You know what they say: ain’t no run-out appeal like the run-out appeal that comes in the immediate aftermath of a drop. With all due respect to Chris Woakes’ bowling and Shardul Thakur’s batting, the highlight of day one of the fourth Test was unquestionably Rory Burns standing astride an
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The flipside of everything going pretty much exactly to plan is that this is a thing that almost never happens. The best laid schemes are forever ganging agley and so what are you going to do when you’re back in the real world where absolutely everything goes wrong absolutely all
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“Oh that’s a nothing shot,” they say – but only when you get out to it. We were thinking about this particular shot of Joe Root’s after watching the BBC highlights the other day. The BBC highlights are an hour long and with no ads, it’s what you might call
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We’re not saying either England or India goes out there looking for a fight. We are however saying that quite a few of the players have a keen eye for provocation and could probably uncover a bit of it even if they were sentenced to solitary confinement. “It just showed
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Sam Curran is a weird one. You’d be unlikely to pick him purely as a batsman. You’d be unlikely to pick him purely as a bowler. You wouldn’t pick him he were a right-armer. You wouldn’t pick him if he were a few years older. But there he is –
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There is a very good chance this article about England’s day five capitulation is not biologically sound. We’re pretty sure it’s cricketally accurate however. The second Test was won and lost at some point during a morning of pointlessly bouncing Jasprit Bumrah. It’s a hard moment to pin down precisely,
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Much is said about Cheteshwar Pujara – we’ve written a lot ourself – but we’re not sure anyone’s ever talked about his ability to persuade you that it rained when it didn’t. The way it went down was like this. Late afternoon we got a message from King Cricket reader
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Last week we suggested that the adaptability of Jonny Bairstow and Moeen Ali was a key reason why they had become yo-yos for England. There are two sides to this. Firstly, the fact that the two men can each perform so many ‘roles’ means that Test openings materialise more frequently
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KL Rahul successfully made it to the middle at Lord’s, batted a bit and then just about successfully made it back to the changing rooms again. As Tom Evans points out, it’s a long way. Here’s Rahul’s epic journey. “Well, we’ve kept them waiting long enough. Let’s do it to
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Starts are important. Starts set everyone’s mood and so shape everything that’s to come. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Abattoir Blues album starts with two bars that sound like the climax of an encore. Nick then forcefully instructs us to, ‘get ready for love,’ and by 12 seconds, there’s
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