Tag Archives: England cricket

“Mike,” Bruce Patterson writes in a comment appended to a piece headlined ‘The Big Squeeze’ in Friday’s London Times, “this is career-defining work. Brilliant insight into how greed and poor governance is killing the game we all love.” “The game of cricket needs more prominent figures (like you),” adds P …

Sunday 14 November, 2021. Remember the date. Fans all over the Caribbean will probably be marking Monday 15 November down on their calendars as well. The organisers are calling it a reserve day; West Indian fans are already seeing it as a day reserved for celebrating Kieron Pollard’s men capture—for …

The following is the third part of Owen Thompson’s recall of that unforgettable summer in 1976 which ushered in the West Indies cricket team’s glory years: There was one final seminal moment to that summer. The Fifth Test, from 12 August to the 17th, was a metaphor in two halves. …

The following is the second part of Owen Thompson’s recall of that unforgettable summer in 1976 that ushered in the West Indies cricket team’s glory years: While the events of that 1975-76 tour of Australia unfolded (between October 1975 and February 1976), a certain Robert Nesta Marley was getting ready …

That cricket is a game of glorious uncertainties is, though never irrelevant, a very tired cliché. That Test cricket is the most severe examination a player can get, though not clichéd, is not exactly new. West Indies did learn a new cricketing truth today, however. It is that, even when …

Conventional wisdom holds that Stuart Broad’s Sunday evening new ball spell killed off the West Indies chances in the Second Test at Old Trafford. The truth, however, is that, had Jason Holder been at the top of his game on Monday morning, he might have found a pulse where the …

I am willing to wager more than a few quid on a West Indies victory. Only a handful of England’s actors (skipper Joe Root, Ben Stokes, Chris Woakes and Stuart Broad) remain on the 2020 set. But Jason Holder has no fewer than seven of his 2017 West Indians, including …

I had been reading Mike Brearley’s 1985 classic, ‘The Art of Captaincy’, and re-reading ‘Frank Worrell’, by Ernest Eytle. It struck me in both that in a sense, like Richie Benaud, they did not become captains of teams, but rather, they moulded teams out of collections of individuals. In their …

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 …

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 …