It’s the Ashes again. Australia won again. Oh shit? If we have a recent sports writing regret, it’s that we only stumbled across the terms MAshes and WAshes after the men’s series had already finished. We very much like this terminology. We wish we’d already started using it. Because it’s
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England’s batting average in this series was the lowest in an Ashes series since 1890. Mitchell Starc opened the bowling against them in all five Tests, yet it doesn’t feel like he’ll get his fair share of the credit. We often think this about Starc. Is that fair? A certain
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Well that was bad, wasn’t it? Unless you’re Australian, in which case that was great, wasn’t it? For a bit. And then maybe not so much. Maybe just a bit hollow by the end. But still slightly great because, you know, residual sense of the Ashes’ importance still. Just about.
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There is no right answer when it comes to England’s Test team selection right now. But there are different types of odd decision. The omission of a spinner for a day/night Test is the most predictable one. England picked five right-arm fast-medium bowlers and no spinner for the day/night Test
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In the wake of England’s Ashes failings, there’s been a lot of talk about how the County Championship is played on pitches that encourage medium-pacers. Pitches are not the big problem. There was a good recent piece about county pitches by CricBuzz’s Rob Johnston. The overly-reduced version of that article
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We’ve said it many times before. Test cricket can offer something that no other sport can. You can’t have a tense hour in a football match because it’s two thirds of the game. In a Test match, 60 minutes can be a tight finish. In a five-day match, everyone’s got
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One of our favourite things about Jonny Bairstow Test hundreds – second only to their existence really – is how he celebrates them. Jonny Bairstow is a pretty fiery hundred-celebrator. Before today, the last time Bairstow made a Test ton was in November 2018 in Sri Lanka. On that occasion
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Here is a bunch of stuff that happened in 2021. It is not an exhaustive list, because an exhaustive list chronicling the activities of multiple people across an entire year would take far longer than a year to read. It is just a selection of striking cricket moments from the
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If you’re really going to turn the heat up and cook a sauce for quite some time, you need plenty of good stuff in the pan to begin with. If you haven’t, you’ll end up with a bitter-tasting charred sticky goo that’s no good to anyone. England are different gravy.
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A few years ago we hit on a suitably half-arsed approach to covering the Boxing Day Tests. We flag what matches are taking place in advance, wish everyone a happy Festivus and then leave you all to cobble together a kind of fragmentary, disjointed log of any major developments in
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