< 1 minute read Dandy Dan writes: I recently met Price for a few beers for the first time since my rather glorious night of drinking with the England cricket team. The glory has somewhat been tainted by the events in the winter, but hey ho. Anyway, I obviously wanted to talk about it
Continue readingMonth: June 2014
England are South Africa
< 1 minute read They don’t really have a spinner, most of their bowlers can bat, their batsmen are stodgy and they’re conservative when it comes to declarations. It’s clear that England’s new era is merely South Africa’s old one – and this despite fielding far fewer South Africans than usual. Honestly, they’re this
Continue readingOne pole needed but no cherries left
2 minute read That’s a reference to something Shane Warne said late on day five. “59 cherries left. Four poles to get.” Okay, you’re Australian, we get it. Just speak normally, okay. The cherry shortfall Following the nine wickets down draw between England and Sri Lanka, it’s hard to avoid pointing to the
Continue readingBallance, Jordan and the power of unarsedness
< 1 minute read We spend about 40 per cent of our waking hours trying to work out which attributes we’d include were we to develop a stats-based cricket management computer game. For batsmen, there’d be things like patience and shot selection; for bowlers, there’d be fitness and accuracy. We’d also include ‘unarsedness’. The
Continue readingA stumpy trying to apply pressure
< 1 minute read This latest England team is a stumpy. It’s not completely without tail – there’s an Anderson-shaped nub there – but there really isn’t much. Presumably, should he return, Ben Stokes would replace Liam Plunkett, which would only strengthen the main spine further. Lower order batsmen rarely contribute on tougher days
Continue readingEngland’s batting’s completely fixed and everything’s absolutely fine again
< 1 minute read Let’s just go with that, eh? Let’s just go with ‘everything’s rosy’. They’ve even addressed our concern that Gary Ballance bats too low for Yorkshire by making him go in first drop for England. Speaking of the batting order, Joe Root clearly benefited from getting one innings in a row
Continue readingEngland’s reactive batting
< 1 minute read Twice last May, we wrote about England’s overwhelmingly reactive batting approach. First we described Kevin Pietersen as being England’s only proactive top order batsman; the only one prone to trying to set the field while at the crease. A week later, Pietersen wasn’t playing and Jonny Bairstow took on the
Continue readingEngland will play a fairly fast bowler
2 minute read We all knew that Sam Robson was going to get picked. He’ll play sensibly and probably quite well. If so, we’ll be quite happy about that while simultaneously wishing that we didn’t have to endure hilarious Australian ‘banter’ about his place of birth every time he gets a half-decent score.
Continue readingMiddlesex v Yorkshire day four – match report
2 minute read Ged writes: It was a beautiful sunny day, the London Underground was on strike and I had arranged to work from home. I thought it would be a good idea to head over to Lord’s, catch some of the cricket and catch up with an increasingly large pile of background
Continue readingThe opposition are allowed to play well
< 1 minute read Is anyone else starting to find this kind of thing grating? “Sometimes you just have to put your hands up and say the opposition were better than us with the bat.” So said Alastair Cook after the fourth one-day international. There’s been an awful lot of ‘accepting that the opposition
Continue reading