2 minute readOver the last 24 hours, we’ve been steering our exasperation towards amusement through the simple tactic of mentally rewriting all references to England curfews so that they’re instead about bedtimes. The two things are much the same, after all. Doing this swap is funny and it also helps highlight how
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3 minute readHistory has changed. If you google “Ben Stokes nightclub incident,” you now see an entirely different Ben Stokes nightclub incident than the one that’s been at the top of the results page for the last nine years. If you’re catching up on the details, this new one – which we’ll
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4 minute readIt’s become one of the great, weird, modern cricket clichés that Brendon McCullum has the ability to make players feel they are an incorrect height. (Invariably taller, invariably 10 feet.) But he doesn’t always make them feel that, does he? We’d be interested to know what height Shoaib Bashir currently
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3 minute readIn the wake of England’s most successful Ashes tour for 15 years, it was widely agreed that some England players needed to play smarter and so that is what Brendon McCullum has promised to deliver henceforth. Some players didn’t need to play smarter though. One in particular has built an
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< 1 minute readAn historic day. Not many teams get the better of Ireland in Test cricket. New Zealand today inflicted only their second ever defeat in home conditions and their first by an innings. Extraordinary stuff. Even more amazingly, New Zealand had never before got the better of Ireland, home or away.
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2 minute readNeither Ireland nor New Zealand play too many Test matches and the Irish players don’t even have a domestic red ball structure to fall back on. You may therefore conclude that there hasn’t been any recent first-class cricket from which we might weigh form ahead of this week’s Test match.
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3 minute readPakistan play three Tests in England later this summer. You can never be entirely sure what you’re going to get from Pakistan, but it does feel like the range of unpredictability has been narrowing for a good few years now; the moments of unexpected brilliance growing ever fewer and further
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4 minute readThere are winners and losers with every England Test squad announcement, but the first one after an Ashes tour tends to feature bigger, clearer signposts for the years ahead. Ollie Pope looks to be one of the less immediately obvious casualties of the greater disloyalty Rob Key promised us. Looking
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3 minute readA modern international cricketer like Ben Duckett has a lot of tricky career decisions to make. Sometimes you don’t know whether you’ve made the right choice until you have or haven’t aged into dust. “This certainly is the cup of The King of Kings,” says grail-hunting, Nazi-collaborating Walter Donovan, shortly
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3 minute readEngland confirmed the dropping of Kent’s Zak Crawley today when James Rew walked out to open the batting for Somerset. There are definitely more straightforward ways of announcing these things. English cricket’s rune-readers have been broadly in agreement for a while now that Zak Crawley is no longer an England
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