2 minute readLast year, we took Birmingham’s appearance in place of Warwickshire in the T20 Blast as being a watertight scientific experiment into whether a future of city teams would lead to better cricket. Birmingham won the tournament, seemingly proving that it would, although the findings were somewhat compromised by their sickening
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Ian Bell continues to take his toll
2 minute readTurns out Ian Bell’s not retiring. You may have heard that he maybe possibly was. You may not. Either way, he isn’t. The umming and ahhing does hint that his career is nearly at an end though. Soon enough, the bell will toll and watching Bell will no longer take
Continue readingWhat we basically had were two inexperienced teams who can’t bat
2 minute readWhere does 2015 rank in the pantheon of Ashes series? Somewhere in the middle, we’d guess. It was certainly dramatic, but it probably wasn’t even the best Test series this summer. It was unpredictable from one match to the next, but the same quality wasn’t particularly apparent within any individual
Continue readingMomentum’s back!
< 1 minute readAs in ‘returned’. It hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything, on account of the fact that it’s an abstract concept and therefore doesn’t have a spine or a rear side or whatever. Mocking momentum’s the in thing to do at the minute. Typical that it would come into fashion six
Continue readingAdam Lyth learns that Ashes scores count half
< 1 minute readIt’s quite an impressive feat to field no fewer than eight batsmen and yet still be prone to comically low scores. You could argue that England have too many eggs in the ‘positive brand of cricket’ basket, but if there were a Venn diagram of baskets, that one would overlap
Continue readingEngland snatch the baton of mass suicide and bludgeon themselves to death with it
2 minute readAt some point surprisingly soon, England and Australia will complete the most one-sided close series in history. Not that it’s been one-sided in favour of one particular side. It’s been one-sided in favour of both of them, just at different times. It’s hard to know what to make of a
Continue readingWhen is a day a fifth of a Test match?
< 1 minute readWe’re all for the ebb and flow of Test cricket with all its nuance and scope for recovery, but all in all we’d much rather see Australia being bowled out for 60 in the span of time normally reserved for a football match. There’s a cycling commentator who routinely uses
Continue readingDuke balls, five-day pitches and the final Test of the summer
2 minute readMike Selvey has written a nice piece about balls. The word ‘caresser’ is used at one point. He is, of course, writing about Dukes balls, the cricket ball used in England which swings for way longer than the crappy, inferior Kookaburra ball. It has a bigger seam too. It’s a
Continue readingShane Warne and friends – the painting
< 1 minute readShane Warne left an important part of his brain somewhere on a cricket field in Hampshire. It’s the part that stops you doing things that your 11-year-old self would have thought a good idea. Here he is describing a painting he had commissioned. Here’s the painting itself. We’d love to
Continue readingRangana Herath is embraced by a grateful planet
< 1 minute readYou’ve got to hand it to us, we can call matches incorrectly with the worst of them. Almost as if they were goaded into it, Sri Lanka have done everything in their power to make our assessment of them the day before yesterday seem almost criminally inaccurate. We called them
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