4 minute readIf there is one great thing the pandemic may have achieved for cricket, it is making the international game completely and utterly unsustainable. “You are burnt out from the start,” said Paul Collingwood this week, in reference to England’s ill-fated Ashes tour hot on the heels of the T20 World
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4 minute readIt was fun to get an insight into the reasoning of some of English cricket’s key decision-makers. Sorry, not fun – gravely concerning and wildly infuriating. There have been two big discussion points relating to county cricket in recent times: Institutional racism Its inability to produce decent Test cricketers As
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2 minute readIt’s the Ashes again. Australia won again. Oh shit? If we have a recent sports writing regret, it’s that we only stumbled across the terms MAshes and WAshes after the men’s series had already finished. We very much like this terminology. We wish we’d already started using it. Because it’s
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2 minute readEngland’s batting average in this series was the lowest in an Ashes series since 1890. Mitchell Starc opened the bowling against them in all five Tests, yet it doesn’t feel like he’ll get his fair share of the credit. We often think this about Starc. Is that fair? A certain
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2 minute readWell that was bad, wasn’t it? Unless you’re Australian, in which case that was great, wasn’t it? For a bit. And then maybe not so much. Maybe just a bit hollow by the end. But still slightly great because, you know, residual sense of the Ashes’ importance still. Just about.
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3 minute readThere is no right answer when it comes to England’s Test team selection right now. But there are different types of odd decision. The omission of a spinner for a day/night Test is the most predictable one. England picked five right-arm fast-medium bowlers and no spinner for the day/night Test
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3 minute readSouth Africa v India has been an excellent series that has thrown up some really significant talking points. King Cricket being King Cricket we’d instead like to focus on one of the insignificant ones: Marco Jansen and how awkward he looks. If you’ve not been paying attention, Jansen is South
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3 minute readIn the wake of England’s Ashes failings, there’s been a lot of talk about how the County Championship is played on pitches that encourage medium-pacers. Pitches are not the big problem. There was a good recent piece about county pitches by CricBuzz’s Rob Johnston. The overly-reduced version of that article
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2 minute readWe’ve said it many times before. Test cricket can offer something that no other sport can. You can’t have a tense hour in a football match because it’s two thirds of the game. In a Test match, 60 minutes can be a tight finish. In a five-day match, everyone’s got
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2 minute readOne of our favourite things about Jonny Bairstow Test hundreds – second only to their existence really – is how he celebrates them. Jonny Bairstow is a pretty fiery hundred-celebrator. Before today, the last time Bairstow made a Test ton was in November 2018 in Sri Lanka. On that occasion
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