< 1 minute readIf you’re Paul Collingwood, you have to do a little bit more than other batsmen. He’s hit three hundreds in his last nine Test innings, each in a different country and each against a different attack. People will accept that he can stay in the side for another couple of
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England batsmen rack up team scores each
< 1 minute readAlastair Cook, 52. What a Herculean effort. Ordinarily, you’d need 11 men to get anywhere near a score like that. Owais Shah, 57. It’s a number beyond counting. We don’t know how many noughts 57 has, but it must be nearly a million. It’s the biggest number we’ve ever heard
Continue readingThe cost of an abandoned Test
< 1 minute readReal, world-class incompetence in the organisation of an international cricket match is pretty funny to a degree. It makes you feel better about those occasions when you can’t quite manage to write a list AND take it to the supermarket with you. However, it being a bit funny is a
Continue readingPeter Moores: Lancashire coach
< 1 minute readWe support Lancashire. You might be wondering how we feel about this. If there’s such a thing as a positive ‘meh’ – then that. He did win the County Championship with Sussex after all. He does have a good track record. Peter Moores’ has Maxonian origins, so this is a
Continue readingWhich England batsman should get dropped
< 1 minute readAlastair Cook Why Because he looks like the kind of person who eats sandwiches with a knife and fork. Why not Because Rob Key’s on the wrong continent. Ian Bell Why Because if international cricket were a cartoon where everyone were an animal, Ian Bell would be the excitable squirrel
Continue readingAndrew Flintoff’s advice for his team mates
< 1 minute read“The spirit’s been good but maybe we need to draw on each other a little bit more.” We used to draw on Chris during maths. At first we pretended to draw on the back of his neck. When he caught on that we were only pretending, we actually drew on
Continue readingEngland 51 all out
< 1 minute readIt was put to Alastair Cook that after Adelaide in 2006 and 81 all out in Galle in 2007, England’s batting was having the odd disaster. “If it happens again, then things have to change. But those are three isolated incidents over three years, so it is not as though
Continue readingKevin Pietersen out in the nineties
2 minute readIn the first Test, Kevin Pietersen was again dismissed in the nineties going for a big shot to reach his hundred. He did the same against South Africa over the summer. There are a number of people (Nasser Hussain’s one) who are angry at Pietersen for this. They say he
Continue readingJerome Taylor bowls fast, full and straight
< 1 minute readJerome Taylor routed a batting side. You have to like someone who does that, even if they do it against your team. Given a choice between England ‘bowling with discipline’ again or Jerome Taylor taking 5-11 again, we’ll go with Taylor’s display thank you very much. Taylor’s not ludicrously fast,
Continue readingTake the positives out of that
< 1 minute read“Possibly we didn’t play Jerome Taylor in the right sort of way.” Andrew Strauss The bat-on-ball to ball-on-stump ratio would tend to indicate a flaw in your collective approach, yes. England love to take the positives and they did that here. Unfortunately, they took all the positives from their second
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