2 minute read“When you go, your footprints will fill with grass. Moss shall cover your tombstone, and as the sun rises, green shall spread over all, in all its shades and hues. This verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements and, try as you might, all you hold
Continue reading
1 minute readThere’s another top of the table clash looming in the County Championship this week. That’s not as dramatic as it sounds though because as tables go it’s something of a chabudai. Quite a lot of teams have only managed one win so far this season – and they’re the high
Continue reading
2 minute readIn England the men’s domestic game tends to flail around incorrigibly, endlessly adding formats and complexity to make itself ever more impenetrable. The women’s game, in contrast, tends to move from one reasoned, accessible structure to another. The sheer frequency of overhauls seems to us the only meaningful attempt to
Continue reading
3 minute readLots of shreds of cricket news about today. Let’s weave them into a single thing – say, half an underpant. Weekender In the UK, weekends don’t come much bigger than Easter for the simple reason that it’s twice as long. It’s therefore a big one in county cricket too because
Continue reading
2 minute readTwo games in, the first division of the County Championship has taken on a blobby, amorphous shape with three counties on the same number of points at the top. Will any of them still be in the running at the competition’s autumnal climax? We may as well start with the
Continue reading
5 minute readThere’s a fundamental tension these days between specialising in one particular format and striving to become a more rounded cricketer. It’s pretty much impossible to walk both paths, but right now Tom Banton appears to have put a good few footprints on each. In the parallel worlds of strength and
Continue reading
3 minute readWe’re about 10 minutes into the county season as we type this sentence and already they’re talking about changing things next year. This is, paradoxically, one of the things that never changes about county cricket: they will forever be talking about changing it. Yesterday we reposted our 2022 article about
Continue reading
3 minute readAll eyes on the Ambassador Cruise Line Ground from tomorrow. Is this funnier or less funny than the previous sponsorship which made it sound like Essex’s nickname was Cloud County? Overseas professionalism is a jaunty, unpredictable thing in the current County Championship era. Remember last year when Surrey went down
Continue reading
2 minute readAh, the County Championship, bastion of egalitarian sporting competition, where every county plays every other county home and away… except for four of them. An important thing to look at when previewing the County Championship is which matches won’t actually happen. Ten first division teams, each playing 14 matches –
Continue reading
2 minute readEvery year, 10 to 20 bowlers take 40 wickets or more in the first division of the County Championship and every year, three or four of them are the exact same Hampshire players. This cannot go on. This will not go on. In 2021, in his first year with Hampshire,
Continue reading