Posted by This was Sam Curran’s face midway through yesterday’s innings at the Rose Bowl.
Has anyone in the history of the world ever looked more serious than this?
We’re aware that sometimes people’s facial expressions don’t accurately reflect their state of mind, but this is no fleeting thing. This is what Sam Curran looks like 100 per cent of the time when he’s batting.
From the moment he came out to the moment he expressed frustration at himself for getting out via a weird rigid-armed scream, this was Sam Curran’s face.
It’s a face that says ‘this is the most serious task anyone has ever undertaken and I fully intend to treat it as such’.
It’s a face that’s heard of smiling, but can’t understand why anyone would ever be so flippant when there’s such serious work to do.
We don’t even need to list alternatives and give them scores for seriousness because Sam Curran’s batting face is literally as serious as a face can get. Sam Curran’s batting face defines the uppermost limit of the scale of facial seriousness.
No-one has ever looked more serious than Sam Curran.
Andrew Miller described it as:
“defiance of a younger brother in the back garden”
Well those are almost certainly its literal origins.
His dad was a serious lad too.
It’s working.
Odds they’ll drop him again?
I’m coming to the conclusion we need 22 Test cricketers who can alternate, that way we can drop everyone every match and then keep recalling them. This sounds like a guaranteed winning strategy to me.
Ian Bell is going to be so good when he gets recalled.
I now want to see Curran and Kohli batting in the same team at the same time, can you imagine the combined fury of the two as their 7th wicket stand sees their team over the line in a tight chase?
Kohli was going to play for Surrey, remember. Then he didn’t. A big loss.
“Hey Moeen, nice bowling. Fancy batting at three?”
It’s where he should have batted anyway but changing it Midway through a test after one innings at seven just makes it look like panic or desperation.
This tinkering and fossicking about is catching.
Is Bairstow trying to show that he bats better when he’s keeping?
Seems like it. Or maybe he bats better when he doesn’t have a broken finger.
Is Buttler batting better, when he is a vice captain ?
All this debate about the batting order has got me thinking:
It doesn’t matter where you bat. Just go out and score runs.
This is half true. We can’t see how it makes much difference for Root to move from three to four but the vacuum in the top order means stroke players who aren’t much good against the new ball are finding themselves bumped up significantly to spots where their effectiveness is minimised.
Moving from 3 to 4 makes about 5 minutes difference.
But seriously, who should bat at 3 next time?
Cook or Stokes?
(obviously, the correct answer is Bell)
Moeen again? There must have been some thought put into putting him at three second innings so I’d expect the experiment to be given more than one innings.
Sam Curran looks like he’s always thinking about the safest spot to bury the body. As such I don’t trust him one bit.
You’d trust him to bury the body, surely?