< 1 minute read England are winning a lot, Ireland are losing a lot and all the talk is about the Ashes. This is an absolutely nailed-on Ireland victory. You know it. Do you remember this situation last time around? In 2019, England thought they were warming up for the Ashes. Ireland, in contrast,
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Why it can be hard to get all fired up about Zak Crawley
4 minute read Zak Crawley is not a popular man in some quarters. If you want a measure of this, you could do worse than count how many times his name cropped up in this week’s discussion about wicketkeepers. “And yet Zak Crawley still gets picked,” was a common reaction to the news
Continue readingEven if Ben Foakes is “the best wicketkeeper in the world” he’s only worth so much to England
2 minute read “Ben [Foakes] is the best wicketkeeper in the world,” said Ben Stokes last summer. “That’s not just my own opinion, that’s a lot of people’s opinions.” Since Stokes said that, Foakes has been left out of England’s Test team in favour of Ollie Pope – who isn’t even a wicketkeeper
Continue readingWhat ‘looking ahead to the Ashes’ tells us about Test cricket’s future (and T20 and the IPL)
4 minute read Rajasthan Royals owner Manoj Badale has told the BBC that, “We are going to have to think creatively about Test cricket if we want it to work.” This was shortly after he’d said the quiet bit out loud. It’s easy to characterise IPL franchise owners as ravenous financial speculators with
Continue readingWhat James Anderson bowling in a bobble hat tells us about ourselves
3 minute read There is undeniably something wrong with James Anderson that he still wants to play this game as much as he so obviously does. Good on him. As 24-year-old Sam Curran turns his arm over in Mohali before tens of thousands of fans and a TV audience of millions – sweat
Continue readingFrom the 2019 Ashes to two World Cup finals – which of Ben Stokes’ big three high pressure run-chase innings was the most ridiculous?
10 minute read With his thin hair and love of whole milk, you could easily mistake Ben Stokes for a baby. But Ben Stokes is not a baby. Ben Stokes is a full grown adult man who plays cricket for a living. He plays it very well with a particular penchant for seeing
Continue readingJoe Root? Dawid Malan? Harry Brook? Which batter isn’t in England’s first choice World Cup XI
5 minute read Do you know England’s first-choice XI for the upcoming 50-over World Cup? Do England? There’s a lot of job sharing in the various England teams these days. Players flit in and flit out to the extent that it’s actually pretty hard to identify the first choice XI. That’s mostly okay
Continue readingMoeen Ali’s backlift v Moeen Ali’s follow-through
4 minute read Few England players have deployed the long handle as delightfully as Moeen Ali. But which element is the more lovely – his backlift or his follow-through? Like all sentient humans, we make a point of devoting one day each month to appreciation of Brian Lara’s backlift. A byproduct of this
Continue readingJimmy Anderson, majestic island of chuntering irritation and sadness
3 minute read Jimmy Anderson has played 179 Test matches and he was completely pissed off to lose this one by a single run. Jimmy Anderson is a quite majestically irritable cricketer. The penultimate ball of the second Test between New Zealand and England could, and probably technically should, have been called a
Continue readingAgainst all odds Jonny Bairstow might have to make a different spot his own
3 minute read We once joked that England’s plan for Jonny Bairstow was to keep him guessing. It always seemed like the aim was to treat him as inconsistently as possible to keep him on his toes. After scoring four hundreds and a fifty in five innings last summer, it seemed safe to
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