Outfield warm-up suggests Sam Curran may be left out while Australia replace James Pattinson with Josh HazlewoodSome summer’s day, this. After six hours of rain, play was abandoned for the day at 4.15pm. There was not so much as a coin toss let alone a ball bowled.There was a brief let-up after lunch, a lull between showers, when everyone got out on the field and pretended they had not seen the forecast for the rest of the afternoon. It lasted just long enough for Chris Jordan to present Jofra Archer with his England cap. Then it started raining again. There was a hint, too, for those watching closely, that England plan to stick with Joe Denly rather than pick Sam...
The ECB trumpeted this summer as a feast of cricket for England but dips in form after World Cup success are commonWhen Eoin Morgan said at the end of the World Cup group stage, during a carnival of cricket that would eventually carry his team to glory, that the experience was proving so intense that “I can’t wait to get away from a cricket field”, there will have been many sportsmen who understood precisely what he was feeling. While fans enjoy the remorseless drama of these great competitions, those actually playing them find they exact a psychological and emotional toll.In October 2018, with many of the players who starred in the World Cup in Russia that summer disappointing in the...
Australia’s star batsman is not resting on his laurels after Edgbaston, once again decorating the game he bruised last yearSteve Smith is ruining Test cricket. Like a maverick cop forced off active duty, he has been back only five minutes but is already laying the town to waste. Or at least this is the perception in some parts of the British Isles.Some objections come from the internet eggs that spawn around comment threads, decrying him as a cheat who should never be allowed near a cricket field again – you know, like all the other ball-tamperers who were banned for life rather than being feted as greats of the game with commentary contracts and hall of fame places. Related: Moeen...
The Ashes may have grabbed the attention of a nation. A new Test competition has notCricket has always had a peculiar vocabulary. The sport’s baffling use of language is part of its charm – naming a boundary fielder after a Graham Greene novel, for instance – but there have been recent additions to the lexicon I refuse to endorse. Bowlers putting “tail” on the ball – as if the word swing did not exist – or batsmen hitting it “downtown”. I hoped with the World Cup over we would have seen the end of the frankly gruesome use of “slot”, which seems to have been widely accepted as a bona fide technical term for a hittable length in limited-overs cricket....
The spinner has been dropped after struggling in the first Ashes Test, leaving England with more questions to answer at Lord’sNathan Lyon has not been as vociferous at the start of this Ashes series as he was before the last one in November 2017. There has been no need and maybe there really is a return to the brave old world when Australia respected their opponents. Back in Brisbane two years ago Lyon was the cheerleader on the welcoming committee, talking of English batsmen “running scared”, of a determination to “head-butt the line” and of an Aussie team eager to “end careers”. “I didn’t end any careers,” he said. “Mitchell Johnson ended them.”There is a suggestion that Lyon might just...