< 1 minute readKeaton Jennings will make his Test debut against India and if there’s one aspect of this news that everyone’s talking about, it’s the fact that the Durham opener has two surnames and no first name. England are not unaware of this and they will no doubt harbour concerns about the
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Trevor Bayliss on batting positivity and batting clarity
2 minute readYou should have hit it harder. Or less hard. Or not at all. Whatever you did with the delivery that resulted in your dismissal, you should have done something else. The latest comments from Trevor Bayliss give a bit of an insight into how the England’s coach sees the game.
Continue readingWhy have the England players gone to Dubai?
2 minute readEngland are taking a break. A mid-tour holiday. There’s been a bit of discussion about the fact that they feel they need one and what that might say about international schedules, but there’s been precious little comment about why the holy hell they saw fit to go to Dubai. We’d
Continue readingDo England play too many all-rounders?
2 minute readThe answer is no. But let’s explore the question anyway. England have just added Liam Dawson to their squad. He joins Moeen Ali, Ben Stokes, Chris Woakes and Adil Rashid in one of the most all-rounderly squads England have ever assembled. He also replaces Zafar Ansari, another spin bowling all-rounder.
Continue readingEngland get a grip, but India keep a grip
< 1 minute readYet again, it’s one of those win the toss, win the match, if you’re India pitches. The sheer predictability of proceedings only being disrupted when the coin ended the other way up. There’s an illusion of inevitability when India bat first, but the play is coerced down a certain path
Continue readingToday’s Ben Stokes-induced happenings
< 1 minute readAt one point in the afternoon session, Ben Stokes accidentally spat on his own shirt. You’d think this would be a low point, but he plucked off the deposit with no obvious display of emotion. Perhaps he knew that things were about to get significantly worse. Shortly after spraying a
Continue readingGood evening, Mr Kohli?
< 1 minute readBefore tea, Che Pujara and Virat Kohli, neither of whom had looked too troubled, started to hit a few more fours. It felt predictable and seemed to foreshadow a long evening session for England. After tea, Pujara – perhaps concerned that he might partially obscure Kohli’s halo – needlessly looped
Continue readingWhere would India be given another half-revolution of the coin?
2 minute readWhen trying to assess the state of play after the first day’s play, it’s often tempting to imagine a parallel world where the toss-winning captain has opted for heads instead of tails, tails instead of heads, or just totally gone off on one and gone for arms or thoraxes or
Continue readingMop-up of the day – guilt, great promise and grey trivialities
2 minute read‘Du Plessis found guilty’ reads the Cricinfo headline. We don’t really feel it necessary to add much to your likely response to reading that. The effect of imposing black and white morality on the sport’s grey trivialities could barely be clearer. Here’s something we wrote last time Du Plessis buggered
Continue readingEngland fans: redouble your pessimism – your country needs you
< 1 minute readWhen they’re not favourites, sides will often talk about proving people wrong. This is all well and good, but it can leave them susceptible to the viewing public’s fickle mood swings. At the start of this India tour, plenty of us thought England could lose every match. In the first
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