< 1 minute read Everybody else is saying it, so why shouldn’t we? How apt that Stephen Fleming should retire with a fifty in each innings. In total he hit 46 in Test cricket, but only nine hundreds. Statistics might not tell the whole story, but there’s only the odd semi-colon missing in this
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Andrew Strauss gets the job done with BIG RUNS
2 minute read There are two sides to this, being as we’re English, we’re first going to concentrate on the negative, because that’s our knee-jerk response when our side have made a comprehensive fightback and put themselves in total control of a Test match. Andrew Strauss shouldn’t have been playing. He shouldn’t have
Continue readingRyan Sidebottom takes 7-47
< 1 minute read A week or so ago, we wondered whether Steve Harmison’s underlying lack of confidence was the result of not feeling like he’d earned his place in the England team. With six years and hundreds of first-class wickets between his first and second Test appearances, Ryan Sidebottom must feel the opposite.
Continue readingEngland’s top six are going to make BIG RUNS
< 1 minute read Word is they’re all hitting it well in the nets. Confidence is rising. Big scores are due. With players of their class, hundreds are just around the corner. As soon as one batsman cashes in, the floodgates will open. Because that’s the way it works. All batsmen have got a
Continue readingLess tweediness from Strauss’s team mates
< 1 minute read Remember how Andrew Strauss was going to GET THE JOB DONE? Ceci sent more pictures, saying: “Squire Hoggard and the chav Vaughan. KP however will always be an alien life form to me. I’d like to say the rough edges are there as an ironic statement, but of course I
Continue readingRyan Sidebottom does the necessary
2 minute read We said after the last Test that you need spectacular performances to win Tests and you also need them to give you some breathing room in case of a bad day. England got away with one day of buttery fingers thanks to Tim Ambrose’s hundred and James Anderson’s five wickets.
Continue readingAnderson knacks his ankle
2 minute read Yes, ‘knacks’. We’re not the BBC here, you know. We don’t have to use proper Standard English words, like ‘knackers’. Actually, we do like to use the word ‘knackers’, but only as a noun. For the verb, we favour ‘to knack’. It was one of those days where you’re waiting
Continue readingJames Anderson’s back
2 minute read As in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything. To think it’s been almost a year since we last made that joke. How time flies. James Anderson has a bit of a reputation for – and you have to use these exact words – ‘spraying it around’. While this
Continue readingTim Ambrose makes himself at home
< 1 minute read Jonathan Agnew wrote today: “Tim Ambrose might be one of the shortest men currently playing Test cricket, but this man can bat.” We’d go further than that. We’d say, ‘Tim Ambrose might have attended Merewether Selective High, but he managed to hit two sixes’. We like a good non-sequitur. Before
Continue readingSteve Harmison dropped
2 minute read The graph doesn’t lie. Steve Harmison’s performances have been deteriorating for ages now. There wasn’t going to be an upturn. Last week Allan Donald revealed that Harmison had been scared while playing for England. There have been a lot of similar stories over the last year or so and they
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