3 minute read When it comes to seam bowling, speed is not everything – but it is something. Reverse swing is something too. Mark Wood delivered the best combination of somethings against the West Indies yesterday. Fast reverse swing is just such a fundamentally wonderful thing. It’s so straightforward, so obvious. Its crushing
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2 minute read It is halfway through day two. The score is 275-1. The last 28 wickets in the series have all fallen to spin. Ben Stokes hasn’t bowled in a match since June. Rohit Sharma faces on 103, thinking about 203 – maybe even 303. Stokes knocks his off stump back first
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2 minute read Commentators often say that a ball has gone “straight up” but few have gone up quite so straight as the one that resulted in Steve Smith’s dismissal against South Africa in today’s World Cup semi-final. It is astonishingly hard to propel a ball straight up. Hit a ball any serious
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< 1 minute read Today Mohammed Shami’s insatiable thirst for World Cup wickets spilled over into his fielding when he utterly failed to secure an easy wicket from a delivery bowled by someone else. What happened was: Jasprit Bumrah bowled, Kane Williamson hit it straight to Shami, and Shami for some reason went all
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3 minute read Afghanistan’s batters hit several incredible shots in their 291-5 against Australia today, but Ibrahim Zadran’s ramp shot off Pat Cummins gets the nod from us as the most incredible. Before we get into this, let’s first have a handful of honourable mentions. Firstly, Azmatullah Omarzai’s cover drive off Mitchell Starc
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2 minute read “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” said Daniel Norcross on BBC commentary. “The throw’s come in at the non-striker’s end and there is dawdleage.” It’s hard to improve on that assessment. What was so remarkable about this dismissal is that it felt like the textbook, “yadda yadda yadda… and there’s
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3 minute read Southern Brave’s Danni Wyatt played the most significant innings in the Hundred final. It ended the way all good limited overs innings should end – with a slightly chaotic run-out. Kate Cross isn’t exactly from Manchester. She played her formative cricket in Heywood, just a little way north of what
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2 minute read It’s quite possible you didn’t. He only scored nine of them in 82 balls after all. You have options in Test cricket. You can choose how you go about things. We would argue that England’s hare approach to batting at the minute is actually a lot more interesting for being
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2 minute read ‘David Warner b Naveen-ul-Haq’ really doesn’t do it justice. You need to see it. Or at least have it described to you alongside a handful of stills. The switch hit is right up there with cricket’s most hubristic shots. It arguably even surpasses the quite-possibly-smashing-it-straight-into-your-own-face peacocking of the ramp shot.
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2 minute read Appealing is one of the great aspects of cricket and Stuart Broad is, in his own way, one of the all-time great appealers. At Lord’s, against New Zealand, he delivered a very fine secondary appeal. If you missed it, Colin de Grandhomme was run out by Ollie Pope at slip
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