Buoyed by the recent receipt of awards and bestowal on him of new accolades, Jason Holder may well believe that the home side he leads can match the visitors in the two-Test series which starts in Antigua today. I honestly hope he does not. Named West Indies Test Player of …

Jinks. India’s Virat Kohli, Ajinkya Rahane’s all-formats skipper, has often called him by that nickname in post-match interviews. But since he has made a splash or two in the Indian Premier League and occasionally been a stand-out performer for the Indians over the last few years, Kohli’s handful of familiar …

About a dozen runs and Shivnarine Chanderpaul. In Monday’s Express, Fazeer Mohammed raised the very pertinent question of who is calling the selection shots. Why is the 39-year-old Chris Gayle, he asks—who unretired towards the end of the 2019 World Cup—included in an ODI squad which, according to the coach, …

Yasin Abu Bakr loves the soap-box. The witness box or the dock? Not quite so much. So at the post-27-July-1990-coup trial, there was no grand “History will absolve me” peroration. None was needed. Not in Clebert Brooks’ court. With no legal training, you would say that an amnesty signed because …

“Bring back the old time days,” Richard “Nappy” Mayers croons in the song of that name. “Used to be everyone/could afford to live right/Just to be nice/didn’t need no Paradise. “Used to be everyone/cared for each other/Lived like brothers/respected one another.” David Rudder punctures that balloon. “Oh how we danced,” …

Writing on the same WhatsApp chat as his erstwhile captain, Valentino Singh, former QRC opener Zafar Khan opts not to focus on the tiebreaker and the seemingly unfair outcome. He does not say so explicitly but it is clear that he agrees with Singh about how unsatisfactory the eventual outcome …

An excellent ESPNcricinfo piece with an Osman Saimuddin by-line headlined “What the luck! New Zealand and the randomness of life” has this to say: You can analyse events down to their minutest detail. This happened because he did this and he did that and next time he did this and …

Yeah, I take the piss out of it all the time. I think I’m one of the luckiest people on the planet. If any of my mates ask on the phone, “What are you up to?” I just say “I’m hanging around, waiting for a bit of luck, mate.”  He …

Which of the ten teams in the World Cup tournament that England won yesterday had the most players with surnames beginning with the letter A? And which one had the most players who have the same initial for first name and surname? Do you know? Do you care? My boyhood …

A yard and a half! Arguably already influenced by a fine, World Cup 2019’s finest hour was finally settled by that fine a margin at Lord’s yesterday; in fact, the official margin of victory was calculated on the countback of England’s 26 boundaries to Kane Williamson’s New Zealand’s 17. On …

Between the end of the World Cup in the Caribbean and Ricky Skerritt’s welcome ouster of Dave Cameron in March, I have rarely got excited about the outcome of a West Indies cricket match. I did get genuinely worked up about Darren Sammy’s side’s 2012 T20 World Cup victory and …

Eight cricketers named Mohammad or Mohammed played in the round robin stage of the 2019 World Cup; none will be in the final. Two Jasons played in the group stage; one will play in Sunday’s Lord’s grand finale. The US$64,000 question is this: should he have been allowed to? At …