4 minute readNo prizes for predicting that England and Pakistan would be two of the ‘big’ nations struggling to qualify for the next phase of this T20 World Cup. New Zealand aren’t usually on the receiving end of drubbings though, even if Afghanistan victories in these tournaments don’t exactly qualify as upsets
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2 minute readIt was an excellent and valuable bit of fine-tuning for both sides. England and Pakistan will enter the T20 World Cup with very clear ideas how to pass the time if any of their games are rained off. 1st T20 Abandoned without a ball bowled. Poker may or may not
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6 minute readTo misquote Ferris Bueller for the Nth time: T20 moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you risk being a cricket website that thinks Joe Root’s still in the England squad. Actually, that mangled quote isn’t even true. T20 doesn’t in fact move
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3 minute readSometimes you can’t choose between awful body part puns for your headline. What can you do in that situation other than mash them together so that neither quite works? Jack Leach’s back As in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything. It was in fact a stress fracture that
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5 minute readThis too shall pass. Barring injury, James Anderson will play his final Test at Lord’s in July. “It feels like a good time,” he said – which isn’t at all how it felt when we first heard the news. Our immediate reaction was to think, “No, carry on. Just play
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2 minute readJos Buttler, Jonny Bairstow, Phil Salt: what does that say to you about hard-hitting, top order wicketkeeper-batters? There’s too many of them? That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is people like them – let’s have some more of them. It’s widely acknowledged that
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7 minute readAs a bowler, Jack Leach is not at all silly. He is diligent, consistent and reliable, none of which are silly qualities. And because he is first and foremost a bowler, this encourages the notion that Leach is somehow not a silly cricketer, which is entirely incorrect. Give Jack Leach
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2 minute readSimple question. When you think of the most ridiculous Ashes moments, what comes to mind? If you’ve ever dipped into the podcast we do with Dan Liebke, you’ll know that our definition of ‘ridiculous’ is pretty broad. Ridiculously good, ridiculously bad, ridiculously weird – they all count. So what comes
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5 minute readJames Anderson and Stuart Broad made their debuts in their early 20s and then just carried on playing until they were middle-aged. This means the players we might ordinarily think of as constituting ‘the next generation’ are mostly now on the cusp of retirement themselves. England have however given Test
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5 minute readJoe Root has been so reliably and frequently excellent that at times it hasn’t even felt that interesting. Today is a celebration of Root’s overlooked brilliance. “Just remember what ol’ Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven
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