3 minute readMarnus Labuschagne recently described facing R Ashwin as being “like a chess game”. It was an interesting choice of words as actual chess could prove to be the off-spinner’s greatest weakness. Labuschagne was alluding to that to and fro of decision-making between himself and a thoughtful bowler like Ashwin who
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2 minute readMountains crop up a lot in metaphors. They’re forever being scaled, climbed or conquered. Steve Smith has come up with his own way to reach the summit of the mountain that is a Test tour of India though. “If we are able to topple that mountain, that’d be huge,” he
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2 minute readIn 2012, we wrote a piece for Cricinfo about Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s patient wait for a West Indies Test team worthy of his contributions. Little did we know he wasn’t just waiting; he was taking active steps. ‘Taking active steps’ is an interesting euphemism because what we’re saying is that Shiv’s
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4 minute readSouth Africa wanted to win this one. England were happy to loosen a few limbs. That’s kind of how it went. In many ways this South Africa v England series was the definitive pointless bilateral: a little island of three one-day internationals dropped right in the middle of another tournament
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3 minute readWho’s up for the contest then? No? Got somewhere else to be, have you? We don’t know if you’ve ever seen the highly violent Indonesian martial arts ballet, The Raid, but there’s a character in that who’s really, really, very much up for a fight. He’s called Mad Dog, so
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2 minute readIf those who run cricket can’t make the cricket calendar comprehensible, we’ll just have to do it ourself. Below you’ll find a month-by-month guide to the series and tournaments we’ll most likely be focusing on throughout this year. Setting it out in writing is as much for us as it
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2 minute read“Bazball” is an ill-defined woolly-yet-squidgy concept that you can smush around to mean pretty much anything you want. We’ve been here before. Speaking ahead of South Africa’s home one-day series against England, captain Temba Bavuma spoke about his team’s way of going about things and how they might look to
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6 minute readWe’re pretty happy with the last year’s Patreon-funded output. Hopefully our crowdfunding campaign doesn’t completely implode in 2023. A very quick recap. We run a Patreon campaign where readers can, if they want, pledge a monthly sum to help support the site. You can pretty much pledge whatever you want
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2 minute read“Cricket Australia basically said to us, ‘Okay, what can we kinda do to make your time in hotels for the next month better? So the boys just took it to the next level” – Pat Cummins The latest series of The Test outlines all the various toys and gizmos the
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2 minute readMop-up of the day is a thing we do when we can’t really be bothered writing more than a sentence or two about a bunch of different things. Sometimes we end up writing extra sentences though because it looks weird if the opening sentence, in bold, is immediately followed by
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