Archive: September, 2009

Adil Rashid makes a case to be England’s new number seven

A week or so ago, Adil Rashid hit two hundreds in successive innings. In Yorkshire’s two innings in the field adjacent to those hundreds, Rashid took five wickets in each of them.

England will naturally be looking for a seam bowling all-rounder to replace Andrew Flintoff – perhaps Rashid’s team mate, Tim Bresnan – but is that the best ploy?

With Stuart Broad offering fast-medium seam and James Anderson offering fast-medium swing, England really need a vicious fast bowler to take wickets on the world’s flat Test pitches. Is there one?

Not really and even if there were, he wouldn’t be able to bat. So why not pick a leg-spinner? If Broad, Anderson and Graham Onions can’t get wickets on a given day, a fourth bowler of similar ilk isn’t going to help one bit.

Leg-spinners can get wickets on flat pitches. Adil Rashid is a leg-spinner. And he can bat.

Paul Collingwood has to go

This is the vibe we’re getting at the minute, but prior to the Ashes, Paul Collingwood averaged 58, 43, 61 and 68 in successive series. Paul Collingwood never gets much slack.

It strikes us that if you say someone’s got no talent often enough, it colours people’s views in itself. Yes, Collingwood had a poor Ashes overall. However, where some players are deemed out of form after a poor series, Collingwood’s dismissed with a short, sharp: ‘He’s crap’.

Cricket T-shirt winners

We’ve got the winners of the cricket T-shirt competition we ran about a month ago.

We ran the competition late and we’re announcing the winners late. That’s pretty much the way things work round here.

At the weekend we were 45 minutes late meeting our friend and it was only a one hour journey. Fortunately, he managed to be two hours late, despite setting off at the same time as me. ‘”I had to stop for a sleep,” he said.

Anyway, here are the winners.

• Thomas Bastin
• Sam Blackledge
• Simon Daffen
• Murray Nixon
• Sue Nolan

You should receive your T-shirts by Friday.