The England men’s team are about to play the fourth Test against India, with Dom Bess apparently set to get another game. Meanwhile the England women’s team have started beating New Zealand in a new format, while Afghanistan and Zimbabwe are trying to get in on the current trend for free-to-air two-day Test matches.

Not even second-Bess

It looks like Dom Bess is going to play in the fourth Test. It’s worth taking a moment to take stock of his situation because it’s hard to keep track of these things at the minute.

Bess played the two Tests in Sri Lanka and took a highly terrible five-for. Then he played the first Test against India. Then he was dropped.

That last word is very important because while there’s been a lot of England team churn this winter, there have been precious few out-and-out droppings. (Maybe they need more fibre.)

It feels like there have been at least three changes for every Test, but if you look back, most players have been coming and going due to scheduled rest periods.

Ben Stokes, Jofra Archer and Rory Burns all sat out the Sri Lanka series, then Jonny Bairstow, Mark Wood and Sam Curran went home afterwards. Jos Buttler was due a break after the first Test against India and then Moeen Ali had one scheduled for after the second.

The Moeen departure was the confusing one for people because he’d only just come back into the team. He’d come back into the team because Dom Bess had been dropped.

The Somerset man has essentially moved one step down the pecking order to third-choice spinner. However, thanks to rotation and a desire to pick two spinners for this third Test, this position is now within the first XI.

Technically Bess is a stand-in for Moeen – although if he waltzes in and takes a stack of wickets, that could result in a leapfrogging. That would seem harsh on Moeen, but the all-rounder would maybe just have to accept that both men have been on the margins of late and that the balance was there to be tipped.

New Zealand tourism

There are surely worse situations in which to find yourself at the minute than playing cricket in New Zealand – particularly if you’re England.

The tourists won the one-day series 2-1, in large part thanks to Tammy Beaumont, who made 71 in the first match and improved from there, following up with 72 not out and 88 not out.

Beaumont averages 45.13 in the middle format, which is double what she averages in the other two. We always find it weird when it breaks down like that for a player. It feels more normal to skew towards one extreme or the other.

The first of three T20 internationals was last night and England won that one too after bowling New Zealand out for 96.

The second game’s on Friday with the last hour unhelpfully clashing with the closing stages of the men’s Test match at the start of day two.

Zimbabwe’s Sean Williams hit a very big hundred

You may well not realise this but all of Afghanistan and Zimbabwe’s matches are now being broadcast on free-to-air TV in the UK.

They’re being shown on FreeSports, which is a channel we’d never previously heard of, but which it turns out does actually exist and which you do almost certainly also have access to.

You can find it on Freeview (channel 64), Sky (422), Virgin TV (553), BT/TalkTalk (64) and also online through the FreeSports Player.

Afghanistan v Zimbabwe may not be the biggest draw, but bear it in mind later in the year. There’s a Zimbabwe v Pakistan Test series scheduled in April, for example, while Afghanistan are due to play a tri-series against Australia and the West Indies in October.

As for this Test, at the time of writing, Afghanistan are 21-4… no, wait… 21-5 in their second innings and positively careering towards an innings defeat after only mustering 131 in their first innings.

The only batsman to pass 50 in the match has been Zimbabwe captain Sean Williams, who made 105.

105 would not ordinarily be considered a big hundred, but the way this one’s towering over the game, we can probably recalibrate.

Procrastinating? Good on you. Go and read some of our features. That’s mostly what the Patreon money goes towards.

Big thanks to everyone who funds the site through our Patreon campaign. We couldn’t justify spending this much time on a King Cricket article without you.

Remember 1996? Things were very different in 1996.

Back in 1996 Leonardo Dicaprio from The Revenant and Claire Danes from Homeland seemed like a perfectly reasonable Romeo and Juliet. Back in 1996 Babylon Zoo could get to number one before anyone realised that the catchy speeded-up bit we all knew from the Levi’s ad only lasted a few seconds. Back in 1996, a “number one” was a meaningful thing. 

Look at some of the other artists who had number ones in 1996 (Oasis, Take That, The Prodigy, The Fugees, Baddiel and Skinner and the Lightning Seeds, The Spice Girls, The Chemical Brothers, Robson and Jerome) and there’s a strong case for saying that musically-speaking, 1996 was the most 1990s year of all.

Cinematically, that title goes to 1997, which brought us Con Air and Face/Off inside a month. Con Air and Face/Off in the same month! And Nicolas Cage was in both of them! That has to be the absolute epicentre of 1990s cinema.

So things were different in 96/97 and this included the England cricket team. The England cricket team was very different indeed. For one thing there were no central contracts and everything was a bit more slapdash as a consequence. Not entirely unconnected from that, the media-trained modern professional had yet to be invented. 

With one significant exception, the men who toured Zimbabwe for England in 1996 and 1997 were basically a bunch of oddballs and misanthropes. For the purposes of this article, we’re calling them the Awkwardest Squad. It’s rhetoric, but what we’re going to do a little further down is we’re going to take a quick look at every single person in that squad to see why we can even float that label out there as a possibility.

That one significant exception though? That one significant exception is how this article came about.

How this article came about

You may remember a few weeks ago that Chris Silverwood was named as England’s new head coach. Shortly afterwards, King Cricket reader D Charlton got in touch to tell us that Silverwood was a very agreeable bloke.

A lot of people say this about Silverwood, but D Charlton appeared to be speaking with a degree of certainty, so we asked him how he knew. Turns out D Charlton was a net bowler on the 1996 tour of Zimbabwe.

As the conversation progressed, we realised that Silverwood’s personable nature had been thrown into greater clarity by the demeanour of his team-mates. We then found the squad and realised that everyone else was really awkward and the whole thing was incredibly 90s and so we decided to do a big thing about it.

A bit of background

The 1996 tour of Zimbabwe was England’s first senior tour of the country. The Wisden Cricketer reported that the England management fell out with the players, “almost as soon as they touched down in Harare,” in large part because they didn’t allow the wives and girlfriends to visit. (During the first Test, the players had a meeting about whether or not to go home for a week.)

TWC also said that the tourists’ approach to the trip was regarded as, “at best aloof and at worst downright rude.” England had been the only country to vote against Zimbabwe gaining full Test status and that, plus broader ‘history’, made it all a bit awks.

To make matters even less stable, David Lloyd was the coach. The first Test was the first in history to finish a draw with the scores level. England needed three runs to win off the final ball, but Nick Knight was run out going for the third.

“We flippin’ murdered ‘em,” claimed Lloyd afterwards and Lord MacLaurin, the new ECB chairman, flew to Zimbabwe to tell him off.

The tour manager was John Barclay, who D Charlton describes as having been, “Quietly classist, displaying a soft, casual, lack of respect for locals.”

The net bowler

D Charlton was with the squad leading up to that first Test in Bulawayo. He’d been in Zimbabwe on his own, following the cricket (England lost quite a few matches on this tour) when a family friend put him in touch with Mark Nicholas, who was Sky’s anchor at the time.

Nicholas introduced him to David Lloyd and 19-year-old D Charlton, on his first trip abroad, became an England net bowler.

“I was an okay youth county batsman and a makeshift seam bowler,” he said. “I’ve always been able to bowl straight and not slow – certainly not quick, but not slow either. I would love to face me because I’m the perfect pace. This makes me a solid net bowler – just right for getting your eye in.”

Lloyd threw D Charlton some balls and some Tetley Bitter branded tracksuit bottoms. D Charlton also vaguely remembers Chris Silverwood giving him one of his tops, “which may or may not be true but that’s the sort of thing he’d have done.”

Nicholas gave him his press pass. “It was a printed out photocopy, which meant I was able to blag my way into the ground – into anywhere, really – for the rest of the tour. He knew that security wasn’t exactly in existence. He also gave me feedback on my bowling: ‘Atherton said you were a good pace for practice.’”

Between practice sessions, he says he, “hung around the boundary awkwardly, out of place, surrounded by The Misanthropes. I chatted to a load of the Zim players who were, predictably, very friendly.

“I jiggered my back bowling. Then, when we got to Harare, I was too nervous to force the issue and do more net bowling: hanging out with the Barmy Army in backpackers’ lodges was way more fun. And that was it.”

This was the early days of the Barmy Army. They sang: “We’re fat, we’re round, this only cost a pound – Inngerrrland, Ingerrrland,” in reference to a pack of six beers. The song seems brutal with hindsight when you consider that Zimbabwe suffered crippling hyper-inflation two years’ later.

Another marvellous song/chant D Charlton recalls was, “Ronnie Irani – In Harare.”

“It went on and on and on. Forever. And whenever I see his name, all I can think of is “Ronnie Irani … in Harare.”

The squad

If we’re arguing that this was peak 90s, you’ll no doubt take issue with the absence of Graeme Hick and Mark Ramprakash. We’ll counter-argue that the whole point of the 90s was that these batsmen were in and out of the side, so it’s every bit as 90s that they weren’t there.

Hick was actually omitted for the first time since becoming eligible to play for England, which must have been especially galling as he was from Zimbabwe. Wikipedia notes that he went over at the same time as part of Worcestershire’s tour and took six wickets in a match against a Matabeleland Invitation XI.

Here’s the Awkwardest Squad.

David Lloyd (coach)

The whole ‘Bumble’ schtick isn’t entirely an act. Lloyd is a passionate and very slightly unhinged man. Recalling the atmosphere leading up to the Test, D Charlton says: “Calm and reserved it was not.”

Mike Atherton (captain)

Didn’t always seem to be in the best of spirits when playing the game. Once broke his own toe kicking a set of scales in the dressing room.

According to D Charlton: “He was called Captain Grumpy by all Zimbabweans and he went out of his way not to disabuse them of this notion. He was in a tour-long sulk.”

Nasser Hussain

This tour was well before the redemption of captaincy made Nasser many England fans’ Favourite Person Ever. D Charlton reckons he batted for his average in the first one-day international. He made 49 not out off 87 balls. England lost.

Hussain’s fiery temper is legendary. Angus Fraser remembers one occasion when he put his fist through a wooden locker. “The wooden slats had pinched around his wrist forming a vice-like grip. It was like a venus fly trap with all the sharp bits pointing in.”

Alec Stewart

A man who said the best thing about scoring a hundred in his hundredth Test was that he did it on the Queen Mother’s birthday. In other words, Alec Stewart is a massive weirdo.

According to D Charlton: “The consummate professional – as in the real sense of professional: out there to make money. Stewart cared about his bank balance more than anything else.”

Graham Thorpe

One way or another, cricket tours didn’t always agree with Thorpe. He was, in many ways, born 20 years too early.

In Zimbabwe, D Charlton felt he was already battling with mental demons.

John Crawley

After our two conspicuous absentees, Crawley was arguably the third Great Unfulfilled Talent from the 1990s. “The stress to fulfil that talent was hurting him in Zimbabwe,” says D Charlton.

Nick Knight

Knight is best known these days as a weirdly earnest commentator and pundit. His trademark line is the drawn-out, bet-hedging, “Should be four… is four.” (Also, ‘Should be out… is out.’)

“Posh lad surrounded by not posh lads, and he knew it,” says D Charlton. “Greeted me with a wink and ‘ah, from the same stable’. (Yes, I’m a public school boy.)”

Ronnie Irani

Not a posh lad. D Charlton says he tried to make up for a lack of ability with being ‘up for it’.

Here are some reviews of Ronnie Irani’s autobiography.

Jack Russell

Didn’t play and spent the entire tour painting. “I saw him in Bulawayo doing a landscape,” says D Charlton.

Russell used to drive between county games clad in a sleeping bag with the bottom cut out. Although he drank up to 20 cups of tea a day, he would use one tea bag per Test match, hanging it on a nail to dry out between dunkings. He once spent every night of the Perth Test at the same Chinese restaurant, ordering cashew chicken without the cashews.

Dominic Cork

Cork actually pulled out of the trip due to personal reasons, but would surely have added to the ambience one way or another.

Robert Croft

“I genuinely remember him demanding England be called ‘England and Wales’ as he led the Barmy Army in song in a bar Harare,” says D Charlton (although he concedes that this is actually a fair call).

Darren Gough

In a half-hearted bid to quickly sum up Gough, we’re going to call him ‘bullish’ and then we’re also going to link to this clip from Hole In The Wall.

“I bowled him a yorker,” says D Charlton. “He dug it out and said well bowled. He seemed more interested in batting practice than bowling.”

Andy Caddick

Caddick was sometimes magnificent, sometimes innocuous, and always a bit of an awkward oddball.

He was a DIY expert who actually took tools away with him and learned to fly helicopters during his playing career. At the age of 39, he railed against the selectors for not picking him. “I can still do a damned sight better job than some of those idiots who are playing for England at the moment,” he said.

D Charlton recalls: “He was in pea-shooter mode, not Paris Gun because of the extreme management strategy of Bumble and support staff. Ian Botham having an official role as ‘bowling mentor’ and ‘motivator’ didn’t help.”

Phil Tufnell

We don’t really need to tell you about Phil Tufnell, do we? Question of Sport, Strictly Come Dancing, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here; nicknamed ‘The Cat’ because he slept in the dressing room all the time; terrible fielder, terrified batsman; “Oi, Tufnell. Lend us your brain, we’re building an idiot.”

D Charlton says: “He was my one ‘international’ wicket in the nets. I clean bowled him and he turned round and wiped out the remaining stumps in anger.”

Alan Mullally

An erratic, laid-back goofball of a man, Emma John described interviewing Mullally as being, “like trying to listen to a Sigur Ros album on shuffle.”

Since retirement, Mullally has lost a lot of money, suffered depression and been charged with drink-driving a bunch of times. He once stuck a 100kg dead shark in Mike Atherton’s bed.

D Charlton says in Zimbabwe he took part in middle practice with such little interest that he had his headphones in as he bowled. “I still can’t work out how as this was pre-iPods.”

Chris Silverwood

“Cracking lad,” recalls D Charlton. “Really friendly to a new face in the dressing room. He really didn’t have to be, but was just a nice, normal dude. He had a great bowling action too.”

What happened next?

The second and final Test match was a rain-affected draw, so the series ended 0-0.

Zimbabwe won all three one-dayers.

First published in November 2019.

Further reading: The 1990s-est England Test XI – a team that couldn’t be more Nineties if it tried

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< 1 minute readIs MS Dhoni’s arm made out of just one super fast-growing bone? We’re imagining an ever-extending protuberance that requires regular pruning based on the following from Cricinfo:

“On the eve of the meeting, a BCCI insider revealed that Dhoni was recovering from a “right forearm” injury. By the time the selectors finished the meeting, an aide close to Dhoni said it was a “wrist” injury. Two hours later, BCCI secretary Sanjay Patel told reporters that Dhoni had been advised rest after hurting his “right thumb”.”

Dhoni was apparently carrying the injury during the aborted series against the West Indies when it was presumably some sort of shoulder problem.

Bangladesh batsmen

In Chittagong, something very unusual is happening. Bangladesh are making a dominant start to a Test match. They’ve already won the first two Tests against Zimbabwe and appear to have drawn some confidence from this. At the time of writing, they were 213-0 and both Tamim Iqbal and Imrul Kayes had made hundreds.

We were going to bring you some exciting statistics about Bangladesh partnerships like a proper media outlet, but Statsguru isn’t working so we’ve quickly lost interest. Someone put something in the comments. Make it up if you want.

Battery

Pakistan are still battering New Zealand. It’s odd how each of their recent Tests appear to have taken place on two different pitches. You’d think the opposition would object to having to bat on a pitted minefield when Pakistan do all their run-scoring on a complete featherbed.

< 1 minute readFaith is what you need when you don’t have facts. More accurately, faith is what you resort to when you don’t have facts – ‘need’ isn’t the right word. Faith is a way of sticking your head in the sand and even when you’re looking for something at the beach, that’s rarely a productive pastime.

The pertinent fact regarding Bangladesh is this: most of their players are 24. This explains their miss-and-hit-and-miss Test efforts to some degree, but it increasingly seems to us that not a year goes by without all of their ages going up. Not one year. Not one, single year.

We’ll never resort to faith when backing Bangladesh, which is why we’ve wavered a bit after they lost a Test match to Zimbabwe. The 4-0 one-day series win over New Zealand is still fresh enough in our mind that we’ll forgive them this blemish, but it would be good if they could help their own cause a little more.

Sometimes it feels like being a real die-hard fan of a band who you always thought had a lot of promise. You keep going to the gigs, you convince yourself there’s still a spark, but eventually you find yourself in Fibbers in York and there’s nine people in the audience.

As you’re walking into the toilet before the band have gone on, the lead singer walks out and says: “You’re not going for a shit are you mate? Only I’ve pissed all over the seat.”

It is at that moment that you finally accept that the promise was only ever a fleeting illusion.

< 1 minute readCricinfo have a headline describing Zimbabwe as ‘woeful’ after they were bowled out for 162 by New Zealand. However, Bangladesh were bowled out for 58 against West Indies. And they were at home.

Cricinfo’s editorial staff really need to get together and establish an adjective hierarchy. Like most people, we rate all events that happen in our life according to the Premier Manager II scale, which runs as follows:

• Fair (one to five stars)
• Good (one to five stars)
• Very Good (one to five stars)
• Superb
• Outstanding
• World Class
• Exceptional
• The Ultimate

But as you can see, there are obvious flaws in this system. We can go out and have a great meal, musing over our brandy whether it was ‘world class’ or ‘exceptional’, but what if we contract dysentry and the waiter punches us in the kidney? ‘Fair *’ seems rather generous in that situation.

We need an improved scale for evaluating poor performance and if Premier Manager II lets you down, where do you turn?

Maybe people could turn to the comments section of a post on kingcricket.co.uk…

< 1 minute read

We know you don’t like it when we don’t have an opinion on something. It’s not that we’re fence-sitting, it’s that in reality we don’t have all that many opinions.

We wander through life indecisive and directionless and we’ve done that since before we went to school. Opinions occasionally find us and those ones usually stick around. When we have to force out an opinion manually – like what we want to be when we grow up, for example – it’s really nothing more than an act.

Sometimes on this website we’re obliged to take up an official editorial stance. It takes it out of us. Sometimes we’ve just nothing inside on which to draw. Zimbabwe beat India in a 50-over match for the second game running today. How do we feel about that?

We want India to win Tests and we want them to lose Twenty20s. We’re sure about that. What about 50-over matches? Are Zimbabwe plucky underdogs, or are they, you know, Zimbabwe?

We’re led to believe that many people form opinions through reading and thinking about stuff, but it’s never helped us.

We’re going to the pub for lunch tomorrow. There’s absolutely no chance we’ll be able to decide what to eat. Any suggestions?

< 1 minute readWe’ve never seen Vusi Sibanda before today. It’s good to see a four-eyed cricketer do well.

‘LASIK surgery? LASIK surgery THIS!’ he seemed to say, as he deadbatted another full ball. It was pretty plodding as one-day innings go, but if you’re Zimbabwe, you make your plans and you stick to them and that’s presumably what happened here.

The West Indies have one of the finest one-day batsmen in the world in Chris Gayle and one of the finest batsmen of the last decade or so in Shivnarine Chanderpaul. Zimbabwe have Tatenda Taibu, who’s actually very good and Ray Price, who’s very, er, effective, but they don’t have much else. Where’s Charles Coventry these days?

Yet Zimbabwe won. Again.

Sibanda’s dismissal was weird. Everyone knows that cricket bats are flimsy these days – like spells of happiness, they’re not meant to last – but even so, we can’t remember one snapping right across the middle before.

Kemar Roach bowled a quick yorker and suddenly Sibanda’s bat became two bats, dividing horizontally, right across the blade.

< 1 minute readZimbabwe’s Charles Coventry hit 194 not out against Bangladesh. Zimbabwe lost. This equals the world record individual one-day international score. How do we all feel about that?

The original 194 not out was scored by Saeed Anwar against India 12 years ago. Even in these days of tree-sized bats and four yard boundaries, Anwar’s score has still never been bettered. Does Coventry’s knock warrant equal billing though? It pushes Viv Richards and Sanath Jayasuriya down a spot in the list of top ODI scores.

It’s common for people to effectively disregard Test scores against Bangladesh, but how do you feel about ODI records? Do they count? And does it even matter? Is the game played to establish a list of records or is it played against eleven opponents for victory in that particular match?

We haven’t seen him bat, but we’re fairly certain that Charles Coventry is a worse batsman than Viv Richards and this record in no way disproves that.

2 minute readDo you want the better batsman or the better wicketkeeper behind the stumps for your team? That argument’s been represented by any number of individual duels over the years. Recently though, we think you’ll all agree that the better batsman’s been winning out, in general.

Blame Adam Gilchrist. He’s a great wicketkeeper, but his batting’s so spectacular it easily overshadows that fact. International sides want wicketkeepers who average 50 now, let alone 40. They’ll never get it because Gilchrist’s a one-off, but it won’t stop them trying.

But there might be some hope for the thoroughbred stumpers. Might Twenty20, that impure bastard version of the game, bring wicketkeeping skills to the fore once more?

Here’s our rationale – obliterate it in the comments with your usual gusto. How many batsmen do you need in Twenty20 cricket? How many do you really, really need? We reckon five – five specialists at any rate.

Presumably at least one of your five bowlers won’t be Tufnell-esque and presumably any eligible keepers are at least half-competent with the bat. If you’re serious about winning, then you don’t really want to be losing more than five wickets in 20 overs. Things aren’t going your way if that happens.

So you can fairly happily pick your best keeper. And you know what – there’s an added incentive.

In Twenty20 cricket, with scoring being so low and tight, batsmen get cheeky. It’s not totally unknown for them to take a run off a ball which goes straight through to the keeper. They like to jump around as well to disrupt the bowler’s line and length, coming down the pitch or batting out of their crease.

So wouldn’t it help if you had a keeper who was good enough to stand up to the stumps to fast-medium bowlers? No cheeky byes. No batting out of the crease. The wicketkeeper’s having a real impact there.

Twenty20: saviour of the wicketkeeping tradition. There’d be a touch of irony in that.

2 minute readZimbabwe have beaten the West Indies. As the result loomed, we were asked whether we were going to paint it as a Zimbabwean improvement or ‘the usual’. ‘The usual’ is of course when we say that if you so much as lose a wicket against Zimbabwe, you’re the worst cricketers to represent your nation.

Well, we’ve had a little look back over Zimbabwe’s recent record and we’re going to revise our stance ever-so-slightly. Zimbabwe are still more embarrassing than that home video of you trying to look cool at a classmate’s tenth birthday party, but they have improved. Slightly.

They beat Australia in the Twenty20 World Cup and you can’t really fluke a victory against Australia in any form of the game, no matter what Twenty20-haters might say. Also, in a recent series against South Africa, they consistently passed 200, even though they lost every match.

Passing 200 doesn’t sound like much of an achievement, but you forget who we’re talking about. This is Zimbabwe, the team that conceded 418-5 in a one-day match against South Africa; the team that against today’s opponents this time last year, were bowled out for 85; this is the team that were dismissed for 69 of the most redundant runs in cricket history against the towering might of Kenya.

As for the West Indies, it’ll come as no surprise to hear that the bowlers sprayed it every which way and that Shivnarine Chanderpaul hit an unbeaten hundred in defeat. People said that the Windies lost a lot when Lara retired, but what the hell are they going to do when Shiv goes? Shivnarine Chanderpaul is The Balls.

Good links in this post. Saying Zimbabwe are toss brings out the best in us.