< 1 minute read We’re warming to the idea that England’s one-day cricket is like life – all crushing disappointments and anticlimax. You want to be a winner. You want to succeed. You try so very hard to become competent at something, but everything you learn seems to be immediately rendered irrelevant by some
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It’s a time of pessimism and things dying
< 1 minute read Autumn. The cricket season ends. The plants die. Every sunny day is tainted with the thought that it might be the last. On the field there’s the Pro40 and one-day internationals and all there is to look forward to is the Champions’ Trophy. If a cricket tournament could be a
Continue readingAshes or one-day cricket?
< 1 minute read As an England supporter, it’s tempting to think that you’d take the Ashes over a one-day series win. No other nationality would think like this. Most people would at least entertain the idea that their side could win both and might even be persuaded into thinking that they were in
Continue readingEngland cricketers playing football
< 1 minute read We know that many of you spent your childhoods betting how many quail eggs your servants could find in half an hour, but we went to a normal school. We played football pretty much every day for five years and never once got injured. When England’s cricketers get a football
Continue readingAdil Rashid makes a case to be England’s new number seven
< 1 minute read A week or so ago, Adil Rashid hit two hundreds in successive innings. In Yorkshire’s two innings in the field adjacent to those hundreds, Rashid took five wickets in each of them. England will naturally be looking for a seam bowling all-rounder to replace Andrew Flintoff – perhaps Rashid’s team
Continue readingPaul Collingwood has to go
< 1 minute read This is the vibe we’re getting at the minute, but prior to the Ashes, Paul Collingwood averaged 58, 43, 61 and 68 in successive series. Paul Collingwood never gets much slack. It strikes us that if you say someone’s got no talent often enough, it colours people’s views in itself.
Continue readingEngland’s 2010 fixtures
< 1 minute read The unstoppable fun train is careering around the UK during summer 2010 and no mistake. England will play no fewer than 13 one-day internationals. This commitment to 50-over cricket has been reinforced by the ECB’s parallel decision to not play any 50-over county cricket ever again. Instead, county cricketers will
Continue readingEngland fast bowlers have short lives
< 1 minute read Following Andrew Flintoff’s Test retirement, Steve Harmison is now making rumblings about leaving the international game. He says his body couldn’t last the 18 months that would take him up to the next Ashes series. Steve Harmison is 30 years old. Flintoff has been in hospital about once a fortnight
Continue readingAndrew Strauss moulds the world into a shape of his choosing
2 minute read It’s the shape of a club with nails sticking out of it and he’s clumping towards Australia with it, looking like Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York (although Strauss hasn’t got the nauseating stench of an unbearably dull film accompanying him). It seems such a long, long time
Continue readingEngland 2009 Ashes victory gloating to last all week
< 1 minute read When Australia first landed in the UK, we renounced level-headed reportage in favour of mindless jingoistic cheerleading. Many of you might have thought that this reached a peak when we asked ‘are England going to win the Ashes?‘ last week and concluded ‘yes, of course they are’. But they did,
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