England

Taking stock of England’s tour against Pakistan

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Well, we would take stock, only there’s NO TIME. England announce the squad for their next tour later today.

England’s fixture list frightens us. We once planned to buy a toothbrush one day and toothpaste the following day because we needed to spread out our tasks to fill the week. It’s good to be in control of how you fill your time.

We don’t mind being busy, but we don’t like appointments. When we have an appointment, it feels like our life’s mapped out and we’re just going through the motions. It feels like watching a bad film for the 50th time.

If there’s one thing that convinces us we could never have been an international cricketer, it’s the number of appointments.

DON'T BE LIKE GATT!

Mike Gatting wasn't receiving the King Cricket email when he dropped that ludicrously easy chance against India in 1993.

Coincidence?

Why risk it when it's so easy to sign up?

Similar deliveries:

Shoaib Bashir and Tom Hartley have the bendable fingers England are looking for when they tour India next month Default ThumbnailEngland seam bowling stock-take

15 comments

  1. It feels like your life is mapped out for you, and you don’t like this?

    ?

    That sounds dangerously like being a free-spirited radical to me. The mapping out of life is what stops people from having to think, and as the Daily Mail says, thinking never brought anything but trouble.

    I have just this minute sent a text to some people, telling them that they need to be somewhere at 7pm this evening. That’s 7pm, not five past. Turning up at five past would ruin everything, literally. I set my alarm to remind me to send this text at 10:45 this morning, which I judged to be the optimal time, not too soon that they might forget, not too late that they might not be able to alter any other arrangements that had crept in to their schedules. 10:45 duly arrived, so the text was duly sent.

    You’re talking about some kind of anarchy in which time and space become relative concepts open for discussion and debate! You could tune in to listen to a test match at 10:59, and you might have missed the first ball! Or, worse, you might have to wait a further five minutes before it starts! This isn’t going to work I tell you.

  2. It was the over consisting of five separate overhead wides that convinced me that I’d never make the international cricketing grade, alas.

    1. I bet Steve Harmison overcame that issue – don’t let a few overhead wides stand in front of your dreams Jimmy…

      KC – what else was it other than the appointments that led you to this conclusion?

    4. To be honest Bradders I was batting – bastard was aiming at my head. Put me off playing the game for life.

  3. I actually watched the last T20- I don’t ususally bother. It was actually rather exciting. That is the advantage of only watching T20 occassionally, you forget that they are all actually almost exactly the same and revel in the inevitably close finish.
    My champagne moment was after the final delivery, Samit Patel running after Jade to slap him on the back but being to fat and slow to catch him and missing completely. I enjoyed that.
    They aren’t really going to play Patel in the tests are they? I can just about resign myself to bits-and-pieces players in T20 and ODIs,and Samit has done pretty well. But tests? Even in the grim old days Ian Austin Didn’t play tests. Mind you Mark Ealham did.

    1. He’s a proper batsman is Samit. Plenty of runs in the first division. We’d be interested to see how he approaches a Test innings.

      Don’t think he’s one of the best seven batsmen in England, but ‘bits and pieces’ is unfair.

    3. I was almost ready to concede your point after your first response…. Then you posted the second.
      Not one of the best seven batsmen in the country or one of the seven best bowlers (and both of those sevens can be stretched a fair bit). Isn’t not justifying your place in either discipline the definition of a bits and pieces player?

    4. We wrote quite a lengthy response to this. It was so long, we decided to make a post out of it, which will appear tomorrow.

      Thanks for the inspiration. (Try and forget we used the word ‘inspiration’ when you read said post.)

    5. Do we really think Samit Patel will be chasing down that boundary at 5 o’clock on day 4 after a day-and-a-half in the field? Or still steely-eyed and concentrating hard after three hours of batting in the scorching Manchester sun? I know I don’t.

      Like a shirt from Jacomo with pie stains down the front, T20 suits him.

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