3 minute read Sometimes you can’t choose between awful body part puns for your headline. What can you do in that situation other than mash them together so that neither quite works? Jack Leach’s back As in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything. It was in fact a stress fracture that
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6 minute read And 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
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2 minute read The 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
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< 1 minute read If 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
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2 minute read Remember 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
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4 minute read It 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
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3 minute read You 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
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2 minute read The groups-then-divisions format of this year’s County Championship achieves a couple of significant things. (1) It creates a magnificent climax where the top teams are all pitted against each other and vying for overall glory. (2) It creates a great morass of meaningless fixtures where everyone else is vying for
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2 minute read “Oh that’s a nothing shot,” they say – but only when you get out to it. We were thinking about this particular shot of Joe Root’s after watching the BBC highlights the other day. The BBC highlights are an hour long and with no ads, it’s what you might call
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2 minute read By being on the receiving end of an agonisingly protracted lecture from Nita Ambani, of course! Regular readers will be well aware of our morbid fascination with Nita’s breath-taking commitment to interminable public speaking. As soon as we realised that Mumbai were going to win, our thoughts immediately turned to
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