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We got our daughter a new toy on Monday. It was a tiny rubber monster thing that you stick on your thumb and it cost 99p. She played with it until one of its arms came off.
This is essentially what England captains do when they’re given a new fast bowler. It’s all too much for them. They can’t leave them alone.
Jofra “Use Him In Short Sharp Bursts” Archer bowled almost a third of England’s overs on his debut and you can entirely see why. He looked like the best bet with the new ball and he looked like the best bet against Steve Smith and he looked like the best bet with the old ball.
It was all very great and memorable, so we wrote about the one delivery Archer bowled where no-one really noticed or cared that it was him bowling; the one where Joe Denly took that tidy starfish catch and then celebrated by backhanding the ball into the air.
You can find that article here. Please read all of it and then report back with your thoughts.
You wrote “ginnel”. This will, I suspect, baffle southerners and make them rue the paucity of their dialects. This, if nothing else, makes it a good article.
Ginnel is a good word.
My Dad use to say “he/she couldn’t stop a pig in a ginnel” to indicate bow-leggedness, an image that was both evocative and odd.
“The ginnel of uncertainty” sounds even more fiendish than the corridor.
I have met people who spell it ‘jinnel’ (or ‘jennel’), and I’ve seen in written as ‘gennel’.
Personally I prefer the one off Burton Road in south Manchester, known as ‘No. 2 Passage’…
It was quite good. Catch hyperbole is a thing, people!
*Catch hyperbole inflation
Can we get an edit function in the new, commercialised King Cricket?
I voted Amused for that article. Because other people had done so and I’m nothing if not conformist.
We actually appreciate that because we have no other signal that people are reading it, let alone liking it.
Wouldn’t take my vote from my hand-held device.
That’s probably true for at least 30,000 people who tried to vote, no?
Much more fun than just ‘liking’ something – so far I have tended to vote for one of the unloved emotions. I think there’s definitely room for expanding the range though, ‘perplexed’ and ‘bemused’ are my go-to options in real life these days.
They’re striking omissions.
We should get these for this site, I tell ya! But stick to just the weird emotions. “Just farted”, for example.
In other news … Mark Cosgrove’s header?
If Australia drafted him in for the rest of the series they’d walk the Ridiculous Ashes.
https://twitter.com/DurhamCricket/status/1164126641905385474
It’s the non-movement of the bat that does it for us.
Rain!
I didn’t see any voting buttons but I did like the bit from Sky about Paine going ‘on the pull’ in the middle (well, the end, really) of his innings. Does that have the same meaning over there as it does over here?