3 minute readDid England’s white ball schedule get ahead of you this month? It got away from us. It got away from England too. First, the bare bones of it: England lost both the T20 and ODI series 2-1 to India, drew the ODI series against South Africa 1-1 and then lost
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< 1 minute readIf Sam Northeast has had a “thing” it was forever being mentioned as a possible England batter but never actually getting picked. Now he’s the guy who made 410 not out. Some players have a real knack for not getting picked for the Test team. Sam Northeast has delivered in
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2 minute read‘Managing’ means two things. It means taking decisions and directing matters so that everything hopefully progresses more smoothly. It also means bumbling through in the face of various problems in the vague hope you’ll just get through it all somehow. Tired of the second approach, Ben Stokes has switched to
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8 minute readEngland were a one-day team who didn’t know how to top 300 – didn’t even dare to try. Eoin Morgan turned them into the best flat track batting side there’s ever been. It’s worth taking stock of the scale of that transformation and the conviction of the captain who achieved
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3 minute readWe have really taken against Suryakumar Yadav and we feel quite bad about that but we also can’t help it. Suryakumar Yadav is widely known as “Sky”. He said Gautam Gambhir gave him the nickname because they’re his initials. Only they’re not his initials, are they? Because he’s not Surya
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4 minute read“It’s a game of failure, batting,” said Joe Root five minutes after this Test finished. The statement was on the one hand very sage and on the other just plain wrong. Four times in a row England have chased a lot of runs to win. This would be remarkable even
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4 minute readSome people said Stuart Broad’s 35-run over to Jasprit Bumrah reminded them of when Yuvraj Singh hit him for 36 in the T20 World Cup that time. But it was not like that. It was not like that at all. This was much, much better and funnier. There’s actually a
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2 minute readEngland’s men’s team are halfway through playing two Tests in two weeks against different opponents. England’s women’s team have a full year to wait until their next Test against anyone. The comparisons are easy, jarring and awful. The New Zealand/India fortnight is only the middle back-to-back for the men after
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2 minute readRemember when being five down for not many runs was a bad thing? Whatever happened to that? Two weeks ago, England’s men’s team were 93-4 in pursuit of 299 to win. Somewhere around a minute later, they’d won the match – in large part thanks to Jonny Bairstow, who was
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2 minute readJonny Bairstow has worked out that he can score twice as many runs simply by doubling his strike-rate. Daryl Mitchell has realised he’ll probably keep hold of his Test place if he scores a hundred in every single match. But what do these developments actually prove? Because yeah, sure, Jonny
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