4 minute readIf you’d asked anyone, at any point in the last year, how this ever-so-predictable World Cup would climax, they’d have all given exactly the same answer. It was always going to end with Welcome to the Jungle blaring out over the PA as Marnus Labuschagne punched the air with 58
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2 minute readCommentators often say that a ball has gone “straight up” but few have gone up quite so straight as the one that resulted in Steve Smith’s dismissal against South Africa in today’s World Cup semi-final. It is astonishingly hard to propel a ball straight up. Hit a ball any serious
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3 minute readToday Glenn Maxwell spent one ball in the 90s and it was a no-ball. There’s not much cause to be nervous in the 90s when it’s so vanishingly unlikely you’ll be dismissed in them. When weird looking batters score a lot of runs, there are two main things people tend
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< 1 minute read2023 World Cup, Game 10, Australia v South Africa A familiar, weird and, in its own peculiar way, quite wonderful feature of World Cup group stage games is when a fundamentally beaten team sets itself the unambitious goal of making things slightly less awful. So it was that Marnus Labuschagne’s
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3 minute readIt’s almost time to start looking ahead to the Ashes again, but before we get back to that, let’s first look back on the Ashes. Specifically, let’s look back on ‘looking ahead to the Ashes’ by revisiting our 10 things to watch out for from before the series, so that
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3 minute readThe 2023 Ashes has sogged and then at the last moment unexpectedly fizzled to its conclusion. With five Tests in 46 days, immediately following on from the World Test Championship final, it’s been a lot to take in. What do you actually remember of it? The series itself resulted in
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< 1 minute readIt’s a weird feature of cricket that you can go out in style but then still carry on playing for the whole of the rest of the day and probably a good chunk of the next day as well. Stuart Broad ended his batting career gloriously. Never mind the artifice
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2 minute readIt’s quite possible you didn’t. He only scored nine of them in 82 balls after all. You have options in Test cricket. You can choose how you go about things. We would argue that England’s hare approach to batting at the minute is actually a lot more interesting for being
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4 minute readIt’s late July and that of course means the end of the Test summer. With no more England men’s fixtures scheduled until the tour of India from the end of January 2024, you should probably try and make the most of the Oval Test. The nights are drawing in, as
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4 minute readIt was only one innings, but two Zak Crawleys batted at Old Trafford last week. The first was what we call in these parts “a jousey bastard” who cemented his reputation as the most gifted inside-edger in world cricket. The second was an almighty destroyer of worlds who flickered into
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