2 minute read We’re intrigued by the formality of cricket board requests. India have asked England if the whole of the upcoming Test series can be shunted forwards a week or alternatively whether the fifth Test, at Old Trafford, could be cancelled. But they’ve apparently only done this “informally”. So it’s not an
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2 minute read “With all due respect…” people say, or “No offence but…” What follows these phrases is somehow never respectful or inoffensive. England coach and selector Chris Silverwood (we warned you he’d try and become a ‘supremo’) didn’t actually plump for either of those options when speaking about the summer ahead earlier
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2 minute read We tend to think of the ‘bio-bubble’ imposed on touring cricketers as an oppressive, negative thing. But there is an upside – at least from a purely cricket point of view. Thanks to the way the world has been this last year or so, it’s perhaps a little easier for
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2 minute read Whenever a Test is decided late on the fifth day, there’s much talk about how that kind of tension and excitement wouldn’t happen with four-day Tests. It’s half true. This is why. If you move a deadline, you don’t negate it. Even if a Test match has no fifth day,
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9 minute read Can we talk about bowlers’ run-ups? We’ve picked out three great ones. They’re not necessarily our favourites, but we feel like each one says something in particular about how bowlers get to the crease and what we as viewers feel as they’re doing so. But before that, please can we
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< 1 minute read “How can ideas have a positive and elevating effect on a practical sphere?” said Ed Smith when we played a Financial Times video about him from an entirely random starting point just now. It turned out that, when he said that, Smith was talking about an article he’d read by
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< 1 minute read Last month we asked which series we should cover next on our Ridiculous Ashes podcast. The results are in. (The results were in a month ago.) We’re going to be doing the 2013/14 series. We nominated 2009 and 2013 as the other possibilities and for a long time the three
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2 minute read Right-arm, average height, fast-medium: there is not, at the very surface level, a great deal to recommend Bhuvneshwar Kumar as a white ball bowler. He’ll just have to rely on his incredible ability and results if he wants to win people over. In the T20 series, England’s bowlers conceded between
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< 1 minute read A run doesn’t have a set value. That is a recurring theme of this website. The value of a run derives from the game in which it is scored and in all honesty can only accurately be gauged with hindsight. Up until the moment a match is finally decided, all
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9 minute read Graham Gooch’s 333 against India at Lord’s in 1990 was the first eye-wateringly big innings we can remember. The idea that one guy could score that many runs on his own in a Test match recalibrated what we thought was possible. There have only really been a handful of oversized
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