4 minute read “It’s a game of failure, batting,” said Joe Root five minutes after this Test finished. The statement was on the one hand very sage and on the other just plain wrong. Four times in a row England have chased a lot of runs to win. This would be remarkable even
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4 minute read Some people said Stuart Broad’s 35-run over to Jasprit Bumrah reminded them of when Yuvraj Singh hit him for 36 in the T20 World Cup that time. But it was not like that. It was not like that at all. This was much, much better and funnier. There’s actually a
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2 minute read England’s men’s team are halfway through playing two Tests in two weeks against different opponents. England’s women’s team have a full year to wait until their next Test against anyone. The comparisons are easy, jarring and awful. The New Zealand/India fortnight is only the middle back-to-back for the men after
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2 minute read Jonny Bairstow has worked out that he can score twice as many runs simply by doubling his strike-rate. Daryl Mitchell has realised he’ll probably keep hold of his Test place if he scores a hundred in every single match. But what do these developments actually prove? Because yeah, sure, Jonny
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2 minute read If you’re attentive and possessed of a decent memory, you’ll clock that the headline above is a very obvious reference to our December article, Root and Silverwood have the Jack Leach they created. There’s a contrast in man management here and if you read that article again, you’ll easily see
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3 minute read Henry Nicholls getting pinballed out off his batting partner was a very, very weird wicket. Yet somehow we can’t say with certainty that it was even our favourite dismissal of the day. On day one of the third Test between England and New Zealand, the man who – thanks to
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2 minute read The Overtones are, in the words of Wikipedia, “a UK based vocal harmony group” (although it’s hard not to think the name would be a far better fit for an Undertones tribute act). The Overtons, in contrast, are a UK based quick bowling partnership. Don’t let your damned auto-correct get
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< 1 minute read Remember that mad notion that England needed to deliberately omit James Anderson and Stuart Broad to create ‘opportunities’ for new seam bowlers? England will play around half a dozen non-Anderson, non-Broad quick bowlers in the coming week alone. It was always a bit of a nonsense. When the two lithe,
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5 minute read Violence is great, isn’t it? Violence is so much fun. We greatly enjoyed Jonny Bairstow, at Trent Bridge, with a cricket bat. At tea on day five, England were 139-4, 160 runs from victory and Jonny Bairstow was on 43 off 48 balls, which is quick, but still within the
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3 minute read When the opposition make 550, it’s rarely because of a missed catch. It’s more a result of all the other chances that weren’t even created. At the same time, an innings of 550 will tend to feature a fair few misses, if only because it’s such a huge volume of
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