Every Monday (well, most of them) we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers.

With the World Cup Final imminent and England still (at the time of writing) having a chance of featuring in it, we thought we’d revisit this cartoon from June 2002.

Product placement has always been a great temptation for newspaper cartoonists. JAK, who did the main cartoon in the Evening Standard for thirty years, was legendary for the private deals he had with companies to feature their name in his cartoons, knowing that he would sell the original artwork to them for £300 (which was a lot of money back in the 1970s). Sometimes he’d even place the names of several competing companies in a cartoon in order to start a bidding war among them for the original. This is probably why he had a fridge in his office stocked with vintage champagne, and we don’t.

Because the Alex cartoon satirises ostentatious and materialistic lifestyles it has over the years given incidental namechecks to various upmarket bands (Porsche, Krug, Hermès etc), but we’ve never had any kickbacks from any of them (actually that’s not entirely true: back in the early days we had given BMW so much free publicity in the cartoon that the manufacturers promised to present us with a new model BMW.. Unfortunately, when it arrived, it was just that: a model. One of those Corgi toys. Charles’s grandchildren now play with it.). On the rare occasions when we featured a real-life company in the cartoon it was usually because we were being rude about it (something which didn’t tend to generate much reciprocal goodwill). The exception to this was charities. This cartoon was from one of Alex’s regular appearances at an annual cricket match hosted by former banker Sir Victor Blank in his back garden (which was big enough to contain an entire cricket ground). The event was held in aid of Wellbeing of Women and the original of the cartoon was auctioned to raise money for the charity.

We also tended not to do cartoons in Alex that only worked on the day that they appeared, as we felt that this dated them. This cartoon is an exception, however, as it relies on the coincidence that the charity cricket match took place on the same day as the World Cup Final. And with the World Cup in 2002 being held in Japan, the match kicked off at lunchtime (UK time) when the cricket would have been in play, so it was too good an opportunity to miss.

It’s quite an unusual Alex cartoon in that it doesn’t rely on verbal trickery or puns to send the reader the wrong way. It’s just a story than unfolds offscreen via Alex’s narrative (it’d have been too difficult to show the action) and which has an unexpected outcome. Clive has always been legendarily bad at cricket and golf, invariably being bowled first ball at the former and ending up stranded in some hazard at the latter, so it’s ironic that his first moment of cricketing glory ends in disaster. Clive doesn’t even appear in the cartoon, but you can sense his furiously blushing embarrassment and you can bet that he got clean bowled next ball.

This is another of our cartoons where people go along to a sporting event, ignore the play on the field and watch a different sport on the TV instead, which is something of a trope in Alex. In this case their lack of attention to the cricket could have been dangerous. It strikes us as odd that health and safety doesn’t seem to have got involved in a sport like cricket, where hard balls made out of cork come flying at spectators through the air at speeds of around 100 mph. By contrast in the corporate world banking juniors are now banned from being sent out to fetch coffees for their team because of the danger posed to them by carrying hot liquids (God’s truth, we didn’t make this up…). This has cemented the long-standing belief in Alex that his sworn enemies in the corporate world - middle-office busybodies (eg compliance and Human Resources) and overqualified graduate trainees - are in league to undermine him.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.