Bert writes…

Regular readers of this website will be aware that I have a standing bet with a good friend of mine, an Australian, on the outcome of each Ashes series. The Bet was established while drunk in late 2002, in The Craic pub in Whakatane NZ, a fine boozer if ever there was one. The rules of The Bet, as agreed at the time and subsequently formalised by a lawyer (he said he was a lawyer, although he was also drunk), are these:

1. The parties agree that a bet of 12 bottles of red wine shall be wagered on the outcome of each official Ashes test cricket series.
2. In the event of an England win, the wine shall be Australian.
3. In the event of an Australian win, the wine shall be English oh all right then European.
4. In the event of a drawn series neither side is deemed to have won, and therefore neither party is liable to pay up.
5. To make the same point, a retention IS NOT a win.
6. Can you not hear me or something? Just because your lot has retained the Ashes DOES NOT mean you get the wine, okay.

I mention this so that you can appreciate exactly what Stuart Broad’s final delivery in test cricket meant to me. It meant that I don’t have to dread each Friday morning, just starting my day’s work, for the possibility of receiving a call from Melbourne, where it is evening, from a half-cut Victorian with a bottle in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. Having to listen to the unmistakeable thwoppp of a cork being drawn. Having to hear, literally hear, the grin all over his smug face. And most importantly, having to take it when the Victorian raises a toast to Ben Stokes, who as losing captain is deemed to be the person most responsible for the state of ownership of the wine. Twelve times. TWELVE TIMES, spread out over about a year usually.

But now there will be none of that, not till early in 2026 at the earliest. It is true that I won’t get the opportunity for smugness either, but this is far less of a concern. Actually (surprising but true fact coming up), if England win that series it will be the first time in OVER TEN YEARS that I will have been able to raise a glass to whoever is Australian captain at the time.

Cricket is changing, test cricket especially, but The Bet remains a constant, an island of stability in an ocean of change. Some of the details might shift a little – the next time I win I am considering Bazdrinking the wine, for example – but what matters does not. Since that evening in 2002, the score in test matches is Australia won 31, England won 18, with 11 draws. Ownership of the urn is similarly slanted, Australia having fourteen years to England’s nine. But these things are irrelevant, because the score in series wins is five-all, and hence the score in bottles of red wine is sixty-all. Each of these 120 bottles has been appreciated for its flavour, for the cricket memories it brings back, and for the global friendship it has helped maintain.

The Victorian was here this year, with me at the Old Trafford test, Day 3. After Lord’s, there was every chance that the series could have already been lost by then, or worse, actually lost on that day. I had threatened to buy him the wine there and then if that happened, ten thousand miles from his home. During the rain break on Day 5 at the Oval, I was browsing Dan Murphy’s online catalogue. But the rain stopped, Woakes swung and Ali spun, and then Stuart Broad stepped up and did his thing. Cheers Stuey. I owe you for that.

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Billed as “a deep dive into one of the fiercest rivalries in sport,” How to Win the Ashes is available now on the BBC iPlayer. Regular King Cricket contributor Sam Blackledge has had a watch. This is his take on it.

Documentaries like this are not really aimed at people like us. We already know the story, and barring exclusive behind-the-scenes footage or surprising revelations, they can appear rather formulaic.

Such is the case with the BBC’s new hour-long special, timed to appeal to the masses ahead of and during the broadcaster’s free-to-air TV coverage of the oh wait. 

First, a history lesson. There’s Harold Larwood in black and white, bouncing the shit out of the Aussies in 1932; there’s Botham, sepia-toned armpits, running from the Headingley field, stump in hand; Flintoff, McGrath, Pietersen, Warne; all fighting over, in Joe Root’s words, ‘a little pot of dust’.

The film tells the modern day story of The Ashes by focusing on four series: 2005; 2010-11; 2013-14; and 2019. 

Other just as dramatic and plot-filled series, such as 2006-07, 2009 and 2015, are completely ignored. 

The camera angles are, as is the fashion these days, jaunty. Key contributors sit at the end of a long varnished wooden table in the Lord’s pavilion, water bottles by their side. 

Greg James is in a cinema. Melinda Farrell in an uncomfortable-looking leather armchair. Simon Jones appears to be in some sort of art deco cafe, all floral print cushions and high barstools.

For some unfathomable reason, old TV sets are positioned in the middle of city streets, playing clips of interviews or wickets from years gone by. 

When Alastair Cook pops up, pink cheeks glowing, eyelashes fluttering, it’s yet another reminder that he really seems to struggle with speaking English. At one point he says, with not a hint of irony, “Words are so easy, aren’t they?”

Poor old Michael Carberry comes off pretty well, speaking of the joy of fulfilling a lifelong dream and the human pain of being discarded, never to play for his country again. 

Other highlights include Geoff Lemon’s hair; Ben Stokes’ steely-eyed passive-aggressive response to the simplest of questions; and Auntie’s bleep machine working overtime to obscure naughty Michael Clarke telling Jimmy Anderson to ‘Get ready for a broken fucken arm.’ Dear Points of View, etc and so on. 

We’ve seen all of this before, from both English and Australian perspectives in The Test and The Edge. But it’s a nice way to whet the appetite, and is bound to generate some added interest in the BBC’s free-to-air TV coverage of the oh wait. 

• 10 important questions after watching the trailer for England documentary ‘The Edge’
• Let’s rate the ‘serious face’ of every England player in the trailer for The Edge

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They’re going to use the Kookaburra cricket ball for the next couple of rounds of the County Championship. Why exactly?

Have you ever seen that godawful film where Nicolas Cage is a pilot and a bunch of people suddenly cease to exist?

Nic Cage films range from actually good to hilariously bad to very deliberately unhinged (the plastic teeth scene from Vampire’s Kiss will never fail to make us laugh). Left Behind, however, is an out-and-out bad film that is not even redeemed by comic overacting.

There’s a bit in it where Cage’s character is piloting a plane that is flying directly towards another plane. The second plane has no pilots because they’ve both ceased to exist. Cage realises he’s on a collision course a pretty reasonable time in advance and tries to take evasive action. Somehow he fails to completely miss the other plane and there’s a glancing blow.

Are we mad or do commercial aircraft not actually manoeuvre like ocean liners? Cage must have steered about four feet in the space of a mile.

That is how much swing you get with a Kookaburra cricket ball.

Is that a good thing?

If you’re a batter, yes. If you’re a fast-medium bowler, no.

But the decision to use Kookaburra balls is not really about being nice to batters. It’s about making life more difficult for the kinds of bowlers who traditionally thrive in county cricket. Why? To see who can rise to the challenge.

There’s a general assumption that a less responsive ball works out better for faster bowlers and certain types of spinner because those styles of bowling become the only realistic ways to get people out.

But it doesn’t exactly work out like that. Glenn McGrath always did quite well out of being tall and landing it on a postage stamp. Vernon Philander had a lot of success without even bothering with the ‘being tall’ bit.

Really only one thing’s for sure: if you’re going to bowl with a Kookaburra ball, you’d better be good at something.

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Wordle has inspired a whole slew of similar puzzle games. Here are four cricket-themed ones we’ve tried: Crickdle, Crickle, Nurdle and Stumple.

Crickdle

Crickdle’s creator, a British student called Ayush, emailed us about this one. It’s a player of the match guessing game where you’re given the match result and the player’s performance in that match. You get four guesses, but we got today’s in one. Come on!

Crickle

Crickle is the same as Wordle but with cricketer names. We actually found it quite hard to come up with names because our brain sometimes likes to have context before it can come up with things. We actually came to a grinding halt as early as our second guess. During this blank spell, we discovered that you cannot guess cricket writers. Next guess we discovered that you also cannot guess at least one Sri Lankan Test cricketer for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to us. (Poor Lahiru Gamage.) This one is really hard.

Nurdle

Seemingly the same as Crickle, only instead of having to come up with six-letter cricketer names, you have to come up with seven-letter ones. First names are allowed, which is maybe helpful given that coming up with valid guesses seems to the greatest challenge.

Stumple

Again, you’re trying to guess the cricketer, but this time you get a bit more of a steer. After each guess, Stumple gives you a yes, no or adjacent for nationality, playing role, retirement status, year of birth, batting handedness, total international matches and – frequently unnecessarily – current IPL team. (We got today’s player in six guesses, one of which was experimental pissing about.)

Imagery: If you’re trying to guess the cricketer at the top of the page, he’s a Dall-E creation from a while back. We can’t actually remember what we typed in to generate him.

We can email you the article whenever we write something. Sound good? Yeah? Give it a go then.

The BBC again finds itself mired in conflict after asking people to vote for its cricket podcasts instead of our one. We’re on the shortlist too, you know. How about a bit of balance and fairness?

It’s been a turbulent time for the Beeb. First the leader of the world’s largest democracy attacked it for a bunch of stuff it said. Then a month or so later it attacked Gary Lineker for something he said.

And now it’s shamelessly pushing its own podcasts for awards over The Ridiculous Ashes. What happened to that famed impartiality?

This is just naked self interest, pure and simple.

The Sports Podcast Awards’ Best Cricket Podcast category has 12 nominations. As well as the two BBC ones, The Ridiculous Ashes is up against the Telegraph, Wisden and Simon Hughes, as well as friends of the site, Adam and Geoff.

We don’t want to prematurely sink to “it’s an honour just to be shortlisted” but it’s decided by a public vote. We can see that the sickeningly biased TMS tweet has been viewed 100,000 times, so we’re not awash with confidence. Please go and vote for us anyway though so that we don’t come last.

The Ridiculous Ashes is also one of eight shortlisted in the Best Sports Comedy Podcast category. We have only one BBC rival in this category.

It’s great to be shortlisted. Double great, even. Voting closes in the middle of next month.

About The Ridiculous Ashes

Together with Dan Liebke, we revisit historic Ashes series and try and work out which team was the more ridiculous – England or Australia.

Each episode covers a single Test. We nominate three ridiculous moments from England; Dan nominates three ridiculous moments from Australia; and then we pick out our top three, allocate points, and whichever nation gets most points wins that ridiculous Test match.

We’ve done four series so far. Pat Cummins had a cameo in the most recent one.

• Series 1 (1997)
• Series 2 (2013/14)
• Series 3 (2009)
• Series 4 (2013)

If those who run cricket can’t make the cricket calendar comprehensible, we’ll just have to do it ourself.

Below you’ll find a month-by-month guide to the series and tournaments we’ll most likely be focusing on throughout this year.

Setting it out in writing is as much for us as it is for you.

Essentials?

You may or may not remember that we did this last year having long carried out a similar sifting with the cycling road race calendar.

Both sports have reached a point where major events aren’t always as major as they pretend to be with frequent overlaps diluting interest further. Maybe you enjoy having your attention knocked about, investing time in stories which then slip into the background when something bigger comes along. We don’t.

So what we do is we go through the coming year and we try and pick out the cricket we most give a toss about (give the greatest number of tosses about?). These are the games we’ll make an effort to follow.

A corollary of this is that a lot of the games we’ve omitted from this list are ones that we kind of wish weren’t being played; the kinds of matches that drain players and injure them and really do little more than sap our enthusiasm for bigger events.

It seems hypocritical to say there are too many matches at the same time as consuming them all, so these days we do our best to actively ignore tinpot bilateral one-day series and most of the T20 franchise competitions. (We’ll come back to this in a moment.)

The 2023 King Cricket Essentials Calendar

February

New Zealand v England, two Tests (men)

February to mid-March

India v Australia, four Tests (men)

T20 World Cup (women)

April

Bangladesh v Ireland, one Test (men)

April to May

First seven rounds of the County Championship

June

England v Ireland, one Test (men)

June to July

The Ashes (men), England v Australia, five Tests

The Ashes (women), one Test, three ODIs, three T20Is

August

The Hundred (men)

The Hundred (women)

September

Last four rounds of the County Championship

October to November

50-over World Cup (men)

December

South Africa v India, two Tests (men)

Hey, there’s a bit of formatting in that calendar of yours…

Yes, there is.

We’ve stuck our A-grade events – the focal points of the year – in bold. We’ve also stuck the two Hundreds in italics. The latter perhaps warrants an explanation.

Domestic T20 cricket does not, to us, feel like appointment-to-view cricket. It happens every year, for one thing, but it’s probably more to do with the best-known players always seeming to some degree detached from proceedings.

That’s not a comment on the way they go about things. It’s just acknowledgement that their loyalties are contractual and those contracts are short.

BUT. One of the ways you can make a tournament a bigger deal is by ensuring it’s the only gig in town. This is a thing that very rarely happens in cricket, but the two Hundreds stand alone in August, with no real rivals for cricket fans’ attentions from start to finish.

We are, in short, keeping an open mind. It’s cricket, with some great cricketers and a bunch of it will be on normal telly. This is what’s happening in August.

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We’re pretty happy with the last year’s Patreon-funded output. Hopefully our crowdfunding campaign doesn’t completely implode in 2023.

A very quick recap. We run a Patreon campaign where readers can, if they want, pledge a monthly sum to help support the site.

You can pretty much pledge whatever you want for as long as you want. If you want to give us £1 for one month, we’ll actually be very, very happy with that. In a world where none of us can be bothered to do stuff, going out of your way to send us a quid feels like an actively appreciative act.

And if you want to pledge £2,000 a month. You know, um, magic. (This is a joke. Don’t pledge £2,000. That would be weird. Also if you accidentally stick a load of extra zeros on your monthly pledge because you were pledging when drunk, let us know and we’ll pay you back.)

You can find more details on the ins and outs of the Patreon campaign here. One key detail that is worth emphasising is that King Cricket is entirely free, whether you pledge a monthly sum or not. All that happens is the more of you who pledge, the more we’re able to do with the site.

What we’ve been able to do with the site

Due to the fundamental hollowness of running a crowdfunder where the crowd doesn’t obviously get anything that it wasn’t getting anyway, we’ve always made a point of using our Patreon-funded time to try and do features. These are the longer, less time-sensitive pieces that simply wouldn’t happen without the monthly contributions from our readership.

Below you’ll find a selection of the features we’ve done over the last 12 months and a few thoughts about each – both about the piece itself but also its relationship to the crowdfunder.

We thought it was worth highlighting them again. Maybe there’s one or two you missed.

Fast bowling: County cricket’s diesels and the unprepared Test batters they create

This one was kind of newsy, in that it was a response to England’s crappy Ashes campaign, but England’s difficulties producing fast bowlers is also a longstanding issue. It’s the kind of subject we allude to a lot in passing, but sometimes it’s good to actually cover a topic properly, all in one place. It seems like this was one of those occasions as we’ve linked back to it plenty of times since.

Tail-end tons: Who is the worst batter to have hit exactly one Test hundred?

We love writing about tail-enders as it’s one of cricket’s unique aspects – people who are crap at something being forced to do it at elite level. This one’s basically about people who are crap at something being inexplicably successful at that thing, which is interesting and amusing to us in so many ways.

Shane Warne: The greatest foe

This one was not fun to write in that the reason for doing so was so sad. At the same time, it was incredibly fun to write because we always learn something about cricket and why we love it when we get a chance to stop and think about the players who’ve affected us the most. And Warne really was among the biggest presences we can think of.

Separate teams? What might a world of cricket format specialists actually look like?

Like the one about county diesels above, this is of its moment to some extent, but also an ongoing thing – and again something we talk about until we bore the arse off ourself. Having an article on the site where we looked at the schedule for top players and how they have to manage it means we don’t have to repeat ourself quite so much, which is surely good news for everyone.

This is the way the county cricket season begins, not with a bang – and we’re happy with that

This one’s similar, but it’s also a celebration of a thing that many regard as a weakness – the slow burn nature of county cricket. This is far from the only piece we’ve done celebrating the appeal of slow burn entertainment. We also republished The ‘Test cricket doesn’t fit into modern life’ fallacy later in the year, which is one of the King Cricket pieces of which we’re most proud.

Five Test wicketkeepers who quite often didn’t actually do any wicketkeeping

Some of these have no great insight underpinning them. They’re often borne of something that slightly irritates us (people thinking Kumar Sangakkara always kept wicket) before heading off to explore that.

What Jonny Bairstow’s Kingsman church scene innings tells us about the ‘throwing off the shackles’ cliché

We felt like this was a chance to write about a couple of things that would remain interesting even once they’d ceased being newsworthy. These things were Jonny Bairstow’s bonkers innings and the dumb simpleton comments that pundits sometimes make about ‘freeing up’ batters with seemingly zero understanding of how that might be achieved.

We also got to write about the Kingsman church scene, which is a good example of the kind of thing we definitely couldn’t do if we’d tried to pitch this piece to another publication. Plenty of these features simply couldn’t be published anywhere else, but even the ones that could would be written in a very different way if they were sold to someone else. We are eternally grateful to our patrons for giving us the chance to write them the way we want to write them. That freedom will unavoidably bring a few missteps along the way, but personally we think that’s a price worth paying if you end up with something quirkier and more interesting every now and again. An awful lot of our favourite sentences and paragraphs on King Cricket are ones that would have been cut for a mainstream outlet.

Eoin Morgan – the captain who ignored everyone and gave England ambition

This one – basically a potted history of the Morgan era – is almost exactly the opposite of what we’ve just described. It’s mainstream and obvious. Even so, we probably wouldn’t have written it if it weren’t for the crowdfunder because the likely freelance fee wouldn’t really have covered the time spent pitching and writing it. Taking pitching out of that equation meant it instantly became more viable.

Where are Jason Roy’s foundations? Do white ball specialists need more time in the middle?

Again, news-ish, but only really as a jumping-off point for a broader point. It’s also hard to imagine anyone else letting us spend the first third of an article talking about speed skating training.

Hot streaks: Test batters who hit a prolonged purple patch

We’ve mixed feelings about this one actually, because it doesn’t, to us, feel like a King Cricket feature. It’s just a bit too straightforward. Sometimes we’ve got an idea to explore and we kind of just want to see what it throws up as there’s usually something unexpected. This is probably an example of that and maybe it didn’t work out exactly as we’d hoped.

Best of the blobs: Eight of Test cricket’s finest duck-makers

Last week’s piece was more ‘on brand’ we reckon. It may be a bit vague and ill-defined (just generally about ducks) but we quite like having that room to manoeuvre as it means we can veer towards whatever happens to draw our interest (which is quite often Ajit Agarkar).

The year ahead

We probably don’t publish King Cricket articles quite as often as we once did (certainly back in the early days when we’d actively try and keep our posts to just a paragraph or two because blogging back then was a lot more like Twitter). We’d like to think that the overall standard is better though – in large part because the Patreon campaign makes longer pieces more viable.

Not every feature will work for everyone. Sometimes you may feel like we’ve travelled further down a road you never wanted to turn down in the first place. Hopefully that’s offset by the articles you do like though. And hopefully you feel like these are the kinds of articles you couldn’t find anywhere else.

All of these pieces take time. The Patreon campaign quite literally buys us that.

There are an awful lot of T20 franchise leagues these days. It’s hard to keep up. If you want to work out whether a new one is worth following, the absolute last thing you’d want to do is actually watch a match. So is there a quicker and easier way to measure the quality of a given league?

Back in August, we wrote a piece headlined ‘How popular are all these Not-Quite-The-IPL franchise leagues actually likely to be?‘ The boiled-down jus of the article is that most T20 leagues aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Not even close. There is in fact a massive excess of cracking-up going on and a correspondingly large volume of failing to meet up to expectations.

With the BBL, BPL, ILT20 and SA20 all currently underway, these are things we’re thinking about a lot right now.

The photo

It all kind of came to a head with a photo of Joe Root. In the photo, Root is playing a reverse sweep while playing for Dubai Capitals with Abu Dhabi Knight Riders wicketkeeper Connor Esterhuizen looking on. What struck us was how familiar it all looked.

Root is obviously a very familiar figure, but his clothes were familiar too. They were basically the Delhi Capitals kit. Esterhuizen’s kit was even more familiar as it was the hugely distinctive gold and purple of Kolkata Knight Riders.

So everything was familiar and yet any conclusions we might foolishly have drawn from that familiarity would have been wrong.

Here we had two teams consciously and explicitly shaped as paler facsimiles of franchises who themselves only retain a certain fraction of their playing staff from year to year anyway. It’s hard to get a toehold in this kind of world. In terms of identity, we’re talking a bunch of freelancers temporarily rallied round a photocopied flag.

Just to underline that fact, when we went looking for the photo just now, we commenced our search in the SA20, which turned out to be completely the wrong league.

Seriousness

Dubai Capitals v Abu Dhabi Knight Riders didn’t, to us, feel like a serious match. We have no doubt that those running the two franchises have put a lot of thought into shaping their squads and that they’ve done the best they can given monetary and availability constraints.

However, when you survey the resultant teams with no knowledge of that process, you could be forgiven for thinking the league had instead opted for the good old-fashioned names-out-of-a-hat system. (Not necessarily such a terrible thing. We’ve advocated for the hat in the past.)

If we’ve added up right (no guarantees) then Dubai Capitals fielded international cricketers from seven different nations. This is no mean feat, but it’s also a measure of how widely the net’s been spread. That approach gives you players like Bhanuka Rajapaksa, Sikandar Raza and Akif Raja. We’ve always loved Ravi Bopara, but he has been younger – so too Robin Uthappa and Yusuf Pathan.

Root’s there, Rovman Powell’s got a bit of T20 pedigree, but things tail off pretty quickly after that. What we’ve been wondering is whether there’s a really quick way to measure that without even reading through the whole team sheet? (Yes, we are very lazy. What of it?)

Where the lack-of-quality shines through

We’ve been wondering whether you can look at the two players in a particular slot on the scorecard in a given match and immediately draw pretty accurate conclusions about the whole league.

At this point we must guilitily inform you that we have no answers here, only scrawled-on-a-beermat thinking-out-loud.

If you manage to secure the services of a great batter, you’ll tend to stick them up the order to get good use out of them. Opening bowlers will often be big names too. When squads are thin, that must leave holes elsewhere. But where exactly? Number six batters maybe? Fifth bowlers? We’re not sure.

Number sixes?

If we take this option, Dubai Capitals v Abu Dhabi Knight Riders gives us Yusuf Pathan and Andre Russell. Pathan may be 40, but Russell’s presence does actually suggest a pretty decent standard of cricket.

Last night’s match between Sharjah Warriors and Desert Vipers gives us Joe Denly and Benny Howell, which is a little less good and also quite geographically misleading.

In the SA20, last night’s Durban Super Giants v Paarl Royals match gives us Dwaine Pretorious and Dane Vilas. Familiar names at least and indicative of a league with a more local hue.

For the most recent match in the BBL, Melbourne Stars v Brisbane Heat, we get Nathan Coulter-Nile and Jimmy Peirson.

In the BPL Dhaka Dominators v Sylhet Strikers gives us Nasir Hossain and Thisara Perera.

Fifth bowlers?

T20 bowling order is a lot less formulaic than in the longer formats. Captains are far more likely to mix things up, opening with a spinner or whatever. Fifth bowler feels to us like the most likely purveyor of the kind of no-man’s land overs when the powerplay has finished and before things kick off at the finish.

Dubai Capitals v Abu Dhabi Knight Riders gives us Sunil Narine and Sikandar Raza, which even if Narine isn’t quite the bowler he was, doesn’t feel representative of the match as a whole.

Sharjah Warriors v Desert Vipers gives us Rohan Mustafa and Mohammad Nabi, which is closer but does also make us want to watch the ILT20 a bit because… Mohammad Nabi.

Durban Super Giants v Paarl Royals gives us Evan Jones and Dwaine Pretorius, which actually feels about right as a flavour of that match and league.

Melbourne Stars v Brisbane Heat gives us Mitchell Swepson and Clint Hinchcliffe, which is pretty good too.

Dhaka Dominators v Sylhet Strikers gives us Thisara Perera and Nasir Hossain (the same two who were batting at number six, funnily enough).

Alternatives?

What these examples suggest is that there isn’t perhaps one particular playing role where weaker players are generally hidden. It also gives no sense of players who might be phoning it in. It doesn’t tell you if a player’s only around for three matches before jetting off to a totally different league.

However, what it does make us think is that if you picked one of these roles, or something similar, it wouldn’t take too many games to get a real feel for the depth in quality in a given league.

The two roles above are just our initial ideas. There are probably better metrics for measuring the same thing and we’re open to suggestions. The key is that it shouldn’t involve analysis; it should be quick and dirty and provide you with an instant gut reaction.

How would you measure the quality of a T20 league?

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A few years ago we hit on a characteristically half-arsed approach to covering the Boxing Day Tests. We flag what matches are taking place in advance, wish everyone a happy Festivus and then cross our fingers and hope that something passing for informative reportage materialises in the comments section.

It generally does.

So what are we looking at this year?

The Boxing Day Tests

• Bangladesh v India is actually already underway
• Australia v South Africa from 11.30pm Christmas Day (these are UK times)
• Pakistan v New Zealand from 5am Boxing Day

It looks like Bangladesh v India will probably be over by Boxing Day, but it’s still eligible for discussion on this page because we sure as Shiv ain’t going to write any more articles in the coming days.

The game at the MCG will be an interesting one because the first Test was an absolute shoot-out, Australia romping to their fourth innings target of 35 for the loss of only four wickets. Their first innings 218 was by the far the biggest innings of the match.

Pakistan v New Zealand we don’t really know what to make of. The home team have just lost 3-0 to England, but that didn’t seem normal and they mostly played well. New Zealand, meanwhile, have a new Test captain, Tim Southee, who will be without two of his main seamers, Trent Boult (didn’t want to tour) and Kyle Jamieson (injured). Ajaz Patel – who’s bowled all of two overs since the Test against India when he took all 10 wickest in an innings – will presumably get through a bit more bowling.

Happy Festivus everybody. Don’t hold back during The Airing of Grievances.

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We’ve always disliked net run rate. Until now.

Let’s first start with an explanation of the concept of net run rate, which should also double as an explanation of why we’ve always hated it.

Net run rate is the average runs per over that a team scores, minus the average runs per over that the opposition scores.

That is a pretty horrible metric – the product of two already pretty messy numbers. It’s clumsy and cumbersome and unintuitive. You end up with positive numbers and negative ones and the digits that matter are quite often those after the decimal point, which isn’t very satisfactory at all.

But then earlier today, we made a discovery that changed our thinking about net run rate COMPLETELY.

Our discovery was this: the abbreviation of net run rate, NRR, can be pronounced as a word and doing that is pretty annoying.

Long-term readers will be aware that we rather pride ourself on our ability to be annoying. Saying ‘nrr’ instead of ‘net run rate’ is so wilfully unnecessary and stupid that it can’t help but be completely irritating to anyone who hears it.

Come on, say it with us. Really draw it out. Nrrrrrrrr.

That we have discovered this brand new avenue of annoyance during this year’s Net Run Rate Season only makes this better.

We’re feeling positively energised at the mere thought of all the confusingly deployed nrrs we’re going to be able to drop into conversation in the coming days.

Stay abreast of all the latest slog and nrr developments at the T20 World Cup with the King Cricket email.