England / India

England get a grip, but India keep a grip

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< 1 minute read

Yet again, it’s one of those win the toss, win the match, if you’re India pitches. The sheer predictability of proceedings only being disrupted when the coin ended the other way up.

There’s an illusion of inevitability when India bat first, but the play is coerced down a certain path simply because the home team can exert control. The players must do long hours with those hand-squeezer thingies because given a slight advantage they always seem able to maintain their grip.

England’s isn’t a wishy-washy limp handshake sort of grip. It’s more of a ‘this is getting a bit heavy, let me just change the position of my hands’ sort of grip. They hoick their burden and try all sorts of different hand positions, but the truth is they just can’t quite take the weight.

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16 comments

  1. I was sitting in the Mumbai airport looking to catch up on some badger. Virat’s fifth ice cube cracked me up. I miss CB because they go into the Promotions section of gmail which I never check — what the hell are you promoting anyway?

    Oh, and a good test match this. Lots of positives and negatives and neutrals that one can take if one is so inclined.

    1. Must be because it goes to an emailing list – or, as our Badger team-mate would have it, an ePosting list. Can you mark it as ‘non-promotional’ or anything?

      1. If it’s Gmail you’re using, it’s a serious pain with this stuff. Once marked Promotional, forever marked… you can remove the Promotional folder entirely and have everything going to Primary, or have all Promotional stuff automatically filed as Promotional. Ne’er the twain shall meet.

      3. Not sure that is so, Mike & Deep. If you grab the item you want and move it to your primary folder, I think gmail remembers that you consider that incoming e-mail address to be one of your primaries.

        Possibly you need to do it more than once or possibly you need to write back to the address in question, but I am pretty sure I have managed thus to persuade my gmail account.

        I have badger sent to my Hotmail account, which is an altogether different e-swamp.

      4. On reflection (and checking) I think what I did was move an e-mail from promotional to primary and then click on the box thingy to add that e-mail address to my gmail contacts.

        I should charge fees for advice of this quality.

      5. Thanks for the tip Ged, I’ll try it. But I cannot, with a clear conscience, pay a guy who still uses Hotmail.

    1. Looks like he’ll soon get a chance to claw at (grip?) the filthy, parched dry earth in search of an even rarer McGuffin…

      The England selectors will move all the batsmen up one further place to enable Jennings to come in at six. You heard it here first.

      1. That does seem to be the current thinking. Bairstow and Stokes to open, with Woakes coming in first drop by the end of the year.

      2. In fact if Sam Billings gets the call up that the Guardian and Cricinfo writers are inexplicably calling for then we might reach an XI comprising four wicketkeepers and seven all-rounders fairly soon.

      3. Liam Dawson?! You have got to be absolutely fuck*** kidding me! More all-rounders please. Because our tinpot spinners haven’t struggled enough to get wickets thus far.

  3. Probably the worst Nu-England performance? No real excuse for losing that badly, pretty much every player other than Hameed and maybe Bairstow did something terrible in at least one of the innings. Maybe Lord’s 2015 was on a par. As fun and likeable as this England team are, they really aren’t winning many Test series are they?

    And yet I am not really that annoyed. Maybe there is something in playing the right #brand of cricket and generally being fairly likeable chaps.

    1. I’m not that annoyed because I’m busy doing NaNoWriMo, playing the new Pokémon game, and generally not concentrating much on the cricket. Otherwise I’d be fuming. Especially at Alastair ‘King in the Subcontinent’ Cook chucking his wicket away with tedious inevitability.

      1. I had to google it, obviously. Some kind of far-eastern cartoon monsters franchise, I gather?

        I’d have called NaNoWriMo ‘Novelember’ instead, though.

      2. Those crazy Americans. No idea about nomeclature. The Japanese had the right idea: Pocket, Monsters, Pokémon. Simple yet effective.

        If the Americans named Alastair Cook he’d be called Strongjaw Nurdleface.

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