2 minute read It’s not cool to say that. But we’re not cool. We once did a live Twitter review of a cricket computer game while drinking real ale. On the face of it, picking a Test side is simply a matter of finding your 11 best players and then saying their names
Continue readingMonth: January 2011
An Ashes graph
< 1 minute read Bert writes: Ged has proved that life is better explained by diagrams, so I’ve made a graph. It shows the innings scores from this Ashes series. The fall of wickets is indicated by numbers. I’ve used blue for England because they play ODIs in blue, and yellow for Australia because
Continue readingA quick pause from the gloating
< 1 minute read The site won’t be much fun for Aussies for almost the whole of next week, but we thought we’d break up the gloating with a couple of other pieces. Remember when we got a bit carried away when Andrew Flintoff retired and wrote not one, but two retirement pieces about
Continue readingAnother reason why Australia lost the Ashes
< 1 minute read Beer sales are down. Moisturiser sales are through the roof. The metrosexualisation of Australian society has damaged the cricket team immeasurably. No-one eats steak any more; they all eat scallops in an Indonesian-style jus. When Simon Katich isn’t in Sydney, male body hair in the city is down by a
Continue readingThree innings victories and one Ashes win
< 1 minute read On balance, you would have to say that this tour of Australia probably went a bit better than expected. Which is better: winning or doing it in such a way that Australia look shit? Don’t answer that. You don’t have to. You can have both.
Continue readingWhen the England cricket team became ruthless
< 1 minute read We’ve always asked that England become more ruthless. Now it seems to be happening and by the jackal head of Anubis it’s a good feeling. England have been good before, but in continually passing 500 and repeatedly recording innings victories over the course of the 2010-11 Ashes, they’ve added something
Continue readingYou’ll miss Paul Collingwood more than you think
< 1 minute read We’ll do a proper Paul Collingwood retirement post in a few days. For now, the cricket comes first. Which is as it should be. Anyone feeling sad that he’s fallen into retirement after diminishing returns with the bat would do well to remember the kind of man he is. He
Continue readingJacques Kallis would genuinely score more runs than you with his eyes closed
< 1 minute read Yesterday, we wrote about Steyn and Tendulkar, but there’s another modern great on display in that match. Like Tendulkar, Jacques Kallis seems to have reached an even loftier plane in middle age. You’ll need to go to another website to see the statistics about his recent form, but take it
Continue readingIan Bell, James Anderson and doing a bit better when things aren’t in your favour
2 minute read It’s always tempting to judge players on their best days, but with anything long-term – a cricket career, a relationship, an overnight stint watching the Ashes on TV – a better form of evaluation is to look at what happens when things aren’t in your favour. You learn a lot
Continue readingDale Steyn doesn’t have a loosener
< 1 minute read It’s yet another amazing thing about Dale Steyn that he’s pretty damn likely to slice in and arc the first ball of the day past the batsman’s outside edge. He doesn’t really do looseners. Our own approach to starting work is more like that of Peter Gibbons, who explains how
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