< 1 minute read People who decide man of the match awards are stupid. If there are loads of runs in the match, man of the match adjudicators think the batsmen have all batted really well and pick the guy who scored the most. If it’s a really low-scoring game, they think the bowlers
Continue reading< 1 minute read And then we realised that we didn’t have to write about England one-day internationals if we didn’t want to. We could just publish pictures like the one on the right instead. It’s a new dance craze. We’re calling it ‘the Pietersen’. It’s like normal dancing, only quite miraculously it’s even
Continue reading< 1 minute read Just close your eyes, stick your arse out, wobble your bat at a funny angle and hope. It’ll be fine. This is the technique for dealing with the moving ball. There is absolutely no way that this is the wrong approach. Three people out? Just stick with it. It’ll reap
Continue reading< 1 minute read The kid who sits next to you at that match will have been waiting for a tenth of his life. He’ll find out that his hero isn’t playing and he’ll cry. “Players know their body best and in future more and more players would come out and say that they
Continue reading< 1 minute read And an arse falls out. Someone should tell Matthew Hayden to try and blend into the scenery if he ever sees a tape recorder or a microphone in the vicinity. “When you get to my age, you get to a point where the next 12 months is a long, long
Continue reading< 1 minute read Last time England toured India, Ian Blackwell was in the one-day side. He did all right as well. As a batsman he’s usually described as ‘rustic’ or somesuch. A variety of adjectives might get used, but they all mean that he’s a fat slogger. He’s a good fat slogger, don’t
Continue reading< 1 minute read Andrew Symonds said: “I did something silly with him one night and I suppose I was a bit disrespectful to him.” What does that sound like to you? It sounds like it could only be one thing to us. What act is both silly and disrespectful? Ask yourself that. It
Continue reading< 1 minute read This was England’s 500th one-day international. It was Yuvraj Singh’s 219th. Yuvraj is 26. Once again Yuvraj hit a hundred. This time, he also took four wickets. We’re not sure it would make a huge amount of difference, but we’re inclined to agree with everyone else in the entire world
Continue reading< 1 minute read “We thought we were a bit tentative in the way we played and could have been more aggressive in everything we did.” So says Peter Moores. He’s right. England need to show more aggression in absolutely everything they do. Look at the first one-day international for example. England showed little
Continue reading< 1 minute read We have never once seen someone quarantined without dire consequences for everyone on earth. It starts with vomiting. It ends with zombies or a flesh-eating virus. Maybe there’s an alien gestating inside Jesse Ryder as we speak – Lord knows, there’s room for one. It’s at times like this that
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