‘So yeah, I wrote this piece …’ Jonathan Liew meets Jonathan Agnew

In 2019 an article about Jofra Archer led to an incendiary Twitter row and a very public falling-out. Last month, our writer and the BBC’s cricket correspondent met to talk things over

Late one Sunday evening in April 2019, I was on a train from Manchester to London when I received a series of Twitter messages from the BBC cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew. As would soon become clear, this was no friendly social call. Agnew was incensed with an article I had written on the media reaction to the selection of Jofra Archer for England. His response, robust and laced with personal insults, would be widely reported in the press and almost cost Agnew his job.

Last month I sent Agnew a text and asked if he wanted to talk things over. We met at his local in Lincolnshire to discuss everything: cricket, broadcasting, race and diversity, that article, those messages. But before all that, we discussed a young Guyanese cricketer who Agnew briefly met as a teenager in the Surrey second XI.

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