6 minute readThose of us chipping away the verdigris have a pretty good idea what an early summer England v Zimbabwe Test is all about – but at the same time… man, it’s been a while. All previous England v Zimbabwe matches arrived in a very narrow window between May 2000 and
Continue reading
7 minute readIs there a less showy attacking batter than Australia’s Travis Head? Australia picked a new opener not so long ago – a couple of them actually. The second one was Sam Konstas, who quickly concluded that the best way to counter the world’s best fast bowler was by repeatedly attempting
Continue reading
5 minute readWe may or may not have caught up with Mark Wood to talk about his interest in wood. It’s a little known fact that England fast bowler Mark Wood is in fact called Mark Rudd. Team-mates began calling him Wood near the start of his career in mocking acknowledgement of
Continue reading
7 minute readIt was a hell of a year. Probably. Who can honestly remember 12 months’ worth of stuff, let alone assign it some sort of value by which the year as a whole can be compared to previous ones? Here’s a bunch of cricket things that happened in 2024 anyway –
Continue reading
4 minute readOur annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners. No point being all coy about this and postponing the opening of the envelope for dramatic effort. Heck, why even insert
Continue reading
6 minute readBrooks aren’t ordinarily associated with peaks – they tend to run beneath them – but Harry Brook might already be at one. We’ll tell you what stops a brook in its tracks though: a dam – or perhaps in this case, the giving of damns. You may or may not
Continue reading
6 minute readThere were eight centurions in England’s gargantuan 823-7 against Pakistan in October 2024. Harry Brook (317) and Joe Root (262) attracted most of the headlines, but there was also Shaheen Shah Afridi (120), Naseem Shah (157), Abrar Ahmed (174), Aamer Jamal (126), Salman Ali Agha (118) and Saim Ayub (101).
Continue reading
5 minute readThis Multan pitch is flatter than a pancake that’s gone under a Looney Tunes steamroller. That doesn’t mean you can score infinite runs on it though. Even Harry Brook had to settle for a mere 317 – and he’s so far made a hundred in every Test he’s played in
Continue reading
8 minute readThe summer just gone brought the retirement of James Anderson at the age of 41. He took 47 Test wickets in his 40s – more than twice as many as anyone else this century. Extending that a little further, he took 224 wickets after the age of 35. In this
Continue reading
7 minute readThe most successful Test partnerships of all time are easy enough to identify. For one thing, they’ll regularly crop up in conversation-fuelling TV graphics whenever a wicket is hard to come by. For another thing, if they happened during your lifetime, you’ll no doubt have lots of memories of the
Continue reading