Look, the sport’s been seen as bland by the general public for as long as I’ve been alive (I’m 17), with a few flashes of brilliance in between. Maybe F1’s not for you?

Sorry about that. Our sport does tend to have quite a few negatives, which is why good news stories like Verstappen’s win on Sunday make us even happier!

In my opinion, every grand prix is good, it’s just the poor decisions of the TV directors that mean we do not get to watch on-track battles as they happen. Concentration needs to be shifted away from the front runners and onto the midfield if Hamilton and co decide that now would be a good time to get a thirty second lead.

While I’m here, I’d like to inform everyone of this fantastic button that comes with all television remotes that’s called the on/off button (on some TVs, it’s called the standby button). By pressing that, you are able to not watch F1 anymore so that you don’t have to moan about it on here. Alternatively, use the TV guide to find something you’d rather watch instead… (sarcastic rant over)

I just don’t know how long Haas can go on blaming Pirelli for their inability to put a good race together despite having excellent pace in qualifying.

Ricciardo will never be as competitive as he was at Red Bull while at Renault. I believe that he is living in a fantasy that Renault will have a championship-winning car when the new Concorde Agreement comes into effect in 2021. As a Brit, I do love watching the McLarens do well after years of languishing out of the points.

Red Bull may have been ahead of Ferrari in the constructors’ championship if the Verstappen-Ricciardo partnership continued but Pierre Gasly is letting the team down massively, which is a great shame for all involved.

Mercedes were suffering from overheating problems all weekend so weren’t performing at their best but even Hamilton himself wasn’t performing at his best seeing as he broke a front wing in his first stint. I’m really happy that Verstappen won because whenever Red Bull win, they really deserve to win because they have to work hard to do so. Nice touch to bring a Honda executive onto the podium to collect the winner’s trophy.

McLaren are now 20 points clear of Renault (who they are customers to) in the constructors’ championship, where they sit 4th. They’ve had a complete overhaul of drivers and team personnel with Eric Boullier being dropped for Andreas Seidl and Gil de Farran and the excellent partnership of Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris beginning to take shape. Sainz admitted that they did upgrade the car in Spain but that Monaco and Canada didn’t really suit the upgrades so it wasn’t until France last weekend that we could see the true performance of this McLaren. It all bodes well for them going into their home grand prix at Silverstone where there will be plenty of fans to cheer them on.

I agree with Seb – F1 is becoming ever more complicated with lots of technical terms and rules to learn. As for Seb’s waning love for F1, it’s been waning since the regulations changed in 2014 when he discovered that he couldn’t just get in the car and blast off into the lead of the race. Like any other racing driver, when you try everything to win and you can’t win then of course you’re not going to enjoy it as much. I don’t think this will make Seb retire, at least for the moment but I wouldn’t be surprised if Seb wasn’t on the grid for much longer after his contract expires next year. Lewis has unveiled his plans to stay for another five years and I do think that this is largely due to the fact that he is in a world championship winning car, which Seb isn’t.

Yes, the decision may have ruined the race but I agree with what Marcus has said in this article and what Michael said in his article – Vettel cannot expect to have right of way when he has made a mistake. We should respect the steward’s decision and there’s certainly nothing we can do about it now. The Canadian Grand Prix finished at 9pm (UK time) on Sunday night, it is now 4pm (UK time) on Wednesday afternoon – let’s move on and stop getting worked up about it. Rules are rules…

The regulations state that you must only re-enter the track if it is safe to do so and the fact that Vettel wasn’t in control of his car shows that it was not safe to re-enter the track. Therefore, penalty rightfully awarded – don’t forget that it was also awarded because he nearly forced Hamilton into the wall upon re-entry. However, I do agree with your point that this doesn’t look good on F1’s record but I don’t think people should give up hope on F1 just because of this. Every sport has rules and they need to be followed.

If this is the incident at the Nouvelle Chicane, then I think you’re right. However, consistency has never been something that the FIA Stewards have done and they treat each incident on a case-by-case basis, hence why the decision on Sunday was different to that of that wet Sunday in Monaco 2016. Driver stewards do change every weekend so I’m not sure if that has an influence on whether decisions differ from race weekend to race weekend and, of course, we have a new Race Director after the unexpected passing of Charlie Whiting. Just ideas though. Court adjourned.

I’d set the alarm for tomorrow morning. Max will do his best to try and come through the field and Ricciardo will throw a spanner in the works for Gasly and Bottas. And, of course, the resumation of the Hamilton v Vettel battle – watch out for those two down into turn 1!

I too was unfortunate enough to be watching the Cricket World Cup opening party. The whole thing just seemed to be very disorganised. To be honest with you, the fact that the 60-second ‘criiio’ challenge was won by Kevin Pietersen and Chris Hughes from Love Island sums it up.

My thoughts are with you Geoff at this difficult time.

The T20 Blast is behind a paywall. Next year 2 men’s international T20 and 1 women’s international T20 will be live FTA on BBC as will matches from The Hundred. Channel 5, another FTA broadcaster, did broadcast some BBL for one season but it didn’t rate very well and was scrapped after that season. I only got into cricket once we were subscribed to Sky Sports so I think that has a massive influence on whether or not people get interested in the game.

Hi Paul,
I don’t think that there would be any detrimental impact to the game in England if England were to lose the CWC or the Ashes (or both – I can’t believe I’m writing this) because there is not that much of a fanbase to begin with. Let me give you the numbers: 2.76m people on average watched the 2005 Ashes series on Channel 4; ten years later, that number dropped to 360,000 watching the 2015 Ashes series on Sky. In 2006, Sport England recorded that 195,200 adults were playing cricket every week; ten years later, that number had dropped to 158,500.

It’s not just the paywall, it’s the game itself. My mates at sixth form think that cricket is boring and that nothing happens and are more interested in football. Even adults get bored by it and don’t want to play a game in which most of their Saturday is spent playing a long game of cricket.

The ECB does run the All Stars Cricket programme for 5-8 year olds and I know that Worcestershire County Cricket Club does run sessions in the school holidays for kids to learn to play cricket and they have had some professional cricketers turn up – even Aaron Finch! (although he turned up on the day when it was a wash-out).

There’s a new FTA deal next year where, while the majority of games will be in highlights form on BBC, some T20 games and games from the new The Hundred tournament will be live on BBC. Sky still hold the bulk of exclusive live games. We’ll just have to wait and see if this changes anything.

Yes, there is something to this. In 2005, a peak audience of 8.2 million watched the Ashes series on Channel 4 but since 2006, all cricket has been put behind a subscription paywall. The numbers are there, ever since cricket went exclusively on Sky, less people are aware of it and so don’t play it or follow it. Kids are not going to get into cricket if they don’t know what it is because they can’t watch it on BBC One, for example.
I think the biggest downfall of these Sky broadcasting deal is the fact that Sky will not let any FTA broadcasters show any World Cup games live despite it being a home tournament. Highlights packages are being shown after midnight on Channel 4 (Sky One are showing highlights earlier at 8pm but you do still need a basic Sky or Virgin Media subscription for that).
On Saturday, BT Sport made the Champions League final between Liverpool and Tottenham free to watch for everyone (as they do every year). Millions tuned in but it is unlikely that Sky Sports will follow their example with World Cup matches should England progress to the final.
There is a new broadcasting deal coming into place from next season where some live games will be broadcast on the BBC so we’ll have to see if that changes anything.

The Sky Sports Cricket channel in the UK, launched two years ago, is purely designed for cricket fans – the way it should be. It’s proved to be successful as it allows cricket fans to just watch cricket, not have to trawl through the back passages of subscription sports channels to find what they want. The SS Cricket channel follows the success of SS F1, which has been broadcasting fantastically for seven years. It’s a shame to hear that you do not have this luxury in Australia (FYI we have Sky Sports Premier League, Sky Sports Football, Sky Sports Cricket, Sky Sports Golf, Sky Sports F1 and four general Sky Sports channels broadcasting the other sports).

How have England failed to walk the walk? Two matches so far: a win against South Africa by 104 runs and a loss to Pakistan by 14 runs (but they did a great job trying to chase down the target of 349). You cannot evaluate a team’s performance after two of nine group stage matches.

The Champions Trophy was 2 years ago and England have only got better since, in my opinion. They achieved world number one status last year – we will evaluate whether they deserve this after the World Cup has concluded on July 14th, I’m sure.

I think that England do need to take the positives out of the match in that they were within reach of the target for the majority of their chase. While losing key batsmen is annoying, these things happen – no team is invincible (apart from perhaps Australia 1999-2007). I don’t think we can put it down to pressure yet, I think that’s something to assess at the end of the tournament.
Australia won the Champions Trophy in 2006 and 2009. The Champions Trophy is sort of a big thing but it has always played second fiddle to the World Cup and has now been scrapped in favour of more T20 World Cups (next one to be played in Oz next year – women’s in Feb, men’s in Nov).

Mark Chapman and Michael Vaughan were talking about this on the Tuffers and Vaughan Cricket Show on BBC Radio 5 Live on Monday night (UK time). Because this is an ICC event, everything has to be neutral – there is nothing that England can do to make the conditions suit them. I don’t know if this has anything to do with England’s slightly sub-standard performance on Monday but England have to be aware that this is not a regular home tournament as there are all kinds of rules in play to keep everything neutral, even the music that’s played at the ground.

Sky Sports have used Warney well in the World Cup so far because they don’t give him time to be jokey because there is no time to be jokey. He’s not on the official commentary team so he only has half an hour before the game (including ads), the half-hour interval and about half an hour after the game so every second of analysis counts.

Thanks Ronan for giving the UK’s coverage of cricket a thumbs-up – it’s all worth the Sky Sports subscription!

I haven’t heard anything from the England team about going for high scores. Whenever anyone’s been asked about scoring 500 runs, they sort of side away from the question – nobody wants to think about it. In fact, I don’t even think you can aim to score 500 runs. I don’t think that when England walked out to bat against Australia at Trent Bridge last summer, they thought ‘do you know what, we’re going to smash the Aussies for 481-6 today’.

Certainly, the match v Pakistan will be a slight wake-up call to England. They need to re-group in Cardiff and go again on Saturday v Bangladesh (who were very strong against SA, will look carefully at how they do v NZ this evening). I don’t think they should make any major changes though – it’s not a desperate situation (yet).

Hi Paul, we lost against Scotland, we lost 2 matches against WI in the Caribbean and we lost the series against India at home so there were some bumps along the way! I just need to ask though – what were Australia’s results against SA in the ODI series in November – I feel that Australia’s opposition was on a par with England’s opposition. Both England and Australia can win the World Cup if everything falls their way.

I believe that England are not going for the 400-plus scores and are going for the 320s that you mention. In fact, you could say that the West Indies are going for the 400-plus scores – they scored 421 against NZ in the warm-ups (I know it’s a warm-up match but still…)

I’m very annoyed that now everyone is having a bash at England because we lost ONE match. I hate to tell you all but there are still seven group games to go…

Yes, sorry my comment was very similar but I’m glad we agree. This match was an example of the ‘new’ England. It was good to see Pakistan bounce back from 11 consecutive ODI defeats though.

The Afghanistan-Sri Lanka match I’m listening to now might not go the full 100 allocated overs though!

England still scored 334-9 off their 50 overs and were still in the game right until the last. 334-9 is still a great score – the English press seem to forget that. Those 14 runs that England didn’t get were those left out on the field through misfield, dropped catches etc. and the failure of the opening partnership of Roy and Bairstow for the second consecutive match but at least England gave themselves a chance by batting 50 overs – it is a 50-over match after all!