Plaudits to India, but this match featured a really weird and memorable passage of play that was pretty much nothing to do with the tourists’ magnificent performance. On the fourth evening, England’s openers delivered some incredibly generic, low octane Test match batting and we somewhat unexpectedly discovered that this really
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Everything unravelled for Haseeb Hameed at Lancashire. You got the sense that the unravelling momentum was so great towards the end that the county were switching between management strategies every other day in a desperate bid to stumble on something that worked. In contrast, Hameed’s new county, Nottinghamshire, have settled
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In another universe, these five cricketers are the backbone of the England Test team. A handful of players make it in Test cricket. Others get picked and aren’t good enough. Then there are the weird ones; the ones who get a few games, look the business and then for some
Continue readingEngland are still very much in the market for a Test opener, you feel. Mark Stoneman is making a fist of things, but they’d quite like another top order batsman or two to take to Australia. At the time of writing, Lancashire are four wickets down but Haseeb Hameed is
Continue readingEngland are taking a break. A mid-tour holiday. There’s been a bit of discussion about the fact that they feel they need one and what that might say about international schedules, but there’s been precious little comment about why the holy hell they saw fit to go to Dubai. We’d
Continue readingThe pace of the world is too much for us these days. Haseeb Hameed is already defying other people’s expectations of him even before we’ve managed to form expectations for him to defy. Hameed has been labelled ‘Baby Boycott’ in some quarters. On the basis of what exactly? The fact
Continue readingThis is what they do nowadays. They say they’re thinking of picking someone as a means of increasing the scrutiny on them and then they see how the player reacts. Earlier in the season, word got out that England were almost certainly going to pick Scott Borthwick. He reacted by
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