6 minute readWe did this last year, reasoning that a collage of moments from England’s home season might somehow paint a broader picture of where they stand right now. It feels like it does a little bit – but then who knows what’ll come next. New dawns are widely regarded as immaculately
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5 minute readJason Roy isn’t at his best. He’s not even in a place where he can try and bat at his best. How can a white ball specialist like him get back into good batting form these days? Let’s start in the obvious place with a story about a speed skater.
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8 minute readEngland were a one-day team who didn’t know how to top 300 – didn’t even dare to try. Eoin Morgan turned them into the best flat track batting side there’s ever been. It’s worth taking stock of the scale of that transformation and the conviction of the captain who achieved
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5 minute readViolence is great, isn’t it? Violence is so much fun. We greatly enjoyed Jonny Bairstow, at Trent Bridge, with a cricket bat. At tea on day five, England were 139-4, 160 runs from victory and Jonny Bairstow was on 43 off 48 balls, which is quick, but still within the
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6 minute readIf you want to be highly regarded as a wicketkeeper-batter, one of the smartest things you can do is not actually keep wicket in a whole load of Test matches. At what point do you become a wicketkeeper? How frequently do you have to don pads and gloves and chunter
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4 minute readNot every tournament needs an opening ceremony. We’ll let you in on a secret. We are not a fast waker-upper. Our daughter sometimes wanders into our room at an unconscionable hour and announces, “it’s morning,” in an indignant tone. It is impossible for us to convey the full horror of
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9 minute readWay, way back in 2006, in our first year of writing this website, we described the international fixture list as being fatter than a TV-loving, chip-munching hippo with an abnormally slow metabolism. We probably should have left ourself with more room for manoeuvre because where does that leave us now?
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6 minute readNo man is an island and no team is either. The team you support is only part of the equation. Opponents elevate a match. Opponents like Shane Warne. Many words have been spoken and written about Shane Warne in recent weeks; about why he was such an incredible leg-spinner; about
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8 minute readSometimes a tail-ender throws the bat and gets a few runs. A quick 20 or 30 or even a half century. But a Test hundred? That’s a bigger thing. Who is the worst batter to have achieved that feat? Many films generate a sense of tension by making the audience
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3 minute readIn the wake of England’s Ashes failings, there’s been a lot of talk about how the County Championship is played on pitches that encourage medium-pacers. Pitches are not the big problem. There was a good recent piece about county pitches by CricBuzz’s Rob Johnston. The overly-reduced version of that article
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