< 1 minute readHowever, Australia won the fours classification by 19 to 14 and they also scored 20 extras to New Zealand’s 12. The upshot was that Australia won the runs classification by 245 to 243. Wickets also fell – but not enough to be of any real significance. Speaking after the match,
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Why is Adil Rashid giving up first-class cricket and becoming a white ball specialist?
3 minute readBecause he’s pressed for time. Adil Rashid has signed a white-ball only contract with Yorkshire for the 2018 season. Some will say he’s looking to become a short format specialist because it’ll allow him to buy a bigger car or house or whatever, but that’s missing the point. The point
Continue readingTest cricket is what Mark Wood wants to play – but even if he’s keen enough and fit enough, modern cricket won’t allow him to do so
< 1 minute readIf you haven’t already seen it, our latest piece for Wisden is about Mark Wood and the weighted, weighty decisions faced by current England cricketers. The crux of it is this: if Mark Wood doesn’t (a) fluke his way into the Test side for the two Tests against New Zealand
Continue readingSteve Smith the ball-eater and other stories: England’s ODI series win over Australia in old-school stats
2 minute readRemember averages and strike-rates? We do. Let’s take a look at some of the meat and potatoes stats for England’s 4-1 one-day series win over Australia. Steve Smith ate balls The Australian captain ate up 148 deliveries over the course of the series and yet paid his team back with
Continue readingNuwan Thushara’s bowling action (+ video)
< 1 minute readWhen is a one-off not a one-off? When he inspires a copycat. Lasith Malinga is not unique. We happened across this video of Sinhalese Sports Club’s Nuwan Thushara the other day. Nuwan has clearly thought to himself: “That bowling action of Lasith Malinga’s looks really logical and easy to reproduce.
Continue readingWe checked who bought Rishabh Pant and it reminded us of something about the IPL
2 minute readRishabh Pant is a player we keep an eye on. We don’t write about him much at the minute, but we get the sense that we will. We were therefore interested to see where he ended up in the IPL auction and whether the teams valued him as highly as
Continue readingJoe Root goes big, Australia fall short
< 1 minute readBefore the fourth one-dayer between Australia and England, the at times nauseatingly partisan BT Sport Twitter account asked which of three England batsmen would “go big” – Jason Roy, Joe Root or Jos Buttler. ✅ Roy ✅ Root ✅ Buttler Who will be the man to go big tonight? ????
Continue readingSouth Africa v India is not boxing, it’s racing
< 1 minute readWith wickets falling every 10 or 20 runs in the South Africa v India series, it’s tempting to resort to the heavyweight boxer cliché. This has the two combatants going toe-to-toe, knocking lumps out of one another with neither taking a backward step. It’s odd to think of wickets as
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What does Lloyd Pope’s hair say about his leg-spin?
2 minute readLloyd Pope took 8-35 to knock England out of the Under-19 World Cup and he’s done a bunch more eye-catching stuff since. This is Lloyd Pope’s hair. You may also notice something hanging off the bottom of it. That thing is Lloyd Pope. You may feel that a man’s hair
Continue readingEngland’s one-day bowling strategy shows up everything that’s wrong with their Test approach
< 1 minute readSpeaking about England’s Test bowling attack this week, Steve Harmison managed the rare feat of deploying the word ‘unit’ in a halfway meaningful way. He told Sky Sports that England have to, “make sure that at any one given time they’ve got skill factor with the new ball, an X-factor
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