4 minute readZak Crawley is not a popular man in some quarters. If you want a measure of this, you could do worse than count how many times his name cropped up in this week’s discussion about wicketkeepers. “And yet Zak Crawley still gets picked,” was a common reaction to the news
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3 minute readStarts are important. Starts set everyone’s mood and so shape everything that’s to come. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Abattoir Blues album starts with two bars that sound like the climax of an encore. Nick then forcefully instructs us to, ‘get ready for love,’ and by 12 seconds, there’s
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9 minute readGraham Gooch’s 333 against India at Lord’s in 1990 was the first eye-wateringly big innings we can remember. The idea that one guy could score that many runs on his own in a Test match recalibrated what we thought was possible. There have only really been a handful of oversized
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3 minute readThe notion of being a natural at something is a wonderful and seductive and funny and misleading thing. Let’s say that you wanted to start playing an instrument again. You used to play the flute when you were at school but then subsequently neglected it and you haven’t picked the
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