Chris Silverwood’s team is behind where he hoped it would be, but India’s series victory can provide a blueprint for successThere was a slightly anticlimactic feel to the announcement of England’s squad for the upcoming Ashes tour. Maybe it was only natural. The England management had, after all, spent a good two years talking about this team, and its goal of urn recovery, right up to the point when a sudden screeching of brakes indicated that hey, there might not even be an Ashes this year anyway. At which point, fans adopted the brace position and prepared themselves for the even-worse-case-scenario – not that England wouldn’t tour, but that they’d arrive at Brisbane with a team devoid of Root, Buttler,...
We’ve already had the first exchanges of chippiness and the start of the actual cricket now cannot come soon enoughThe Ashes series is go. Sort of. Kind of. The Ashes series is confirmed as long as various requirements are met when it comes to quarantining and playing in Australia. Which is effectively the same position that the England & Wales Cricket Board has been taking for the last few months, before Friday’s statement officially conveying the above. The important thing is that now they have said they actually will be going to Australia. Unless later they decide they are not. In which case they will say that they are not. Crowds are warmly invited to book tickets on this basis.We...
Trescothick threw light on to the mental health problems in cricket, and we need better understanding more than everTime flies. It’s been 15 years since Marcus Trescothick last played for England, in a warmup match against New South Wales in November 2006. He broke down in the dressing room on the last day of the game – “All the same feelings of irrational fear, despair and panic came back in wave after bloody great wave” – and flew back to England that same evening. The team management described it as a “recurrence of a stress-related illness”. There were a lot of accusations, jokes and innuendoes, which were only put straight when Trescothick published his autobiography in 2008, and people at...
With Australia’s World Test Championship hopes resting on Joe Root’s men drawing a series they trail 2-1, it’s a difficult time for fans who would happily back North Korea against England“It feels bloody terrible,” he said, head bowed over his pint. “Suddenly everything gets turned upside down. I don’t know how to feel about it.” Picture a couple of men huddled over a table in the corner of a pub – there have been millions of variations of a conversation like this. In the beer garden of the Great Northern hotel in Melbourne last week, though, I was offering solace to a friend about having to support England in a cricket match.The World Test Championship final in June will feature...
The 2013-14 series left genuine scars in the England team, but there is still a chapter to play out against AustraliaIt seemed too easy at the time. Three weeks ago, Australia’s cricketers lost a Test for the first time in 33 years at the Gabba – deepest, dankest dungeon of the Australian sporting soul, and a kind of mental disintegration portal for meeker, less thrillingly chosen races. So yeah, they got beaten there by India’s B team. But at the end Justin Langer was out in the celebrations looking humble and magnanimous and weirdly invulnerable – all the while wearing that familiar alpha dog, kungfu, zen master smile, the look of a man who, to quote John Updike, has just...