3 minute read When England first played Ireland in a Test match four years ago, we had visions of it becoming an annual fixture with a slowly developing history. We’ve followed England cricket long enough to know there was pretty much zero chance that would happen, but the prospect has only seemed more
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2 minute read There’s a lot of joshing around. We’re now going to try and help you stay on top of it all. Tongue Josh Tongue will play for England against Ireland this week. ‘Tongue lashing’ headlines await (although we’ve been quite disappointed how infrequently he’s been described as ‘slippery’ as this does
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< 1 minute read England are winning a lot, Ireland are losing a lot and all the talk is about the Ashes. This is an absolutely nailed-on Ireland victory. You know it. Do you remember this situation last time around? In 2019, England thought they were warming up for the Ashes. Ireland, in contrast,
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2 minute read “It is tough and it’s only going to get tougher,” said Ireland captain Andrew Balbirnie after Sri Lanka won the first Test by an innings and 280 runs. That seemed a wildly inaccurate assessment at the time – and indeed so it has proven. Ireland conceded 591-6 in the first
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2 minute read ‘David Warner b Naveen-ul-Haq’ really doesn’t do it justice. You need to see it. Or at least have it described to you alongside a handful of stills. The switch hit is right up there with cricket’s most hubristic shots. It arguably even surpasses the quite-possibly-smashing-it-straight-into-your-own-face peacocking of the ramp shot.
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2 minute read A paean to pace, the pivot-pan and the perils of the pair of them today. If you’re unaware of the shot known as the pivot-pan, it’s probably because we only just labelled it. As you’ve no doubt guessed, the nomenclature in large part arose because we wanted to slot a
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< 1 minute read Imagine missing a World Cup because you literally didn’t manage to get on the plane in time. Imagine how you’d feel about that tournament. You could forgive Shimron Hetmyer for perhaps feeling a smidgeon of relief that Ireland absolutely battered the West Indies today, knocking them out of the tournament.
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2 minute read Given that modern media coverage of T20 cricket tends to revolve around intelligent and enlightening dissection of complex data, we figure there’s a niche for celebrating one of the format’s more straightforward features: the slog. We get very irritated when people dismiss T20 as “just slogging” because there are strategies,
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7 minute read Our main memory of the Netherlands’ win over England at the 2009 T20 World Cup is that the final over was utter madness. Let’s take a look back and see whether that was really the case. (Spoiler: It absolutely was.) 2009 is a funny old time when it comes to
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2 minute read Here’s an ostensibly exciting but actually very depressing thought: are we currently watching the greatest Afghanistan cricket team? If you enjoy hearing Alan Wilkins saying “goodness me, that’s gone a long way” then watch the highlights of Afghanistan’s innings against Scotland. There are some fairly amazing shots in there. It’s
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