In the end, players who have previously been marginalised, sidelined and discarded came good at just the right timeAfter days of dire forecasts, it was unexpected to even have a T20 World Cup final. Angry cartoon thunderstorms failed to deliver on a night that felt warm and humid enough to bring them on. India supporters had expected to see their team but their semi-final knockout didn’t have the expected hit on crowds, with more than 80,000 still in attendance at Melbourne’s giant arena. As Pakistan fans filed out, post-match presentations offered a manufactured euphoria of ascending Coldplay choruses while gold glitter covered the grass, shimmering like a fleeting nightclub dream. The real euphoria was among the England squad, whose podium...
Run rate shapes as kingmaker with the World Cup hosts, along with New Zealand and England, expected to bank final-round winsAnd now, the end is near. And so we face the final curtain. A bit dramatic for the end of the group stages of a Twenty20 World Cup, but soon eight teams out of a dozen will be heading home or to their next assignments, thinking about what might have been and the disappointment of what wasn’t. And in Group 1, at least, the matter of which two teams get to stay a little longer will come down to pure and beautiful arithmetic. Arriving at this tournament, England and Australia would have been worldly enough to know that they couldn’t...
Key to victory against New Zealand were England’s seamers but Ben Stokes’s role in the team invites plenty of questionsThis was a very satisfying game of cricket, a mid-tournament group match in a rain-frazzled week that stayed alive for 39 of its 40 overs, played out in front of a semi-packed Gabba. In the broader sweep of things England’s 20-run defeat of New Zealand was another note in an excellent World Cup of deeper gears and genuine engagement.The lesson of these contests, which have felt jarringly real after the thin gruel of the year-round franchise circuit, is that the product works; that all the cricket is good, red or white ball, when it actually means something. Continue reading...
All-rounder has never truly shone in the shortest form but his personality and vibes could be crucial for such a tournamentShut your eyes and it’s not hard to picture the enduring images of Ben Stokes’s England career. In Test cricket he’s almost certainly leaning back, arms in the air at Headingley, roaring after he’s just cut away, cut away for four. In ODIs he’s probably decked out in baby/powder blue, arms aloft once again but this time with innocent eyes. Martin Guptill’s throw has deflected off Stokes’s bat for the six that no one saw coming. Not long afterwards, Stokes will have the World Cup trophy in his hands.In the shortest form, however, the image is a painful one. It’s...
Captain leads by example with the ball and field placings but some of his batting has not been up to his high standardsAs I look back over a summer when Ben Stokes has inspired an extraordinary turnaround of England’s fortunes in Test cricket, I keep returning to a more distant memory. It was 2013, and Stokes and I were in Australia, his first England Lions tour as a player and my first as batting coach. He was sent home after coming back very late one evening or, more accurately, early one morning.David Parsons, the England and Wales Cricket Board’s performance director, and the first-team coach, Andy Flower, happened to be over at the time and sat in on the disciplinary...