While defeat in Chittagong would have been a chastening experience for Alastair Cook’s side, it would have been a historic moment in Test cricket and one that Bangladesh will surely manage soonThey say the English are the only people who feel schadenfreude about themselves, and anyone who stuck with English cricket through the 1990s will know there is some truth in that. Back then you had to try to find some small measure of pleasure in their losses, which came around with ritual regularity. There was the rollercoaster thrill of their batting collapses, the dizzy lurch of a sudden but inevitable turn for the worse, and the meditative contemplation of their long and fruitless days in the field, watching the...
Alastair Cook picked three spinners but kept his seamers busy, England still have a gap at the top of their order, and DRS has provided more drama in ChittagongA sport that exists in three international formats is a sport taking risks with its future, and the five-day game now struggles to fill grounds in several nations. But when it is good, it is still the best. In Chittagong, a match that could have been hopelessly one-sided turned out to be a gripper – tight, tense, low‑scoring, ebbing and flowing, keeping us guessing till the final hour. And this was not just proper cricket but modern cricket, with infusions of urgency; Bangladesh began their run chase as if playing T20. Which...
Australia’s recent antics in South Africa and the accusations made at the Phillip Hughes inquest show the idiocy of resorting to hackneyed insultsLeast among the many insights provided by Jonathan Trott’s autobiography, Unguarded, comes this contender for the canon of classic sledges. The scene was Lord’s, late September 2010. Popular Pakistani stand-up Ijaz Butt, two years into his comic turn as the chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board, had just accused England of “taking enormous amounts of money” to throw the third ODI. England’s players, unamused, spent the night debating whether or not to withdraw from the series. And came within a single vote of doing it, too. At nets the next morning Trott met Wahab Riaz. “You going to...
On current form the spinner, who has developed a Glenn McGrath-like knack of removing the opposition’s best player, is a captain’s dream – a stock strike-bowlerHow good is Ravichandran Ashwin? To some the question is rhetorical, to others interrogative. After another spectacular performance against New Zealand, he is No1 in the ICC Test bowling rankings, and will surely make life very unpleasant for England’s batsmen this winter. Yet this is not a straightforward case of a spinner achieving greatness. The enormous disparity between his record at home and abroad means that Ashwin is often disparaged by one little phrase: rough-track bully.His overall record is astonishing. He has taken 220 wickets in only 39 Tests, and has won four consecutive man...
Selectors may have one eye on the next series but will need to get things right first in Chittagong and DhakaEngland have won all eight of their Test matches against Bangladesh but they will have done very well if that 100% record remains intact in a fortnight’s time. There are good reasons for this conclusion ranging from the weather – there is clearly rain about in Chittagong at this time of the year – to the perception that Bangladesh have improved significantly in recent times.There is concrete evidence for Bangladesh’s advance with a white ball. By winning the ODIs 2-1 England ended a run of six series victories at home for Bangladesh and it was all the more rewarding for...