It’s time for a change of pace. So here’s Peter Jackson Eastwood, operating right arm over the top from the literary end. Eat your heart out, Dylan Thomas … Now as a Test Cricket purest, I don’t care much for the Big Bash, And as England prepare for the greatest of series, I fear they could be burned to Ash. And yet I still cling to that morsel of hope, For we Englishman never despair, I light a candle for a Bell cover drive, And pray to Ryan Sidebottom’s hair. ...
Who Will Score England’s Runs This Winter?
With Ben Stokes nursing a broken hand, a bruised ego, and a ruptured reputation, England might find themselves short of runs this winter. However, one unintended consequence of long batting line-ups is that individuals sometimes lose focus and don’t take responsibility for scoring big runs. Instead they assume that someone else will dig the team out of trouble somewhere along the line. Consequently it’s possible – and I admit this is just a tenuous theory – that losing Stokes might...
England’s Four-Year Cycle, Botched
The last time England toured Australia we were slight favourites. We’d just beaten them 3-0 at home, albeit not as convincingly as the score suggests, and we had a settled team with fond memories of their last Ashes tour. The spine of the team looked good: Cook, Trott, Pietersen, Bell, a young Root, Prior, Swann, Broad and Anderson. A few of them were carrying some physical or mental baggage but overall life looked rosy and most fans were relatively optimistic. And then we lost 0-5. When...
Pull the other one – England’s Ashes injury hoodoos
Injuries. They’re the bane of the England cricket team’s existence. And every time there’s an Ashes tour down under things just go from bad to worse. Back in the 1990s England only seemed to have two players the Aussies worried about: Darren Gough and Graham Thorpe. Therefore it was odds on they’d both get injured either before or during the tour … thus making an impossible task even more impossible – if degrees of impossibility are indeed possible. Back in 2002, both Thorpe and Gough...
Fantasy Cricket and Prediction Games
James Pope from Fanto and Matt Gisby have been in touch to tell us about games they’ve developed for The Ashes. I thought I’d pass on the details. James runs a fantasy league site and he’s put together an Ashes version you might be interested in. It works a bit like the fantasy games you see in the newspapers, but the fanto version looks a bit simpler to set up and monitor … which has got to be a good thing. Here’s what it’s all about in James’s words:...
A Guide For Disabled Cricketers
I quickly wanted to give people with disabilities a heads up about Darren Douglas’s new Disability Cricket Guide. It’s a pretty comprehensive article that explains how you can get involved in the sport at amateur level. I have to admit that, like many, I was in the dark somewhat when it comes to this subject. However, after discussing things with Darren it seems there are great opportunities for people living with disabilities to start playing the game. For starters, there are many...
