England’s long-time white-ball opener was hanging on to his place in the team before a spellbinding 113 in BloemfonteinIn the final Harry Potter book our eponymous hero was presented with a golden snitch – if you are unaware of what a snitch is, imagine a golden object of your choice – bequeathed to him by (spoiler alert) his recently deceased headmaster and mentor Albus Dumbledore. On it he discovered a riddle: “I open at the close.” For months he and his friends Ron and Hermione puzzled over the phrase, but to no avail: “No matter how often they repeated the words, with many different inflections, they were unable to wring any more meaning from them.”These days any fan of English...
ODI series will last less than a week – a far cry from 13,000-mile round trips made by steamer and 60-hour coach journeysA philosophical question: does England’s one-day international series in South Africa really count as an overseas tour? The first match takes place on Friday, the last on the following Wednesday. Two of the games are at the same ground in Bloemfontein and the other within day-tripping distance – you can get to Kimberley in less than two hours on the bus. It will be the briefest, slightest cricketing incursion an England team has made to the country. Perhaps, in a modern age of peripatetic players and bite-size schedules, any tour less than a week in length could be...
Mavericks don’t often get the big jobs – Ben Stokes has shown everyone the value of doing things differentlyAccording to lore some of the very best Test captains are the ones who never got the job. Like Keith Miller – an admired, and audacious, skipper at New South Wales – who never led Australia because he was always on the wrong side of the selectors and in particular Don Bradman, who disliked the way Miller went about his cricket. Or Shane Warne, who won 10 games out of 11 as captain of Australia’s one-day team, but lost out to Steve Waugh on the Test job, a decision, it has to be said, which probably spared the selectors from having to...
Since Ben Stokes took over as captain, the Test side have had all the answers, but there are difficult questions to come in 2023I’ve just been to India with the cricketers from Harrow school, where I coach. There are some very strong players and a bit of depth in the first-team squad at the moment, which means I am lucky enough to be able to rotate players around.I always encourage young players to be all-rounders – you want athletic cricketers who hopefully can contribute with the bat, the ball and in the field – and recently the talent and flexibility in the squad has given me the latitude I need to mix up the side and give more people opportunities....
Only one other side has taken all 60 wickets in a three-Test series in Pakistan –and Sri Lanka had Muttiah MuralitharanWhen cricket lovers discuss this new England, they rave about the batting. So fearless! Five an over! All day long! Sometimes even seven! And everybody at it (except Ben Foakes, the designated driver). If fast scoring was all Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum had brought us, it would be quite something. But they would not have won nine Tests out of 10.The second most exciting thing about this new era, and perhaps the most significant, is that England keep bowling their opponents out. Whether they’re facing New Zealand, India, South Africa or Pakistan, every time Stokes’s England take the field,...