< 1 minute readThere’s a great interview with Lancashire’s new signing Stephen Moore on the ECB site. If you didn’t know anything about him, you’d come away thinking he was being unfairly kept out of the England side. It’s littered with comments about how he’s ‘ready’. One of our favourite bits is the
Continue readingCategory: England
What is Matthew Hoggard?
< 1 minute readMatthew Hoggard has been released by Yorkshire. He was offered a contract at the start of the season and it sounds to us like he weighed it up for a bit too long. Hoggard’s understandably pissed off about this, because after 15 years at Yorkshire, he hasn’t had a chance
Continue readingKevin Pietersen ready to abandon England so he can get more money elsewhere
< 1 minute readThat’s an exaggerated version of the kind of headline that’s been cropping up after Kevin Pietersen’s interview with the Observer. It’s a shame that’s the angle that’s taken, because actually Pietersen’s got a lot of sense in him and it gets washed away by all the indignant, semi-xenophobic spitting that
Continue readingEoin Morgan – keep him at five or six
< 1 minute readEoin Morgan can play mental reverse sweeps and ping shots into someone’s picnic off the weighty part of his bat, but we’re most impressed by the fact that he seems largely unarsed about playing international cricket. He plays straight, he wanders down the pitch, maybe he edges the ball, but
Continue readingHow Joe Denly got to play for England
2 minute readThis isn’t specifically about Joe Denly. He’s just the example. It’s about being a young English cricketer and what you have to do to play for the national side. It’s also about Australia’s wicketkeeper, Tim Paine. Paine and Denly are just starting their careers and have been opening the batting
Continue readingWhy are England so bad at one-day cricket?
2 minute readYou can come up with immediate reasons, like how badly they’ve been batting of late, but take a step back. Why are England so consistently bad at one-day cricket? We’ve been thinking about this a bit and our theory revolves around player rotation. One-day internationals, more than Test cricket, revolve
Continue readingEngland’s one-day all-rounders
< 1 minute readAre they going to win a game with the bat? Are they going to win a game with the ball? Luke Wright Dimitri Mascarenhas Tim Bresnan Adil Rashid There’s room for players who chip in, rather than deciding matches on their own, but there seem to be altogether too many
Continue readingGraeme Swann interviews
< 1 minute readYou want Graeme Swann to be man of the match every time he plays, because he’s head and shoulders above everyone else in world cricket when it comes to the post-match interview. Today’s offering after a consolation win that followed six consecutive defeats: “Everyone talks about this big word ‘momentum’.
Continue readingHow bad is England’s one-day batting?
< 1 minute readFour fifties between them in six one-day internationals. That’s bad. Remember when you were at school and someone had egg sandwiches. ‘Ughh. Who’s got egg?’ someone would ask. Think of the faces everyone made when they realised someone had egg. There were probably even a few children crying, because having
Continue readingWhy Andrew Flintoff turned down a contract that would have prevented him from making almost painful amounts of cash
< 1 minute readIt was because of the bungee clause. Flintoff’s agent, Andrew Chandler, explains why his client has turned down an incremental England contract which might have stopped him playing in the occasional lucrative Twenty20 tournament: “There were one or two things in it that made it difficult to sign like he
Continue reading