England go Wagner, Azhar Ali enjoys captaincy and Pat Cummins makes many crores | Mop-up of the day

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Neil Wagner (via Sky Sports video)

Over in South Africa, half England’s bowling attack aren’t playing because they have the shits. This perhaps meant they moved to Plan B earlier than they normally would during their tour match. Plan B appears to be Chris Woakes bowling bouncers.

“Neil Wagner in particular uses the middle of the pitch a lot and he’s gone pretty well with it,” explained Woakes.

We’ve long believed that England need a short-pitched specialist. We’re not entirely sure Chris Woakes is that person, but hey-ho, at least they’re slightly less wedded to Plan A.

Over in Pakistan…

Test cricket is happening and it is a wonderful thing. Azhar Ali has been given the honour of leading the side in its first home Tests for a decade. He isn’t having a great time.

Back in 2016, the PCB removed Azhar as one-day captain, reasoning that “his batting is being affected because of the extra burden of leadership.”

Since replacing Sarfaraz Ahmed in October, Azhar’s batting seems to have been affected because of the extra burden of leadership. So far he has made 98 runs in four Tests. Today he made a duck.

Pat Cummins makes a fortune at the IPL

It’s the/an IPL auction today. Pat Cummins went for 15.5 crore.

We’ve included this section purely so we could use the word ‘crore’. We love lakhs and crores and how incredibly bloody hard they are to read when expressed numerically.

Pat Cummins went for 15,50,00,000 rupees.

See.

This last section was going to be a new thing…

We were going to trial a Whatsapp version of the Edge, our twice-a-month email newsletter. Halfway through the morning we decided we aren’t going to do that.

Soooo…

SIGN UP FOR THE KING CRICKET EMAIL!

Or WG Grace and Billy Murdoch will be forced to come round your house and...

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10 comments

    1. If there’s a way, we’ll do it, but the general feeling is that Whatsapp are cracking down on ‘broadcast’ lists, while group chats mean you can see other people’s phone numbers, which obviously isn’t okay.

      1. To answer your other question, we haven’t seen the words ‘white froth’ yet so it seems safe to assume it isn’t wild.

  1. Not too bothered about anyone seeing my phone number, as it seems the only friends I have are Vodafone and the lady who keeps telling me that I’ve had an accident that wasn’t my fault.

    I can’t help feeling it must have been my fault if I didn’t know about it.

    🙁

  2. If it’s called WhatsApp, does it mean even the designers haven’t quite made up their minds about it? And if so, wouldn’t it be the perfect medium for the Edge?

  3. My experience of WhatsApp mainly involves my wife conspiring with my sisters to organise things that I really don’t want to do. I prefer to keep it pigeonholed as an arguably necessary evil, rather than the medium for something I enjoy.

  4. WhatsApp? That’s for old people and terrorists.

    This quotation came from my son (cuff round the ear administered), presumably referencing WhatsApp’s End-to-End encryption. It is unbreakable, which means that we can use it to organise a campaign of civil disobedience (*). The secret plan will be that we gather in the market square in Stroud at 1330 hours on the 19 January 2020, and take over the country from there. And because of the E2E encryption, nobody from the security services will ever be able to find out what the plan is. Bwa ha ha ha haaaa.

    (*) Never really understood this term. Is it like, “I’m not doing that, if it’s all the same to you”?

    1. Civil War – Guns = Civil Disobedience.

      If you get caught, instead of sending you to prison, they send you to your room. So be careful on the square.

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