Carse ‘feels he let England down’, says Durham coach: county cricket, day two – live

Led by the nose from game to terrible game by increasingly disturbing and terrible adverts, I feel like I’m in the cinema scene from A Clockwork Orange We’re all escaping something when we play video games. Mostly it’s the drabness of real life, where we don’t get to command kingdoms using armies of dragons, win Champions League trophies with our local team, or inhabit the body of an improbably speedy hedgehog. Sometimes I play them because I want to escape from the version of me that gets paralysed by depression, and boy has the black dog been sniffing at my bits recently, because the Atlantic Ocean is separating me from my wife for a few months. For 30 years she has been the light that banishes that darkness, and I am honestly lost without her. If that sounds pathetic, you haven’t met her. She leaves everybody she meets feeling better. It’s a superpower that warrants a call from the X-Men...

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Winning the Europa League and finishing fourth did not inoculate Villa and Spurs were not hampered by a season of woe In theory Aston Villa supporters should have been rubbing their hands together at the prospect of a Champions League season. Equally, Tottenham fans could have been despondent after a relegation battle that went to the wire. A 17th-place finish meant Spurs earned about £35m less in Premier League merit payments, which are based on final league position, than Villa. Yet the mood in the two camps is reversed. Spurs have spent an estimated £322m in the transfer window, and that excludes the loan of Manchester City’s Omar Marmoush, for whom they are committed to paying £55m after this season. Sales have reduced the outlay to a net £140m, but Spurs fans seemed buoyant, at least until the first match, when they were soundly thrashed by one of the data scientists’ teacher’s pets, Brentford...