People often say that having Ben Stokes in the team gives England a fourth seamer. That’s not right. Having Ben Stokes in the team gives England a spinner, because apparently they still pick four seamers even when he’s not playing. This was the first Test cricket at Lord’s for a
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Test cricket is back. Even if it’s a last minute two-Test series that even the boards who arranged it seem a bit nonplussed about, Test cricket is a wonderful and important thing – and never more so than to those who are making their debuts. The general astonishment that England
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Everything unravelled for Haseeb Hameed at Lancashire. You got the sense that the unravelling momentum was so great towards the end that the county were switching between management strategies every other day in a desperate bid to stumble on something that worked. In contrast, Hameed’s new county, Nottinghamshire, have settled
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England have reportedly declined India’s ‘informal’ invitation to cancel the fifth Test at Old Trafford. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will therefore do what cricket boards always do in these situations: it will schedule exactly the same number of matches within a shorter span of time.
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We’re intrigued by the formality of cricket board requests. India have asked England if the whole of the upcoming Test series can be shunted forwards a week or alternatively whether the fifth Test, at Old Trafford, could be cancelled. But they’ve apparently only done this “informally”. So it’s not an
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“With all due respect…” people say, or “No offence but…” What follows these phrases is somehow never respectful or inoffensive. England coach and selector Chris Silverwood (we warned you he’d try and become a ‘supremo’) didn’t actually plump for either of those options when speaking about the summer ahead earlier
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We tend to think of the ‘bio-bubble’ imposed on touring cricketers as an oppressive, negative thing. But there is an upside – at least from a purely cricket point of view. Thanks to the way the world has been this last year or so, it’s perhaps a little easier for
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Whenever a Test is decided late on the fifth day, there’s much talk about how that kind of tension and excitement wouldn’t happen with four-day Tests. It’s half true. This is why. If you move a deadline, you don’t negate it. Even if a Test match has no fifth day,
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Can we talk about bowlers’ run-ups? We’ve picked out three great ones. They’re not necessarily our favourites, but we feel like each one says something in particular about how bowlers get to the crease and what we as viewers feel as they’re doing so. But before that, please can we
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“How can ideas have a positive and elevating effect on a practical sphere?” said Ed Smith when we played a Financial Times video about him from an entirely random starting point just now. It turned out that, when he said that, Smith was talking about an article he’d read by
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