2 minute read As you’re all no doubt aware, pretty much all DIY tasks can be embarked upon using only a dessert spoon and a hammer. They’re adaptable devices and allow you to make a start, but after a bit you may well yearn for more specialist tools which would enable you complete
Continue readingMonth: October 2015
Alastair Cook is a complete part-timer
< 1 minute read Epic, they say. Monumental. Alastair Cook batted for 836 minutes against Pakistan. That’s almost 14 hours. Or, in other words, not even two days’ work for a normal person. So before we start lauding Cook’s extraordinary powers of concentration, let’s just stop a minute and ponder whether he could spend
Continue readingAlastair Cook does the big shop
< 1 minute read After sizing up the bowling and briefly treating himself to a strange and hugely entertaining ‘mustn’t handle the ball’ dance, Alastair Cook quickly moved up through the gears. At times he got as high as third. Mostly he sat in second. When there was a break in play, he refuelled,
Continue readingHow costly will that dropped chance prove to be? Apparently only fate can decide
< 1 minute read Last year, Pakistan managed first innings scores in Abu Dhabi of 570-6 and 566-3 against Australia and then New Zealand. It’s not like England did especially badly in conceding 523-8. Pakistan are just good. Not that it’s impossible to take wickets there though. Those two teams’ responses were 261 and
Continue readingBen Stokes makes things happen
< 1 minute read To which one can only say: who doesn’t make things happen? We just made a typo happen, for example. Shortly afterwards, we made a correction happen. A littler earlier, we made a cup of coffee happen. Jade Dernbach makes wide long hops happen. Shaun Marsh makes hard-handed edges to the
Continue readingAnyone For Real Tennis? – England v New Zealand match report
2 minute read Ged writes: Two days after my last-minute-dot-ticket-office, cocktail-avoiding day at the Lord’s Test with Charley the Gent Malloy, I returned for my long arranged Sunday visit with Daisy. The weather forecast had been dreadful, but we woke up and indeed arrived at the ground on a beautiful sunny Sunday. Daisy
Continue readingAggressive cricket can be all about playing really defensively
< 1 minute read We’ve written about ‘aggressive cricket’ about a billion times, but that’s largely because – like a snipped clothing label that hasn’t quite been fully removed – it continues to irritate us. Different people mean different things by ‘aggression’ and also confuse cricketing aggression with actual aggression. The latest to say
Continue readingAli Asad explores new depths
2 minute read There’s the shallow end, there’s the deep end and then there’s the Mariana Trench. Ali Asad didn’t just make a duck against England in the second warm-up match, he didn’t just make a pair – he made a pair in the same innings. Pakistan A finished the day on 192-12.
Continue readingScarborough Cricket Festival match report
2 minute read Ed writes: I went to the Scarborough Cricket Festival. Here’s nearly proof. Yorkshire playing Durham in a top-of-table Div 1 encounter. Your proverbial 32-pointer. We bought our tickets at the turnstiles. At the same time, my Dad was at Trent Bridge. His ticket was more fancy. We asked where we
Continue readingJos Buttler wearing an ice bra
< 1 minute read We think that’s what it is. Or maybe it’s just a conventional sports bra and therefore entirely normal. The image comes from an ECB video that’s largely about how hot it is in the UAE. Jos appears shortly after Mark Wood has said: “We’ve had lads grabbing ice and putting
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