< 1 minute readHere’s a joke for you: What do a 35-over a side game in Habantota and a 50-over match in New Zealand or Australia have in common? Pretty funny, eh? In the third match of this series, Sri Lanka were positively blown away by England’s tactic of randomly selecting a load
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Why Alex Hales and Moeen Ali would make a great one-day opening partnership
2 minute readThis is going to come across as a gossamer-thinly-veiled plea for Alastair Cook to be given the old heave-ho, but it’s not. It’s literally just about Hales and Ali – Cook’s merely collateral damage. In fact let’s say he can bat at three. There’s still a large part of us
Continue readingEngland try and sprint to 300 but succeed only in tripping and crawling to 185 all out
< 1 minute readThe ECB media cheat sheet will have been passed around again after today’s performance. All this running talk of attacking batting is understandable, but England repeatedly show a worrying lack of aptitude for walking the full 50-over distance (actually only 45 in this instance). Six times in their last seven
Continue readingMoeen Ali foolishly expects other England players to score some of the runs
< 1 minute readThat’s okay. That’s what these tours are for. Moeen will have learnt from this. From now on, he’ll know that 119 off 87 balls simply isn’t enough and he’ll instead score 180 off 110 balls or whatever. Other than that, one of the great joys of the first one-day international
Continue readingEngland’s 2015 World Cup Song (to the tune of Waltzing Matilda)
2 minute readSticking with World Cup songs, Bert writes: All proper World Cup campaigns, no matter what the sport, need a World Cup Song, but in the past I think teams have made a tactical mistake. All these songs tell of hope and excitement, of the chance of winning, no matter how
Continue readingMop-up of the day – tails and knees
2 minute readFirst up, tail-enders. They’re ace, but they’re a dying breed. Blame professionalism. Now we love lower-order shenanigans as much as the next person, but the key word there is ‘shenanigans’. A textbook forward defensive stroke is not a shenanigan. These are shenanigans. A tail-end innings should bring all the fun
Continue readingMop-up of the day – legs and hands
< 1 minute readOur latest Kings of Cricket piece is up on the All Out Cricket website. The subject is Paul Collingwood. Bear with us. We think we’ve made our case. It’s mostly about his magical magnetic hand, but there’s more to it than that. Consider it a paean to three-dimensionality; an ode
Continue readingEngland coaching news: someone to do something for a bit
< 1 minute readFans of inexplicable additional consonants in first names rejoiced today when it was announced that one of England’s former bowling coaches will be returning to the setup, albeit on a short-term basis. No, it’s not Allan Donald – it’s Ottis Gibson. Gibson may or may not have said: “I was
Continue readingJonathan Trott joins Yorkshire
< 1 minute readAt least we think that’s what’s happened. As far as we can tell, Trott and a handful of others have signed for Yorkshire in time for the county’s tour to South Africa. Weirdly, there doesn’t seem to be any explanation why only seven of last year’s Championship-winning squad will be
Continue readingKP v ECB on Twitter – a medieval battle with an invisible audience
3 minute readOur latest Twitter round-up’s just appeared on Cricinfo. It was an unusually tough assignment. We’d sign into Twitter, get distracted by the latest developments arising from Kevin Pietersen’s autobiography and then find that we’d lost an hour or more. We’d then force ourself to close down Twitter so that we
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