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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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< 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
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2 minute readSam Curran is a weird one. You’d be unlikely to pick him purely as a batsman. You’d be unlikely to pick him purely as a bowler. You wouldn’t pick him if he were a right-armer. You wouldn’t pick him if he were a few years older. But there he is
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2 minute readThere is a very good chance this article about England’s day five capitulation is not biologically sound. We’re pretty sure it’s cricketally accurate however. The second Test was won and lost at some point during a morning of pointlessly bouncing Jasprit Bumrah. It’s a hard moment to pin down precisely,
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2 minute readMuch is said about Cheteshwar Pujara – we’ve written a lot ourself – but we’re not sure anyone’s ever talked about his ability to persuade you that it rained when it didn’t. The way it went down was like this. Late afternoon we got a message from King Cricket reader
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< 1 minute readLast week we suggested that the adaptability of Jonny Bairstow and Moeen Ali was a key reason why they had become yo-yos for England. There are two sides to this. Firstly, the fact that the two men can each perform so many ‘roles’ means that Test openings materialise more frequently
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