< 1 minute readAs in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything. In Bangladesh, England typically made headway with the ball when they managed to get some reverse swing. Ben Stokes was far and away the most effective practitioner. Should England manage to get Anderson back into the team at some point
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Mop-up of the day – Batting collapses don’t just come against spin, apparently
2 minute readA true collapse comes after a start. Throwing a load of Lego bricks over the floor is just a mess; putting them together to build some sort of tower before watching it keel over – that’s a collapse. Like England last week, Australia took the time to set the scene.
Continue readingJack Leach and why you should never pick your saviours
2 minute readEngland lost to Bangladesh. There has to be a reason for it and it has to be that they picked the wrong players. One obvious area in which England were inferior was the spin department. Last season Jack Leach took more wickets than the spinners who played in the last
Continue readingMehedi Hasan extracts turn and respect against England’s will
2 minute readWe all can’t spake. Uncertainty is the lifeblood of sport and so this series has made for compulsive viewing. As the Test Match Special Twitter account put it yesterday. Things in Dhaka have continued where they left off in Chittagong! Again, the momentum has reversed in a matter of minutes.
Continue readingEngland derailed by their own sickening wrong-handedness
< 1 minute readWith hindsight, maybe England should have picked more right-handers. None of their left-handed batsmen passed 20, while all of their right-handers did, bar Steven Finn. Quite why people think it’s acceptable to do things left-handed is beyond us. Bangladesh are working their way into a strong position. This is no
Continue readingWhy Gary Ballance’s 2016 return to the England side was too easy for him
3 minute readEngland dropped Gary Ballance before the third Ashes Test of 2015 after a run of form that wasn’t actually all that dreadful with the benefit of hindsight. He had passed 30 once in his last 10 innings and had been bowled five times. People said he struggled against good quick
Continue readingZafar Ansari is almost certainly batting too high
< 1 minute readEarlier today, we took issue with England’s willingness to make bold prophecies. However, we rather shot our match-previewing bolt yesterday, so we’re now going to have to commit much the same crime simply so that we have something to say. We are guessing/predicting that Zafar Ansari will be (a) playing
Continue readingGareth Batty – the winter bike
2 minute readThere seems to be a tendency in some quarters to perceive England’s Test tours of Bangladesh and India as being one long competitive outing. They are not. They are separate. For all the talk of ‘taking a look’ at players ahead of England’s arrival in India, there is a Test
Continue readingWhy Bangladesh are potentially having a reasonably well-attended party
2 minute readTwenty-two runs – England’s winning margin – is not a lot. You can splice and dice it however you want. It’s a bunch of thick edges to third man. It’s a handful of extra runs from your lower order across two innings because you’ve picked countless all-rounders. It’s less than
Continue readingThe scope of Ben Stokes
2 minute readIf you were to look at Ben Stokes purely as a batsman or purely as a bowler, you’d struggle to see what the fuss was about. Averages of 34.04 and 35.64 are still at this stage the wrong way round. Taken together, you begin to get a sense of his
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