2 minute read We don’t normally report on excerpts from cricket autobiographies because, you know, read the book. We have to make an exception for this majestic exchange from Jonathan Trott’s Unguarded though. (We haven’t read it, but he wrote it with George Dobell, so we’re pretty confident it’s excellent.) After Pakistan Cricket
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England selectors spiked with Sunset Yellow
2 minute read For much of the year England’s selectors are Uncle Alan and Auntie Cynthia, who always go to the Marks and Spencer coffee shop. On the average trip to town, they might stop in there two or three times to break up the afternoon. They will walk past any number of
Continue readingEngland are so good they even managed to beat Bangladesh
2 minute read When England lost to Bangladesh at the World Cup, the British media stuck with the word ‘even’ – as in, ‘England are so bad, they even lost to Bangladesh’. That line was a good fit for the narrative of the time, so it would have been counterproductive to investigate, let
Continue readingJos Buttler’s feud with Bangladesh – who started it?
2 minute read Jos Buttler is not an overtly angry man. Few batsmen better expose the fallacy that attacking cricket and on-field aggression are somehow symbiotically linked. As a batsman, Buttler demolishes via controlled explosions. He delivers a series of well-timed detonations and more often than not, the opposition implodes. Yet as a
Continue readingWhy Edgbaston day-night Test will be a success (and another attendance-related experiment the ECB should run)
2 minute read Novelty. That’s enough for the first match, isn’t it? We’d happily pop along to Edgbaston to see what a day-night Test in England is like. The true test (lower-case T) is whether people will keep on going, year after year. So far, day-night Test cricket has been, in the broadest
Continue readingWhy England have selected Gareth Batty
2 minute read “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” At the age of 38, we have genuinely never been fitter in our entire life. We had however assumed that our chance of playing international cricket had passed. Not so! Almost as if England were Australia and Gareth
Continue readingCity-based T20 and the art of forcing windows
3 minute read Independent websites are meant to provide a rapid response to news stories, telling the world how things should be based on an unshakeable sense of what is right and what is wrong. However, we long ago concluded that when it came to stories about what might happen to the structure
Continue reading‘We played like pretty boys there at one stage’ – Trevor Bayliss
< 1 minute read It’s been very humid in the North-West these last few days. That probably didn’t have any impact on the outcome of the T20 International between England and Pakistan but we haven’t got much to say about the cricket so thought we’d flesh out this piece by talking about the weather
Continue readingEngland float the idea of picking Haseeb Hameed to see what happens
< 1 minute read This is what they do nowadays. They say they’re thinking of picking someone as a means of increasing the scrutiny on them and then they see how the player reacts. Earlier in the season, word got out that England were almost certainly going to pick Scott Borthwick. He reacted by
Continue readingOne major worry about England’s one-day team
< 1 minute read They aren’t due. Aren’t remotely due. This occurred to us midway through yesterday’s run-chase when they were a few wickets down. While they eventually overhauled Pakistan’s total, that’s only postponing the problem. Yes, there are arguably players who haven’t scored too many runs recently, but unfortunately for them, England aren’t
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