4 minute readWe can’t tell you how much of our life we’ve sunk into looking at Test match scorecards, thinking about them a bit and then talking to people about what’s been going on in those games. This colossal time investment in one of our greatest passions has been almost infinitely less
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The 2024 Festivus holding page: The Boxing Day Tests
2 minute readNo idea why artificial intelligence saw fit to make our Festivus cricket image so UK-centric, but who are we – a mere human – to question its wisdom. It’s trawled through and exploited far more intellectual property than we ever will. To very quickly bring you up to speed on
Continue readingEngland win a Test (against South Africa), England lose a Test (to New Zealand) – incredible, mind-blowing stats ensue…
3 minute readIt’s amazing to think that this week brought England’s first Test win since 2014 and even more amazing to think they haven’t beaten South Africa since 2003. The amazement then takes on a slightly different hue when you learn that they’ve also preserved their unbeaten record against the same opposition.
Continue readingR Ashwin: thinker, destroyer, weirdo
5 minute readR Ashwin has exited Test cricket in idiosyncratic style and with a bunch of weird quotes. It’s a fitting departure really for a quirky sort of fella who has done as much as anyone to shape Test cricket over the last decade. Ashwin has taken the Graeme Swann route of
Continue readingAt least Zak Crawley has momentum
3 minute readWe appear to be back to what we call the Gaylian definition of ‘momentum’ where there’s a hard reset every Test match and recent history is more or less bunk. (Unless you’re Zak Crawley, of course, in which case momentum is very real and you’re almost certainly going to get
Continue readingKiwis should hope Tim Southee goes out in a blaze of dross
2 minute readThis is the way careers are supposed to end: messily and unsatisfactorily. No wicket with your final ball and six with your final shot. No nonsense exhibition match seemingly played solely for your benefit. Tim Southee has a chance here to lessen the grief for his team-mates and countryfolk by
Continue readingSkipping, standing, slips and slogs: 5 peculiar highlights from England’s latest action-packed win over New Zealand
3 minute readBack in the mists of time, whenever the digital rights for Test matches were last agreed, someone decided that the free YouTube highlights for a day’s play should be just 10 minutes long. That was when a day’s play was a fifth of a Test match though. Surely now they
Continue readingAre we already watching peak Harry Brook?
6 minute readBrooks aren’t ordinarily associated with peaks – they tend to run beneath them – but Harry Brook might already be at one. We’ll tell you what stops a brook in its tracks though: a dam – or perhaps in this case, the giving of damns. You may or may not
Continue readingRohit Sharma has seen Steve Smith’s stellar recent success and he wants a piece of it
2 minute read“I hear you’re a middle order batter now, Rohit. How did you get interested in that type of thing?” Before this Australia-India series, we reported how failing failure Steve Smith was going to hide down the order following his abject failure as a Test opener. The move has gone really,
Continue readingWho will stand in for Jimmy Anderson if England again lose by one run?
2 minute readJames Anderson had a great many attributes as a Test cricketer – none bigger than his ability to serve as a majestic island of chuntering irritation and sadness when England lost a Test match by a single run. England are in Wellington again. Bloody Wellington. To recap what happened last
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