They say white-ball cricket makes you forget. On Sunday, two batters – playing a little over 400 kilometres apart – did their best to be the exceptions. I. Trent Bridge, Nottingham It is the fourteenth over of the Indian chase. They are in pursuit of 216 – a daunting T20 target even on the best of pitches. Luckily for them, they are playing at Trent Bridge. But the conditions do not count as much as the desperation of the situation does. The Indian side leads the series 2-0, with an air of...
If all you need is ten good balls to dismiss a side in Test cricket, Ajaz Patel bowled 1.4 quality overs to become the third Test bowler with a ten-fer in an innings. However, as with most things in cricket, you’d be doing his achievement a disservice if you didn’t look at the story behind the numbers. Jim Laker and Anil Kumble have gottento the mark before him – but they did so at home, and Kumble could only do it...
As one shifts from commercial art to literary fiction, they are greeted by increasingly ambiguous endings. After all, when a plot unravels in the subtext rather than on the surface level, how can one expect ‘blockbuster’ climaxes in the truest sense of our modern understanding? To stretch the analogy beyond its natural limit, Test cricket’s followers might just form the ‘literary circle’ of the sporting world. There doesn’t seem to be much going on at any time when one tunes into the format. If...
If I were from an older generation, I would have waxed poetic about how The Hundred reminded me of visiting my hometown after ages: the region’s aesthetics have become jarring, the administrators more obnoxious, and the things I loved the most about it are now buried under irrelevant schtick. But I was born into the age of T20 cricket. I haven’t lived through the ‘good old times’ when red-ball cricket’s reputation was preceded by its monopolistic hold over the sport. Those days might have been...
People had been talking about Jimmy Anderson’s 1000th first-class wicket for a while. I first heard Tanya Aldred bring it up on The Guardian’s live blog for the County Championship more than a year ago. So, I assumed he was somewhere pretty close to the milestone when this year’s tournament came around. Worse still, his next international assignment was set to be the five-match Test series against India. When they last toured the UK in 2018, he had surpassed Glenn McGrath’s wickets tally...
Today we welcome back Abhijato to TFT. It seems that England supporters aren’t the only ones despairing at the state of the game they love … It’s become hard to care about the cricket anymore. I’ve always loved the sport for what it is – perennially imperfect, occasionally irritating, and gloriously rewarding. But over the past couple of months, a switch in my life seems to have been flicked off by a mysterious force straight out of a Murakami novel. I can’t pinpoint the exact...
