< 1 minute readThis is the conclusion we drew from last week’s round of pink ball County Championship fixtures. Only one of four matches in the first division ended in a result – and even that one saw only 23 wickets fall. Despite the experiment only resulting in the confounding situation where Essex
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BBC to show “some” live cricket from 2020 as highlights move from Channel 5
2 minute readThe England and Wales Cricket Board has recently accepted that it needs to get some live cricket onto free-to-air TV. The question most of us have been asking is what constitutes “some”. From 2020 (appropriately enough) the BBC will be showing two men’s and one women’s T20 internationals each summer.
Continue readingChamari Atapattu can hit a cricket ball
< 1 minute readChamari Atapattu – full name, somewhat confusingly, Atapattumudiyanselage Chamari Jayangani, so that she appears on scorecards with the one name she doesn’t appear to use – has played an innings. If anyone else had bothered to help her, Sri Lanka would have won. At the same time, if anyone else
Continue readingLiam Livingstone’s golden duck was one of the finest
2 minute readLiam Livingstone’s England debut was pretty spectacular. He didn’t just fail to display his talent to a wider audience, he actively concealed it. He dropped a catch; mishit everything, including the one boundary that he hit; bust his bat; and then got run out. He also found time to enrage
Continue readingAB de Villiers plays decisive innings to win first T20 for England
2 minute readA real man of the match performance from AB de Villiers won England the first T20 international against South Africa. The greatest sportsman who ever lived ate up 58 balls in making an unbeaten 65. If the innings hinted at a two-paced pitch, England’s batsmen only noticed one of them
Continue readingEngland play South Africa in a pretty meaningless T20 international and Bob isn’t playing
< 1 minute readWe said you were going to start noticing everyone going mental about Mason Crane. Today marks an obvious step-up in mentalgoing as it seems highly likely the leg-spinner will make his international debut. Indirectly referring to him, AB de Villiers grappled with the meaning of the word ‘unknown’. “A few
Continue readingPeak Pakistan
2 minute readScrape into a tournament through being ranked eighth in the world, throw in a few debutants, win the thing. Quite often you get to play Pakistan. Occasionally you have to play Pakistan. India suffered the latter. How in blazes? If we were to imagine that winning a cricket tournament involved
Continue readingVideo: Virat Kohli dropped off Mohammad Amir… Virat Kohli caught off Mohammad Amir
< 1 minute readPakistan often lunge enthusiastically towards the ridiculous in the firm knowledge that this is their best hope of rebounding to sublime cricket – but even for them this moment was something else. There is a strong argument that Virat Kohli is the finest one-day batsman there’s ever been. He is
Continue readingNine things to watch out for when India play Pakistan in the Champions Trophy final
2 minute readThere are all sorts of India v Pakistan previews out there, but this is currently the only one on this website that goes up to nine. 1. Jasprit Bumrah’s bowling action Evidence, if it were needed, that the “hey, what’s that over there?” bowling ploy can work just as well
Continue readingIndia v Bangladesh goes pretty much exactly how everyone expected
< 1 minute readWho would have thought this match would turn out exactly as everyone expected it to? What were the odds on that? Extremely slim, you’d have thought, what with the extraordinary wealth of alternative outcomes. Tamim Iqbal played a good innings and there was reasonable support from one of Bangladesh’s middle-order
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