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Earlier this year, Keaton Jennings failed to catch Virat Kohli and it was one of the greatest misses we’ve ever seen. Today he failed to catch Dimuth Karunaratne and it was also of the greatest misses we’ve ever seen but in a wholly different way.
Here’s how it played out.
Step one: Keaton Jennings sets off to try and take a chance that doesn’t yet exist
Step two: The chance becomes an actual thing that exists in reality and Keaton Jennings tries to snaffle it
Step three: Keaton Jennings fails to snaffle it. The ball hits his hand so hard it actually bounces off towards Ben Foakes
Step four: Ben Foakes snaffles it
Step five: Keaton Jennings justifiably raises his pan-hands to the skies to celebrate creating a wicket out of nowhere like some kind of all-seeing short-leg deity
Shades of Gower and Gatting* there. Only completely different.
*English fielders from the 80s may differ.
Shades of Tavare and Miller https://youtu.be/gWwpvWVRS8U
I have so very thoroughly enjoyed following this test match.
Perhaps that is down to the fortuitous timing enabling me to follow much of it – I tend to rise early at the best of times…so soon after our return from Japan makes 4:15/4:30 starts seem a doddle, yet I have few early morning work commitments these days.
Perhaps my enjoyment is because of England’s success and/or because this Kandy match was a well-contested one on a good pitch – i.e. a pitch on which 250-350 seemed about par and which did not seem to have the match determined by the toss of a coin.
But I will remember the match for a few big moments:
* Stokes’s superbly executed run-out;
* Joe Root’s majestic ton;
* Keaton Jennings’s wonderful catch at short leg and then the “assist” described in the KC piece above.
But what was Jennings doing, on interview at the close of play, beaming away, admitting that the assist was, in reality, a missed catch that went fortuitously to the keeper?
In this era of commercialism and fake news, surely Jennings should have simply nodded sagely and mumbled generically about “lots of hard work in practice” and “IPL levels of fielding”?
Joking apart, it was refreshing to see Jennings’s beaming face on camera, simply telling it like it was.
KJ seems like a decent chap. Self-effacing.
Does everybody else’s KC page make you click ‘continue’ below the picture to allow you to read the text? Rather than previously only having to click in if you want to read the comments. I feel a little how i did everytime Cricinfo changes its layout…
If this is a design change yer maj, i’d rather it the old way as that extra click can actually mean i don’t read something when previously i did. Particularly if kids hanging off me etc.
ps i realise that the Kingdom is not here just to be reactive to my needs and wants – if so we’d have far more Rob Key articles, cats etc – however interested to see if this is my browser or a design change and if so to give a little feedback! Cheers
It’s a deliberate change. Occasional visitors and those who haven’t visited before can now see more article headlines more quickly when they view the homepage. It means you can scan through the last week to see whether you’ve missed anything.
All design changes are trade-offs but the signs are that people are, in general, spending longer on the site, which is the aim.
Thanks KC – i will adjust no doubt!
Neil Wagner alert in the Pak/NZ game. Cracking finish.
This is tremendous Pakistannery here. Good few games for Test cricket in general.
Wow, a collapse of some sort in every innings! Top stuff.
I concur with Balladeer – Pakistannery of the highest order, but winning the match anyway after that collapse would probably have been even Pakistannier
User feedback to be included in your product backlog:
Once in the post can there be a link to the next/previous post so that we dont have to go back to the home page before going to the next post?
and maybe a delete/edit comment because you realise the thing that you wanted was there all along.
We’re all guilty of it. We literally typed out a reply to your first comment having read but somehow not absorbed your second. Does highlight the problem of trying to make *everything* prominent though.
We figure that for the individual posts, people mostly just want to read the content, whereas a large proportion of people are merely scanning the homepage – hence the change. Ideally, we’d have done a tiled thing to get more stories ‘above the fold’ but life’s too short and we probably don’t write enough to justify that anyway.
Can I mention top trumps? If you are judging on hours spent on this site, that was a good one…
Ajaz Patel is presumably now an enemy of the kingdom, having snatched a wicket that was rightfully TGNW’s, thus selfishly robbing him of his three-fer for a poxy five-wicket haul on debut.