When England’s openers strode to the crease yesterday, one was a fresh faced youngster with just one test under his belt (in which he looked unconvincing), and the other was a seasoned test player with more hundreds under his belt than any other England player in history. People who had never watched a cricket match before would have assumed that Alastair Cook was the former, not the latter. Cook’s dismissal was so predictable it was painful. He should have been given out on Friday evening...
The ECB and selecting the wrong selectors
I’m not a negative person by nature. I’m actually getting pretty fed up with all the negative things we’ve had to write about recently. With the notable exception of Ben Stokes, there was absolutely nothing positive to write about this winter. Then we had the fallout from Andy Flower’s departure – all good things must come to an end – and the sordid Kevin Pietersen debacle. It almost went unnoticed that during the KP affair, in which the ECB quite rightly became public enemy number one, they...
Freddie Flintoff: The Defence
It seems like everyone’s been having a pop at Andrew Flintoff in recent days (including us). So in the interests of fairness, and the noble quest for true objectivity (if such a thing exists), we thought we’d give the other side of the argument. We’re not going to pretend that Freddie’s a teetotal intellectual with the tactical acumen of Michael Vaughan – or claim that he was right to have a pop at Athers – we’re just going to question the increasingly prevalent media view that he’s the devil...
