Team with no selection issues but plenty of injury worries find themselves in a no-win situation with the World Cup loomingWarmup matches are a curious creation. With days until the Cricket World Cup, England played Australia on Saturday to lose by a dozen runs, then will suit up against Afghanistan on Monday. Both are unofficial matches that will never be reflected in international annals. These matches lack validity, but their existence implies they have value.That’s true for teams working out their best combinations or fine-tuning a style, but England’s one-day side are doing neither. They have been ready to play a World Cup since Pakistan’s fast bowlers used a tacky Cardiff pitch to knock them out of the Champions Trophy...
Despite the ICC’s attempts to muddy the waters every team will have a decent following for the 12th iteration beginning next weekJack Bannister, who died in 2016, was an influential figure in cricket: fine seam bowler for Warwickshire, pioneer of the players’ union, journalist, broadcaster, behind-the-scenes fixer. Shrewd? He could have had a Regius professorship in shrewdness. He also owned a chain of betting shops.In 1983, halfway through the third World Cup final, Bannister had a brainstorm. An acquaintance shouted at him through the open windows of the old Lord’s press box: “What price India?” “100 to 1.” With Jack, such questions were never theoretical. He took the bet, and he paid. Related: England's 2019 Cricket World Cup squad –...
One must pick himself up and the other is flying high but it is to be hoped that both can justify inclusion in the squadEngland’s preparations for the World Cup have been silky smooth for the past two years, during which a settled side with a very good captain, audacious batsmen and tenacious bowlers who have learned to keep their heads high even when the ball has just disappeared over the boundary have become the best in the world, according to the ICC rankings.But now with the start of the tournament a month away the usual pin-pricks – an inconvenient list of injury concerns over Jason Roy, Joe Denly, Tom Curran and Sam Billings and the perennial worries over the...
Pace bowler qualifies to play for England on Sunday but picking him this late for the tournament would be a bad decisionA weird thing kept happening during the TV broadcast of England’s white-ball series against West Indies. Whenever an English batsman steered the ball down to third man the camera would pan after it and viewers would catch a brief glimpse of something startling, a kind of apparition in the corner of the screen.Look back at the highlights and there it is again: a tall, frighteningly still figure, half-glimpsed against the green. Some ancient pastoral scarecrow, a spirit of the land perhaps. Or maybe even death himself, lurking at the edge of your vision saying, yes, even here in this...
The Cricket World Cup does not need McFly and Love Island to be cool. It is just lost behind Sky’s paywallAdmiral Jellicoe probably wouldn’t have been a big advocate for one-day cricket. In the first world war, the commander of the British fleet gained a reputation for a strictly defensive style of play, the kind of dead-batting that determined the Battle of Jutland was only ever going to end in a draw. Winston Churchill did, after all, describe him as “the one man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon”. Jellicoe couldn’t afford a mid‑innings collapse. Related: Questions facing England in West Indies 100 days out from World Cup | The Spin Related: Meet Haris Rauf,...