Young Lions Sometimes Roar
A hiatus, and a new project
Hello all and a (very) belated Happy 2026 to you.
I’m very pleased to announce that my next book, Young Lions Sometimes Roar, will be released later this year.
It’s about growing up watching the (very unsuccessful) England cricket team of the 1990s and my equally unsuccessful attempts to play cricket as a teenager. Plus a flash-forward to the present day, and the doomed quest of a middle-aged man trying to rekindle his love affair with the sport by watching county cricket in the cold.
To explain the name: when Sky Sports first flexed their financial muscle to take hold of English sport in the early 90s, they were quite keen on flashy promotional videos for their own coverage.
Most famously, there was their ‘Whole New Ball Game’ campaign for football’s new Premier League, backed by Alive and Kicking by Simple Minds, which attempted to convey the message that English football had been completely transformed1 via the unusual medium of slightly homoerotic changing room scenes featuring players from every team.
Their approach to cricket was, however, much lower-budget, and featured original music which promised that England’s ‘Young Lions’ were ‘going to roar’.
I first experienced this theme while watching England suffer heavy defeats in all three matches during their 1993 Test series with India. Even to an 11-year-old, it was clear that it was an unsuitable accompaniment to the action.
Somehow, this series was the basis for a future lifelong love of cricket, even though the frequency of the roaring during the rest of the 90s remained pretty low.
To support the book, I’ve launched a brand new Substack project, also called Young Lions Sometimes Roar, in which I’ll be delving through some dusty old cricket books and writing about some of the players, coaches and pundits of that era.
The first introductory post is live, and I’ve linked to it below. I’d be very grateful if you’d follow the link and support me by subscribing. There’s more information about the format here, and the Substack will feature only free posts: there is no paid tier.
While I’m very excited about these new developments, it does mean that Brand Building will be on hiatus for the foreseeable future while I focus on these other projects.
Thanks very much to you all for reading over the past couple of years. If you don’t want to receive a newsletter about 90s cricket, I quite understand. But if you do feel able to continue following my work, and/or are able to recommend it to others, it would be most appreciated.
Extra special thanks, too, if you bought a copy of Our Teaching’s Great, The Admin Sucks (and if you enjoyed it, it would really help if you left a positive review on Amazon).
As for Brand Building, it may return in the future: unfortunately, I never quite followed through with all of the different ideas I’d had at the outset, or reached the intended frequency of posting. The lack of focus on a particular subject, while initially enjoyable, did ultimately prove challenging, and meant that I was too easily derailed by Quite Bad Events occurring in real life.2
In the short term, I’ll probably pop back here when there’s more news to share about the new book. In the meantime, please do follow the link below and consider subscribing to the new Substack.
Of course, English football had been completely transformed by Sky’s money, but not overnight, and certainly not in a way that seemed obvious to anyone at home wondering how the new Premier League was any different from the old Football League Division One.
Young Lions follows a set format, and has future content rigorously planned, scheduled and written in advance.