2 minute readWhenever a Test is decided late on the fifth day, there’s much talk about how that kind of tension and excitement wouldn’t happen with four-day Tests. It’s half true. This is why. If you move a deadline, you don’t negate it. Even if a Test match has no fifth day,
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9 minute readCan we talk about bowlers’ run-ups? We’ve picked out three great ones. They’re not necessarily our favourites, but we feel like each one says something in particular about how bowlers get to the crease and what we as viewers feel as they’re doing so. But before that, please can we
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< 1 minute read“How can ideas have a positive and elevating effect on a practical sphere?” said Ed Smith when we played a Financial Times video about him from an entirely random starting point just now. It turned out that, when he said that, Smith was talking about an article he’d read by
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< 1 minute readLast month we asked which series we should cover next on our Ridiculous Ashes podcast. The results are in. (The results were in a month ago.) We’re going to be doing the 2013/14 series. We nominated 2009 and 2013 as the other possibilities and for a long time the three
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2 minute readRight-arm, average height, fast-medium: there is not, at the very surface level, a great deal to recommend Bhuvneshwar Kumar as a white ball bowler. He’ll just have to rely on his incredible ability and results if he wants to win people over. In the T20 series, England’s bowlers conceded between
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< 1 minute readA run doesn’t have a set value. That is a recurring theme of this website. The value of a run derives from the game in which it is scored and in all honesty can only accurately be gauged with hindsight. Up until the moment a match is finally decided, all
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9 minute readGraham Gooch’s 333 against India at Lord’s in 1990 was the first eye-wateringly big innings we can remember. The idea that one guy could score that many runs on his own in a Test match recalibrated what we thought was possible. There have only really been a handful of oversized
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2 minute readEngland just played a handful of T20s in India ahead of the World T20 in India later this year. How did it go? Did anyone learn anything? The headline stat is that India won 3-2. The standfirst stat is that they managed that while testing out more players than England.
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3 minute readWhen it comes to T20 batting, the ICC’s rankings reward selfishness – but teams often benefit more from selflessness. The Dawid Malan debate is an interesting one. There’s a pretty strong case for saying T20 batting rankings aren’t worth the webspace that stores the algorithms that generate them. Because what
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5 minute readEngland are finally putting out their first team. And people aren’t happy. Speaking ahead of the T20 series against India, Eoin Morgan came as close as anyone has so far to articulating the principles underpinning England’s 2021 squad rotation policy. (We’re not going to call it a ‘controversial’ squad rotation
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