Cricinfo's 25 Greatest 21st Century Men's International Cricketers

There's a lovely new list for me to get my teeth into. Cricket lists are my favourite lists (indeed, when I was little, I owned a book called "The Book of Cricket Lists") and I can think of nothing more riveting than dissecting the details of this one;

https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/the-greatest-cricketers-2000-2025-1510638

25. R Ashwin 24. Stuart Broad 23. Kevin Pietersen 22. Virender Sehwag 21. Mahela Jayawardene 20. Pat Cummins 19. Ben Stokes 18. Chris Gayle 17. Mitchell Starc 16. Kane Williamson 15. Jasprit Bumrah 14. MS Dhoni 13. James Anderson 12. Rahul Dravid 11. Adam Gilchrist 10. Steven Smith 9. Joe Root 8. Dale Steyn 7. Kumar Sangakkara 6. AB de Villiers 5. Ricky Ponting 4. Muthiah Muralidaran 3. Virat Kohli 2. Sachin Tendulkar 1. Jacques Kallis

Cricket is a sport in which statistics are so embedded, so revealing, that it is hard to get a list like this wildly wrong, and this list is not wildly wrong, but there are several points of interest and dissent, nevertheless.

As soon as I saw the title "international cricketers" (as opposed to "test cricketers" or just "cricketers"), I knew that Virat Kohli would be very high, and that that would annoy me. In fact, the three successive superstars of Indian cricket, Sachin Tendulkar, MS Dhoni, Virat Kohli, are all, in my opinion, too high in this list. Such is superstardom. 

There are seven Indian cricketers, five Australian, five English, three South African, three Sri Lankan, one New Zealander, one West Indian, no Pakistani, no Bangladeshi, Afghan, Zimbabwean, Irish. Such is the balance of power in cricket - power not being exactly the same as success. One might think India have been the most successful team across the three formats over the last 25 years, but, no, it has very clearly been Australia.

And yet, as I will get to, it is an Indian cricketer whose omission from the 25 is, to me, the most unjust - Ravindra Jadeja, probably my favourite 21st century international cricketer.

So, to start with, I'm going to talk a bit about lists in general. One thing I've learnt from making a lot of lists is that the number of items in the list is a statement in itself, and can make or break its integrity.

For example, the recent travesty that was the New York Times' 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters - the number 30 immediately set alarm bells ringing. Why not a classic list number like 10, 25, 50 or 100? 30 is a very specific number that says "it's these 30 and it would be wrong to have any more or any fewer, we haven't been forced into this number, this is the right number we choose" ... but then you leave out an awful lot of people who plenty of people will think is one of the greatest songwriters, be it Kanye West, Tom Waits, Billy Joel, Madonna, Joanna Newsom or Jeff Tweedy, while also putting in a few randoms. So, it was either clever and knowledgeable people being clever and arch, or it was dweebs thinking they were cleverer than they were, and the youtube round table discussion of the jury revealed, of course, the truth of that matter. But, anyway, let the Americans be.

What I've learnt from making lists of greatest songs is that the worst kind of number you can pick when there are just SO MANY SONGS is something large like 500, which would suggest it might contain all the multitudes required, but does not even scratch the surface. I made my ridiculous list of 2022 Songs, but eventually understood that was not close to containing everything people might think a classic. A list of 10,000 songs would not contain everything everyone thought was a classic. You might as well, rather than that, keep a very tight definition of historic greatness, make a big case, and go for 50, 100 ... or 101, I guess.

But, in general, if you are able to have a number where the constituent members are clearly set apart and there is not an entirely valid case for several others to be within that number, that is best. Perhaps the perfect scenario is a slight trailing off at the end, so a reader might go "aah, i can see that eg 47,48,49, and 50 are all less good than, say, 41 and 42, which are not much less good than eg, 31 and 32."

Another major pitfall of compiling lists is not making your criteria and your parameters clear.

So, in the case of this list of Greatest 21st Century Men's International Cricketers, it gradually dawned on me, as they unveiled the list on the website over the course of a couple of weeks, that the criteria and parameters were such that a handful of the greatest cricketers of all time, who played not a negligible amount of international cricket in the 21st century, would not be included. Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath. Brian Lara.

While some of the greatest cricketers of all time, who played not a negligible amount of international cricket in the 20th century, would. Sachin Tendulkar. Mutiah Muralitharan. Jacques Kallis.

Maybe it's just me, but if you're going to leave Shane Warne off a list of great cricketers, I'm a little surprised you're not saying you're doing that right at the start, just for clarity. Warne took more than 350 test wickets in the 21st century, McGrath 300, Brian Lara scored 6000+ runs at an average of 54. They belong, in at least some sense, to the category of 21st century cricketers, so I'd have thought laying out the reasons for saying they're not among the 25 best would be top of the list for the list not feeling a bit off.

Having looked for but not found the explicit way this decision was made, I'd say there are two likelihoods, both of which are fair enough in and of themselves, for who they have and haven't included. 1) they considered everyone but only for their international play from 2000 onward - as if the years they played before that simply didn't exist. 2) they only considered players at all if more than half of their international career was from 2000 onwards. That applies to Tendulkar, Murali, Kallis, but not Warne, McGrath, Lara. So, ok, both make sense ... it seems more likely they did the former as when writing about Tendulkar, they gave his stats from 2000 onwards, rather than his whole-career stats. But there's a big problem with that, really. Tendulkar being the Number 2 player of the 21st century (and judged the best batsman) - magnificent as he is, it doesn't hold up in and of itself. Others have scored more at a higher or comparable average, captained better, won more. Sachin is one of the great batters, but what lifts him above peers is not average (great, but so are others), not style (beautiful, but so are others), certainly not number of defining backs-to-the-wall knocks (actually, arguably, fewer than some others), it is sheer volume and longevity. But if we're not considering the whole volume, no, I do not put him above Smith, Dravid, Sangakkara, Williamson, Root, Ponting in the 21st century. 

And is it really right to leave Warne and McGrath out even if you are just considering the 21st century? No, absolutely not. They were the dominant figures in the most dominant era in the history of test cricket - 7 years of their greatness from 2000 to 2006, when Australia crushed almost all in front of them, was quite enough greatness to make the list. I mean, come on, it feels like a swizz, whatever the criteria.

The list attempts a tricky feat by being about "international cricket" - the three forms - test cricket, ODI and T20I, the latter of which has becoming increasingly prevalent as entertainment and money-spinner in the past 15 years, more at the cost, in some ways, of ODI than tests. It's tricky for various reasons - firstly because of how much weight to assign to each of the three forms. Most still consider tests by far the highest and truest test of greatness, but the gaps are narrowing.

Most of the great cricketers on this list are great in all the forms (while some played the majority of their careers before T20 was quite so widespread), but there is a handful whose placing is more due to white-ball greatness than test greatness. Those would be Chris Gayle, MS Dhoni, AB De Villiers and Virat Kohli. De Villiers was also a great test batter, but I don't think he'd be as high as Number 5 if he wasn't also one of the greatest white-ball batters. Chris Gayle's inclusion is understandable, but rankles a little. Dhoni, I think, is a little high. A superstar, a very good keeper-batsman in tests but not averaging over 40, a very good captain who led India to the 2011 World Cup and transformed their test team, a truly great white-ball finisher. But, I don't know - 4876 runs at 38 in tests ... there are players he's above that he should not be above.

And then, there's Kohli, Kohli at 3 in the list. Kohli is (vynig with De Villiers) the greatest white-ball batter in history, I don't dispute that. He was also a good captain for India, though he didn't quite lead them to the summit as was hoped. He neither led them to the World Test Championship (though they were the Number 1 team in the world for quite a while) or to either a 50-over or 20-over World Cup. But, and I really think it is a more significant than people allow, he failed in test cricket in a way that almost no one else on the list has done. Test cricket ended up defeating him. He started slowly, had a few years of utter magnificence, then lost his form and did not completely regain it. He finished his test career with 9000 runs at 47. There was so much talk of the fab four batters for years (Kohli, Smith, Williamson, Root) but, ultimately, in tests, Kohli is Andy Murray compared to the other three. They've got way more runs, way higher average. Kohli may only be the 20th greatest test batter of the century.

One player with a much better test record than Virat Kohli, who does not make the Top 25, is Pakistan's Younis Khan - 10,000 runs at 52. There are no Pakistani players on the list, not one. I'm not saying, apart from Younis, that there necessarily should be, based on statistics. Pakistan cricket has had a long period of decline, only occasionally arrested by brilliance. Without going into all the reasons for that, it's interesting to think of a possible make-up of a list of 25 Greatest International Cricketers 1975-1999. Now, for those years, International Cricketers really were almost entirely defined by their test record, so in some ways the list is easier to make:

Without too much thought, and not in order, it would be somethiing like:

Viv Richards, Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Sunil Gavaskar, Waqar Younis, Allan Border, Richard Hadlee, Clive Lloyd, Malcolm Marshall, Curtley Ambrose, Kapil Dev, Ian Botham, Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar, Javed Miandad, Steve Waugh, Sanath Jayasuriya, Dennis Lillee, Greg Chappell, Michael Holding, Joel Garner, Courtney Walsh, Warne, McGrath, Allan Donald - (on the edge possibly Gower, Gooch, Chris Cairns, Rodney Marsh, Greenidge, Willis, Kumble, Inzamam ...)

so clearly there are fewer Indian players, fewer English, a lot more West Indian, more Pakistani. This is, sadly, where money has talked in cricket. Look at all those great West Indians ...

Another thing to note is that the late 1900s are seen as the age of the all-rounders, and there are not many all-rounders on Cricinfo's 2020s list - there we had Imran, Hadlee, Kapil Dev, Botham, not to mention Wasim, Marshall, the likes of Waugh, Border, Richards, Jayasuriya:

Here there is Kallis, one of two great batting-allrounders in the history of test cricket, and then Stokes as really the only classic all-rounder (with a few like Root, Sachin, Ashwin, Gayle, Starc who are pretty good at the other thing but not all-rounders).

Now this is, I would say, a significant point of dissent for me. The all-rounders have not been fairly served on this list, nor, as it happens, the left-armers. I'm not saying all these should be in the Top 25, but here are some fine 21st century all-round cricketers - Andrew Flintoff, Daniel Vettori, Shakib Al-Hasan, Chaminda Vaas, Jason Holder, Shaun Pollock, Ravindra Jadeja.

I would have considered Shakib Al-Hasan, Bangladesh's best batter and bowler across three formats for a long time, someone, who for all his faults, carried a relatively new international nation to the position they're now at, of solid competitiveness. I would certainly have considered Shaun Pollock, who probably suffers from his career spanning the millennium, but nevertheless a very forgotten and underrated cricketer, with 3500+ test runs at 32 and 400+ test wickets at 23. Pollock was an unspectacularly magnificent cricketer, perhaps in the shade of Kallis and of Donald then Steyn.

Above all, the absence of Jadeja is a serious oversight. Jadeja has always been an underrated cricketer. It is always "he is a canny cricketer" "he is a useful asset" etc whereas the statistics say he is, in fact, one of the greatest cricketers of all time. No one described Imran Khan as merely "a useful asset" and yet Imran is the only all-rounder with a comparable statistical record to Jadeja. Imran - 88 tests, 3807 runs at 37.7, 362 wickets at 22.8. Jadeja - 89 tests, 4095 runs at 38.3, 348 wickets at 25.1. Uncannily similar, and a better all-round ratio than Botham, Kapil, Ashwin, Pollock, Hadlee, Stokes, Flintoff, than almost any other bowling all-rounder in history, in fact. 

Put it this way, if someone who had never watched cricket nor engaged in cricket discourse but understood statistics were to look at each player's statistical record in tests from the 21st century, Jadeja would be placed in the Top 5 players without question. 

He suffers for being a left-arm spinner and an unspectacular one. Likewise he is an unspectacular batter (ironically, he is a spectacular fielder, probably the finest outfielder of the era).

But, in general, I think the list ill serves all-rounders, and perhaps favours batters over bowlers. Another fairly rank omission is Kagiso Rabada, the magnificent South African paceman who has the best strike rate of ANYONE with over 200 test wickets, and who drove a South African team who had pretty much given up on test cricket a few years ago to winning the World Test Championship. The inclusion of Kevin Pietersen, in particular (whatever his impact), over Rabada feels pointedly off.

What else? It is a mistake to conflate statistics across the three forms of the game. Classic test match statistics are one thing. They do not tell the whole truth, but they tell most of the whole truth. ODI and particularly T20 statistics are a very different matter. It's like, in football, when goals and assists are put together as "Goal contributions" and that's meant to tell the whole story of a player.

In T20, a player can lose his team a game with a knock of say, 60* in 40 balls, and a player can win his team a game with a quick 20 or with one over at a crucial time which, say, only goes for 8. Also, the reality is - every test match still matters. With ODI and T20i, most of it doesn't really matter in and of itself - most of it is glorified practice building for the tournaments. The numbers work in a different way.

I could go on and on but I think I've said most of what I wanted to say. I've been thinking about the best way to have solved the conundrum of who to include. I think having Murali but not Warne, having Tendulkar but not Lara, whatever the rationale, is a cut too severe. But I also think it would have been too silly to place Warne at, say, 17 on the list, based purely on his 21st century performance.

So, I'm going to do my own list and my criteria will be "Anyone who played at least five years/took 200+ test wickets/scored 5000+ runs in the 21st century, but once they're included, counting their whole international career ...

And, going back to an earlier point, I think 25 was too few, by any measure. There are too many players who have as much justification for being there as some of those included.

Apparently, the list was whittled down from a longer list by a combination of votes from great ex-cricketers and and the Cricinfo editors. I mean, they always are - it's always a bit of voting and a bit of tweaking to suit the agenda. It's not a bad list, it is, as I said, hard to get something like this wildly wrong, and it really depends how much weight you ascribe to white-ball vs red-ball, batting vs bowling, all-round ability, moments vs consistency, being a captain, being a keeper, etc, 

but, taking into account that listing the greatest cricketers excludes many of who would be the most valuable cricketers in the modern world, where T20 is everything (Maxwell, Pollard, Suryakumar Yadav, Klaasen etc)

and, admitting that even whittling it down to 50 has been harder than I thought ...

this would be my

50 Greatest 21st Century Men's International Cricketers

OK, actually, before I start, I'm going to mention one other player who doesn't meet the benchmark because he stopped playing tests in 2003, but he's a great of modern cricket. Let's call him ... the 51st Great ... there are no Zimbabweans in the list, but Zimbabwe's greatest player is Andy Flower. First of all, he averaged 51.5, which is more than all the other great keeper-batters. Secondly, he has gone on to be one of the great coaches - leading England to 1 in the world and their first major tournament, winning the IPL more than once etc. Thirdly, his protest at the 2003 World Cup with Henry Olonga was a truly brave and powerful thing, It finished his career, cast him out of his home country, and could have resulted in worse for him. So, he is a notably great 21st century cricketer.

So, saying that, ...

50. Andrew Flintoff (England) Well, obviously, some personal bias will come into my list. Some idea of what I personally thinks constitutes greatness. So I include Flintoff at 50, whereas one should really have found a place for the Australian David Warner, a battering ram across three formats, but all the demerit points he gets, you know .... and, as for Flintoff, I was thinking "well, it's not a about stats with him", and then I looked at his test record again, and it still looks like the record of a very substantial cricketer, even with the slow start and the years of injury. He was the best cricketer in the world for a couple of years, and he changed the whole direction of cricket for a while, so I think he earnes his place.

49. Mitchell Johnson (Australia) I include the likeable Johnson, who had a spat with the unlikeable Warner. Similar to Flintoff, didn't quite have the career he might have had, but was the best player in the world for a while.

48. Misbah-ul-Haq (Pakistan) Rather like Andy Flower, a substantial moral figure in cricket. Having been ignored by Pakistan in tests for most of his career, he was brought in as the one good incorruptible man in his late 30s to sort the whole sorry business out after the matchfixing scandal of 2010. He became Pakistan's most successful test captain, while also having a top-class test batting career into his 40s. While the 2000s are generally seen as a time of decline in Pakistan cricket, Misbah briefly got them back to Number 1 in the world.

47. Chaminda Vaas (Sri Lanka)

46. Daniel Vettori (New Zealand) 

45. Mohammad Yousuf (Pakistan)

44. Nathan Lyon (Australia) No Shane Warne, but it may surprise people when Lyon calls it a day that their records end up being not all that dissimilar.

43. Inzamam-ul-Haq (Pakistan)

42. Chris Gayle (West Indies) The biggest drop from the Cricinfo list, just not a cricketer I liked. Not really fair to him, it felt at the time like he was undermining test cricket in a way that countless people have done since. Mega-talented, applied most of that talent to white ball cricket.

41. Jason Holder (West Indies) Whereas Holder made the best attempt anyone's made to take West Indies cricket on his broad shoulders and arrest the decline. Really a fine cricketer, making big money in the franchises now, but one can't begrudge him.

40. Kevin Pietersen (England) Again, perhaps a bit lower than he ought to be, as he really affected cricket in a big way, but, you know, this guy ...

39. Alastair Cook (England) I don't love this guy either, but I'd place him above Pietersen for a few reasons and 4000 test runs.

38. Mahela Jayawardene (Sri Lanka)

37. Rohit Sharma (India) One of the all-time great white-ball batters, and a good captain.

36. Anil Kumble (India)

35. Matthew Hayden (Australia)

34. Michael Clarke (Australia)

33. Shivnarine Chanderpaul (West Indies)

32. Graeme Smith (South Africa) Now a bit underrated, I think, and could be higher. Has more wins as a captain than anyone else in test cricket history. Has an average of 48 as an opener. Never scored an aethetically pleasing run, though.

31. Mitchell Starc (Australia)

30. MS Dhoni (India)

29. Rashid Khan (Afghanistan) All formats, close to being the best bowler in the world over the last decade. And, obviously, has had a huge impact on the game.

28. Younis Khan (Pakistan)

27. Shakib Al Hasan (Bangladesh)

26. Ben Stokes (England) The vicissitudes of form, fate and the public mood mean Stokes might well have been 10 places higher at the end of last summer, and might be again if he has a great summer in 2026. But, right now, it feels like he's not quite everything like people always thought. Not quite. Tough gig.

25. Stuart Broad (England)

24. Adam Gilchrist (Australia)

23. Kagiso Rabada (South Africa)

22. Jasprit Bumrah (India)

21. Virender Sehwag (India)

20. Pat Cummins (Australia)

19. Ravichandran Ashwin (India)

18. Shaun Pollock (South Africa)

17. Rahul Dravid (India)

16. AB De Villiers (South Africa)

15. Dale Steyn (South Africa)

14. Virat Kohli (India)

13. Brian Lara (West Indies) In the same way as Warne is somehow just the best bowler, the true wizard, even though the numbers don't quite back that up, Lara is, for me, the true batting wizard - the most magical, the most brilliant, the one with the highest ceiling. But he didn't achieve everything Warne achieved in the game, so I can't put him too high.

12. Ravindra Jadeja (India)

11. James Anderson (England) Putting Anderson above Steyn is a tricky one, but correct. Seen as the two top seam bowlers for a while, Steyn had a substantially better record than Anderson whilst they were in sync, but, the point is, the second half of Anderson's career was as good as the whole of Steyn's career. 400 wickets at 23. So even though Anderson ends with the higher average overall, he had a whole equivalent era of being as effective a bowler as Steyn, not to mention another era as a very good but slightly less effective bowler.

10. Steve Smith (Australia)

9. Joe Root (England) I do put Root just above Smith though Smith has an average a fair bit higher because a) volume b) most catches in tests c) better bowler d) 51 for England when no one else has got above 48 for England in 50 years ...

8. Glenn McGrath (Australia)

7. Ricky Ponting (Australia)

6. Kane Williamson (New Zealand) I think Williamson is substantially too low in the Cricinfo list. As good a batter as Smith, and one of the best test captains, who captained the smallest test nation to the first WTC, to a World Cup final they really deserved to win. So great you barely even notice him.

5. Kumar Sangakkara (Sri Lanka)

4. Sachin Tendulkar (India)

3. Muttiah Muralitharan (Sri Lanka)

2. Shane Warne (Australia) Still, though Murali took more wickets at a better rate, that certain something makes Warne the greater cricketer. Maybe it's just that he was a much better batter. But, you know, also, it's just Shane Warne.

1. Jacques Kallis (South Africa) Without question.

There are a handful of others who also really merit a place in the Top 50 - you're never going to get the number just right. Anyway, this has been a highly WORTHWHILE EXERCISE for me, so there we go.

Seeing the Beatles

Something I'd never specifically thought about before, which is a fun little thought, is ... supposing the Beatles had reunited in, say, 1974, or 76, or 78, for a big one-off show, or tour, what would you want them to have played?

Assuming ... 

there's no expense spared, but there are still technological limitations

it's a really good music venue, I don't know what the best venue of that era was ... but, you know, everyone can hear. It's in the UK.

they play for about two hours.

they can all still play and sing as well as ever.

I think this is different from Greatest Hits - i think i wouldn't want them to play all my favourites... i'm wondering what would be the ultimate crowd-pleasing Beatles set, drawn from their whole career (I'm going to assume they don't play any solo tracks, though, if they did, let's say we'd get Instant Karma, Live and Let Die, What is Life as a sneaky 10 minute secret set at the end ...)

Help

I Saw Her Standing There

Drive My Car

Helter Skelter

Happiness is a Warm Gun

I Want to Hold Your Hand

Don't Let Me Down

Something

Get Back

A Hard Day's Night

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

With a Little Help from My Friends

Octopus' Garden

Back in the USSR

I Got a Feeling

Revolution

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Come Together

She Loves You

Let it Be 

-

Hello Goodbye

Hey Jude

Twist and Shout

She Came in through the Bathroom Window/Golden Slumbers/Carry that Weight/The End

Something like that ... not very subtle really.

Totnum hosper

Totnum hosper - sounds a little like a Latin motto meaning "Whether too much, I am held to hope" ... anyway.

I've supported Spurs for 40 years, and I've mainly felt it was a good club to support, that it played good football, that it knew its place, didn't get ahead of itself, wasn't evil, was basically one of the "good" clubs and I could broadly accept that there were other more successful clubs.

The last few years have tested my fandom. It was very embarrassing when the club joined the disastrous European Super League. It was very embarrassing when a significant portion of the fanbase wanted their team to lose to Man City so that Arsenal didn't win the league. The TV documentary series was embarrassing. Having Jose Mourinho as manager was embarrassing. And, the last couple of seasons, being pretty terrible at football has been pretty embarrassing.

I think everyone connected to Spurs is to blame at different times for what's gone wrong, but, ultimately, it hasn't gone that wrong. The club is still in the Premier League. Spurs are not, nor have ever been, Man Utd, Liverpool, Arsenal, modern Man City, modern Chelsea. Spurs are on a par with Villa, Newcastle, Everton, Forest, West Ham, Leeds United - big clubs with big fanbases that have won some things, but not monster clubs which dominate. Apart from Everton, those other clubs have been relegated from the Premier League this century. Spurs have done better than all of them for the last 20 years, but between 1990 and 2005, finishing bottom half was pretty commonplace. 

Daniel Levy was a good chairman who, thanks to some luck with players and managers, shrewdness with a decent budget, made Spurs a consistent Top 6 club for a while, got them near the league title and to the Champions League final. Spurs fans act like it's his fault we didn't win those moments, and that it's his fault we're not winning them all the time. Completely ahistorical. Levy's biggest mistakes were not caution but overreaching (hiring Mourinho, European Super League). His successors and his critical fans are finding out how easy it is to make a success of Spurs.

Anyway, what I want for Spurs next year is top half of the league, a good cup run, and to play decent football again, and not be a team of dirty, not-particularly likeable foulers, which we've been lately.

I want the promising, talented players to not be injured all the time. I want Romero and Vicario to leave, thanks. Micky van der Ven will obviously leave, but with more sincere thanks

Amongst other things, a particular problem for Spurs in the last couple of seasons is simply that other teams have got better. Spurs could get 60 points in a mediocre season by picking up good amounts of points vs Brighton, Bournemouth, Forest, Fulham etc even if we fell short against the big clubs. Those clubs are very good and well-managed now and there are fewer cheap points than ever, and Spurs haven't adjusted to that.

Anyway, since it's been 40 years, here are my 40 favourite Spurs players.

40. Lucas Moura - i didn't love Moura with his right-wing politics but his hat-trick in the Champions League semi-final was my favourite moment as a Spurs fan.

39. Kevin Danso - best player in the run-in. Think we've found one there.

38. Rafael van de Vaart - down the years, world-class players have occasionally turned up at Spurs and that's been great. Touch of class, van de Vaart.

37. Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg - very solid. Suffered a little for being not quite as good as what came before, but much better than what came after.

36. Darren Bent - I like Bent in general as a player, think he was a bit hard done by, both for Spurs and England.

35. Ruel Fox

34. Paul Robinson

33. Ossie Ardiles

32. Gary Lineker

31. Paul Stewart - adaptable, solid, scored in the 91 Cup Final.

30. Mousa Dembele - few players have had their memory embellished by posterity so much as Dembele. Now gets talked about like an all-time great. He was good though.

29. Aaron Lennon - had a brief period of everyone thinking he should be picked ahead of Beckham for England. A good classic winger, who was a big part of the era when Spurs got good.

28. Edgar Davids - I know he didn't do much for Spurs. But it was Edgar Davids! For Spurs!

27. Dejan Kulusevski - aah, i wish him some luck. Class

26. Tom Huddlestone

25. Danny Rose I liked Danny Rose. Deserved a better career.

24. Jan Vertonghen

23. Christian Eriksen

22. Richarlison - hasn't really delivered for Spurs, but is, unlike Moura, a Brazilian footballer with good politics.

21. Eric Dier

20. Stephen Carr Was not much good, and then, admirably, became good.

19. Glenn Hoddle

18. Vinny Samways Definitive 90s Spurs player.

17. Paul Allen

16. Clive Allen. The rest will mainly be pretty self-explanatory.

15. Hugh Lloris 

14. Paul Gascoigne

13. Micky Van de Ven

12. Ledley King

11. Gareth Bale

10. Luka Modric

9. Chris Waddle

8. Ben Davies

7. Gary Mabbutt

6. Son Heung-min

5. Dimitar Berbatov

4. Chris Hughton Not like I watched him play for Spurs all that much, but just a football person I like.

3. Harry Kane

2. Robbie Keane

1. Erik Lamela A rogue choice at one, but I just loved Lamela. Very talented, but always got injuries. Worked hard, got in opponents' faces. The fact he was peripheral for a lot of the best era shosws how good that squad was.

So, I've left out, amongst others ...

Sheringham, Ferdinand, Klinsmann, Walker, I Walker, Trippier, Anderton, Defoe, Perryman, Aldeweireld, Dele Alli, Crouch, Ginola, Adebayor, Paul Walsh, Justin Edinburgh, Eric Thorsvedt, Rebrov, Iversen, Pavlyuchenko, Jenas, Carrick, Dawson, Woodgate, Barmby, Sanchez, Sissoko, Wanyama, Brennan Johnson ...

Some absolute Spurs legends. I don't exactly know why. They just don't bring a warm glow to my heart when I think of them in a Spurs shirt.

Same playlist, other songs

As promised, here are some brief thoughts on some more songs from the same playlist:

Some Girls - Rachel Stevens Firstly, this is a brilliant song. I liked it at the time and I like it even more now. It's also just about the most 2004 thing that exists. Richard X, who wrote it, refused to let Geri Halliwell record it and she locked herself in a car to try to persuade him. He then wrote a mean song 'Me Plus One' (recorded by Annie) about her. The video, for Sports Relief, of Some Girls, has Colin Jackson, Pat Cash and Audley Harrison (!) in it! It's so far from the song, an uneasy, dark, glam stomp about nasty music industry goings-on. Rachel Stevens, voted by FHM magazine in 2013 the sexiest woman ever (for ever ever?) does a good job with her simple vocals. A "better" singer wouldn't have carried the concept of the song so well. There are layers and layers to this that require greater detail than I can give it now.  When people talk about poptimism, this is, for me the good side of it - a whole raft of great, clever, UK pop singles in the early 2000s. Critics judging that every bloated album by a superstar is a masterpiece ... that's pooptimism.

Orange County - Gorillaz featuring Bizarrap, Kara Jackson, and Anoushka Shankar This is the nearest thing to a hit on the latest Gorillaz album. The combo of Jackson and Albarn singing a duet about grief was my unexpected delight of the year. Kara Jackson's Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?, about her best friend who died, was my favourite song of 2023, and Albarn is of course singing about his father Keith who organised the exhibition where John Lennon met Yoko Ono, so technically broke up the Beatles.

Hasta la Raiz - Natalia Lafourcade This was on Rolling Stone's fairly recent list of the 250 Best Songs of the 21st century, and it was my favourite that I'd not heard before, at least I thought I'd not heard it before- when I was going through playlists recently I found it on another playlist of songs to listen to from a list. Well, anyway, it's a beaut. I don't know what it's about. I do usually like to have a rough idea what songs are about, I am what they call "a lyrics guy", but hey, you know what they say, Hasta la raiz, baby ... but, anyway, this is a beguilingly excellent song.

Coming in from the Cold - The Delgados Masters of sweet melody tied to mean lyrics, the Delgados. "Not to blame, no one's telling you you're not to blame" - "take your tantrum trailer out of town" here. And the melody of the chorus of Coming in from the Cold has probably been the thing I've whistled more than anything else in the last 20 years. It's my whistle of choice!

Hammond Song - The Roches Ha, the Delgados and the Roches ... what next, the Fignons? The Hinaults? Anyway, this is truly an unusual, unsettling, song - there are various different voices on it and they sound completely different and then they join together and sound like one.

6th Avenue Heartache - The Wallflowers I often think about the extremely handsome son of Bob Dylan with the pleasantly conventional radio voice who is always polite and forthcoming in interviews, and was briefly a big rock star in the late 90s. Anyway, this was the Wallflowers' second biggest hit, and it's good. It sounds a little like Knockin' on Heaven's Door at certain points. Nice work by the Jordi Cruyff of music (don't mean that as an insult).

Drop the Pressure - Mylo This may just be my favourite straight-up dance track of all time, and I couldn't understand (notwithstanding that's it's one line is "motherfucker's gonna drop the pressure") why it wasn't a supermassive hit. Anyway, if I'm to pick out one specific moment from it, it's probably the bit where he goes "motherfucker's gonna drop the pressure".

Stop! - Erasure This, on the 'Crackers International EP' was one of the first singles I bought. You don't need me to tell you how many great singles Erasure released. This was bang inbetween A Little Respect and Drama!. What a run that is ... I think the "we're gonna be we're gonna be together again" bit was one of my first headly thrills from pop music. 

Don't Delete the Kisses - Wolf Alice Wolf Alice are, there or thereabouts, the biggest, most consistent, most acclaimed UK indie band of the last 10 years, and this is their biggest song, and it reached Number 100 in the charts. It's a lovely song, this, and gets better with age. Both the whispered verses and belted choruses are, in their way, gloriously romantic.

Hard to Handle - Otis Redding Every second in this is golden. Well I guess I first heard it in The Commitments, as is the way with too many soul songs if you're my age. This is the most alive song ever, and yet it was first released after Otis Redding's death. What would that have been like to hear? Unfathomable. I've said it before - everything in music is different if Otis Redding hadn't died. I truly think that.

All Your Favorite Bands - Dawes This is California band Dawes' absolute best attempt to write a classic American soft rock song, and they do succeed, and they have famous friends like Brandon Flowers and Conor Oberst in the video, it just wasn't a hit. The stately piano, the specific American nostalgia, the feelgood hook, this song kind of had everything for a just world where the people like cheesy singalongs, like I do.

London - Benjamin Clementine "London London London is calling ..." obviously pops into my head when I go to London, and I'm a little more surprised this song isn't better known. Pretty idiosyncratic, Mr Clementine, with his great voice and great face, and a bit of success in films and in music, but clearly just a guy who does his own thing.

Serious Drugs - BMX Bandits Beloved of Nirvana and the first band Oasis supported on tour. I cannot say I am a big BMX Bandits but this is, in a way, the definitive Scottish indie pop song - the defining sound. A lovely song.

Hey That's No Way to Say Goodbye - Roberta Flack There was a tribute album a few years ago, which I really liked, of Tom Waits songs sung by women, and you could do the same with Cohen (I mean, that probably already exists, doesn't it...) This somehow manages to be even gentler and stiller than the original.

I'll Say Forever My Love - Jimmy Ruffin Kevin Rowland bloody loved that soul music, didn't he? Never stopped going on about it. I knew this song for years only from its title/chorus being interpolated into 'Reminisce' from 'Don't Stand Me Down'. Turns out it's a nice song. I have bought Kev's autobiography and apparently it's brilliant, but haven't got round to reading it. Hopefully he will talk about walking down the Edgware Rd and listening to I'll Say Forever My Love.

I Know It's Over - The Smiths It feels embarrassing to say it now, but this was the song that really sold me on the Smiths - I'd been ambivalent for years, and then, I guess, bought The Queen is Dead when I was about 20, and this is the second track. I loved the melody, I loved the guitar (i think i bought it before Christmas and it reminded me of The Pretenders' 2000 Miles) and when Morrissey sang "It's so easy to laugh, it's so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind" I didn't know enough about him to laugh it out of town.

Superstar - The Carpenters I think it was on the first series of X Factor or maybe it was Pop Idol and one of the contestants did this in the live shows, and it's funny, really, at the start of those shows, before it got too organised,they'd just do quite old-fashioned songs the judges liked - I remember someone doing Monday Monday by the Mamas and the Papas. Anyway, I think this is the best Carpenters song - in some ways, works quite well alongside Some Girls, smuggling some darkness into a pop setting.

Busby Berkeley Dreams - Magnetic Fields In the really quite icky recent NYT list of the 30 Greatest Living American songwriters, Stephin Merritt was pretty much the only male indie/alt guy, which somehow was even more annoying than there not being one at all. Still, this is a beautiful song, and, as far as I know, it still awaits the big choreographed Hollywood cover it cries out for.

Hurricane J - The Hold Steady I saw the Hold Steady early evening at a festival in 2007 and I loved it - the puppyish won-a-competition enthusiasm, the geekiness, the chanting, the long dense lines, the crowd play, but I remember some of the people I was with not enjoying it at all. I was really into them for a while, but developed a certain "well, here's the Hold Steady doing what the Hold Steady do" weariness. It had certainly set in by the time of Hurricane J from 2010, even though it's an excellent song. But I listened to it again recently and thought "yeah, that's just great". "You're a beautiful girl and you're a pretty good waitress [pause leaving vocals isolated] Jessie I don't think I'm the guy (guitars crash in]" - lovely stuff ...

Just to add one more Train of Thought - A-ha I was listening to this yesterday. It was my favorite A-Ha song when I was little but I think I haven't really listened to it for about 35 years. And, I just thought, I know Morten Harket is acknowledge as a good singer, but I'm not sure he's really talked about as one of the greatest pop singers of all time, but he should be. Pretty astonishing. Effortless mix of Buckley (both) and Orbison.

New playlist, songs and bits of songs

I made myself a big new playlist, having realised I'd been listening to quite a lot of the same stuff when out and about for the last year or two. I took some care over it, digging into lots of existing playlists and picking out songs that I'd liked at the time but had gone off my radar, just trying to avoid all my completely obvious favourites, while also wanting to make sure it was mainly stuff I really did like, across a good range of genres and eras. But, equally, there's no particular order or meaning to it after a while. When a song came to mind, I added it, so it's quite unwieldy.

But I'm pretty happy with it. I'll share a link to the whole thing at the bottom, but thought I'd write a sentence or two about certain songs, and certain bits in certain songs, which I particularly like.

And Your Bird Can Sing - The Beatles. The bit halfway through which goes "Tell me that you've heard every sound there is ..." Just, halfway through an album, a non-single, they decided to make that incredible noise together. They didn't have to. It's funny, I've been looking this (mainly Lennon) song up and he was a bit sniffy about it, saying it was basically a polished turd - just so funny that, with their double guitars and glorious harmonies, McCartney and Harrison turned a song of his which he thought merely ok into something magical and he couldn't help but be annoyed about it.

Still Life - Suede. The apotheosis of doomed Suede grandeur. Every album should contains a song that attempts to be this grand. I've taken to starting it quiet and then turning the volume up high just as it builds to the big chorus 2.30mins in. Bit of fun. Anderson now sings it in concert with just an acoustic accompaniment and without a mic, which, in its way, is just as grandiose and ambitious as the massive string section on the album.

Fantasy - Earth, Wind and Fire This is one of those songs that was around in my head for years before I first properly heard it and knew what it was. I still love it so much - the melody and the sound and the vocals. It sounds like something from a psychedelic musical, as much as a disco/funk track. Like a lot of songs I love, it leaves you waiting a long time for the full glory. Philip Bailey is an incredible singer.

Some Jingle Jangle Morning (When I'm Straight) - Mary Lou Lord I first heard this on a compilation of lo-fi 80s British indie, where it stood out in that a) it's from the 90s, and b) she's American. It's also a great song. There are two versions - one (I guess the one I first heard) which is very lo-fi from 1993, and then rerecorded with more alt-rock sheen in 1998. Her name, and maybe the title, make you think it will be a bit country, but not really. It's classic scuzzy/grungy melodic indie - catchy, pretty, but also very sad, about lost love and addiction. The chorus references Dylan and Guns n'Roses, and I literally only found out today that the song is a lament for the singer's former relationship with a little feller you might have heard of called Kurt Cobain. So I guess the 98 version has a different level of sadness to the 93 version. Anyway, it's a beauty of a song.

Heat Wave - Martha and the Vandellas I've given it some thought, maybe a lifetime's thought, and I just think the "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah" bit in Heat Wave is the most joyful thing in the history of pop music.

So Sorry - Feist I saw Feist supporting Ed Harcourt in the early 2000s in some properly tiny venue - basically the size of a large living room, with a barely raised stage, and I remember being sat, with my feet tucked in so as not to kick the artists, to the side of the stage, literally about a metre from Feist, who was tiny, and not at all well known. She became pretty well known a few years later as her song was used in an Apple advert, and gradually she has become one of my favourites. There's a bit at the start of the second verse here where the spare vocal is suddenly backed by a humming accompaniment and she varies the vocal melody slightly, which is really lovely, just a moment to melt into the music.

Lawyers, Guns and Money - Warren Zevon I usually resist the calls that tell you that cult favourites like John Prine, Townes van Zandt and Warren Zevon are the USA's actual greatest songwriters - I'd been quite indifferent to Zevon, but I love this. It's got quite a bombastic intro and has a superb opening couplet - "I went home with a waitress the way I always do / How was I to know she was with the Russians, too?" Needless to say, the people eg Bob Dylan who tell you these kind of guys are good at writing songs are right.

Chandelier - Sia It's an incredible piece of singing, Chandelier. It makes you think "Why aren't there more pop songs like this?" but the answer is fairly simple, of course - there are only so many pop stars who can sing (and write) like Sia, and once she's done this once and had a hit with it, she can't really do the same thing again (rather like I sometime ask why there aren't more Wilco songs like Impossible Germany). 

St Dominic's Preview - Van Morrison I think there is the biggest gap, with Van Morrison, of anyone, between the persona he presents to the world and the music he has created. Or rather, some of the music he has created. Perhaps that's a visual thing too. The fact he's always looked, not just talked, like a curmudgeonly uncle. So, sure, that fits with the basic, tight, blues and jazz he does, but some, a lot, of his greatest songs, like St Dominic's Preview, have so much vision, and joy, and wonder, so many words and thoughts and ideas, fly so far above the world, it really does feel impossible to reconcile.

I'll Take You There - The Staple Singers I mainly think of Mavis as a modern grandee, a gospel/soul/protest survivor beloved of everyone from Tweedy to Run the Jewels, Gorillaz and Waxahatchee, making all kinds of songs her own. And clearly also just one of the nicest, best people to have ever lived. But also, in the 70s, the Staple Singers had massive hits. I'll Take You There was a US Number 1, (as was Let's Do It Again). It borrowed the intro from Liquidator and used the Stax house band, but it's really all about Mavis Staples - one of the absolute best voices, hardly diminished even now.

Alfie - Dionne Warwick Funny song, Alfie. I do like it. Interestingly, most people involved in the creation of it didn't love it that much, or rather didn't love having to do it. The film needed a song - Bacharach and David didn't really know what to do with the title, until they watched a draft of the film. Cilla Black, who sang it for the UK, didn't really like the idea of singing the name Alfie so much either. Anyway, there are multiple covers - the Cher and Dionne Warwick versions are well-known, but the glaring omissions are the two people who should have sung it, Sandie Shaw and/or Dusty Springfield. I don't know why Dusty Springfield didn't sing it, but Sandie Shaw was offered it first and turned it down. Now, that is a damn shame. Still, it's an odd song but a great effort by Bacharach and David to make it work. It's the Dionne Warwick version I've always listened to, and she always sings great, but, still, it's not quite right ... anyway, the reason it's come back to my mind in the last year or so is because my cousin's dog is called Alfie (apparently one of the reasons Sandie Shaw didn't want to sing it was because she thought Alfie sounded like a dog's name!) and he's a lovely dog but has a bit of a bark when startled and when he does, I inevitably mutter "what's it all about, Alfie?"

Kids in America - Kim Wilde It's such a brilliant song, Kids in America, almost unfathomably good. It's got so many bits to it. I always loved the slightly unexpected male backing vocals (which i think is her brother Ricky who wrote the song with her dad Marty). One of the best singles of the 80s.

American Girls - Harry Styles A few things about Harry Styles - he can do a sub-3 hour marathon. That's no joke. He's got a seriously weird transatlantic accent now, but, funnily enough, he always had quite a weird accent, quite hard to place, a product of different English places. He kind of looks old now. Not in a bad way, but most 32 year old pop idols still try to look 22, but he looks happy to look 32, or even 37. This is a great single, about his fifth bona fide great single. 

Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard - Paul Simon I quite like this little clip of https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AaaPDD0padE Paul Simon talking about how it's difficult to write story-based songs to electronic dance music, but that his music has a strong rhythmic feeling which people can dance to if they want. It reminded me that the first dance at our wedding was to Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard. Now, this was a joke. I said to Julio, well, we're getting married at a school, let's have Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard, and she said ok, and we listened to it together, and she, who knows about dancing and rhythm, said, well, ok, that's a pretty complex rhythm, it's not going to be easy to dance to, but we'll give it a go, and she taught me a little dance we could do, but needless to say, it was entirely beyond me so I jumped up and down a bit and looked embarrassed, and of course no one got the joke. Anyway, I love Me and Julio ... it's a super-fun song with strong rhythmic content, but I'm better off listening to it than dancing to it.

Maybe the People Would Be The Times or Between Clark and Hilldale - Love Always one of my favourite song titles, and always one of my favourite songs from Forever Changes. Weird how this kind of mainstay of "classic albums" has kind of faded away. Love were kind of a massive deal in the 90s and 2000s, it felt like they influenced lots of the music I loved. But now? Not really. Modern music is influenced by Take on Me and Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls.

Jenny Was a Friend of Mine - Killers Weird how, within a handful of listens of Hot Fuss and liking at least four of the songs, I decided I thought the Killers were essentially throwaway rubbish and haven't liked anything by them since. Bit unfair really. Why did I judge them by a harsher standard than other bands? (I guess cos of that infernal "i've got soul but i'm not a soldier" bit) Still, intro to this is the best thing they ever did, really.

My Brave Face - Paul McCartney Just, nothing could sound more like a Paul McCartney song co-written with Elvis Costello.

So, here's the whole, 300+ playlist, which is called "2026 is moving" - more hits than misses, I think https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/2026-is-moving/pl.u-JPVaJCjqxpe

I may even do a part 2 of this type of blog, as there are a lot of interesting songs on the list I could write a couple of sentences about ...

The American bands

This week saw the release of the 12th Foo Fighters studio album, which is the 12th Foo Fighters studio album I won't listen to and whose presence I will slightly resent. 

I'm not going to specifically slag off the Foo Fighters as there are plenty of musical acts I myself like which are extremely mundane, but it just got me thinking about the American bands - the big American rock bands, as in, whichever US guitar bands might have headlined a biggish UK festival in the last, say, 30 years.

Let's say post-grunge, so I'm not talking about Nirvana. I'm also not talking about Bon Jovi, who really, perhaps with the exception of Guns n' Roses, exist in their own space - so mainstream that, in some sense, they're not mainstream anymore. I'll say about the Jove, I'm probably fonder of more of their songs than most of the bands I'm going to talk about, combined.

I suppose I'm not really talking about "metal" either, which is just its own thing, though will include some bands which are in and around being metal.

So, who do I mean? I mean

Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day, Blink-182, Linkin Park, The Killers, Rage Against the Machine, Limp Bizkit, Pearl Jam, Metallica, Smashing Pumpkins, Kings of Leon, Slipknot, Nine Inch Nails, Black Crowes, Counting Crows, and let's say, for good measure, The Offspring, My Chemical Romance Weezer, Good Charlotte, Dave Matthews Band, Paramore (a later vintage, so a bit different) and, I'm even going to say it, Queen of the Stone Age (though I made more of an effort to like them, and do, a bit) ...

but I mainly mean the ones at the top of the list, and actually I'm not going to slag them off at all. It's just funny how I really never got into these bands, and that I kind of lump them all together even though they sound pretty different. I mean, I guess they do. I've actually not sat through more than two full albums by the whole list combined.

But what's funny is that pretty much all of them have one song I've grudgingly gone "yeah, fine, that's a bit of fun" and it's usually the obvious song, the absolute monster smash, or near enough, but I've never had the slightest desire to investigate beyond that. Maybe it's just my lingering Britpoppery. I'm still a Blur/Jam little Englander.

But, of course, a lot of my favourite bands in the world are, or have been, the tier of American guitar band, of the same era,  a bit below this - Wilco, The Walkmen, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Shins, Decemberists, Rilo Kiley, Waxahatchee, The National, Iron and Wine, Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes, Mercury Rev, Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem etc etc.

so I can't be so anti-America per se.

I guess there are two main bands who slip through the cracks - REM (and actually it took me a pretty long time to finally admit I liked REM) and The Strokes, who are, as I've long maintained, a small band who got bigger than they should have, and are great on record, but not good to a large crowd live.

Oh, and the Pixies, who I once saw headlining Benicassim and were immense, but, again, think they're a bit different. And The White Stripes (so, you know, a few sort-of exceptions).

Anyway, someone who explains actual music well, and someone who explains actual cultural differences well, could and would explain this. I feel like I do have the explanations fairly clear, in an unspoken way, in my head, about why those are not actually very very good bands, sorry, but am quite sure, if I attempt it, I will sound like an arsehole, even to myself. So I'll leave it.

Arts

Herein I compare myself to Vincent van Gogh. Or rather I compare everyone to Vincent van Gogh. I think about Vincent van Gogh and I think about creating things and its reward.

I walked around the Van Gogh Museum last week, and thought to myself "God damn, he did a lot of paintings, Vincent van Gogh". If there's anywhere you're going to think that, it's the large museum dedicated to the work of Vincent van Gogh. He really did though. I've seen a lot of his paintings elsewhere and yet here were floors and floors of the things.

That guy loved painting.

Didn't he? 

I think, until this week, I'd slightly misunderstood the legend of van Gogh only selling one painting in his lifetime. Firstly, in thinking it true. It's not really true. There's only one painting he sold in his lifetime that all the details are known about (The Red Vineyard). But he definitely did sell other paintings. And he definitely swapped paintings with other artists, which is the same thing, really, especially if those artists are Gauguin and whoever else.

But I think I'd misunderstood whether van Gogh had any inkling, during his lifetime, that he was good and that people thought he was good. I think I thought the remarkable thing was that he fiercely devoted his life to painting without any but the smallest notion that he had any great gift for it and that other people thought so. But that's not true. He clearly was made aware that many people thought he was good, from family members to teachers and fellow artists including Monet.

But, even so, for not selling many paintings, that guy did a lot of paintings.

Some of them are really good. You should check them out.

However conscious he was of his own genius, van Gogh fulfils the myth for any unsuccessful creator that they too might be a misunderstood maestro whose work will be venerated beyond the grave.

This famous, rather lovely, scene from Doctor Who https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTJI_UphPk garlands that myth.

Could happen to any of us, right? We could travel through time, meet Bill Nighy, and discover that we're the most beloved artist in the history of the world, or there and thereabouts? Find out that even the little things that probably only took us a few hours are stared at with wonder and awe and would probably cost a buyer several million quid?

Glad it all turned out good for VVG and that la tristesse didn't durere, hope that happens to me ...

It's good to create things. But, in all seriousness, kids, it's also good not to be tortured by creating things.

The creative thing I mainly do is write poems. I started doing it when I was, I think, 17, and although I may at times have laboured in the vineyard of delusion, I haven't for a long time (he said, deludedly).

Writing the kind of poems I write to the average standard I write them feels quite close to the Olympian ideal of art for art's sake. That's where Van Gogh comes in, or rather doesn't. As I was walking around the Van Gogh Museum, I did think "he just did all this because he felt compelled to and he loved to, that's amazing" but, in most artistic endeavours, where there is a potential reward which includes public acclaim, respect of one's peers, approval, and riches, and you know, in some sense, based on your own feelings and things that other people have told you, that those things are truly within your grasp ... if only ... that must be tortuous. Van Gogh had that problem. Nick Drake had that problem. Lots of people, whether accurately, or through delusion, have that problem. There is, nearly always, something to do it for other than its very self.

I don't have that problem, or, at least, I think, I have it, as regards my poems, to a pleasingly small extent. There is almost no possibility of any tangible effect on the world from my poems. This isn't some false modesty. I wouldn't write them if I thought they were, in and of them themselves, always terrible and without any merit.

So, there are several reasons I can be so relaxed and pessimistic. Firstly ... poems, right? Who reads poems? Or rather, who makes money from poems? A very small number of people, and often they are writing poems I have no aspiration or capability of writing. Next, who is my voice for? Almost nobody. People a bit like me. There really are not many people a bit like me, I have discovered. And especially not reading poetry. Next, how would I go about gaining the smallest amount of acclaim for my poems if they deserved it? By doing things that are completely beyond me. Putting myself out there, selling myself etc. Next, I do other work, which, as luck would have it, is creative work that is experienced by a lot of people. That specific itch is scratched (as I'll get to, that work does not scratch all itches.

Why do I write poems then? Because I want to write a good poem. Or maybe five, or maybe ten. I want to know it's good. But also, I just want to create things. And at times, sure, it has been to get something out of me, to bear my soul. And, early on, sure, I thought it might lead somewhere, that there was a purpose to it.

But now, it really is, mainly, because I want to write a good poem.

There remains something profound and beautiful in the fact that when the mood takes me to create a poem and the blank page is in front of me, there is the possibility that it will become the most perfect, beloved work of art ever created. That possibility survives even the first few words. I mean, you could even say it survives until the writer has completed the editing process, but we know that's pushing it. But still, that blank page is an incredible space.

I still don't think I've written a good poem - one which I would confidently place in front of any group of people and say "See, this is a good poem". That's pretty interesting to me, because I'm fairly good at my job, and my actual job does actually have more similarities to writing poems than most jobs have, so it is a good opportunity for self-examination when I consider why I'm good - in a truly effective, recognised way - at the one and not the other.

Both things involve words, patterns of words, order and reorder, set structures, misdirection, opacity turning to clarity (or not), keeping to rules and learning where it works to break rules. Some people, including me, occasionally, find some OC questions beautiful. When I've written one that's gone well, I have had the satisfaction of knowing that 2.5 million people will see it and think it good, some of them will specifically think "wow, those clever people who write the questions for this clever and entertaining show". And I'm good at that, and prolific. I've got 100s and 100s of those.

This is good for me, but I'd much rather write one good poem. Still, I've come to enjoy that writing poems is a seemingly unwinnable battle against my limitations. As a quiz writer, I don't have that many limitations. I definitely have some. I have weak subjects, I don't type as fast as some people, I'm not as natural at creating high quality puzzles as some people, but I know a lot of stuff across a fairly wide range of subjects, my mind moves fluently between topics, I know how to structure a question, without being mega-funny I understand pretty well how low-level comic structure works, I know better than most, through years of experience, what different demographics do and don't know, and I can work pretty hard when I need to.

Some of those skills are quite useful in writing poems, but some of them aren't. I read poems by other people and, look, sometimes there are successful and well-liked poems which I don't think are that great, both from the past and present, but when I read a good one, particularly a good modern one, I do say "shoot, there it is, that's what I don't have". Feelings I don't feel, images I don't see, care I can't quite take, words I'd never put together, daring I can't show, experiences I haven't had, space I can't leave. Those things. How wonderful and frustrating sometimes to read truly magical poems, just as unreachable as singing like Marvin Gaye or bowling like Shane Warne. And yet, and yet, when something as blunt and basic as If by Rudyard Kipling was voted the nation's favourite poem, as it was a few years ago ...

Something that is fascinating about poems is that sometimes you can, to all intents and purposes, do a good job and end up with a big fat blob of nothing. There have been plenty where I've decided what to write about, which I think is a fairly interesting topic or happening, I've decided to use a rhyme and metrical structure, I've stuck to that nicely, I've chosen my words carefully, I've told a story, set a scene, I've worked hard, I've enjoyed writing it, and, at the end (or at let's say looking back on it a time later) realised it is nothing that any person would ever want to read.

So, saying all that, I work within my limitations, sometimes try to stretch beyond them. I don't write poems in a vacuum. I used to, and they were worse. My poems have improved since I have, to a small extent, engaged with the idea of a reader. I post them on a poetry site called Allpoetry, which is useful but frustrating. Most people on it are American. Your poems get given an instant score by an algorithm (I know!), which also tells you about "weak words" and "strong words" and "too many capitals" and stuff like that. You can ignore all that, which I do, but a higher score means a poem is more likely to be posted on the site's front page, which means more people will read it and comment on it. All of this is to be taken with a pinch of salt, but, still, I'm glad the site's there.

I've never attempted to get a poem published, or submitted a poem to a competition, but I did, a few years ago, participate in a zoom workshop, which was kind of excruciating, particularly in reinforcing how overbearing i can appear even when I'm trying my hardest not to be. The people were nice but I defintely thought "I'm not like these people, none of them know how many test centuries Brian Lara scored" and I don't think I was a great presence in the group, so won't be doing anything like that again, I don't think. 

I did learn, or confirm, some interesting things though, which is that people did not like the quizziness/puzzliness of some poems, they did not like that there were certain things I'd written based on factual, or legendary, things which to me were assumed people would know about a bit, and that was offputting to people. People don't really like having to work out poems and feeling stupid if they don't, which is fair enough, and a bit like quizzes, but different from quizzes. And my inability not to do that without being extremely stolid is a good explanation for why I'm good at writing quizzes and less so at poems

Going back to Vincent van Gogh - as Bill Nighy accurately says in the Doctor Who clip, van Gogh is the "most popular great painter of all time", and anyone who knows the smallest bit about art recognises his style and knows a decent number of his paintings. He is, I guess, the Shakespeare, or at least the Dickens, of painting. He's as quotable as they come.

But, being honest, in what form does poetry survive, even to arty, smarty people, to all but true enthusiasts? Even some of the greatest poets are widely known not even for one whole poem but for a couple of quotable lines from a poem. Poetry is still popular in some sense, but like everything, even more than other things, it's often reduced to soundbites.

So, in a weird way, that's where my delusion can harmlessly remain. Because, sometimes, late at night, or early in the morning, a line that I've written comes into my head and won't leave, maybe something I wrote a couple of years before, where I can't remember much else of the poem, but just a snatch of what is, at least in that moment to that one person, even if that's the person that wrote it, memorable. I don't know if that's enough reward, but it's some.