< 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 readingCategory: News
England 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
Continue readingSri Lanka and India are also playing cricket
< 1 minute readFor those who don’t know what Sri Lanka v India is, it’s kind of like the Ashes, only they don’t make the losing team play a fifth Test. Or a fourth one. Sri Lanka seem to have turned a little bit insipid. They coped with Muttiah Muralitharan’s retirement surprisingly well
Continue readingWhy has no-one made fun of Darren Lehmann for that ‘hiccup’ comment?
< 1 minute readThe thing about hiccups is that they almost always come as a plural. You might cough once, you can get away with a single sneeze, but hiccups arrive en masse. As such, Darren Lehmann’s description of the Cardiff Test as ‘a minor hiccup’ seems entirely fitting. Far from being symptomatic
Continue readingBen Stokes can swing a cricket ball and also a bat, but we don’t need to be told that he isn’t Botham or Flintoff
2 minute read“We don’t want to say he’s going to be the next Botham, or the next Flintoff,” said Trevor Bayliss. England’s coach then veered away from an already painfully familiar statement somewhat by adding: “He’ll be the next Ben Stokes” – as if we’ve had one already. Every time anyone says
Continue readingDid England just win the 2015 Ashes?
< 1 minute readThey completely did. They fully did. What do you make of that? And as a bonus talking point, Michael Clarke seems likely to retire at the end of the series. We presume he’s only waiting that long lest Steven Smith feel the pressure to follow suit immediately after leading the
Continue reading