< 1 minute readMehedi Hasan is making his debut. Bangladesh saw fit to give him the Murali role. Younger readers might think that ‘the Murali role’ is all about being brilliant and freakish and baffling people with magic, but there is a more prosaic aspect to it too. For much of his career,
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ITV4 are showing highlights of the Bangladesh v England Test matches
< 1 minute readJust a quick public service post to say exactly what we’ve just said. ITV4 have got an hour-long highlights programme for each day of the two Test matches between Bangladesh and India. Tonight (Thursday) it’s at 7pm and having just scrolled through the listings, it’s also 7pm for each of
Continue readingWhy has no-one asked Jonathan Trott’s mum how we can stamp out match-fixing?
2 minute readWe don’t normally report on excerpts from cricket autobiographies because, you know, read the book. We have to make an exception for this majestic exchange from Jonathan Trott’s Unguarded though. (We haven’t read it, but he wrote it with George Dobell, so we’re pretty confident it’s excellent.) After Pakistan Cricket
Continue readingEngland selectors spiked with Sunset Yellow
2 minute readFor much of the year England’s selectors are Uncle Alan and Auntie Cynthia, who always go to the Marks and Spencer coffee shop. On the average trip to town, they might stop in there two or three times to break up the afternoon. They will walk past any number of
Continue readingEngland are so good they even managed to beat Bangladesh
2 minute readWhen England lost to Bangladesh at the World Cup, the British media stuck with the word ‘even’ – as in, ‘England are so bad, they even lost to Bangladesh’. That line was a good fit for the narrative of the time, so it would have been counterproductive to investigate, let
Continue readingJos Buttler’s feud with Bangladesh – who started it?
2 minute readJos Buttler is not an overtly angry man. Few batsmen better expose the fallacy that attacking cricket and on-field aggression are somehow symbiotically linked. As a batsman, Buttler demolishes via controlled explosions. He delivers a series of well-timed detonations and more often than not, the opposition implodes. Yet as a
Continue readingWhy Edgbaston day-night Test will be a success (and another attendance-related experiment the ECB should run)
2 minute readNovelty. That’s enough for the first match, isn’t it? We’d happily pop along to Edgbaston to see what a day-night Test in England is like. The true test (lower-case T) is whether people will keep on going, year after year. So far, day-night Test cricket has been, in the broadest
Continue readingWhy England have selected Gareth Batty
2 minute read“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” At the age of 38, we have genuinely never been fitter in our entire life. We had however assumed that our chance of playing international cricket had passed. Not so! Almost as if England were Australia and Gareth
Continue readingCity-based T20 and the art of forcing windows
3 minute readIndependent websites are meant to provide a rapid response to news stories, telling the world how things should be based on an unshakeable sense of what is right and what is wrong. However, we long ago concluded that when it came to stories about what might happen to the structure
Continue reading‘We played like pretty boys there at one stage’ – Trevor Bayliss
< 1 minute readIt’s been very humid in the North-West these last few days. That probably didn’t have any impact on the outcome of the T20 International between England and Pakistan but we haven’t got much to say about the cricket so thought we’d flesh out this piece by talking about the weather
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