‘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.

When you switch batting stance even before the bowler has bowled, what you’re saying is, “I think I am still way better than you even when I am batting wrong-handed.”

The fact that switching stance almost always precedes a ferocious wallop only magnifies that message. It was very entertaining therefore to see all of that implied strut drip away from David Warner in instalments.

Warner went for the switch hit against Afghanistan’s Naveen-ul-Haq today.

Just to underline that this was a premeditated thing…

Position A:

Position B:

Having made the decision to deploy the show-off heave, Warner got his bat right up in the air, ready to give it some humpty.

Unfortunately for Dave, the delivery turned out to be an unhumptiable off-cutter.

Recognising this, Warner had a rethink and instead selected the flat-footed prod as probably the best shot available to him given that he was batting the wrong way round and no longer had any real clue where his stumps were, other than somewhere vaguely behind him.

There they are, Dave – splattered.

Here’s another angle so that you can more clearly see how really very crap this shot was.

As you can see, we have added a caption to the image above, even though that is a thing we almost never do. The caption is ‘crap’.

What you can’t immediately see is that the image filename is crap.jpg

As he walked off, Warner swished his bat angrily through the air.

He swished right-handed.

Get our email, you frippet.

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 hard to pick a favourite, but here are some contenders:

• Mohammad Shahzad’s scythe for six where he starts his backlift only when the ball arrives (9s)
• Rahmanullah Gurbaz’s helicopter shot (2m12s)
• The same batsman’s back foot, long-on pummel after stepping in front of his stumps (2m32s)
• Only a four, but we’ve a soft spot for Mohammad Nabi’s terrifying straight drill, if only because it’s Nabi. Love Nabi (3m21s)
• Najibullah Zadran’s wristy cow corner heave which appears to leave the stadium (3m28s)

If we had to pick, we’d be tempted to go with Najibullah’s flat-footed effort at 2m52s, where he reaches for and then rises into a ball well outside off stump and almost jumps it for six.

And that was just the batting. Their bowling was pretty tidy too.

Afghanistan have got Pakistan on Friday and Namibia on Sunday, followed by India, New Zealand and Australia. They’re in with some sort of a chance of making the semi-finals.

But is this it? Is this the climax of the story?

Throughout their cricket history, Afghanistan’s defining feature has been their almost supernatural ability to almost instantly get up to standard whenever they’ve taken a step up.

This quality is best exemplified by Mohammad Nabi who was playing for them when they were at the same level as Jersey and is still playing for them now.

This team is not borne of a long and storied history in the game. They’re not products of some flawless domestic structure. Somehow they just crack on and get better and better.

But there have to be limits, don’t there? Not every barrier is insurmountable. Circumstances that were never really that good in the first place have recently deteriorated markedly.

“The only happiness in Afghanistan is cricket,” said Mohammad Nabi after his side absolutely pulverised Scotland.

If they’re to continue their trend for awe-inspiring relentless progress, Afghanistan are really up against it.

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.

Mohammad Nabi didn’t play for Afghanistan against Scotland in April 2019. Nothing too unusual there. Nabi had been at the IPL, playing for Sunrisers Hyderabad, and they’d qualified for the closing stages.

Except it is unusual. It’s highly unusual. It was Afghanistan’s 112th one-day international (ODI) and Mohammed Nabi played in all of the first 111. Every single one.

The IPL went well

Nabi took eight wickets in eight games at the IPL and the knock-out match was the first he’d played that Sunrisers Hyderabad didn’t win. He was fasting for Ramadan that day.

We can’t function or interact with other human beings in a remotely civil manner if we haven’t eaten. Nabi made 20 off 13 balls and then opened the bowling, conceding 28 off four.

Throughout the tournament, he conceded just 6.65 runs an over. Only Ravindra Jadeja and his Afghanistan team-mate Rashid Khan took more wickets with a lower economy rate.

The man’s a star.

One to Nelson

Nabi made 58 in Afghanistan’s first one-day international, an 89-run win over Scotland in April 2009. He made 40 and took 1-47 in the 111th, a five-wicket defeat to Ireland.

Just to reiterate, he played every single game for them in between.

Nabi and Afghanistan have travelled some distance from one to Nelson, but the story begins before that.

The documentary Out of the Ashes opens with Afghanistan’s ICC World Cricket League Division Five win back in 2008, where they scuffled past the likes of Jersey and Botswana.

Nabi played in all seven of Afghanistan’s matches in that competition. He scored 108 runs and took 10 wickets, the second-most for Afghanistan in each – which is a very Nabi way of going about things. Our man doesn’t quite make the headlines, but at some point you look back and realise the weight of what he’s done over the years could probably sink a continent.

But this wasn’t the start. Nabi was playing for Afghanistan before that. His first match was in 2003, against Rahim Yar Khan Cricket Association, in one of Pakistan’s domestic competitions. He top-scored with 61.

The man has grown as the Afghanistan cricket team has grown. He learnt the game as a refugee in Peshawar during the civil war and returned to Afghanistan and bought cricket gear from Pakistan and India so that he could carry on playing. Since then it’s been on and on, and up and up, to full one-day international status, the IPL, Test cricket and now the World Cup. At some point in the middle of all this, Nabi’s father was kidnapped and held for two months by a bunch of goons who were looking for a ransom.

It’s just insane.

Mohammed Nabi might just be the most remarkable cricketer playing today.

Mohammad Nabi.

First published in May 2019.

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The Cricket World Cup is insanely long. Cycling’s ‘grand tours’ are considered epic feats of endurance but the World Cup started in May, halfway through the Giro d’Italia, and finished in July, halfway through the Tour de France.

(Here’s a recap of the first week of this year’s Tour and here’s where you can get the next two weekly recaps emailed to you.)

The World Cup is simply too big to hold in your brain. Here are some of the things that happened.

1. The 82% amazing Ben Stokes catch

Airborne blind backhand catches anyone?

2. Sri Lanka have four goes at stopping the ball and fail

Why fail to stop the ball once when you could fail to stop it four times?

3. Jason Roy decking umpire Joel Wilson and umpire Joel Wilson not being at all happy about it

Flooring an umpire while securing your hundred is maybe 50 per cent funny. Joel Wilson’s face in response to Jason Roy’s apology for said flooring was about 96 per cent funny.

4. Faf du Plessis having to explain everything

Being South Africa captain at a Cricket World Cup is a very rubbish job.

5. Glenn Maxwell’s 10-ball knock against Bangladesh

And people say he had a bad tournament.

6. Lasith Malinga paunching England to death

They’ll never, ever master facing him.

7. Carlos Brathwaite runs out of magic

It seemed like he could do anything. But he couldn’t.

8. Chris Gayle’s diving stop

Timberrrrrr.

9. Richard Kettleborough’s face when MS Dhoni was run out

The run-out was pretty memorable. But the face. It was all in the face.

10. Usman Khawaja ramping the ball into his own stumps

Shot!

11. Steve Smith getting run out through his legs

Contrast with the Ben Stokes deflecto-non-run-out in the final.

12. Jason Roy v Umpires Part II

Poor Umpire Dhamasena.

13. Sky letting Channel 4 broadcast the final

Hats off, because they didn’t have to. (There’s a petition to get more international cricket on free-to-air TV, by the way.)

Assuming no major developments before August 1, Now TV will probably be your best option for watching the Ashes, with highlights (at a civilised hour) on Channel 5.

2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 36, Afghanistan v Pakistan

We’ll freely admit that we’re not impartial on this one. Impartiality is for the BBC. We’re highly partial when it comes to Mohammad Nabi and don’t give a flying full toss who knows it.

From our massively biased position, Mohammad Nabi’s celebration of the dismissal of Babar Azam was the best celebration so far this World Cup.

There are many ways to celebrate a wicket. Dale Steyn did the mad chainsaw-starting action; Imran Tahir sprints for five eternities; Brett Lee did that weird, camp heel-click thing; while at this World Cup several of England’s players have been reprising the Ian Botham see-saw fingers celebration from 1992.

None are as good as Mohammad Nabi’s Babar Azam celebration though.

The delivery was special. As far as we can tell, it was beyond non-turning – it looked like it actually turned against the spin. Babar swept, missed and the Zing bails zang or possibly zung.

What Nabi did at this point was even more special. He took 100 per cent of the adrenaline and elation he felt and he put half of it into his finger and half of it into his face and none of it anywhere else.

Here’s his face (and his finger).

Bloody delighted he was. So bloody delighted, in fact, that there was a delight surplus, a little of which spilled into the umpire.

What you can’t see from these still shots is how slowly he was walking and that was the thing that was so wonderful about this celebration.

When celebrating a big, cool wicket, bowlers tend to either (a) charge madly, or (b) come to a complete standstill so that they have a good, firm base from which to launch their celebratory pyrotechnics.

Nabi ambled.

Nabi ambled, but it wasn’t a cool, sneering, I-expected-to-take-a-wicket-anyway amble. Nabi did a delighted amble.

Mohammad Nabi fired that one finger into the air with such urgent force that you could see the aftershocks ripple through his body. His face burst into the purest gleeful smile. Then, with all of that excitement and all of those endorphins coursing through him, he just ambled.

No destination in mind, no follow-up fist pumping. Just an unimaginably slow amble with one finger aloft and a massive great grin.

In the second series of Stranger Things, Dustin hears a noise in a bin. Ignoring the spooky music and his own fear, he goes and opens it.

Next thing we see is Dustin depositing a small obese newt thing into the tank he normally keeps his tortoise in. He feeds it a 3 Musketeers bar, making the wildly irresponsible assumption that this is an appropriate food for a creature he’s never seen before in his life.

(According to Wikipedia, a 3 Musketeers bar is essentially a Milky Way without any caramel. It got its name because it originally came in three pieces, each with a different flavour, only for rising costs to result in strawberry and vanilla being phased out. Oddly they didn’t rename it a 1 Musketeer bar, but they absolutely should have done.)

Because of the 3 Musketeers bar, Dustin calls the creature D’Artagnan, which is pretty smart for a kid. Then, because he’s an American, he shortens it to Dart, which isn’t particularly smart, but is perfectly understandable because names always end up as one syllable eventually and you might as well just accept that.

Dustin keeps Dart. Dart grows. After about a day, he pops a pair of rear legs out – like this is the kind of thing you can just do on a whim.

Another day and he’s the size of a small dog and his head looks like this.

Next thing you know he’s the size of a person and he’s killing soldiers.

Turns out Dart’s a Demogorgon and honestly you don’t need to have a PhD in demonology to know that that’s a terrifying thing.

What’s interesting here is the rate of development. Things rarely progress that rapidly in real life, but one exception is the Afghanistan cricket team.

Afghanistan went out of the Asia Cup last year after a tied game against India. At the time we expected India to be largely unaffected by the experience and for Afghanistan to be somewhere around twice as good the next time they took the field because that’s the way that things seem to work with Afghanistan.

Let’s go back a little bit further so you get a better feel for what we mean by that.

Back in 2009 and 2010, Mohammad Nabi’s first few one-day internationals saw him make fifties against Scotland and Canada. Afghanistan actually lost the Canada match.

A year before that, the side had been scraping a win against Jersey in ICC World Cricket League Division Five. The target was 81 and they only made it with eight wickets down.

Nabi was out for two in that match, but he made another fifty in the 2018 tie with India and he made a 50 against them again in the 2019 World Cup in a match Afghanistan ultimately lost, but which somehow felt like a bigger result because they got so close and… well, because it’s the World Cup.

A fifty against India is a very different thing to a fifty against Canada. Same man, but things have moved on enormously.

Another example: Nabi was outscored in the Asia Cup tie with India by Mohammad Shahzad, who was out for 124 when the score was somewhat jarringly 180-6. Shahzad made a duck in the 2010 Canada defeat.

What we learn from this is that Afghanistan are a team who have at no point drawn any firm conclusions about how good they could be. At each step on their journey they’ve inevitably come up against a team that’s better than them and rather than take this as some sort of reality check, they’ve basically just resolved to instantly become better and then somehow achieved that.

Five of the side that beat Jersey have played for the national side in the last 12 months. They are basically the same bunch of guys.

One day you’re a little flappy newt in a fish tank, next day you’re a Demogorgon.

This is an updated version of an article first published on September 26, 2018.

2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 24, Afghanistan v England

Eoin Morgan faced fewer balls than Joe Root and made not far off twice as many runs. Joe Root made a very boring 88 at quicker than a run a ball. Eoin Morgan only hit four fours.

None of the above really makes sense and nor did Morgan’s unquenchable thirst for hitting the ball at someone – or something – in the stands. He did it 17 times. What was he aiming for?

Even in an era when milkshake has become many people’s weapon of choice, a cricket ball fired from a cricket bat is a very strange thing with which to set about someone.

The only thing we can think – and this is very much a working theory – is that there was someone in the temporary stand who’d somehow offended England’s captain. If you’ve seen the back of that stand, it’s a terrifyingly rickety scaffolding construction. You could definitely take the whole thing out if you managed to catch one of the lower supports with a firmly-hit lofted drive.

2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 7, Afghanistan v Sri Lanka

The greatest moment of the World Cup so far was when Dawlat Zadran hit a four against Sri Lanka.

That’s him hitting the four above. It was just a block really. Not a very Afghanistan shot at all, in truth, but it wasn’t really him who made it such a wonderful moment.

Phase 1: Nuwan Pradeep does not pick up the ball

Nuwan Pradeep was in his follow-through and the ball was pretty much past him before he could get over.

This one was pretty forgivable.

Phase 2: Lasith Malinga does not pick up the ball

Fortunately for Sri Lanka, Lasith Malinga got across to it easily.

Unfortunately for Sri Lanka – and fortunately for anyone who enjoys shoddy fielding (which is everyone) – he completely failed to stop the ball.

Phase 3: Angelo Mathews does not pick up the ball

Fortunately for Sri Lanka, Angelo Mathews was there to clear up.

Unfortunately for Sri Lanka, Angelo Mathews did not clear up.

Phase 4: Angelo Mathews does not pick up the ball (again)

Fortunately for Sri Lanka, Angelo Mathews was able to chase it down.

Unfortunately for Sri Lanka, Angelo Mathews persisted in not picking up the ball.

Who had the biggest role in this wonderful moment?

It’s tempting to go for Mathews, because he had two goes, but we’d give it to Malinga because his failure to pick up the ball was the most gloriously gratuitous.

Well played everyone though. Great cricket.

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2019 Cricket World Cup, Game 4, Afghanistan v Australia

Steve Smith is many things to many people. To us, he’s the most despicable cricketer in the entire world. You probably think it’s the sandpaper thing. Or maybe you think it’s the lying about sandpaper thing.

Let us tell you right now: it’s neither of those things.

Steve Smith is a man whose lust for batting has resulted in some extraordinarily major character defects. All that time he’s spent honing his demented technique is time he hasn’t spent learning how to be a half-decent person.

You’re thinking of the sandpaper again, but it barely warrants a podium position. Here are two things that are infinitely worse than the sandpaper.

First, the most sickening lack of empathy we’ve ever heard about.

Matt Renshaw was playing cricket for Australia when he was struck down by a bout of the wild shits. As he was running off the pitch because he was about to smear his undercrackers in front of millions of people, Smith stopped him and made him come back and speak to the umpires.

Renshaw said: “He’s like, ‘what are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘mate, I need to go to the toilet’, and he’s like, ‘no, no, no, come back with me.’”

That’s just inhuman. But it gets worse. Today Steve Smith ran out Mohammad Nabi.