< 1 minute readWhat will the victors in the Stanford 20/20 for 20 match become? They will become “dollar millionaires” or ‘not real millionaires’ to you – because of course we don’t have dollars in this country. It really brings it home that this isn’t really about you, the supporter and it isn’t
Continue readingCategory: England
No win no fee cricket
2 minute readNo win, no fee cricket starts today in the shape of the Stanford Super Series, which culminates in a $20million winner-takes-all match between England and the Stanford Superstars next Saturday. We ordinarily support England, so we suppose that we’re supposed to follow them here as well. But why? They won’t
Continue readingMonty Panesar to live in Sri Lanka for a bit
< 1 minute readEngland have been taking a more individual approach to player development in recent times and we’re all in favour. Monty Panesar’s going to spend some time playing for the Bloomfield club in Colombo. He’ll get more experience of bowling in subcontinental conditions, but more importantly he’ll be dumped there on
Continue readingChallenging umpires’ decisions
< 1 minute readThe four Test series between the West Indies and England will feature the umpire challenging system, whereby batsmen can remove one of their gloves, slap the umpire across the face with it and call for lbw shouts to be decided by a duel. Either that or you get a few
Continue readingDarren Gough retires
2 minute readThere’ll be a bit of Twenty20 next year, but basically this is it. This is as close to a definitive goodbye as he’ll give us. The very reason why Darren Gough didn’t go out in a blaze of glory is the very reason why he deserved to do so. He
Continue readingBotham flouts health and safety regulations
< 1 minute readIs that suitable footwear? No. Should he be removing his hard hat? No. Also, it’s generally accepted that a high-visibility tabard be worn over the top of ordinary clothing so that you can easily be seen. Botham is wearing high-visibility clothing, but has concealed its garish, eye-catching qualities beneath a
Continue readingEngland’s Stanford Twenty20 squad
< 1 minute readWe’ve been waiting for the announcement of England’s Stanford squad with the strange notion that we’d have something to say about it. Other than bemoaning the absence of Ian Austin, Chris Tavaré and Alan Igglesden, we’ve nothing. The squad’s who you think it is and the same players make up
Continue readingThat’s a win
< 1 minute read6-1 off three overs? That’s a win. We need to be more decisive about things like this. We can’t just say that there was ‘no result’ because there wasn’t much cricket. That’s just laziness. There was plenty of cricket. Three overs is plenty and what we saw was clearly an
Continue readingGraeme Hick retires
2 minute readWe learnt a lot through Graeme Hick. We learnt that nothing’s preordained. We learnt that heroes can let you down. We learnt that huge talent isn’t the sole ingredient for Test success and we learnt that if you mess about dropping and reselecting players it doesn’t help them one bit.
Continue readingPeter Moores talks balls
< 1 minute readWe mean that how you think we mean it. He’s not been going on about Kookaburras or whatever. Talking about Andrew Flintoff Peter Moores said: “When it gets tight he takes a deep breath and delivers his skills.” Maybe that doesn’t bother you, but all sorts of alarm bells started
Continue reading