6 minute readIf you want to be highly regarded as a wicketkeeper-batter, one of the smartest things you can do is not actually keep wicket in a whole load of Test matches. At what point do you become a wicketkeeper? How frequently do you have to don pads and gloves and chunter
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3 minute readIt’s common to assume that we accurately value all-rounders as the sum of their parts, but more often than not, we value each part separately and sneer at each of them a bit. Ravindra Jadeja is a pretty good example. To many people, Jadeja is a fill-in bowler who takes
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2 minute readWe’ve half-followed some underwhelming international series that we don’t especially care about before now, so we like to think we know a thing or two about the genre. Sri Lanka’s current tour is shaping up to be a fine example. Exclusively white ball tours can often be shoulder-shruggers. It’s not
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8 minute readThere have been 28 occasions in the last 25 years when a bowler has taken eight wickets or more in a Test innings. Some of these were weirder than others. At what point does a bowling performance become really, truly, freakishly remarkable? We’d say at the seventh wicket. Five-fors are
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3 minute readThree things, okay? Thing 1 Just as with Botham’s Ashes, the 2021 Moose Cup Powered by Daraz seems destined to be forever remembered as Root’s Moose Cup Powered by Daraz. In the first Test, Sri Lanka made 135 and then Joe Root made 228. In the second Test, Root made
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< 1 minute readWhen we talk about how much players want to win a trophy such as the World Cup, what we’re really talking about is how much they want to win the competition for which the World Cup itself just happens to be the prize. The Moose Cup, on the other hand
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2 minute readJoe Root has always been a batsman who’s scored about 40 more runs than you thought he had. Like a man on an e-bike, he glides along far quicker than seems to make sense given the effort he appears to be putting in. People really didn’t talk about Root all
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3 minute readSomeone has to carefully document Dom Bess’s absolutely dreadful 5-30 against Sri Lanka and that person has to be us. The stats people at CricViz do a thing where they estimate how many wickets a bowler could realistically expect to have taken in a given spell based on the deliveries
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2 minute readThe tyre-flipping is over and the gloves are off (or on, if the player in question is batting or wicket-keeping). The first Test between Sri Lanka and England is, by the time you read this, quite possibly underway. It isn’t underway as we write though, which means we are now
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8 minute readIn 1998 Muttiah Muralitharan took 16 wickets in a Test match against England at the Oval. But honestly that isn’t even the half of it. Only one person has taken 800 Test wickets and it’s easy to think that’s what makes Muttiah Muralitharan unique. But we need to take a
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