The book has been written, apparently. The Hundred, a bit like Welsh Fire themselves, took on ‘the haters’ and secured a comprehensive victory against all the odds. Stakeholders like Michael Vaughan and Kevin Pietersen, plus the entire Sky and BBC commentary teams have declared, in George W. Bush fashion, that the mission was accomplished. The ECB’s new tournament was a runaway success, they claim, and therefore they were right all along. As for those haters – the...
I didn’t watch England’s loss to India in the second Test. Regular readers of this blog will know the reasons why. Let’s just say that English cricket and I have issues at the moment. Big issues. The problem is, a bit like England’s cricketers themselves, that I just can’t win. I generally wish our players well but I realise that any success they have simply papers over the cracks and gives the disingenuous suits currently ruining English cricket a longer stay of...
The perfect yorker is maybe cricket’s coolest delivery. The batter is left helpless as either their toes are crunched, or their stumps are clattered. When done right, little can stand in its way. As such, it has become something of a death bowling staple in white ball cricket. When a chase gets tight, teams look to their bowler to nail some yorkers. The problem is what comes when they go wrong. Indeed, the yorker quickly becomes the most expensive delivery in a bowler’s arsenal. Yorkers On a...
Last Wednesday I went to the dentist. On the same day, The Hundred started. Why are these two events related? Well, I approached both of them with a sense of complete dread. I loath dental visits with a passion and to regular readers of this website my feelings on the Hundred are no secret. After both events I experienced the same feeling, that of pleasant surprise that the event had not been as awful as I imagined it would be. In fact it had been quite tolerable, but it was still not something...
The very first World Test Championship, which we shall call WTC from now on, came to a close in June with the Kiwis becoming the first country to have their name engraved on the trophy. The WTC was a positive initiative from the International Cricket Council to promote Test cricket amidst the popularity of T20 and the rise of franchise cricket. In the following article, we are going to look at what worked with the WTC and what didn’t work so well. We’ll also suggest some changes for...
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...
