2 minute read“Oh that’s a nothing shot,” they say – but only when you get out to it. We were thinking about this particular shot of Joe Root’s after watching the BBC highlights the other day. The BBC highlights are an hour long and with no ads, it’s what you might call
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< 1 minute readWe’re not saying either England or India goes out there looking for a fight. We are however saying that quite a few of the players have a keen eye for provocation and could probably uncover a bit of it even if they were sentenced to solitary confinement. “It just showed
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2 minute readSam Curran is a weird one. You’d be unlikely to pick him purely as a batsman. You’d be unlikely to pick him purely as a bowler. You wouldn’t pick him if he were a right-armer. You wouldn’t pick him if he were a few years older. But there he is
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2 minute readThere is a very good chance this article about England’s day five capitulation is not biologically sound. We’re pretty sure it’s cricketally accurate however. The second Test was won and lost at some point during a morning of pointlessly bouncing Jasprit Bumrah. It’s a hard moment to pin down precisely,
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2 minute readMuch is said about Cheteshwar Pujara – we’ve written a lot ourself – but we’re not sure anyone’s ever talked about his ability to persuade you that it rained when it didn’t. The way it went down was like this. Late afternoon we got a message from King Cricket reader
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< 1 minute readLast week we suggested that the adaptability of Jonny Bairstow and Moeen Ali was a key reason why they had become yo-yos for England. There are two sides to this. Firstly, the fact that the two men can each perform so many ‘roles’ means that Test openings materialise more frequently
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3 minute readIf there’s one thing we know about yo-yos, it’s that if you send one out, it tends to come back. If we know another thing about yo-yos, it’s that sometimes they get all tangled when they’re fully extended and don’t actually come back and then you have to spend ages
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3 minute readStarts are important. Starts set everyone’s mood and so shape everything that’s to come. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Abattoir Blues album starts with two bars that sound like the climax of an encore. Nick then forcefully instructs us to, ‘get ready for love,’ and by 12 seconds, there’s
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3 minute readJames Anderson took two wickets in his 11th over of the first Test: Cheteshwar Pujara for 4 and Virat Kohli for 0. Both are great and significant batsmen and if our maths is correct – and no guarantees on this one, people – there is only a four-run difference between
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3 minute readWell India are great and England seem massively out of their depth. So what are we left with? Let’s compare ducks. Four ducks in an innings. That’s a thing now, apparently. Cricinfo’s George Dobell says it’s the third time it’s happened to England in their last five Tests. That’s… a
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