< 1 minute readAustralia might have had a better chance in the first Twenty20 international if 10 of them hadn’t been shit. The 11th player, Shane Watson, has suddenly found a world where hitting fifties and bowling straight medium-pace is quite handy. If he’d have found a competent team mate, Australia would have
Continue readingCategory: England
England’s Test selectors got everything right
2 minute readIt’s not cool to say that. But we’re not cool. We once did a live Twitter review of a cricket computer game while drinking real ale. On the face of it, picking a Test side is simply a matter of finding your 11 best players and then saying their names
Continue readingA quick pause from the gloating
< 1 minute readThe site won’t be much fun for Aussies for almost the whole of next week, but we thought we’d break up the gloating with a couple of other pieces. Remember when we got a bit carried away when Andrew Flintoff retired and wrote not one, but two retirement pieces about
Continue readingWhen the England cricket team became ruthless
< 1 minute readWe’ve always asked that England become more ruthless. Now it seems to be happening and by the jackal head of Anubis it’s a good feeling. England have been good before, but in continually passing 500 and repeatedly recording innings victories over the course of the 2010-11 Ashes, they’ve added something
Continue readingYou’ll miss Paul Collingwood more than you think
< 1 minute readWe’ll do a proper Paul Collingwood retirement post in a few days. For now, the cricket comes first. Which is as it should be. Anyone feeling sad that he’s fallen into retirement after diminishing returns with the bat would do well to remember the kind of man he is. He
Continue readingIan Bell, James Anderson and doing a bit better when things aren’t in your favour
2 minute readIt’s always tempting to judge players on their best days, but with anything long-term – a cricket career, a relationship, an overnight stint watching the Ashes on TV – a better form of evaluation is to look at what happens when things aren’t in your favour. You learn a lot
Continue readingCake having and eating
< 1 minute readMost of us find that part of the joy of cricket is that there’s always something to talk about. When a match is in the balance, you can pick it apart for hours trying to work out which team’s more likely to win. In the past, we’ve also found it
Continue readingEngland cricketers’ Ashes sprinkler celebration
< 1 minute readThis is another good way of celebrating the retention of the Ashes. If you don’t know about ‘the sprinkler’, it’s become the England cricketers’ official dance of the tour. It’s a stupid dance and they’re all awful at it, but you can’t help but warm to them even more when
Continue readingTim Bresnan is two players in one
< 1 minute readMore specifically, Tim Bresnan, England’s fifth-choice seamer, is Ben Hilfenhaus and Peter Siddle rolled into one. Bresnan has the fitness, pace and accuracy of Siddle. He also bowls away swing with the new ball and reverse swing later on like Ben Hilfenhaus. Oh, and he can bat. Bresnan’s reputation as
Continue readingJonathan Trott – unarsed England number three
< 1 minute readGenerally being unarsed about stuff is a fantastic quality for a Test batsman to have. Jonathan Trott’s got it in spades. You can have all the shots and the best hand-eye co-ordination, but if you wobble when things don’t go perfectly, you’ll never make it as a Test batsman, because
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