Posted by England have binned an entire one-day international squad and picked a different one. You’d think that might have resulted in some barrel-scraping. But it hasn’t really.
Cannon Fodder was the first videogame we can remember that featured near-constant character turnover.
It was right there in the name.
Jools would get shot and he’d be replaced by RJ.
Jops would get picked off and in would come Chas.
RJ and Chas would buy it and you’d have to bring in CJ and Tadger.
There was a very large pool of characters from which to draw.
It’s probably a side-effect of the relentless international schedule that England’s ODI B-squad isn’t super-weird. England dip pretty deeply into their reserves even when they haven’t just suffered a Covid outbreak.
Zak Crawley and Dan Lawrence are in the Test team, Dawid Malan is in the T20 team and James Vince is only ever five minutes away from a recall.
Then there are a whole bunch of people who – depending when you last paid attention – you may have thought of as being hi-vis tabard wearers within the first-choice one-day squad anyway.
Jake Ball, Danny Briggs, Ben Duckett, Saqib Mahmood, Craig Overton and Matt Parkinson have all played one-dayers. Throw in Lewis Gregory, who has been appearing in the odd T20 international, and you’re only left with five truly new names: Tom Helm, Will Jacks, David Payne, Phil Salt and John Simpson.
It’s unlikely all five will play and even if they do, it won’t be all at once.
Then there’s the captain. Ben Stokes is a relatively familiar face, even if he appears to be playing in an unfamiliar body right now.
“I felt 45 after bowling in the Championship game,” he said this week.
This is no bad thing. At least he’ll appreciate the Cannon Fodder reference.
Tadger?
One of the levels was called “Explore My Hole”.
Anyone else remember the Cannon Soccer Xmas Special? Was a mashup with the much lamented Sensible Soccer. https://youtube.com/watch?v=P9WS3Ng4au0
War has never been so much fun
At this rate the best 2 ODI teams in the world are England A and England B.
Actually, that’s extreme because you have remember that Pakistan are capable of such rubbishness that the England D team could beat them. They are also capable of such brilliantness that they could whitewash the England A team.
If this was a global tournament Pakistan would have won 3-1 somehow.
Does a global league not count as a global tournament? I suppose it is a league that leads into a tournament rather than being the first part of the tournament itself.
I was more of a Rampart sort of guy
Never really forgave him for going on Strictly
Ikari Warriors?
That one’s had a whole article of its own on here.
James Vince has got past 27 without edging to slip. Can he… can he get get to his maiden international 100…?
https://www.espncricinfo.com/series/belgium-in-malta-2021-1268186/malta-vs-belgium-4th-t20i-1268191/full-scorecard
Is this the first time that 20 wickets have fallen in a T20I but the chasing team won? Belgium 128 all out (19.3 overs), Malta 130 all out (19.2 overs). It’s broken cricinfo’s result-calculator, it just says “Malta won by (with 4 balls remaining)”. Originally Malta lost by 3 runs but at the end of the match, 5 penalty runs were added to their score. Someone has typed the correct result into the match notes as “Final result – Malta won by penalty runs” but I can’t recall seeing the auto-generated result being messed up like that before.
Not exactly an everyday occurrence, a seeming win changed to a loss due to a post-play adjustment.
It feels very Belgium v Malta if you know what I mean.
My only experience of fielding a Belgian in my team ended up as comedy cricket of the highest order:
https://ianlouisharris.com/1998/07/22/the-very-first-z-yen-charity-cricket-match-barnardos-22-july-1998/