< 1 minute read The ECB media cheat sheet will have been passed around again after today’s performance. All this running talk of attacking batting is understandable, but England repeatedly show a worrying lack of aptitude for walking the full 50-over distance (actually only 45 in this instance). Six times in their last seven
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Moeen Ali foolishly expects other England players to score some of the runs
< 1 minute read That’s okay. That’s what these tours are for. Moeen will have learnt from this. From now on, he’ll know that 119 off 87 balls simply isn’t enough and he’ll instead score 180 off 110 balls or whatever. Other than that, one of the great joys of the first one-day international
Continue readingEngland’s 2015 World Cup Song (to the tune of Waltzing Matilda)
2 minute read Sticking with World Cup songs, Bert writes: All proper World Cup campaigns, no matter what the sport, need a World Cup Song, but in the past I think teams have made a tactical mistake. All these songs tell of hope and excitement, of the chance of winning, no matter how
Continue readingMop-up of the day – tails and knees
2 minute read First up, tail-enders. They’re ace, but they’re a dying breed. Blame professionalism. Now we love lower-order shenanigans as much as the next person, but the key word there is ‘shenanigans’. A textbook forward defensive stroke is not a shenanigan. These are shenanigans. A tail-end innings should bring all the fun
Continue readingMop-up of the day – legs and hands
< 1 minute read Our latest Kings of Cricket piece is up on the All Out Cricket website. The subject is Paul Collingwood. Bear with us. We think we’ve made our case. It’s mostly about his magical magnetic hand, but there’s more to it than that. Consider it a paean to three-dimensionality; an ode
Continue readingEngland coaching news: someone to do something for a bit
< 1 minute read Fans of inexplicable additional consonants in first names rejoiced today when it was announced that one of England’s former bowling coaches will be returning to the setup, albeit on a short-term basis. No, it’s not Allan Donald – it’s Ottis Gibson. Gibson may or may not have said: “I was
Continue readingJonathan Trott joins Yorkshire
< 1 minute read At least we think that’s what’s happened. As far as we can tell, Trott and a handful of others have signed for Yorkshire in time for the county’s tour to South Africa. Weirdly, there doesn’t seem to be any explanation why only seven of last year’s Championship-winning squad will be
Continue readingKP v ECB on Twitter – a medieval battle with an invisible audience
3 minute read Our latest Twitter round-up’s just appeared on Cricinfo. It was an unusually tough assignment. We’d sign into Twitter, get distracted by the latest developments arising from Kevin Pietersen’s autobiography and then find that we’d lost an hour or more. We’d then force ourself to close down Twitter so that we
Continue readingCan we please dissolve the ECB?
< 1 minute read We support the England cricket team. We will always support the England cricket team. It’s just that it would be so, so, so much easier to support the England cricket team if it weren’t being run by the England and Wales Cricket Board. The Pakistan Cricket Board is mental, the
Continue readingIs Kevin Pietersen’s book worth buying?
2 minute read We didn’t get a review copy of KP: The Autobiography. Apparently it was already getting enough attention without a review appearing here in about six months’ time. We wonder whether we need to read it. The two-page email from Rahul Dravid about how to play spin that features within it
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