< 1 minute readPaul Collingwood, a man of incomparable aceness right now – in fact a man so ace he’s forcing full-grown men to write like 11-year-olds – hit England’s fastest ever fifty at some point in the recent past. Hitting England’s fastest ever fifty is a bit like being Australia’s most debonair
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Paul Collingwood – all-rounder (in one-day cricket)
2 minute readAn excellent all-round performance from Paul Collingwood: 3-43 with the ball and 70 not out off 50 balls. If it were Andrew Flintoff with those figures, everyone’d be giggling, dribbling and getting all rambunctious. They’d be saying ‘bring on the Aussies’ like morons due to the lack of blood supply
Continue readingMatthew Hoggard and Younis Khan play “spot the statistics nerd”
< 1 minute read‘Spot the statistics nerd’ isn’t a game you should play in a cricket ground when it’s anything other than completely empty. It’s no challenge at all. A game of ‘spot the fancy dress drunk’ was abandoned later that same day.
Continue readingHow to get run out
< 1 minute readWe nearly laid into England after their limp defeat in the first one-day international, but thought: ‘No. Wait. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for the minute.’ What a waste of an update. England have only gone and played just as pathetically in the second one-dayer. Feeble total
Continue readingProfessional cricketers fail to act their age
< 1 minute readA top score of 31 and a third of the team getting run out? A fielding side that dives around after everything like it’s tanked-up on E numbers? It’s under-11s cricket, isn’t it? There was a disappointingly small number of wides and the match wasn’t decided by the one kid
Continue readingMarston’s Pedigree Six
< 1 minute readMarston’s have brought out a new beer because they sponsor England. It’s called Pedigree Six on account of it being 6%. Mmm, boozy. We’re going to drink four ‘Sixes’ in honour of Dimitri Mascarenhas’s four sixes the other day (and with perhaps a nod towards our own alcohol dependence as
Continue readingTwenty20 takes 22 players
< 1 minute readWe really like Twenty20, but it can be difficult to report on. It’s more difficult to identify that one, stand-out performance from a player. Twenty20’s more of a team game than you might think. With only 20 overs, it makes sense that one big innings from a batsman decides the
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Dimitri Mascarenhas is handy down the order
< 1 minute readEngland don’t often find batsman who are pretty good. They have good and great batsmen at the top of the order and they have rubbish and not awful batsmen down the order, but there always seems to be a number eight-shaped hole in the batting card. In one-day cricket at
Continue readingEngland v New Zealand – masterful cricket scheduling
< 1 minute readGreat news for fans of England v New Zealand matches – today’s Twenty20 match was the first of 19 consecutive international fixtures between the two sides. Surely what everyone’s hoping is that one team gets on top early on and shows itself to be vastly superior to the other team.
Continue readingAlastair Cook in one-day cricket
2 minute readAlastair Cook hit a hundred in England’s latest warm-up. The bowlers he had to face might not have been the world’s finest, but he hit 138 not out off 140 balls and every time he does that he’ll be getting a little bit more comfortable with one-day cricket. There are
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