4 minute read It looks like Essex’s Sam Cook is finally going to get a Test cap. “About time!” you might be thinking. Or maybe you’re thinking, “Okay, that makes sense now – although which other bowlers is he going to be playing alongside?” With 318 first-class wickets at 19.77, Sam Cook’s statistical case is beyond compelling and for many that’s enough. These people are utterly perplexed that he’s so
2 minute read “When you go, your footprints will fill with grass. Moss shall cover your tombstone, and as the sun rises, green shall spread over all, in all its shades and hues. This verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements and, try as you might, all you hold dear will succumb to it. Your skin, your bones. Your virtue.” Basically, in the grand scheme of
1 minute read There’s another top of the table clash looming in the County Championship this week. That’s not as dramatic as it sounds though because as tables go it’s something of a chabudai. Quite a lot of teams have only managed one win so far this season – and they’re the high performers. After three games, no-one’s notched a second victory. That leaves us with Nottinghamshire v Sussex as
2 minute read In England the men’s domestic game tends to flail around incorrigibly, endlessly adding formats and complexity to make itself ever more impenetrable. The women’s game, in contrast, tends to move from one reasoned, accessible structure to another. The sheer frequency of overhauls seems to us the only meaningful attempt to alienate fans. A few years back, we rather liked the Super League: six regional teams playing 10
3 minute read Lots of shreds of cricket news about today. Let’s weave them into a single thing – say, half an underpant. Weekender In the UK, weekends don’t come much bigger than Easter for the simple reason that it’s twice as long. It’s therefore a big one in county cricket too because this week’s matches precisely span a lot of people’s time off work. If we’re to believe the
2 minute read Two games in, the first division of the County Championship has taken on a blobby, amorphous shape with three counties on the same number of points at the top. Will any of them still be in the running at the competition’s autumnal climax? We may as well start with the table: Just to highlight the margins here, if one ball had gone differently in yesterday’s Durham v
3 minute read “Yes, if it is to be said, so it be, so it is,” as Greg Hirsch would say. Harry Brook has been named England’s T20 and one-day international captain, as we all assumed he would be. So what happens when Ben Stokes gets injured and can’t lead the Test team in, ooh, let’s say THE ASHES? Because we all know that is 100% definitely going to happen.
5 minute read There’s a fundamental tension these days between specialising in one particular format and striving to become a more rounded cricketer. It’s pretty much impossible to walk both paths, but right now Tom Banton appears to have put a good few footprints on each. In the parallel worlds of strength and endurance training, coaches often talk about the relationship between volume, intensity and frequency. Volume is how much
3 minute read We’re about 10 minutes into the county season as we type this sentence and already they’re talking about changing things next year. This is, paradoxically, one of the things that never changes about county cricket: they will forever be talking about changing it. Yesterday we reposted our 2022 article about how the county season starts, “not with a bang.” A key feature of that piece is that
3 minute read All eyes on the Ambassador Cruise Line Ground from tomorrow. Is this funnier or less funny than the previous sponsorship which made it sound like Essex’s nickname was Cloud County? Overseas professionalism is a jaunty, unpredictable thing in the current County Championship era. Remember last year when Surrey went down to the deluxe temp agency and hired Shakib al Hasan for all of one game. A short
