3 minute readMatthew Hayden will be working as a batting consultant for Pakistan at the T20 World Cup in the UAE next month. Matthew Hayden is a man we used to write about very often. Now, against our better judgement, we’re about to write about him again. Some time in 2006, we
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You can stop short of all-out cynicism and still accept that the threshold for binning the Old Trafford Test was lower than normal
3 minute readHave you ever agreed to go to a thing and secretly not really wanted to go to the thing? Maybe it was a thing you’d ordinarily enjoy – like a meal out with a friend – only you also had a whole bunch of other stuff on that week and
Continue readingVirat Kohli can pick the ‘wrong’ team for Old Trafford and it probably won’t matter
5 minute readTeam selection is a fun thing to talk about before a Test match, but sometimes it really isn’t that important. We tend to view selection decisions through a prism that refracts everything into right or wrong. But cricket doesn’t exactly work like that. In any given Player A versus Player
Continue readingBurns, Hameed, nothing much going on – and only then ‘the good bit’
2 minute readPlaudits to India, but this match featured a really weird and memorable passage of play that was pretty much nothing to do with the tourists’ magnificent performance. On the fourth evening, England’s openers delivered some incredibly generic, low octane Test match batting and we somewhat unexpectedly discovered that this really
Continue readingWe heartily endorse Rory Burns’ run-out appeal body language
2 minute readYou know what they say: ain’t no run-out appeal like the run-out appeal that comes in the immediate aftermath of a drop. With all due respect to Chris Woakes’ bowling and Shardul Thakur’s batting, the highlight of day one of the fourth Test was unquestionably Rory Burns standing astride an
Continue readingHow far will England’s Plan A actually carry them?
2 minute readThe flipside of everything going pretty much exactly to plan is that this is a thing that almost never happens. The best laid schemes are forever ganging agley and so what are you going to do when you’re back in the real world where absolutely everything goes wrong absolutely all
Continue readingDale Steyn was a trier
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
Continue readingThe almighty cumulative power of Joe Root’s nothing shot
2 minute read“Oh that’s a nothing shot,” they say – but only when you get out to it. We were thinking about this particular shot of Joe Root’s after watching the BBC highlights the other day. The BBC highlights are an hour long and with no ads, it’s what you might call
Continue readingWho will provoke whom into provoking them in the third Test
< 1 minute readWe’re not saying either England or India goes out there looking for a fight. We are however saying that quite a few of the players have a keen eye for provocation and could probably uncover a bit of it even if they were sentenced to solitary confinement. “It just showed
Continue readingA report from the first day of the Hundred at the Oval
4 minute readThis is our second match report from the inaugural season of the Hundred. Here’s the first. King Cricket match reports focus on what it was like to be at the game – not the match itself. Miriam writes… The afternoon started off slightly stressfully because my husband had a meeting
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