Ten months on from England’s capitulation at the cricket world cup, we can finally put the team’s abject performance into some kind of perspective. The team didn’t lose because Peter Moores was crap, or because we played an archaic style of cricket, we lost because we were, erm, English. It’s now more than apparent that English sportsmen and the knockout stages of world cups don’t mix. We just don’t like them very much. As a nation we very much prefer what I call the baseball rule: three misses...
Downton, Clarke and Lancaster Bombing
This is a cricket blog, so I never really get to express my love of rugby union. If the England cricket team is my first love, then Worcester Warriors – another team that have given me a rollercoaster ride over the years – are my second. You could say I’m married to both. I was lucky enough to be at Twickenham last weekend to see England lose to Wales. I say ‘lucky’ because the atmosphere was superb, it was a great day out, and I’m half Welsh. However, I felt...
County Members Tell ECB To Get Stuffed. Good News?
So that’s that then. There will be no changes to the domestic structure of English cricket in 2016. Those who ran campaigns to prevent Harrison and Graves from implementing their plans have been victorious. The gruesome twosome will be licking their wounds. To briefly summarise, Harrison and Graves wanted to cut the number of county championship games from sixteen to fourteen per season. They also wanted to play limited overs cricket in blocks – a bit like they do in the international season...
The State of the Nation
The least said the better about Sunday’s defeat. It was a poor way to finish the international season. There’s still an awful lot of work to do. However, the result shouldn’t put too much of a dampener on England’s fine summer. Overall this has been a year of progress on the pitch – even if events at the ECB and the ICC have left a nasty taste in the mouth. When our players left the Windies with their tail between the legs, I don’t think many people foresaw an Ashes victory and the emergence of...
Andrew Strauss Talks Team Culture
Andrew Strauss has been spending some time with the media recently. It’s always interesting to hear him speak. Although I don’t always agree with everything he says – I sometimes feel that he over-complicates things and makes simple ideas sound more complex than they really are – I find it reassuring that he obviously cares a great deal about the England side, and that he takes his role extremely seriously. After the days of Ted ‘let’s call up Martin...
The Great Evasion: Tom Harrison Speaks
At 10am yesterday morning, a protest against the ICC power grab took place outside The Oval’s Hobbs gate. A few journalists (predominantly the younger ones) and a squad of photographers were there to cover the event. They wore Giles Clarke masks and carried placards bearing the slogan #changecricket. These people care deeply about the future of the international game. They don’t like seeing the rich get richer, while test cricket elsewhere in the world slowly dies. Their arguments are fair and...
