Our loosely-held editorial guideline of “no-one cares what you think” isn’t necessarily one that drives productivity at what is, fundamentally, an opinion website. It means there’s a whole bunch of recent news stories we haven’t covered because no-one cares what we think.

The County Championship

Let’s start with the latest round of Championship fixtures, because four-day first-class cricket lends itself to easing into things.

There was only one win in the first division last week and even that featured its fair share of runs, Somerset racking up (high scores are always ‘racked up’) 591-7 before Jack Leach took eight wickets to secure an innings victory.

It was a similar story in the second division where Durham took the only win, thanks to another 11 wickets from Matthew Potts. An England Test debut was already being floated for Potts before the match, so that’s starting to seem like a thing that will probably happen.

After a winter of moaning about April pitches, run-scoring has been almost comically heavy so far this year. Is it pitches though? Presumably at least a little, but when high scores are common pretty much everywhere in the country, we suspect it has more to do with this season’s batch of balls. Not that you care what we think.

Update: Sounds like there have been some complaints about the balls. Also sounds like Durham may have some assertive captaincy from Scott Borthwick to thank for last week’s win – at least partly.

RIP Andrew Symonds

Depending on which route you’ve taken into the site today, you may already have read our piece on Andrew Symonds. Here’s a link if you haven’t. It features a reference to the time Symonds called Brendon McCullum “a piece of shit” which takes us neatly onto…

England’s new Test coach

This really is one of those where we have very little to contribute – although you might want to revisit our review of Episode 1 of This Could Go Anywhere, which isn’t especially featuring in other people’s coverage of England’s latest hire.

We’re broadly in favour of Brendon McCullum’s appointment. There’s been talk of him lacking qualifications and experience, but how many people have been in charge of an ailing Test team and completely turned it around? Not many. That seems a pretty good qualification and pretty relevant experience to us.

We get where people are coming from and why some might feel a bit put-out that someone can so easily bypass all the coaching badges they’re working so hard to attain, but we kind of see international cricket like writing. There are certainly useful skills you can acquire, but there’s also a sort of innate understanding of how it works that can’t really be taught.

Brendon McCullum made international cricket slightly better during his playing career. We think that should earn him a shot at doing the same as England’s Test coach.

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Three things, okay?

Thing 1

Just as with Botham’s Ashes, the 2021 Moose Cup Powered by Daraz seems destined to be forever remembered as Root’s Moose Cup Powered by Daraz.

In the first Test, Sri Lanka made 135 and then Joe Root made 228. In the second Test, Root made 186 before Sri Lanka made 126. England’s bowling was effective, but the captain made the runs.

There were other noteworthy performances though and it would be remiss of us not to mention Lasith Embuldeniya who appears to have filled a vacancy.

Sri Lanka generally like to have one guy who’s going to bowl somewhere near half their overs. Murali is the obvious example and then there was Rangana Herath. Now it looks like it might be Embuldeniya.

Embuldeniya took 15 wickets at 27.66 in the series. Sri Lanka’s second most effective bowler was Dilruwan Perera, who took five wickets and then Asitha Fernando, who took two.

In contrast, England had seven wicket-takers. Joe Root took the fewest – also with two.

Thing 2

We’ve always been a big fan of vague yet slightly misleading descriptions of size.

A lot of people get annoyed about “fun size” Mars Bars, moaning that there’s nothing fun about them being smaller. However, the flip side of using terms like “fun-size” to mask inadequacy is that we also get crisps in a “grab bag” which is a magnificently evasive way of saying “geared towards the fat bastard”.

And so to “bite-size” highlights.

If you’re fairly-but-not-massively interested in the Pakistan v South Africa Test series, you may be pleased to hear that Sky Sports are uploading free “bite-size” highlights packages to their YouTube channel after each day’s play.

The day one video is about 11 minutes long and they cram more in than you perhaps think.

Thing 3

After much dicking about last week, we have finally concluded that we don’t actually know how to repost an updated version of an older article so that it goes out in our daily email (despite the fact we do it by accident all the time).

So let us instead tell you here within this shiny new article that the fourth episode of The Ridiculous Ashes Podcast is now available to listen to. You can find all four episodes – all of which focus on the 1997 Ashes – on this page.

The fourth Test is one of the better episodes – our co-presenter Dan Liebke says it’s his favourite so far.

There’s a big philosophical question in this week’s episode: At what point do you become a one cap wonder?

It also features pantomime cow hostility, Australian street hustles and an explanation of how Curtly Ambrose could have been one of Test cricket’s greatest batsmen.

No amount of mopping-up would have been sufficient to ensure the T20 World Cup semi-final between England and India would have taken place. With no reserve day, India went through to the final because they came top in the group stage.

Harmanpreet Kaur reckoned India had taken the rules into account from the outset.

“We knew from day one when we were going to start this tournament that we would have to win all the games, because if we don’t get a match because of any condition, then whoever is at the top in the league, that team is going to play the final.”

We’re a bit dubious of this claim. The long and short of it is that every team was going out to win every game. Why would they have checked the rules at the start and gone, “Oh wow, we’d better really try and win every match in case it rains in a fortnight’s time”?

Heather Knight said England hadn’t paid attention to the rule in advance. “We plan to try and win every game that we can,” she said.

So basically England approached their games in exactly the same way as India but won fewer of them and aren’t in the final.

The redesign

We got really irritated with how this site was presenting images after a recent software update. We couldn’t fix the problem so we’ve instead gone for a complete redesign. This is a little like buying a new house because the front door hinges are squeaky.

There was a bunch of other stuff we wanted to tweak anyway – chiefly making the Patreon-funded features a little more prominent. We’re trialling this look for a few days. Please let us know if there are any issues (or if there’s anything you actively like).

How should you let us know?

We realised earlier this week that we haven’t been getting all our emails. It’s only a forwarding issue, so they’ve all been received, but if you’ve sent something and we haven’t responded, this is probably why. We’ll try and get to them all eventually, but obviously there’s a backlog.

We’re slowly working to sort things out and nothing’s lost. Soz though.

< 1 minute readFor a good long while you could accurately gauge Sri Lanka’s score by whether or not Angelo Mathews was walking out to bat or not. If he was, they were 22-3. If he wasn’t, it was some other score.

A couple of recent batting finds had encouraged the notion that Mathews would no longer be obliged to be his team’s Shivnarine Chanderpaul as well as serving as captain and doing a load of bowling. This optimism may be unfounded, for against South Africa it has been business as usual.

Mathews appears to be back to leading by example regardless of whether or not anyone shows the faintest interest in following. It is at least very thoughtful of the rest of the cricket world to limit his workload by refusing to schedule many matches against his team.

Down in Melbourne, Pakistan are still batting and no-one really knows what it means because it’s still the first innings. Whether theirs proves to be a good team score or not, Azhar Ali’s unhurried rise continues.

< 1 minute read

Okay, first up, our Twitter round-up. Yep, still doing it, so have a read. Nasser Hussain’s in it and there are two absolutely blinding selfies from opposite ends of the selfie-taking spectrum. We still can’t decide which of the two is our favourite.

Second on the order of business, Cricket Badger. A couple of weeks ago, we failed to gain subscribers compared to the previous week and that makes us livid, so either sign-up or tell someone else to. This will not stand.

Finally, Steve Smith scored a hundred today which means everyone forgets where we were yesterday and says that he’s clearly the best player in the world, just ahead of Virat Kohli and Joe Root, who are in turn ahead of Kane Williamson on the grounds that they played more recently.

What no-one seems to care about is that all of these players are batsmen and therefore dull as shit. Oh for a fast bowler to undermine everyone’s pointless lust for a hierarchy.

2 minute readA bitter-sweet mop-up of the day today, like someone’s spilt a honey-and-lemon sore throat remedy.

Actually, maybe that’s sweet and sour.

A sour-sweet mop-up of the day today.

Sour

James Anderson is out of England’s tour of Bangladesh and probably won’t be back until halfway through the India tour. No non-international fixtures are scheduled for that trip, so it’s not easy to see how the management will be able to convince themselves he’s fit to play a Test. Squinting at him and crossing your fingers isn’t really acceptable these days.

They’ll probably find a match for him somewhere or other, but a greater concern is the frequency with which he’s missing matches at the minute.

Anderson’s never been an injury-prone Mark Wood type (Wood will also miss the Bangladesh tour), he’s always been pretty resilient.

It’s quite obviously the beginning of the end, but hopefully, like in the Lord of the Rings, the end will go on for bloody ages.

Sweet

Nabi! Love Nabi.

Mohammad Nabi took 2-16 off ten after opening the bowling against Bangladesh and he then made 49 as Afghanistan bobbled to the win. England can probably learn from this ahead of their tour. The main thing they should learn is that Nabi’s ace, although they should really have known this already.

We feel like the cricketers we particularly like need to be branded in some way. It’s awkward to say ‘cricketer who we’ve written about a handful of times and hold in high regard’. We thought we might instead start referring to them as ‘Cricketers of the Realm’.

We could call them knights, but cricketers are better than knights.

Savoury

The latest Cricket Badger’s out on Friday morning. It’s got Shoaib Akhtar in it.

Sign up here: sportsbadger.com

You’re really missing out if you don’t. Honestly. Even from an unbiased point of view.

< 1 minute readFirst to Kandy, where the five minutes when it was both dry and bright enough to play cricket saw Sri Lanka set Australia 268 to win.

David Warner’s recently-discovered inability to make runs outside Australia persisted as he was bowled for one, and the tourists also lost Joe Burns and Usman Khawaja before Steve Smith whinged about how dark it was and they went off.

Burns was dismissed by what must surely qualify as ‘a ripper‘ from Lakshan Sandakan whose debut brings not just smashing wrist spin but also a great many initials. Paththamperuma Arachchige Don Lakshan Rangika Sandakan matches even Chaminda Vaas for number of names, but alas he must bow to the eternal master when it comes to syllables. Don’t mess with the big boys.

Speaking of which…

Marlon Samuels has been saying things. It’s always worth listening to Marlon, because he’s hilarious.

The West Indies lost the first Test against India by an innings and Marlon refuses to say that it’s because they have a young team.

“For me to say that is like finding excuses for the team. It’s a Test team, and Test cricket is big-man cricket, and the players should know that by now.”

Big-man cricket.

Neil Wagner took six wickets

New Zealand are currently 235-2 against Zimbabwe which we take as proof that it is not just difficult to take wickets on this pitch, but near-enough impossible.

Laughing uproariously in the face of near-enough impossibility, The Great Neil Wagner took 6-41.  Four of his wickets came off moderate-paced short balls.

Neil Wagner is the most effective moderate-paced short-pitched bowler in the world. This also makes him the most miraculous bowler in the world.

You need a miracle – you call for Neil Wagner.

< 1 minute readBuoyed by a first innings display in which he took six for a million, Neil Wagner persisted with his innovative attritional shock tactics in the second. He took 1-60.

It’s worth noting that Wagner produced this display despite a broken hand. More accurately, he produced this display despite a broken bowling hand.

Neil Wagner.

Hello

To the new top-ranked Test side, Australia. It was a hugely impressive performance from them in New Zealand. The only reason we didn’t write about it was because we didn’t want to because we were supporting New Zealand.

Goodbye

We’ve just noticed that we started an article about Brendon McCullum at some point recently and it’s saved as a draft. Rather than writing anything about him here and now, we’ll investigate what we’ve already written and maybe try and get something up tomorrow (if we get time).

Odds are the draft article’s just a heading and nothing beyond that, but we live in hope.

Goodbye?

Some classic Pakistan retirement talk from Shahid Afridi this week. Our man’s previously said that he’s retiring after the World T20, but now he’s admitting to being under pressure from friends and family to stick around a while longer.

His reasoning’s magnificent.

“I am saying there is a lot of pressure on me that I shouldn’t retire from T20; that I can play on – and as there is no real talent coming through in Pakistan whose place I am taking?”

2 minute readAfter day-night Tests, the latest innovation in the ongoing Australia v New Zealand Test series has been additional opponents. Sri Lanka and the West Indies have been drafted in to keep things fresh, but they couldn’t tip the balance. Australia still had marginally the better day.

New Zealand would have felt confident of finishing the first day in the ascendancy after making 409-8. That is a lot of runs to make on any day of a Test match, let alone the first. However, Australia struck back with 438-3 and it’s hard to see how the Kiwis can haul things back from there.

AB de Villiers’ new hobby

Cricinfo reports that vehement letter-C denier, AB de Villiers, will ‘keep wickets’ for the first two Tests against England – although they do not specify how many. It is a little-known fact, but keeping and raising wickets is de Villiers’ new pastime. He says it helps him get away from the game and relax and he’s looking to become a professional breeder when he retires. De Villiers was of course a schoolboy wicket-breeding champion.

There are also rumours that as well as becoming a wicketskeeper, he might fill-in as wicketkeeper. This may seem a strange decision, but it could be a quota thing. Clearly, you always want at least one AB de Villiers in your side – that’s not the issue. It’s more that de Villiers’ selection as keeper may be a means of allowing other players to be picked.

It strikes us that Imran Tahir has been dropped and if Tahir is out, maybe someone else has to come in. Assuming the first-choice seam attack for the first two Tests will comprise Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel and Kyle Abbott, South Africa presumably need to bring in a batsman to ‘balance the side’.

Vernon Philander’s due to return for the third Test, incidentally.

< 1 minute readAustralia obliterated India, England battered the Windies and all for nought. World Cup pressure is not yet here and in fact probably won’t be here until the 18th of March when the quarter finals finally get underway.

Even so, these were striking results. England dismissed the Windies for 122 and then lost only one wicket in chasing that down. Australia made 371 with that wonderfully ludicrous man, Glenn Maxwell, making 122 off 57 balls.

Mohammad Hafeez is out of the World Cup

Told you he was worth watching. His departure gave rise to a great swathe of articles which can best be summed up as:

“Pakistan might replace Mohammad Hafeez with Saeed Ajmal now that the latter has been cleared to bowl again. Oh no, wait, they’ve replaced him with Nasir Jamshed. Well let’s do the Ajmal article anyway because it’s still possible that he might feature in the World Cup if someone else gets injured.”

This is poor journalism. The correct story to publish would of course be one entitled: “Pakistan’s toast is dry and the larder is empty. To the jam shed!”

Steve Harmison is the new manager of Ashington FC

Weird, but good luck to him.

Ashington play in the Northern League Division One. To put that into universally-understandable terms, that’s two leagues below Witton Albion.