3 minute readWhen the weather allows New Zealand to get onto the field for the first Test against England, their attack will be without Kyle Jamieson (stress fracture) and Matt Henry (looming child). It will also be without Trent Boult because apparently no one has really decided on a selection policy for
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4 minute readSouth Africa wanted to win this one. England were happy to loosen a few limbs. That’s kind of how it went. In many ways this South Africa v England series was the definitive pointless bilateral: a little island of three one-day internationals dropped right in the middle of another tournament
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3 minute readWho’s up for the contest then? No? Got somewhere else to be, have you? We don’t know if you’ve ever seen the highly violent Indonesian martial arts ballet, The Raid, but there’s a character in that who’s really, really, very much up for a fight. He’s called Mad Dog, so
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2 minute read“Bazball” is an ill-defined woolly-yet-squidgy concept that you can smush around to mean pretty much anything you want. We’ve been here before. Speaking ahead of South Africa’s home one-day series against England, captain Temba Bavuma spoke about his team’s way of going about things and how they might look to
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2 minute readMop-up of the day is a thing we do when we can’t really be bothered writing more than a sentence or two about a bunch of different things. Sometimes we end up writing extra sentences though because it looks weird if the opening sentence, in bold, is immediately followed by
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2 minute readAs in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything. So what does this mean? It’s almost two years since he last played for England. Where does he fit in these days? Yesterday, Jofra Archer made his return for Mumbai Indians Cape Town – almost literally a franchise within a
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6 minute readOur annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners. Up until now we’ve always recognised players for their batting or their bowling or both. This year, something else has swayed
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4 minute readLast week Rehan Ahmed became England’s youngest debutant and soon after the youngest men’s Test debutant to take a five-wicket haul. But just how young is he really? Age is famously just a number (in this case 18), so maybe we can get a clearer perspective on his youth by
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3 minute readWe don’t believe you can draw meaningful conclusions from players’ debuts – but we report on them anyway. We have a track record of getting overexcited about 18-year-old leg-spinning all-rounders. It worked out last time though, so the way we see it, it makes perfect sense to get completely overexcited again.
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3 minute readWhile England’s hell-for-leather batting approach of the first Test was again seen in the second, it was often tempered by either (a) conditions or (b) getting out. What we can conclude from this is that pitches matter. So what can we expect from the National Stadium in Karachi for the
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