4 minute read This article is about the time former England off-spinner John Emburey leant over a creme caramel and sucked the whole thing up without using his hands. We watched Sky Sports’ Spinwash ’93 documentary the other day. More accurately, we finished watching it. Apparently we watched the first 20-odd minutes over
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Rachin Ravindra deserved a ball hundred
< 1 minute read When you’re batting for a draw, the unit of measurement switches from ‘runs’ to ‘balls faced’. This is where we get the concept of the ball hundred. New Zealand’s Rachin Ravindra made his Test debut against India this week. He has three first-class hundreds to his name, but we are
Continue readingWith less than a year to go, let’s look at who’s finding form for the T20 World Cup
2 minute read It’s now less than a year until the final of the 2022 T20 World Cup. Let’s take a look at how some of the teams are shaping up with just a handful of matches left for fine-tuning. The world is unanimously agreed that the 2022 edition will be the first
Continue reading12 England things that happened in the 2021 summer – several of which you’ve almost certainly already forgotten about
5 minute read England played a bunch of cricket matches in the summer of 2021. We’ve got this mad idea that if we pull together a load of the moments that caught our attention, it will somehow give a sense of what the entire season was about. Let’s see, shall we? So much
Continue readingWe have slowly and unexpectedly come to like Ravi Shastri very much
2 minute read Once upon a time, we didn’t much care for Ravi Shastri. Now we do. And it isn’t just his habit of wearing the worst sunglasses in the entire galaxy. As a commentator, Shastri was terrible. A relentless purveyor of booming cliché, he’d have been easy to ignore if he hadn’t
Continue readingYou can stop short of all-out cynicism and still accept that the threshold for binning the Old Trafford Test was lower than normal
3 minute read Have 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 readingVirat Kohli can pick the ‘wrong’ team for Old Trafford and it probably won’t matter
5 minute read Team 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 readingWe heartily endorse Rory Burns’ run-out appeal body language
2 minute read You 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 readingHow far will England’s Plan A actually carry them?
2 minute read The 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 readingThe almighty cumulative power of Joe Root’s nothing shot
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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