2 minute read Sponsorship is a wonderful thing. It keeps fun stuff profitable and it allows sports players to sound institutionalised and cut off from reality. Midway through the British summer, we saw Alastair Cook being interviewed on breakfast TV. Consummate professional that he is, Cook never once said “Test” when he could
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I Don’t Like Cricket, I Hate It – the upcoming Ashes tour edition
3 minute read A semi-regular feature in which we ask a fella going by the name of Prince Prefab about cricket – even though he hates cricket. We are in bold. Prince Prefab is not. It strikes us that a looming Ashes tour is one of the few times when the sport might
Continue readingEngland to win the Ashes via airy off-side drives
2 minute read Is that a dripping tap way off in the distance? No, it’s actually James Vince gently knocking on the door to politely request selection, if that wouldn’t be too much trouble. Quite how the selectors heard him is beyond us. Vince wasn’t thought to be good enough at the start
Continue readingBen Stokes makes a night in the cells happen
2 minute read The facts are these. Splice and dice them as you see fit. The ECB say that 26-year-old Ben Stokes was arrested in the early hours of Monday morning following “an incident” in Bristol Police say a 26-year-old man was arrested that night on suspicion of causing actual bodily harm Another
Continue readingMoeen Ali does some clean hitting
2 minute read Mo mowed it. It was a day of increasing numbness to sixes and Batting Ali had the good sense to get in early when they still seemed important and the match was still in the balance. Others may have hit the ball further, but no-one lashed it quite so reliably
Continue readingStuart Broad’s batting has peaked
2 minute read Stuart Broad’s batting just gets better and better. Maybe not by the traditional metric of batting average, but there are far more sensible ways of assessing a cricketer’s worth. Once upon a time, Broad was a good batsman: high left elbow, great timing and solid defence. Then he top-edged a
Continue reading“You don’t see Alastair Cook drop too many”
2 minute read So said Michael Vaughan after Cook had shelled an easy one early on. Where has he been looking? We’ve always felt like he drops a fair few – although maybe not by Vaughan’s own almost criminally low catching standards. We wouldn’t go so far as to say that Cook’s a
Continue readingWith the Ashes decided, England and Australia will look to determine which has the better ODI second XI
< 1 minute read England and Australia fans who enjoy answering the question “so why isn’t this the Ashes then?” will be delighted to hear that the two sides are going to do that thing where they follow the Test series with five don’t-give-a-toss one-day matches six months later in the other country. The
Continue readingWhen should a captain declare?
2 minute read The timing of a declaration will often elicit heated discussion among commentators. However, it seems safe to assume that the actual importance of the decision rarely justifies the level of debate, which is almost certainly artificially exaggerated by the fact that such questions generally only arise when not much is
Continue readingThe West Indies make use of some quality imports
< 1 minute read The great thing about alternative dimensions is that every now and again you can pluck a similar-looking cricket team from one of them and deploy it in your own world. The incarnation of the West Indies seen in this Test was an unusually gritty one. Like a team-mate’s belt within
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