< 1 minute readHow’s that for a rallying cry? England are playing their least-favoured format in their least-favoured conditions. This series against India will show them at their very worst and as such, it will tell us a hell of a lot. England’s worst is not yet ‘middling’. They should aspire to middling
Continue reading< 1 minute readIt’s just a one-day series, but as it happens England’s home win and India’s World Cup win have made this quite an appealing prospect. Plus it’s only five matches, not seven matches like it will be next winter. What’s that, you say? Seven one-day matches next winter? You don’t mean
Continue reading< 1 minute readWhen a losing team plays another losing team, one of them has to lose. No-one wins. This is good though. It’s like life. Life is an ongoing damage limitation exercise that is ultimately doomed to failure. You try your best, you slave away, you constantly improve yourself and the best
Continue reading2 minute readGed writes: We were all set for our (almost) annual visit to Edgbaston for the first two days of the Test. Charlie “The Gent” Malloy had arranged everything. Front row seats in the Raglan Stand, digs at Harborne Hall, nets the night before the start of the Test at Harborne
Continue reading< 1 minute readThose following the court case involving Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif will have seen a lot of eye-catching headlines. The agent at the centre of all this is Mazhar Majeed. He is, frankly, a bit of a knobhead. The thing is, most of the headlines derive from things Majeed said
Continue reading< 1 minute readIt’s nice to see bowlers being decisive in a Twenty20 match. Far too often they might as well just glue different mugshots onto a bowling machine and use that instead. In the Champions League final, Mumbai successfully defended 139. For a large proportion of the match, the commentators were talking
Continue reading< 1 minute readThis week, Zaheer Khan said: “Indian bodies are not designed to bowl fast.” Assuming that Zaheer has chosen his words carefully, this seems to indicate that he believes that humans are ‘designed’. If they are designed by God, and Sachin is God, then we can conclude that the Mumbai batsman’s
Continue reading< 1 minute readIs there ambiguity or a double meaning in that title? Certainly the former, possibly the latter, depending how things go for Somerset tomorrow. We did a piece for Cricinfo, which, on the face of it, is about Somerset being in the Champions League despite being perennial runners-up. That sentence makes
Continue reading< 1 minute readWe’ve seen a handful of games where one team needs a six off the final ball to win – it’s hard to beat. We’ll talk you through the climax of Bangalore’s win over South Australia in the Twenty20 Champions League: Some Aussie guy ran in and bowled and Bangalore’s wicketkeeper
Continue reading2 minute readSuppose we should take a look at how our 2011 County Championship players to watch fared. Adam Lyth, Yorkshire 553 runs at 26.33 Yeah, that’s pretty shoddy. James Hildreth, Somerset 893 runs at 38.82 That’s okay. Ben Stokes, Durham 628 runs at 48.30 and 17 wickets at 33.00 Three hundreds,
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