2 minute read After four-and-a-half years and 59 Test matches, Alastair Cook has finally thought to himself: “Wait a minute, this is a rubbish a job and I don’t actually have to do it.” It sometimes seems like every England captain’s career is simply a long, slow deduction that the honour and prestige
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MS Dhoni is officially capable of scoring a fifty in a T20 international
< 1 minute read Ah, bless. He’d made a few in club cricket, but this was MS Dhoni’s first fifty in T20 internationals. Hopefully this is a first step towards a successful career on the big stage. Speaking after the game, Dhoni may or may not have said: “This was my first fifty in
Continue readingEngland will pray for nip or tail at the Champions Trophy
2 minute read The early stages of England’s one-day cricket revolution saw the team transform from one that scored about 250 on average to one that score about 250 on average. The difference was in the range. They went from making 240-260 and losing every game to making 100-400 and winning half the
Continue readingWhy waste your best bowler in the final over?
< 1 minute read The idea that England might try and bounce out Virat Kohli proved as wide of the mark as a Devon Malcolm loosener. They decided to pepper him with half-volleys instead. And it worked. They adopted a similar method against Yuvraj Singh and MS Dhoni, occasionally mixing things up with a
Continue readingHas Alastair Cook stood down as England captain yet?
< 1 minute read Only we’ll have to get something up about it pretty darn sharpish if he does. Our readers will doubtless have much to say about such a development. Maybe we could publish some sort of ‘holding post’ instead, floating the possibility that Cook might stand down without actually stating that this
Continue readingThe two ways of looking at Alastair Cook’s captaincy
2 minute read There are two ways of looking upon the England captaincy. You can see it as an important position where the incumbent can have a major positive influence on how the side performs, or you can see it as one more thing that could go horribly wrong. Rated according to the
Continue readingVirat Kohli had power tools while Alastair Cook only had rusty manual hand-me-downs
2 minute read England haven’t stagnated. They’re just worse at bowling and facing spin than India. And playing Test cricket in India involves bowling and facing an awful lot of spin. So rather than howling about normality, now might instead be the perfect time to revisit the monumental achievement that was England’s 2012
Continue readingZombies, ghosts and theodolites
1 minute read A pitch’s flatness extends beyond its physical characteristics. No matter what its actual nature, the fielding side is going to struggle to accept that there’s anything there to be exploited when it’s 600-5 and this mentality only smooths the surface further. By 700-6, a captain will be yearning for a
Continue readingSpin bowling is all in the pelvis
< 1 minute read Apparently. A forthcoming study on the biomechanics of elite finger spin bowling has found “very strong positive relationships between the orientation of the bowler’s pelvis and the rate at which the ball spins during flight.” The boffins (for that is what you are obliged to call academics when writing about
Continue readingJoe Root still struggling to get out in single figures
< 1 minute read When Joe Root made 254 against Pakistan earlier this year, there was much talk of how he’d cracked it; how he’d responded to the move to number three by adopting a newfound merciless approach. The responsibility of batting at three had firmed Root’s desire to eradicate errors and from now
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