3 minute read It sounds like a sherry-related incident, but it’s really just a faintly festive version of our Mop-up of the Day not-quite-sure-what-to-write-about-today feature. Boxing Day Eve Eve The most important of the coming days is of course Boxing Day. Few people know that Boxing Day was actually named after the Boxing
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Mop-up of the day – tails and knees
2 minute read First up, tail-enders. They’re ace, but they’re a dying breed. Blame professionalism. Now we love lower-order shenanigans as much as the next person, but the key word there is ‘shenanigans’. A textbook forward defensive stroke is not a shenanigan. These are shenanigans. A tail-end innings should bring all the fun
Continue readingMop-up of the day – heads and faces
2 minute read Can New Zealand do what Australia couldn’t and give Pakistan a decent Test match? Brendon McCullum’s already made a major contribution to his team’s cause in the second Test by winning the toss. We don’t actually know whether McCullum went for heads or tails or whether he just passively watched
Continue readingMop-up of the day – legs and hands
< 1 minute read Our latest Kings of Cricket piece is up on the All Out Cricket website. The subject is Paul Collingwood. Bear with us. We think we’ve made our case. It’s mostly about his magical magnetic hand, but there’s more to it than that. Consider it a paean to three-dimensionality; an ode
Continue readingMop-up of the day – rail and radar
< 1 minute read A lot of people were going for the ‘we can land a robot on a comet but we can’t get the trains to arrive on time’ line of reasoning yesterday. Just to let you know, it’s not the same people. Different people are responsible for space missions and rail travel.
Continue readingMop-up of the day – bones, Bangladesh batsmen and battery
< 1 minute read Is MS Dhoni’s arm made out of just one super fast-growing bone? We’re imagining an ever-extending protuberance that requires regular pruning based on the following from Cricinfo: “On the eve of the meeting, a BCCI insider revealed that Dhoni was recovering from a “right forearm” injury. By the time the
Continue readingMop-up of the last few days – learning, ‘restaurants’ and Roach
< 1 minute read Sorry, we know content’s been a bit thin on the ground this week. Our nickname in one job was ‘Bare Minimum’ and we seem to have been harking back to those days. Learning Michael Clarke earlier this week: “We were hopeful that we learnt some lessons from our trip to
Continue readingMop-up of the day – Younus Khan’s bat and Murali’s balls
2 minute read Younus Khan’s just made his third Test hundred on the bounce. We mentioned that he was underrated after the first one. Let’s revisit that. We all know Younus averages some way north of 50 and that he’s now made Test hundreds against every nation, but let’s dig a little deeper.
Continue readingMop-up of the day – stealth, Siddle, celebrations and social media
2 minute read First up, Pakistan v Australia where the ‘home’ side appear to be doing a reasonable job of putting a score on the board. It’s always hard to tell what’s a decent first innings total, but with Pakistan’s flaky batting, you reckon they’d be pretty happy already. Stealth The major contributor
Continue readingMop-up of the season
< 1 minute read Everyone does end-of-season awards, but only ours are called The Horseys. Rest assured that more time was spent writing the column than coming up with the name. If there was one bit that didn’t get finished, it was the Every Dog Has Its Day Award. We didn’t want to call
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