< 1 minute read People are always saying this. It drives us mental. They say it like it’s a fact. Stuart Broad’s the latest. “I think Test wickets should be flat, no doubt, because the crowds want to come and see runs scored.” No we don’t. The most boring days we’ve ever seen have
Continue reading< 1 minute read There is more than one thing to celebrate regarding Andrew Flintoff’s return to competitive cricket, but surely this is the greatest. A county match report which doesn’t go on and on about how some no-mark is ‘pushing for selection’ is a rare thing indeed. Okay, so in this instance the
Continue reading< 1 minute read Apparently Andrew Strauss has been caught calling Kevin Pietersen ‘the C-word’ during a commentary stint. He thought he was off-air, but they were actually still broadcasting in Australia. Being as this is Strauss, we’re presuming that the word used was ‘cad’. We’re quite taken aback by this. Our guess would
Continue reading< 1 minute read Can we just remind you that we also write a Tour de France website. The race starts tomorrow and the first three days promise to be ‘a big deal’ because they’re in the UK. Stage two on Sunday is the one we’re most looking forward to, but we’ll be covering
Continue reading< 1 minute read Should they pick the batsman who bowls slippery fast-medium (Ben Stokes), the fast-medium bowler who can bat (Chris Jordan), the faster fast-medium bowler who can bat (Liam Plunkett) or the fast-medium bowler who really can bat (Chris Woakes)? All are good players, but even an eskimo may from time to
Continue reading3 minute read Ged writes: Over Easter, the Lancastrian nephew-in-law, Escamillo Escapillo (EE) and I schemed to meet up for the Middlesex v Lancashire fixture at Lord’s this year, even if we could only manage half-a-day off during the working week. In the flurry of subsequent e-mails and texts, I said that I
Continue reading< 1 minute read Over the weekend, Cricinfo published an article of ours about the English hatred of ‘giving it away’ and how it gives rise to a way of batting which is fundamentally unproductive. It’s called Why so passive, England? and it’s another angle on the whole proactive batting thing we’ve been so
Continue reading< 1 minute read Sperm whales have pretty small brains. If you saw one, it would look massive, but they’re small brains in relative terms because sperm whales are massively massive. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville makes the case that the small brain is compensated for by the whale’s giant vertebrae, the first few
Continue reading< 1 minute read A bit of housekeeping. We’ve had some of our articles published on other websites. First up, The Shire Horse, our fortnightly thing for All Out Cricket. This week’s edition makes fun of some things that England players have said, has a bit about Lancashire’s batting and then there are the
Continue reading< 1 minute read Will Alastair Cook learn his lesson? Most people know that it’s incredibly unwise for the England captain to demand that critics be less critical. But not Cook, apparently. He recently said that “something needs to be done” about Shane Warne’s relentless criticism of his captaincy. The headline of Warne’s latest
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