Politics & Power Quote by Ted Dexter

A polite sentence with a quietly scathing payload, Ted Dexter's line is less a match report than an establishment figure allowing himself a rare public wince. "The whole of our national sport" widens the target past a bad series or a few out-of-form players. He frames cricket as a national institution, a kind of civic mirror, then tells you the reflection is shabby. That scale is the point: he is diagnosing not just performance, but stewardship.

The phrasing matters. "Not doing very well" is conspicuously mild, almost tea-and-biscuits understatement, which in English sporting culture is how you deliver criticism without sounding hysterical or disloyal. Dexter isn't ranting; he's letting restraint do the damage. Subtext: things are worse than we're admitting, and the people in charge are hiding behind tradition, etiquette, and incremental excuses.

Contextually, Dexter sat at the intersection of player, captain, selector, and administrator - someone who knew how the game could be cushioned from accountability by its own rituals. Coming from him, the line reads like an insider's warning that cricket's decline is systemic: talent pathways, governance, priorities, maybe even the sport's ability to keep pace with modern entertainment and professionalism. It's also a subtle appeal to national self-respect. If cricket is "our national sport", then its mediocrity isn't just a sporting problem; it's a story about complacency, about a country expecting competence as birthright rather than something you have to build.