< 1 minute read England appear to have sold you a dummy. Just when you thought they might be transforming into some sort of competent modern T20 side, they conspire to lose three wickets in an over against Afghanistan. Masterful stuff. The bowler was Mohammad Nabi, one of our ten World Cup players to
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The first 229 runs of a T20 chase are apparently the easiest
< 1 minute read After two overs against the West Indies, England had scored five. They then added another 177. After two overs against South Africa, England had made 44. They then added another 186. The first two overs aren’t to be wasted. It was an odd match though. We can only conclude that
Continue readingJason Roy is tinder
2 minute read Not so long ago, England were claiming that they had little regard for par scores any more. Henceforth, their only target was to be ‘as many as we can get’. Maybe this is still the case, but today’s batting against the West Indies seemed initially cautious to these sometimes blurry
Continue readingIt’s the India cricketers we feel for
2 minute read Imagine you work in accounts for a biggish company that leases out some of its office space to other firms. Imagine that one of your company directors inexplicably removes the coffee machine from the shared kitchen and places it in the middle of your firm’s office. Now imagine that you
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Ian Botham and the statistical unit that is a cricketer’s career
2 minute read One guy played 25 Tests and finished with a batting average of 40.48 and a bowling average of 18.52. Another guy played the same number of Tests and averaged 23.45 with the bat and 42 with the ball. Name those cricketers. We’ll give you the answer at the end of
Continue readingAlex Hales cultivates a healthy aversion to failure
2 minute read If you were starring in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and needed to act in a scene where the submarine grounded on the seabed or was attacked by some sort of leviathan, there was only one way to do it. You and the rest of the cast ran
Continue readingEngland win, England lose, life goes on
< 1 minute read Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. When you win, all’s well. The captain says that you played well as a unit while adding a cautionary note: “We are not yet the finished article.” When you lose, he talks about processes and learning curves. Lose a few in a row and
Continue readingWill Liam Dawson play for England at the World Twenty20?
< 1 minute read He’s in the squad. The squad’s not that big. He probably will. Australia may well be going down the same route, but it still seems weird to us to select players for a World Cup when you’ve never selected them before. We were so taken aback by Liam Dawson’s inclusion
Continue readingHashim Amla in ODIs – a brief but unwelcome detour into stats
2 minute read The human brain isn’t wired for statistics. In fact it isn’t wired at all. Perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe in the distant future when we’re all mechanically enhanced cyberfolk we’ll be able to make logical decisions based on data rather than being influenced by our demented emotional responses to stories
Continue readingEngland ODI team triggers outlandish pronouncement
< 1 minute read We once overheard one man say to another man: “I gave you the money and you ate the money.” True story. The background is that we were in a restaurant in Goa on Christmas Day. It was early evening and the proprietor was already absolutely shit-faced. A customer was buying
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