3 minute readYou wouldn’t think there would be much nervous tension about a guy with 39 Test hundreds getting into the 90s again and maybe scoring a 40th. But there was. Fortunately for all of us, very dull asterisks against career records and the prospect of Matthew Hayden doing a lap of
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2 minute read“I hear you’re England’s spin bowler now, Joe. How did you get interested in that type of thing? Should we all be England’s spin bowler now? What’s the official line?“ England’s perfunctory ‘tour match’ against England Lions is underway and all is becoming clearer, team selection-wise. Ollie Pope appears to
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< 1 minute readJos Buttler hasn’t always impressed us as England’s white ball captain. But man… this was below the belt. We don’t habitually read “employee backs his boss” type articles because they don’t tend to be awash with intriguing thoughts that enrich our life. But in this case, the BBC headline sucked
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3 minute readJoe Root reached his latest hundred with one of those reverse sweeps of his. We’ve seen them plenty of times before, of course. We’ve seen all of it plenty of times before. It doesn’t stop being impressive, but it’s become a nagging, cumulative impressiveness that never really leaves you, rather
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3 minute readYou may have guessed that we didn’t see much of this one. But that’s okay – we can read a scorecard with the best of them. England won. It is 2-0. Here are some things that apparently happened… Joe Root one-ups himself Has Joe Root finally hit upon a way
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5 minute readJoe Root has been so reliably and frequently excellent that at times it hasn’t even felt that interesting. Today is a celebration of Root’s overlooked brilliance. “Just remember what ol’ Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven
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4 minute readThe vast majority of the time since he made his debut in 2012, England’s batting has been Joe Root and a revolving cast of team-mates who seem to have it in them to play a decent innings, but most likely won’t. In the recent five-Test series in India, only one
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2 minute readWhen Joe Root drops catches, Joe Root blames the ball. Remember when English commentators were talking up Josh Tongue’s “extra pace” because he was bowling 85mph? That seems even more nonsensical now after Mark Wood made the Headingley crowd gasp at not just the obvious threat of his bowling but
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5 minute readDo you know England’s first-choice XI for the upcoming 50-over World Cup? Do England? There’s a lot of job sharing in the various England teams these days. Players flit in and flit out to the extent that it’s actually pretty hard to identify the first choice XI. That’s mostly okay
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5 minute readThe second Test was “a differently played game” according to Ben Stokes. It still resulted in England winning in Pakistan though, which is not a thing that had happened too often until this month. The match has left us with quite a few half-baked thoughts rolling around our largely empty
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