6 minute readTop level cricketers really care about what they do. Caring is the basic fuel for their careers. But whether it’s an Iranian gasfield, a Tesla Cybertruck battery or merely the giving of shits, sometimes fuel can also finish you. Part of an international coach’s job is therefore to protect players
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3 minute readThe ECB briefly banned all players with England central contracts from speaking to the media this week. What did they think would happen? Did they honestly expect one of them to say something interesting? The ban’s since been lifted – probably on the basis that its mere existence made the
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3 minute readUnder Matthew Mott, England were very bad at the 2023 World Cup, then made the semi-finals of the 2024 T20 World Cup, where they lost to India. Under Brendon McCullum, they were very bad at the 2025 Champions Trophy, then made the semi-finals of the 2026 T20 World Cup, where
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2 minute readAll right you primitive screwheads, listen up. We honestly aren’t all that interested in T20 cricketers who aren’t Jasprit Bumrah any more. It’s a cliché to call bowlers cannon fodder in this format, but we’ve reached a point now where really it’s the batters who are the unchanging nondescript wallpaper.
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3 minute readWe feel like we’ve read this sentence, or one very much like it, almost daily for the last few weeks. If you hadn’t noticed, Jos Buttler hasn’t been scoring too many runs. He’s apparently tried to correct this with more and more practice. Is this the right approach? If you’d
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< 1 minute readBosch is a simply terrible name for a T20 bowler. It does nothing but invite unflattering commentary exclamations. Today, in the T20 World Cup final against New Zealand, South Africa’s Corbin suffered an over that began 6, 4, 4, 4, 4… BOSH! Finn Allen was the batter responsible and he
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2 minute readWe adore nrrdling (the hugely unambitious art of batting to make defeat slightly less awful because it improves your chances of going through to the next stage of the tournament should your team finish level on points with another). It’s not really a thing in T20 though. Due to the
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2 minute readExcuse us looking so far ahead – they’ve each got another match to play before India v Zimbabwe on Thursday – but we’ve been sucked in by the wildly diverging fortunes of Abhishek Sharma and Brian Bennett so far this tournament. We can’t wait to see what happens when they
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2 minute readIt ended as world tournament exits so often do: with a day of drizzle in a game they weren’t even playing. England sacked their coach after losing in the semi finals of the last T20 World Cup. Australia failed to make it that far in either of the previous two
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2 minute readAustralia were whitewashed in Pakistan going into this tournament and earlier in the week lost their captain to internal testicular bleeding. Defeat to Zimbabwe could therefore plausibly still rank as being ‘on the up’. Today’s result moves Australia’s T20 World Cup record against Zimbabwe along to ‘played two, lost two’.
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