< 1 minute readAfter two overs against the West Indies, England had scored five. They then added another 177. After two overs against South Africa, England had made 44. They then added another 186. The first two overs aren’t to be wasted. It was an odd match though. We can only conclude that
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Turns out AB de Villiers is rubbish at T20 cricket
1 minute readThere’s only so many times you can hear how wonderful something is before you want to hit it with a hammer or push it down a flight of stairs at the luxury five-star hotel at which it’s staying ahead of its team’s first match at the World T20. However, this
Continue readingAlex Hales cultivates a healthy aversion to failure
2 minute readIf you were starring in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and needed to act in a scene where the submarine grounded on the seabed or was attacked by some sort of leviathan, there was only one way to do it. You and the rest of the cast ran
Continue readingEngland win, England lose, life goes on
< 1 minute readSometimes you win, sometimes you lose. When you win, all’s well. The captain says that you played well as a unit while adding a cautionary note: “We are not yet the finished article.” When you lose, he talks about processes and learning curves. Lose a few in a row and
Continue readingHashim Amla in ODIs – a brief but unwelcome detour into stats
2 minute readThe human brain isn’t wired for statistics. In fact it isn’t wired at all. Perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe in the distant future when we’re all mechanically enhanced cyberfolk we’ll be able to make logical decisions based on data rather than being influenced by our demented emotional responses to stories
Continue readingEngland ODI team triggers outlandish pronouncement
< 1 minute readWe once overheard one man say to another man: “I gave you the money and you ate the money.” True story. The background is that we were in a restaurant in Goa on Christmas Day. It was early evening and the proprietor was already absolutely shit-faced. A customer was buying
Continue readingWhen should we start thinking about the World T20?
< 1 minute readApparently things don’t ‘hove into view’. They actually heave into view – it’s just that no-one says that. One thing’s for certain though, things that demand this verb are large and cumbersome. A cat never heaves into a view, for example (although it may well heave while in view, if
Continue readingWhy were we going to write about Roger Telemachus?
< 1 minute readAnyone? Any idea? We’ve been doing a bit of housework around the ‘back end’ of the site and while we were doing this, we spotted a draft of an article from 2011. It was entitled, simply, “Roger Telemachus”. That’s intriguing, we thought, and so we opened the page to see
Continue readingHashim Amla – the other best batsman in the world
2 minute readCricket loves to rank things. You’d think the whole point of a cricket match was to determine which of two teams was the better, but apparently that’s not enough. Cricket also wants to know how the teams involved compare to all other current sides and how each of the players
Continue readingStephen Cook takes care of the present
< 1 minute readThere was a classic Bob Willis moment during the third Test when Charles Colvile asked the lugubrious pundit about South Africa’s then opening batsman. “Well you know my opinion on Stiaan Van Zyl, Charles,” responded Bob – because having repeatedly voiced that opinion throughout the series, he no longer needed
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