This year’s Allstars Festival is pencilled into this year’s fixture list for Bank Holiday Monday 30th August, at Barnes Common. Sadly missing from last year’s calendar, the Festival is an opportunity to celebrate the spirit of the Allstars, with a game played in a party atmosphere, between two teams of Allstars and friends, with barbecue, beers, friends, and hopefully some sunshine. Friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, children, other relations, and even James Hindle, are all welcome, to play or just to watch and socialise.

I thought I’d kick off discussion about this year’s Festival, by asking: what would you like to see at this year’s festival? Dancing girls? Fire-eaters? Elephants? Do you like the two-15-over-innings-a-side format? Tell us your hopes and dreams for what will inevitably be the highlight of the cricketing year, putting the IPL, the ICC World Twenty20, and the Ashes into the shade.

We need a more esoteric, personalised name – to convey its intended role as a kind of online version of the Sun Inn after a match. It can be as obscure as you like: only regular players will ever visit anyway. Enter your suggestions below.

We’ve finally dragged Allstars online interactivity kicking and screaming into 2006. Welcome to our new blog. Or we could call it a forum. Or a chatroom. Or something like that.

The idea is to allow everyone to comment and discuss Allstars news and results – with plenty of scope for mickey-taking, bitching, moaning, gloating, and James Hindle.

It also means, if you fancy it, you can post your own updates and photos directly to this site, even from your mobile. Just let me know and I can set you up for access; alternatively you can create a Blogger user ID.

I can tell how excited you already are about this.

Thank you very much.

MHA.