Ashes diary: Edgbaston turns blue for Bob Willis while Stokes mixes it up

Edgbaston turned Blue for Bob on Saturday, part of a fundraising campaign run by the Bob Willis Fund to raise money for prostate cancer research and awareness. They’ve raised £800,000 in their first two years, part of which has gone towards the development of new, non-invasive tests at the University of East Anglia. The day doubles up as a celebration of Willis, there were hundreds of big bushy wigs on show, and a bowling net behind the RES Wyatt Stand where people were invited to attempt their best impressions of his loping run. Impressive as all that is, the fund’s most remarkable achievement may be that they managed to persuade Willis’s hero, Bob Dylan, to be their Honorary Patron. Dylan is a baseball fan and even wrote a tribute to the New York Yankees’ pitcher Catfish Hunter. His only known contribution to cricket, though, is the brief epitaph he offered Willis: “Bob Willis was a great sportsman who left too soon. I’m happy to keep his flame and cause alive.”

It’s only in an Ashes summer that you’d find the England football manager being asked what he made of England’s cricket on the same day his team beat Malta 4-0. “I imagine it’s the first team in my lifetime to declare on 393 for eight on day one,” Gareth Southgate said on Friday night. “That’ll be an interesting decision because in the end people will judge that on the outcome, as they do all the decisions we make as a coach. But that’s a clue as to the mindset they’re going into the series with. They’re going to be judged on an Ashes series in the same way we’re judged on European Championships and World Cups.” Southgate has worked with the ECB’s director of cricket, Rob Key, on a couple of crossover training sessions at St George’s Park and is a handy