2 minute read Our loosely-held editorial guideline of “no-one cares what you think” isn’t necessarily one that drives productivity at what is, fundamentally, an opinion website. It means there’s a whole bunch of recent news stories we haven’t covered because no-one cares what we think. The County Championship Let’s start with the latest
Continue readingCategory: England
England batters: mystery of the odds
2 minute read We have in recent years aimed for coherence, clarity and accessibility in our opening paragraphs. It’s tough to take that approach today though because we’ve accidentally written a headline that reads like the title of an obscure B-movie or computer game. It’s the tagline bit that does it. It’s got
Continue readingBen Stokes to vie with Eoin Morgan for use of Ben Stokes
3 minute read We very much hate announcements of announcements. You know – when they announce that an announcement is going to be made and also exactly what that announcement will be. Hopefully by the time you read this Ben Stokes will have officially been announced as England Test captain and we can
Continue readingFive Test wicketkeepers who quite often didn’t actually do any wicketkeeping
6 minute read If you want to be highly regarded as a wicketkeeper-batter, one of the smartest things you can do is not actually keep wicket in a whole load of Test matches. At what point do you become a wicketkeeper? How frequently do you have to don pads and gloves and chunter
Continue readingThis is surely the very worst place to get an assessment of Rob Key’s suitability for his new England job – but here’s one anyway
5 minute read When we think about some of the decidedly non-newsworthy Rob Key related things we have reported on down the years, it is pretty clear to us that we will have to say something about him becoming the managing director of England men’s cricket too. To give a handful of largely-picked-at-random
Continue readingJoe Root steps down to give England an exciting new problem
5 minute read The England Test team is going to remain awash with problems for quite some time to come. The best you can hope for as a fan is that they at least keep those problems fresh and interesting. The Joe Root captaincy problem was getting a bit stale, so at least
Continue readingSeparate teams? What might a world of cricket format specialists actually look like?
9 minute read Way, way back in 2006, in our first year of writing this website, we described the international fixture list as being fatter than a TV-loving, chip-munching hippo with an abnormally slow metabolism. We probably should have left ourself with more room for manoeuvre because where does that leave us now?
Continue readingLesson from the World Cup final: the team that wins absolutely every single game is a good team
2 minute read Well that wasn’t precisely how we expected England to lose the World Cup final to Australia. Nat Sciver played one of the finest World Cup final innings you’re ever likely to see in England’s forlorn chase of 357, making 148 not out off 121 balls. The only issue was that
Continue readingWho will lose to Australia in the World Cup final?
2 minute read When we put together our Essentials Calendar last month, we figured we’d turn our attention to the World Cup at this point. We thought our gaze would shift from the West Indies v England Test series at the perfect time and we’d catch a big, exciting finish to the tournament.
Continue readingPretty soon someone is going to prise the brush out of Joe Root’s automaton fingers
3 minute read If you needed to sum up England’s latest series defeat in a single quote, you could do a lot worse than Joe Root’s pre-tour comment: “I don’t want this to sound like a development tour at all but…” A friend of ours tells a story about when he did a
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