2 minute readScrape into a tournament through being ranked eighth in the world, throw in a few debutants, win the thing. Quite often you get to play Pakistan. Occasionally you have to play Pakistan. India suffered the latter. How in blazes? If we were to imagine that winning a cricket tournament involved
Continue reading< 1 minute readPakistan often lunge enthusiastically towards the ridiculous in the firm knowledge that this is their best hope of rebounding to sublime cricket – but even for them this moment was something else. There is a strong argument that Virat Kohli is the finest one-day batsman there’s ever been. He is
Continue reading2 minute readThere are all sorts of India v Pakistan previews out there, but this is currently the only one on this website that goes up to nine. 1. Jasprit Bumrah’s bowling action Evidence, if it were needed, that the “hey, what’s that over there?” bowling ploy can work just as well
Continue reading< 1 minute readWho would have thought this match would turn out exactly as everyone expected it to? What were the odds on that? Extremely slim, you’d have thought, what with the extraordinary wealth of alternative outcomes. Tamim Iqbal played a good innings and there was reasonable support from one of Bangladesh’s middle-order
Continue reading< 1 minute readNot the case. It was perhaps true that they’d solved modern one-day cricket… but then they came up against Pakistan. As we said the other day, Pakistan don’t care what year it is. They don’t care how other people are approaching one-day cricket these days, they just do their own
Continue reading< 1 minute readJust because someone’s due, it doesn’t mean anything’s actually going to happen any time soon. Trust us on this. Referring to Jason Roy, Pakistan coach Mickey Arthur alluded to the concept of dueness, saying: “We had a discussion in the bus this morning. I was particularly worried that Roy hadn’t
Continue reading< 1 minute read“300-plus scores? No, thank you. We’ll just persist with our old approach of bowling the opposition out for slightly less than our own low score, if that’s all right with you.” Pakistan held South Africa to 219-8 off 50 overs. Sri Lanka managed a whopping 236 all out against them.
Continue reading< 1 minute readThat’s our way of saying they were Wooded. We wrote about the benefits of having Adil Rashid in your side a couple of days ago. Mark Wood offers something similar. Remember how the middle over used to be? It was like the batsmen saw everything in high-definition and everything moved
Continue reading< 1 minute readSometimes you buy a pair of shoes and it’s only after the first prolonged wear that they reveal their true feelings towards you. The sides rub, the soles feel like they’re made out of wood and the uppers are so rigid that they actually gouge into your ankle. ‘Accursed footwear!’
Continue reading2 minute readImagine you have a good knife and a really shitty knife. You regularly use both, but the shitty one’s kind of shitty. It can cope with cheese and maybe a courgette, but you’d never risk it on an onion or something like that. One day you want to slice a
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