2 minute readTurns out Ian Bell’s not retiring. You may have heard that he maybe possibly was. You may not. Either way, he isn’t. The umming and ahhing does hint that his career is nearly at an end though. Soon enough, the bell will toll and watching Bell will no longer take
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What we basically had were two inexperienced teams who can’t bat
2 minute readWhere does 2015 rank in the pantheon of Ashes series? Somewhere in the middle, we’d guess. It was certainly dramatic, but it probably wasn’t even the best Test series this summer. It was unpredictable from one match to the next, but the same quality wasn’t particularly apparent within any individual
Continue readingMomentum’s back!
< 1 minute readAs in ‘returned’. It hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything, on account of the fact that it’s an abstract concept and therefore doesn’t have a spine or a rear side or whatever. Mocking momentum’s the in thing to do at the minute. Typical that it would come into fashion six
Continue readingAdam Lyth learns that Ashes scores count half
< 1 minute readIt’s quite an impressive feat to field no fewer than eight batsmen and yet still be prone to comically low scores. You could argue that England have too many eggs in the ‘positive brand of cricket’ basket, but if there were a Venn diagram of baskets, that one would overlap
Continue readingEngland snatch the baton of mass suicide and bludgeon themselves to death with it
2 minute readAt some point surprisingly soon, England and Australia will complete the most one-sided close series in history. Not that it’s been one-sided in favour of one particular side. It’s been one-sided in favour of both of them, just at different times. It’s hard to know what to make of a
Continue readingWhen is a day a fifth of a Test match?
< 1 minute readWe’re all for the ebb and flow of Test cricket with all its nuance and scope for recovery, but all in all we’d much rather see Australia being bowled out for 60 in the span of time normally reserved for a football match. There’s a cycling commentator who routinely uses
Continue readingDuke balls, five-day pitches and the final Test of the summer
2 minute readMike Selvey has written a nice piece about balls. The word ‘caresser’ is used at one point. He is, of course, writing about Dukes balls, the cricket ball used in England which swings for way longer than the crappy, inferior Kookaburra ball. It has a bigger seam too. It’s a
Continue readingWhy has no-one made fun of Darren Lehmann for that ‘hiccup’ comment?
< 1 minute readThe thing about hiccups is that they almost always come as a plural. You might cough once, you can get away with a single sneeze, but hiccups arrive en masse. As such, Darren Lehmann’s description of the Cardiff Test as ‘a minor hiccup’ seems entirely fitting. Far from being symptomatic
Continue readingBen Stokes can swing a cricket ball and also a bat, but we don’t need to be told that he isn’t Botham or Flintoff
2 minute read“We don’t want to say he’s going to be the next Botham, or the next Flintoff,” said Trevor Bayliss. England’s coach then veered away from an already painfully familiar statement somewhat by adding: “He’ll be the next Ben Stokes” – as if we’ve had one already. Every time anyone says
Continue readingDid England just win the 2015 Ashes?
< 1 minute readThey completely did. They fully did. What do you make of that? And as a bonus talking point, Michael Clarke seems likely to retire at the end of the series. We presume he’s only waiting that long lest Steven Smith feel the pressure to follow suit immediately after leading the
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