5 minute readWhen we think about some of the decidedly non-newsworthy Rob Key related things we have reported on down the years, it is pretty clear to us that we will have to say something about him becoming the managing director of England men’s cricket too. To give a handful of largely-picked-at-random
Continue reading
5 minute readThe England Test team is going to remain awash with problems for quite some time to come. The best you can hope for as a fan is that they at least keep those problems fresh and interesting. The Joe Root captaincy problem was getting a bit stale, so at least
Continue reading
< 1 minute readEvery cricketer has been out for a duck, but Andrew McDonald might be the only player who’s ever been physically assaulted by one. It happened in 2010 when he was walking through Queen’s Gardens in Perth with then team-mate Aaron Finch. “We walked too close to the ducklings and the
Continue reading
2 minute readThere is much debate about fairness in county cricket at the minute. Is it fair that Nottinghamshire – who finished third in the Championship last year – have to play in division two based on how they performed in 2019? Is it fair that teams in the top flight won’t
Continue reading
4 minute readNot every tournament needs an opening ceremony. We’ll let you in on a secret. We are not a fast waker-upper. Our daughter sometimes wanders into our room at an unconscionable hour and announces, “it’s morning,” in an indignant tone. It is impossible for us to convey the full horror of
Continue reading
9 minute readWay, way back in 2006, in our first year of writing this website, we described the international fixture list as being fatter than a TV-loving, chip-munching hippo with an abnormally slow metabolism. We probably should have left ourself with more room for manoeuvre because where does that leave us now?
Continue reading
2 minute readWell that wasn’t precisely how we expected England to lose the World Cup final to Australia. Nat Sciver played one of the finest World Cup final innings you’re ever likely to see in England’s forlorn chase of 357, making 148 not out off 121 balls. The only issue was that
Continue reading
2 minute readWhen we put together our Essentials Calendar last month, we figured we’d turn our attention to the World Cup at this point. We thought our gaze would shift from the West Indies v England Test series at the perfect time and we’d catch a big, exciting finish to the tournament.
Continue reading
3 minute readIf you needed to sum up England’s latest series defeat in a single quote, you could do a lot worse than Joe Root’s pre-tour comment: “I don’t want this to sound like a development tour at all but…” A friend of ours tells a story about when he did a
Continue reading
2 minute readIt’s probably best to avoid extrapolating from that England innings in a bid to predict the course of this Test match. England went to Grenada and were at various points 53-3, 53-6, 114-9 and 204-9. This all added up to one of the weirdest-arsed scorecards you are ever likely to
Continue reading