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Month: February 2024

February 27, 2024 New Zealand

Who will be the next great 82mph bouncer bowler now that Neil Wagner has retired?

2 minute readEveryone has a favourite batter. Everyone has a favourite fast bowler. Everyone also has a favourite fast-medium short ball workhorse bowler… and it’s always Neil Wagner, because no-one else in the history of cricket has ever made that work. Unique cricketers usually stand out for very obviously freakish physical reasons.

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February 26, 2024 India

R Ashwin isn’t a robot – he just treats himself like one

5 minute readR Ashwin says he “had to literally rewire” himself to bowl in Ranchi. As far as we’re aware, R Ashwin did not have to literally rewire himself. We haven’t watched HBO’s version of Westworld in a while, but the way we remember it, the series went pretty heavy on the

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February 21, 2024 England / India

Ranchi Test pitch preview with the printer from Office Space

3 minute readRenouncing orthodoxy and precedent, England took an unlikely win in the first Test of this series. However, some feel that defeat in the third Test last week was the flipside of that attitude. Our own view is that they’d most likely have lost whatever they did – this is playing

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February 19, 2024 England / India

Is it possible to bat with the conviction of Ben Duckett yet talk with the bleak defeatism of the average England fan?

6 minute readConviction. It’s what Ben Stokes’ England Test team is all about. This is great to watch but cringe-inducing to listen to. Is there any chance they could play the same way without… saying all of those things? The most obviously groansome comment arising from England’s 434-run defeat to India in

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February 15, 2024 India

Rohit Sharma’s hat was the real victim when Sarfaraz Khan was run out because Ravindra Jadeja was so keen to get off 99

2 minute readRun-outs are always dramatic, but doubly so when the batter’s on 99. That unignorable need for a single just brings a whole new dimension to the drama. The burning desire to get another run to get you to 100 can even result in collateral damage, like the loss of your

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February 14, 2024 England / India

Rajkot Test pitch preview with Captain Ahab

2 minute readBen Stokes’ cap has been looking pretty tatty, but he is due a new one for his 100th Test match in Rajkot this week. The series currently sits at 1-1 with – glory be! – three Tests still to play. Ravindra Jadeja will most likely return for India, while England

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February 13, 2024 Extras / Features

How popular are all these Not-Quite-The-IPL franchise leagues actually likely to be?

5 minute readThe birth of a whole new wave of T20 franchise competitions will bring about the death of international cricket according to a great many articles we’ve read in the last six months. We don’t really know about that. We’re pretty certain that they’ll bring about the death of several T20

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February 8, 2024 England / Features / India

What has been the most improbable feat by an England cricketer in India?

8 minute readIndia is a place where the impossible becomes improbable and the improbable honestly just may well actually happen. As Tom Hartley showed in Hyderabad, even England cricketers aren’t immune. Below we’ve picked out a few other improbable feats delivered by England cricketers while touring India. You can pick your own

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February 5, 2024 England / India

What does Mukesh Kumar tell us about time travel team selection?

3 minute readIf you were to fire up your flux capacitor and hop into your DeLorean, would you go back and pick a different England or India team for the recently-completed second Test? More quick bowlers perhaps? Yes? No? Maybe? We’re assuming that given access to time travel, the first thing you’d

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February 3, 2024 England / India

Was Jasprit Bumrah’s yorker to Ollie Pope the best since Waqar Younis?

3 minute readWe’re not saying that the delivery with which Jasprit Bumrah bowled Ollie Pope was the best post-Waqar yorker. All we’re saying is that a decent case can be made and that’ll do for today. First things first, the greatest yorker of all time was bowled by Waqar Younis at some

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Latest comments

  1. Tim on Why is Lord’s so slippy?July 11, 2025

    I wonder what to call this DRAMA - many people have followed it on the radio for years, involves a…

  2. Rhys on Why is Lord’s so slippy?July 11, 2025

    Oh there's DRAMA happening

  3. King Cricket on Why is Lord’s so slippy?July 11, 2025

    You and your blinking telekinesis. Get a grip on it, man!

  4. Ged Ladd on Why is Lord’s so slippy?July 10, 2025

    Oh dear. It’s confession time. This must have been ALL MY FAULT. I played tennis up to the start of…

  5. Richard on Jofra Archer’s backJuly 10, 2025

    I have always rather facetiously said that the lasting legacy of Joffra Archer's test career will be the test career…

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