2 minute readWe’ll tell you one thing – there is going to be an Ashes. Even if it’s just Tim Paine v Tim Paine Pretending To Be The England Players, there’s going to be an Ashes. “The Ashes are going ahead,” revealed Australia’s long-term stand-in captain this week. “The first Test is
Continue reading
2 minute readWe’ve often joked about Moeen Ali’s willingness to take on any pretty much any job for England. Any format, any role, bat or ball, Moeen would give it a go. This means there’s quite a lot of ‘what might have been’ in response to his retirement from Test cricket. But
Continue reading
3 minute readIt’s always been the case that some tours have been easier to cancel than others. Assorted pressures mean cancellations are coming thicker and faster at the minute. What are the implications of this? Earlier this month, we wrote that the threshold for binning the Old Trafford Test was lower than
Continue reading
3 minute readHave you ever agreed to go to a thing and secretly not really wanted to go to the thing? Maybe it was a thing you’d ordinarily enjoy – like a meal out with a friend – only you also had a whole bunch of other stuff on that week and
Continue reading
5 minute readTeam selection is a fun thing to talk about before a Test match, but sometimes it really isn’t that important. We tend to view selection decisions through a prism that refracts everything into right or wrong. But cricket doesn’t exactly work like that. In any given Player A versus Player
Continue reading
2 minute readPlaudits to India, but this match featured a really weird and memorable passage of play that was pretty much nothing to do with the tourists’ magnificent performance. On the fourth evening, England’s openers delivered some incredibly generic, low octane Test match batting and we somewhat unexpectedly discovered that this really
Continue reading
2 minute readYou know what they say: ain’t no run-out appeal like the run-out appeal that comes in the immediate aftermath of a drop. With all due respect to Chris Woakes’ bowling and Shardul Thakur’s batting, the highlight of day one of the fourth Test was unquestionably Rory Burns standing astride an
Continue reading
2 minute readThe flipside of everything going pretty much exactly to plan is that this is a thing that almost never happens. The best laid schemes are forever ganging agley and so what are you going to do when you’re back in the real world where absolutely everything goes wrong absolutely all
Continue reading
2 minute read“Oh that’s a nothing shot,” they say – but only when you get out to it. We were thinking about this particular shot of Joe Root’s after watching the BBC highlights the other day. The BBC highlights are an hour long and with no ads, it’s what you might call
Continue reading
< 1 minute readWe’re not saying either England or India goes out there looking for a fight. We are however saying that quite a few of the players have a keen eye for provocation and could probably uncover a bit of it even if they were sentenced to solitary confinement. “It just showed
Continue reading