2 minute read If James Taylor’s public pronouncements betray an admirable desire to retain a sense of humour about things, his retirement from cricket at the age of just 26 due to arrhythmogenic right ventricular arrhythmia is anything but funny. It’s easy to point to his having had a job as a professional
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How Brendon McCullum made international cricket slightly better
2 minute read It’s a familiar story to most of you, but it’s worth retelling. Looking back on losing his first two Tests as captain to South Africa by more than an innings, McCullum told the New Zealand Herald: “If we’re being honest, at that point the perception of the New Zealand cricket
Continue readingShivnarine Chanderpaul – the last great West Indies cricketer
3 minute read The world’s coaching manuals can breathe a sigh of relief because the greatest dissident of modern times has officially called it a day. No-one who remains will question them quite so persuasively. Cricket’s lost a lot. The start and end When Shivnarine Chanderpaul made his Test debut, he did so
Continue readingIs Brendon McCullum retiring too soon?
< 1 minute read Yes. Yes he is. The answer you are looking for is ‘yes’. Now that he’s a statesmanlike trendsetter and role model, the very embodiment of what cricket should be, it’s easy to forget that for many years Brendon McCullum was just a mediocre wicketkeeper-batsman who typically flailed then failed in
Continue readingThe Mitchell Johnson bowling action – a nasty and effective and unreliable thing
2 minute read Mitchell Johnson contributed some extremely interesting cricket and you can’t ask for much more than that from a player. Overall, his record is very good, but that long-term-very-goodness was created by opposing short-term extremes. At his best, Johnson was as exciting to watch as pretty much any cricketer ever. If
Continue readingShoaib Malik adds to the rich tradition of Pakistani cricketer retirements
< 1 minute read No-one does retirement quite like a Pakistan cricketer. Mohammad Yousuf’s was a textbook departure, entirely equivocal such that his absence can perhaps only now be considered permanent, some five years later. Or at least it could have been considered permanent if he hadn’t played a number of international matches after
Continue readingThe story of Matt Prior
3 minute read Perhaps it’s mankind’s predisposition towards seeing the world in terms of stories that has resulted in there being so much emphasis on the latter stages of Matt Prior’s career. Stories build towards an ending, so we tend to think that’s the most important bit. Such a way of looking at
Continue readingThis is the way a cricket career ends, not with a bang
2 minute read Hurray! Friday! Let’s celebrate by writing about melancholy exits! We’ve sadly had two recently. Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s international career ended just as he imagined it would when he first took up the sport as a boy, with a WhatsApp exchange between Test series. Meanwhile, Craig Kieswetter has had to call it
Continue readingJonathan Trott: the totem who knew his mind
4 minute read This article was first published on the All Out Cricket website in May 2015, but the All Out Cricket website no longer exists so we’re republishing it here. Jonathan Trott was never a cash-in player. He was never the guy who exploited tired bowling. He never stood on anyone else’s
Continue readingJonathan Trott – the king of relentlessness finally relents
< 1 minute read Our proper Jonathan Trott retirement piece is over on All Out Cricket. Other than that, here are two old posts which sum up different aspects of a top, top player. The first focuses on the sheer relentlessness of the man – surely his defining quality. If we have a happier
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