It has taken 38 innings for Buttler to record his maiden Test century and it was his application, not just his ball-striking, that stood outIt was not enough to earn him the nickname of St Jude – the patron saint of lost causes – but in securing his maiden Test century and ensuring that England’s experience here has not solely been one of batting ineptitude, Jos Buttler made a significant point to himself, his teammates and perhaps the wider public, too.After all, until it was trumped by that of Adil Rashid at the start of this series, the restoration of Buttler to the Test team by England’s new selection impresario, Ed Smith, in May was among the most eye-catching and...
The 1971 Oval Test was a historic one and memorable because of a sleepy captain and a pachyderm named BellaThere used to be two shops in Birmingham called Tyseley Pet Stores. While in one advert they boasted of their stocks of “puppies, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters and mice” these were not your average pet shops – by the end of the paragraph they had moved on to “our large selection of monkeys, tame chimps and latest arrival, the baby gorilla”. They imported around 2,000 marmosets a year and shipped tortoises from Morocco at the rate of 6,000 a time. As might be expected, not all of these creatures were particularly keen on life in a Birmingham pet shop: in 1961...
Roar at catching India’s captain on 97 shows England all-rounder’s relief at being back centre stage for the right reasonsWho writes your scripts? So asked Graham Gooch of Ian Botham at the Oval in 1986 after the all-rounder picked up a wicket with his first ball back in Test cricket after a 63-day ban for admitting to smoking dope.This was one of many scene-stealing moments in Botham’s outstanding career, making New Zealand’s Bruce Edgar Test victim No 355 and, therefore, equalling Dennis Lillee’s world record before, just 11 balls later, making it his own when Jeff Crowe (match referee for this current series with India) was pinned lbw with a ball that jagged back in. Related: Virat Kohli inspires India fightback...
No English cricketer has got so rich so fast but the all-rounder’s figures do not add up to a career as successful as it should beA few months ago a study was published warning against the use of hand dryers in public lavatories because of the high density of airborne human waste particles. Turning on a hand dryer hugely accelerates the rate at which these circulate the room. So, to take a topical example, when Madonna lingers sensually over the jet from a hot-air dryer in the iconic video to the No 1 hit Get Into The Groove she is basically bombarding her own face with particles of human excrement, blowing accumulated toxic faecal matter directly into her eyes, nose,...
Stokes, Woakes, Moeen, Roland-Jones, the Currans, Rashid and Bess provide options and, while packing the team with them would not work, they can help make England better travellersHow many players are there in a cricket team? The simple answer, as you know, is 11 but when the team in question is England’s Test side, things are seldom simple. The true answer is anything from three to 15.In the last Ashes series, Joe Root had only three players coming up with the sportsman’s favourite abstract noun – consistency. One of them was himself – five Tests, five 50s, Mr Reliable (If A Bit Frazzled). Another was Dawid Malan, superb on hard surfaces, as Ed Smith noted the other day when dropping...