2 minute readIndia got past Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood bowling with the new ball and lo, they won the Test match. That’s reductive – but then so’s concluding a team can’t bat when it gets bowled out for 36. Ajinkya Rahane made the most obviously telling contribution, run out for 112
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3 minute readIf you’ve ever seen The Perfect Storm, you’ll know that quite a lot of things go wrong in it. The Perfect Storm is a film about fishing, starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and quite a few other people you know. At one point Wahlberg is bitten by a shark. A
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2 minute readSometimes there’s a man. We won’t say a hero, because what’s a hero? But sometimes there’s a man – and we’re talking about Shaun Marsh here. Sometimes there’s a man… well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that’s Shaun Marsh. If there’s
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< 1 minute readSteve Smith’s pad-tapping, box-adjusting pre-delivery fidget routine is really quite something. And now, finally, we know why he does it. “I think it’s left pad, right pad, box, one tap in the middle, two behind my foot, look up, two behind my foot, look up, one… good to go.” That’s
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3 minute readThe videogamification of short format cricket continues with the announcement of a series of BOOSTS and POWER SURGES in the Big Bash League. (Why don’t they ever use genuinely entertaining videogame mods, like Sensible Soccer’s reduced gravity or Goldeneye’s giant heads mode?) The new rules are predictably puzzling and –
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3 minute readThe day after Ben Stokes and Jack Leach at Headingley in 2019, Australia coach Justin Langer forced his players to watch the footage. Thanks to Amazon’s documentary, The Test, we can see how that went down. It did not go down very well. Who was least happy about it? Cricket
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2 minute readThe exact location of ‘The Line‘ is extremely easy to identify if you’re an Australian cricketer. Everybody else needs a bit of a steer. Fortunately, we are here to help you out. Welcome to Linewatch. As we all know, the Australian cricket team is responsible for dictating the location of
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< 1 minute readThe First Crowd-Free T20 International between England and Australia saw the home team engineer a position where they would have to play very well and Australia very badly to secure their desired result. England did their bit and so too did Australia, in large part thanks to David Warner’s nondescript
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4 minute readDo you know the only way you can successfully ‘dig in’ as a batsman? Completely and utterly mindlessly. Any other approach is far too much mental hard work and means you’ll make a bad decision sooner rather than later. We wrote a long thing for the Nightwatchman, Wisden’s quarterly publication,
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3 minute readWe’re pitting an England XI comprising the players we invested in the most against an Antagonists XI using International Cricket Captain’s ‘All Time Greats’ mode. England made 202 runs and lost four wickets on day three. It was very boring and far and away their most successful day. Australia still
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