He couldn’t leave it at mere “accuracy,” could he? Chris Silverwood had to talk up the England bowling attack’s “supreme accuracy” when announcing the 2021-22 Ashes squad. “Here you go, everyone. Each of you take a stick. You’ll need these to beat us with in a couple of months’ time.”
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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
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Shane Watson’s run-out for 103 during the Perth Test of the 2013/14 Ashes was one of the all-time great comedy dismissals. This is why. As an England fan, it’s easy to steer your gaze away from the 2013/14 Ashes. It wasn’t just a defeat, it was an annihilation. And it
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We’ll tell you one thing – there is going to be an Ashes. Even if it’s just Tim Paine v Tim Paine Pretending To Be The England Players, there’s going to be an Ashes. “The Ashes are going ahead,” revealed Australia’s long-term stand-in captain this week. “The first Test is
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We’ve often joked about Moeen Ali’s willingness to take on any pretty much any job for England. Any format, any role, bat or ball, Moeen would give it a go. This means there’s quite a lot of ‘what might have been’ in response to his retirement from Test cricket. But
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It’s always been the case that some tours have been easier to cancel than others. Assorted pressures mean cancellations are coming thicker and faster at the minute. What are the implications of this? Earlier this month, we wrote that the threshold for binning the Old Trafford Test was lower than
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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
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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
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Plaudits to India, but this match featured a really weird and memorable passage of play that was pretty much nothing to do with the tourists’ magnificent performance. On the fourth evening, England’s openers delivered some incredibly generic, low octane Test match batting and we somewhat unexpectedly discovered that this really
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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
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