Is cricket played as much with the head as with bat and ball? Though essentially a physical pastime, David Foot in his blog on the Guardian website tries to reason why the game in particular has appealed so much to men of letters, the poets, those with sensitive, philosophical natures.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle loved the game's swaying statistics with one theory superseding another as entrenched batsmen were ground down and then outwitted. His friends believed that the capture of a wicket was to him as fulfilling as the villain's nadir in the final chapter.

Michael Vaughan is very bad at singing - well music in general really. By his own admission, he's an awful singer but it doesn't stop him from belting them out from time to time. It gets more interesting in The Five Minute Interview with John Matthew Hall in the Independent.

You know me as a cricketer but in truer life I'd have been...

A businessman. I'm always coming up with great ideas that I know would do really well.