see any of that from Amla.
Indian fans probably warm to Tendulkar more, because he was their darling from a very young age and he is a class above anyone else in his team. But in any other generation Dravid would be there by himself.
Rather than influence the media, I hope that my progress from player to correspondent shows that there is a role for former cricketers in the media, despite the intolerant views of some of my colleagues in the press box.
I think most cricket fans would accept that Dravid and Tendulkar are very different individuals but they are both great players.
Some people get the wrong idea about what the job of a cricket correspondent involves – it’s not all laid-on luxury travel.
What we have learned is that Roland-Jones is a very promising prospect. Because of the way he bowls, he will not blow batsmen away, but is more likely to take wickets through accuracy and building pressure.
It takes very little effort to make someone happy.
If anyone ever accuses me of bias – on Twitter, say – they’re blocked straight away. It simply isn’t true.
In one-day internationals, the batsman is under pressure to get on with run-scoring and does not have the luxury of leaving too many deliveries.
The bouncer shouldn’t be banned. Hitting batsmen, I’m afraid, is part of the game. But it’s the histrionics, the nonsense, the prancing, the in-your-face nastiness. It’s become accepted, and actually it’s not acceptable at all.
The old player in me can certainly sympathise with how your targets change because you simply do not know what is around the corner.
The truly great players have this advantage over the rest of the international elite, gifted though those others are: they have the ability to slow down a ball travelling at 90mph, to move before others can, to make the world adjust to their rhythm rather than the other way round.
I always wanted to be a professional cricketer, which meant I didn’t work as much as I should have done at exams. But, happily, it came off.
For me, Test cricket at its best is all about ebb and flow of initiative, and it’s always a fascinating moment of the match for me when one sides snatches it from the other.
It is one thing to err on the side of caution. Equally, Test wins have to be earned. They are seldom handed to you on a plate.
It’s all you hear on a cricket field – ‘Knock his head off, knock his head off.’ Cricket has gone too far. It shouldn’t be posturing, abusing.
When you are at the top, teams raise their game to play against you, breathing down your neck because they want what you have.
Stuart Broad’s 400th Test wicket did not come the way he would have wanted – Tom Latham chipped the ball to mid-wicket – but he will take it nonetheless. It is a fantastic achievement.
I’m not much of a reader; I’m more of a laptop person. I would never consider travelling without it.
Archer has a loose-limbed approach in a run-up that is not very long. He gets into a good position at the crease and releases the ball late from a very high action. He snaps the ball down at genuine pace. He has rhythm to his bowling.
This is Test cricket. Being positive is not far away from being reckless. For all that the sport has become more fast-flowing and entertaining, you still need batsmen whose first instinct is to be patient.
Anybody can have a dip in form.
There are times when it’s difficult to see your wife and her ex-husband sitting next to each other chatting away.
A good commentator is someone who obviously people like listening to, who gets the blend between description, entertainment and accuracy of conveying the event right. If you can do that in an interesting way, you are a good commentator.
