< 1 minute readThe climax of the County Championship is always thrilling. Always. This year was no exception. (How could it have been when we literally just told you that the climax is always thrilling? (Think, McFly! Think!)) Having surrendered a ten million run first innings deficit to last year’s champions Essex, this
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Why is cricket so infatuated with the Powerplay?
2 minute readOne of the more mundane revelations from the recently undertaken trials of The Hundred is that they’re going to have a Powerplay. ‘So what?’ you might think. But when all innovations seem to be on the table and the aim is to make the game as simple and straightforward as
Continue readingMorkel Burns Pope (and now for some commas)
2 minute readSurrey have won the County Championship. You win 10 of 12 matches and draw the other two and these things happen. We were checking the averages in the first division of the County Championship earlier today and two things struck us. Firstly, very few people have averaged over 40 and
Continue readingYou can probably gauge the worth of Paul Collingwood from that time he was an umpire
2 minute readPaul Collingwood excelled at all those aspects of cricket which are undervalued; all the ones that are hard to measure; stuff like fielding and unearthing singles that have no right to be taken. Because of this, he was one of our heroes when he retired from international cricket and he’s
Continue readingSorry about this but we’re going to report the latest rumours about The Hundred
2 minute readThat joke isn’t funny any more. You know the one. The one where you make up an outlandish format detail about The Hundred in an effort to satirise the ECB. The problem is that while The Hundred seems like rich source material, it really isn’t. The joke suggestions are too
Continue readingHow about a nine-ball over? Would that be too much for a fast bowler?
2 minute readThe prospects of there being a fresh tactical dimension in The Hundred have been all but dashed after Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA) chairman Daryl Mitchell said that no-one was really up for the 10-ball over because it seems kind of tiring. Speaking to The Mail, he said: “People who are
Continue readingThe Hundred is not going to be a big deal, people aren’t going to talk about it and it won’t attract a new audience
2 minute readAsk a stupid question, get a stupid answer. After that, build a whole stupid thing around the stupid answer and then pin all of your hopes for the survival of your sport on how well the stupid thing fares. The ECB are going to launch this 100-ball competition and they
Continue readingWe’re mostly talking about Ollie Pope again this week, with maybe a dash of James Hildreth and a soupcon of Keaton Jennings
2 minute readA combination of (a) the current state of the England cricket team and (b) the nature of early season cricket means that we’ve almost exclusively been talking about batsmen so far this summer. This isn’t actually all that great for those of us who consider batsmen necessary impediments to the
Continue readingAre you in The Wisden Cricket Weekly Gang?
2 minute readDo you mind if we tell you a barely relevant story? If you do mind, you’re probably reading the wrong website. We’re very confident that the pure hilariousness of this tale cannot possibly be conveyed without first-person experience of the person involved, but we’re going to tell you anyway because
Continue readingMark Wood’s IPL experience with Chennai Super Kings has helped him make his choices – but where will he go next?
2 minute readYou may remember that earlier in the year, we wrote about the weighted, weighty decisions faced by Mark Wood this season. Wood’s long format career has been in the balance of late. An IPL contract seemed likely to keep him out of all early season first-class cricket and a consequence
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