3 minute read It’s common to assume that we accurately value all-rounders as the sum of their parts, but more often than not, we value each part separately and sneer at each of them a bit. Ravindra Jadeja is a pretty good example. To many people, Jadeja is a fill-in bowler who takes
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2 minute read If we could just ruin the ending of the sort-of-okay action film Braven for you, it climaxes with Jason Momoa throwing himself and the bad guy over a cliff but cleverly snagging his own foot in a bear trap tied to a tree so he doesn’t fall. That’s the kind of death-or-glory,
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6 minute read Specialist bowlers having to bat is one of the greatest things in the world because batting is absolutely nothing like bowling. It is like a javelin thrower training for years and years to perfect their art only to turn up at the Olympics and be told that they also have
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Continue reading2 minute read There are two main reasons why cricketers are annoying. (1) They play for your team and they aren’t very good. (2) They play for the opposition and they are very good. The first is self-evident. The second is rather more nuanced and deserves a little bit of elaboration. So let’s
Continue reading2 minute read Imagine you have a good knife and a really shitty knife. You regularly use both, but the shitty one’s kind of shitty. It can cope with cheese and maybe a courgette, but you’d never risk it on an onion or something like that. One day you want to slice a
Continue reading< 1 minute read Probably. We wouldn’t blame them one bit. Imagine being down the pub with your mates, talking about cricket. The company’s good, the beverages are exquisite: you’re in your element. The next day, you find yourself in an overpriced city centre drink hole along with some colleagues. They’re talking about potential
Continue reading< 1 minute read It’s okay to start headlines with ‘and’ when you’re emphasising the repetitive nature of something. Ravindra Jadeja isn’t exactly the tail, of course. Even if you play half your domestic matches on the world’s flattest pitch, scoring three triple hundreds shifts you out of the tail-end category never to return.
Continue reading2 minute read In some parts of England, they talk about ‘schools cricket’ – note the plural. This is a bizarre, alien form of the game in which posh 15-year-olds play on immaculate grounds in exquisite locations having been expertly coached by former internationals. ‘School cricket’ (singular) is rather different. In school cricket,
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