Here’s Jack Mendel with some interesting thoughts on Stuart Broad’s candidacy. Thanks go to our friends at The Diary of The 17th Man for the image above. We’ve resurrected it from a piece Jeremy Pooley wrote for us a while back. Following the resignation of Alastair Cook, the possibility of Stuart Broad succeeding him has surfaced. This would inject a very Australian feeling into England. Stuart Broad is hated by Australia so much that one wonders if they’re just a bit...
Welcome to The Full Toss captaincy formula. I went with ‘formula’ because it’s even sexier than ‘process’. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Mr Strauss. In the space of a few pithy paragraphs we’re going to achieve in five minutes what the ECB want to do in three weeks: find the best person to be the next England test captain. And we’re going to employ some hugely scientific methodology to really impress our sponsors. We call this innovative...
We’ve waited almost three years for this. And I can only applaud Alastair Cook, now free of the captaincy, for finally having his say on the ECB’s handling of the Kevin Pietersen debacle. Better late than never eh. Although some won’t be prepared to take Cook at his word, I personally believe his testimony backs up what I thought from the start: that the real villains of the piece were the hapless and spineless ECB not the captain. The board were primarily the ones who wanted...
First the good news: unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 24 hours you’ll have heard that Alastair Cook has resigned as test captain. It’s the right decision. England need a more aggressive captain who shares the positive outlook of Trevor Bayliss and the team’s attacking young players. However, there is some bad news: Andrew Strauss has started one of his famous ‘processes’ to find a new skipper. Cue endless management speak, cliches, and...
After being given the luxury of six weeks to decide his future, Alastair Cook has finally decided that he has no future … as captain at least. He announced today that he’s stepping down from the role. Giving in to his critics can’t have been easy but it’s undoubtedly the right thing to do. Although the captaincy never really suited Cook – it always struck me that he was made skipper because of his background and squeaky clean image rather than an ability to lead...
We’ve never talked about drugs on this site before. I hasn’t really seemed necessary. Call me naive but I’ve never really thought that steroids (or other performance enhancing drugs) could particularly enhance a cricketer’s abilities. The sport is so technical that sheer bulk, or muscle strength, always seemed slightly irrelevant. Although I’ve often thought that a bowler’s stamina could be aided by hormones, and that a batsman might find it easier to relax...
