5 minute readThis too shall pass. Barring injury, James Anderson will play his final Test at Lord’s in July. “It feels like a good time,” he said – which isn’t at all how it felt when we first heard the news. Our immediate reaction was to think, “No, carry on. Just play
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6 minute readAnd so the greatest Test batter of all time has departed the game just four ducks short of Courtney Walsh’s all-time record with 39. To put that in context, the next highest tally by someone with a Test hundred to their name is Marvan Atapattu’s 22 – and that was
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2 minute readWe’ve often joked about Moeen Ali’s willingness to take on any pretty much any job for England. Any format, any role, bat or ball, Moeen would give it a go. This means there’s quite a lot of ‘what might have been’ in response to his retirement from Test cricket. But
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3 minute readCalling someone a trier is usually seen as damning them with faint praise, so we’re going to have to expand on that headline a little bit to ensure the praise is significantly less faint. The early days Dale Steyn’s just retired from cricket. We remember his Test debut. For his
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3 minute readAs Ian Bell retires from first-class cricket, let’s talk about a player whose Test record was plenty good enough but whose technique honestly left us kind of cold. Ian Bell was player of the series in a 3-0 Ashes win. Can we just state that first before we get into
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Continue reading< 1 minute readAB de Villiers spent rather a long time desperately trying to engineer a cake monopoly. He wanted to retain and eat The Cake of International Cricket; he wanted to retain and eat The Lucrative Cake of T20 Franchise Cricket; and he also wanted to retain and eat The Cake of
Continue reading2 minute readEach to his own and all that, but the “new chapter” in Zafar Ansari’s life sounds dull as shit to us. He’s retired from cricket at the age of 25 to pursue another career, “potentially in law”. We’ve been here before. We’ve been here several times. There was James Bruce,
Continue reading< 1 minute readIf we weren’t actually first off the mark in lauding Tom Smith, we were there or thereabouts. He elicited that laudery by taking 3-29 on the first day of the 2006 season. Fortunately for us, Smith actually made his debut a year before, so we’re still not yet at the
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5 minute readThis article was first published on Cricinfo in April 2016, but they seem to have deleted it so we’re republishing it. For a fair few years, from the early Nineties onwards, there was a phenomenon in British newspapers where Australian opinions of England cricketers were given greater weight. Seasoned cricket
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