2 minute read There are all sorts of India v Pakistan previews out there, but this is currently the only one on this website that goes up to nine. 1. Jasprit Bumrah’s bowling action Evidence, if it were needed, that the “hey, what’s that over there?” bowling ploy can work just as well
Continue readingMonth: June 2017
India v Bangladesh goes pretty much exactly how everyone expected
< 1 minute read Who would have thought this match would turn out exactly as everyone expected it to? What were the odds on that? Extremely slim, you’d have thought, what with the extraordinary wealth of alternative outcomes. Tamim Iqbal played a good innings and there was reasonable support from one of Bangladesh’s middle-order
Continue readingThere was a rumour that England had ‘solved’ one-day cricket
< 1 minute read Not the case. It was perhaps true that they’d solved modern one-day cricket… but then they came up against Pakistan. As we said the other day, Pakistan don’t care what year it is. They don’t care how other people are approaching one-day cricket these days, they just do their own
Continue readingIf Jason Roy is “due” what will happen to all those runs he saved up?
< 1 minute read Just because someone’s due, it doesn’t mean anything’s actually going to happen any time soon. Trust us on this. Referring to Jason Roy, Pakistan coach Mickey Arthur alluded to the concept of dueness, saying: “We had a discussion in the bus this morning. I was particularly worried that Roy hadn’t
Continue readingPakistan don’t care what year it is
< 1 minute read “300-plus scores? No, thank you. We’ll just persist with our old approach of bowling the opposition out for slightly less than our own low score, if that’s all right with you.” Pakistan held South Africa to 219-8 off 50 overs. Sri Lanka managed a whopping 236 all out against them.
Continue readingAustralia suffer forestation
< 1 minute read That’s our way of saying they were Wooded. We wrote about the benefits of having Adil Rashid in your side a couple of days ago. Mark Wood offers something similar. Remember how the middle over used to be? It was like the batsmen saw everything in high-definition and everything moved
Continue readingWhy Shakib-al-Hasan is just about the finest shoe we’ve ever owned
< 1 minute read Sometimes you buy a pair of shoes and it’s only after the first prolonged wear that they reveal their true feelings towards you. The sides rub, the soles feel like they’re made out of wood and the uppers are so rigid that they actually gouge into your ankle. ‘Accursed footwear!’
Continue readingSri Lanka force Virat Kohli to use the other knife
2 minute read Imagine you have a good knife and a really shitty knife. You regularly use both, but the shitty one’s kind of shitty. It can cope with cheese and maybe a courgette, but you’d never risk it on an onion or something like that. One day you want to slice a
Continue readingEngland are taking swigs of Adil Rashid again and it’s made them a better team
2 minute read England are also through to the semi-finals. A handful of percussive mid-sized innings and some hearty bowling were enough to dispatch New Zealand. Jason Roy was still there, continuing his ill-advised experiments with flips and flicks, and Adil Rashid was back. England’s template was therefore pretty much back in place
Continue readingBritish Weather through to semi-finals of Champions Trophy
< 1 minute read After a dominant performance against Australia/New Zealand and a narrow victory over Australia/Bangladesh, the British Weather has booked itself a place in the semi-finals of the Champions Trophy. After displaying dreadful, relentlessly sunny form throughout May, UK meteorologists were left fearing that their side would be knocked out during the
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