2 minute read We’re in the era of the boundary juggler. It was therefore quite refreshing to deploy an ‘oh wow’ for a good old diving catch yesterday, as Glenn Phillips briefly turned into a glider to dispatch Moeen Ali. England levelled the one-day series against New Zealand yesterday and in so doing
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2 minute read First published in 2016 and now republished without changing a word – although we did update the lead image and add a link at the bottom. If you have a problem, if no-one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can ask Moeen Ali to do
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4 minute read Few England players have deployed the long handle as delightfully as Moeen Ali. But which element is the more lovely – his backlift or his follow-through? Like all sentient humans, we make a point of devoting one day each month to appreciation of Brian Lara’s backlift. A byproduct of this
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< 1 minute read England could shuffle their team in all sorts of different ways to cover for the absence of Jason Roy. The only thing we can be certain of is that no matter who opens, it will mean Moeen Ali being asked to do something different. This is, in fact, not strictly
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2 minute read “Hey, Moeen. You’re not going to believe this. We’ve found another one. We’ve been digging and digging and digging to try and find one and we’d pretty much given up hope. We didn’t think there was anything left. But there was. And we’ve found it. We’ve found another one. We’ve
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2 minute read We’ve often joked about Moeen Ali’s willingness to take on any pretty much any job for England. Any format, any role, bat or ball, Moeen would give it a go. This means there’s quite a lot of ‘what might have been’ in response to his retirement from Test cricket. But
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< 1 minute read Last week we suggested that the adaptability of Jonny Bairstow and Moeen Ali was a key reason why they had become yo-yos for England. There are two sides to this. Firstly, the fact that the two men can each perform so many ‘roles’ means that Test openings materialise more frequently
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3 minute read If there’s one thing we know about yo-yos, it’s that if you send one out, it tends to come back. If we know another thing about yo-yos, it’s that sometimes they get all tangled when they’re fully extended and don’t actually come back and then you have to spend ages
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3 minute read Virat Kohli is a man who struggles to come to terms with being bowled. We assumed we’d already seen Kohli’s finest “I’ve just been bowled” face. And maybe, for a pure, single facial expression conveying sheer bafflement that such a thing could possibly have happened, the face he produced after
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2 minute read Moeen Ali hit four sixes in England’s last ball victory over South Africa in Durban. Because he’s Moeen Ali and hasn’t even heard of ugly batting, each and every one of them was a languid, spaghetti-armed thing of wonder. In all, Moeen hit seven lovely boundaries in his 11-ball innings.
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