2 minute read England just played a handful of T20s in India ahead of the World T20 in India later this year. How did it go? Did anyone learn anything? The headline stat is that India won 3-2. The standfirst stat is that they managed that while testing out more players than England.
Continue reading
3 minute read When it comes to T20 batting, the ICC’s rankings reward selfishness – but teams often benefit more from selflessness. The Dawid Malan debate is an interesting one. There’s a pretty strong case for saying T20 batting rankings aren’t worth the webspace that stores the algorithms that generate them. Because what
Continue reading
5 minute read England are finally putting out their first team. And people aren’t happy. Speaking ahead of the T20 series against India, Eoin Morgan came as close as anyone has so far to articulating the principles underpinning England’s 2021 squad rotation policy. (We’re not going to call it a ‘controversial’ squad rotation
Continue reading
4 minute read We used to work with a girl who had access to a secret weather report. “It’s going to be 40 degrees on Thursday,” she would say. And she would state this as a fact. How often is it 40 degrees in the United Kingdom? The answer is never. Armed with
Continue reading
8 minute read Turns out people don’t like squad rotation. Not when you call it that anyway. Test Match Special can be a good place to gauge which way the wind’s blowing – and not just because it’s regularly interrupted by the shipping forecast. Earlier this week, Jonathan Agnew wrote a column in
Continue reading
< 1 minute read As we’re sure you’re aware, the Ridiculous Ashes – the parallel England v Australia competition we first ran over at Cricket 365 for the 2019 series – is now a podcast. Series 1 was about the 1997 Ashes and we thought you’d like a say on which series we cover
Continue reading
2 minute read Here’s a thing we noticed about Rishabh Pant. He’s terrible in adverts. Now here’s another thing we noticed about Rishabh Pant. In 2018, Pant made 114 in the fifth and final Test at the Oval. In 2019, he made 159 not out in the fourth and final Test at the
Continue reading
2 minute read Dom Bess didn’t play the last two games. Joe Root said that he had used the time to work on a few things. We saw some evidence of that today. We’re not quite sure what it is, but we seem to be writing about Dom Bess a lot this winter.
Continue reading
3 minute read The England men’s team are about to play the fourth Test against India, with Dom Bess apparently set to get another game. Meanwhile the England women’s team have started beating New Zealand in a new format, while Afghanistan and Zimbabwe are trying to get in on the current trend for
Continue reading
3 minute read Shane Warne said he always used to try and really rip a leg break when he first came on to bowl. This wasn’t to try and dismiss the batsman – although sometimes it did – it was really just to sow a seed of doubt. Warne wanted to maximise the
Continue reading