3 minute readEngland achieved a couple of things at Headingley. Most obviously, they won – but they also did so while compelling Jasprit Bumrah to bowl really quite a lot of overs. That’s an investment that might pay dividends later in the series. Unleashed! It’s easy being a really good batter because
Continue reading
2 minute readIn England the men’s domestic game tends to flail around incorrigibly, endlessly adding formats and complexity to make itself ever more impenetrable. The women’s game, in contrast, tends to move from one reasoned, accessible structure to another. The sheer frequency of overhauls seems to us the only meaningful attempt to
Continue reading
5 minute readLancashire are 15 points behind Nottinghamshire and 20 points behind Warwickshire going into the last round of matches. Those two teams will play each other and a draw plus a couple of bonus points for Notts would be enough to save both. That would be true even if Lancashire were
Continue reading
2 minute readThe County Championship enters its first hiatus with not much in it at the top after Essex won by an innings and Surrey lost by an innings. Third-placed Somerset also lost by an innings, weirdly. What happened with Surrey then? Dunno really. Despite the fact everyone in their top six
Continue reading
6 minute readAnd so the greatest Test batter of all time has departed the game just four ducks short of Courtney Walsh’s all-time record with 39. To put that in context, the next highest tally by someone with a Test hundred to their name is Marvan Atapattu’s 22 – and that was
Continue reading
2 minute readThe hot Le Creuset pan that is the County Championship has sufficiently cooled that we again feel able to grasp it in our now autumnally frostbitten fingers. But just what are we grasping after all this time? What’s the situation here? In the early days of Breaking Bad, back in
Continue reading
< 1 minute readIf Sam Northeast has had a “thing” it was forever being mentioned as a possible England batter but never actually getting picked. Now he’s the guy who made 410 not out. Some players have a real knack for not getting picked for the Test team. Sam Northeast has delivered in
Continue reading
2 minute readRemember when being five down for not many runs was a bad thing? Whatever happened to that? Two weeks ago, England’s men’s team were 93-4 in pursuit of 299 to win. Somewhere around a minute later, they’d won the match – in large part thanks to Jonny Bairstow, who was
Continue reading
4 minute readIt was the first England Test squad announcement of the summer today. You may well have something to say about some of the specifics, but can we please first just stop and celebrate the annual ritual of picking apart the coming Test season before it’s even begun. Near the start
Continue reading
3 minute readYou can see where they’re coming from. But pretty sure they did. What we’re talking about here is of course the format of the 2022 County Championship. Nothing wrong with the format itself. (Oh no, wait, it’s gone back to being lopsided and ridiculous.) The (new) issue is how they’ve
Continue reading