Where other bowlers have seen careers ruined by injury, mutterings about girth, depression and homesickness, Anderson is still going strong in his 162nd Test“What’s the secret?” Nasser Hussain asked Jimmy Anderson before the start of this Test. “A lot of it is luck,” Anderson told him. “I’ve been born with a body that can cope with the pressures of bowling.” The rest, he said, was “hunger”, the appetite to work at getting better every day for the past 6,596 days, since he made his Test debut in May 2003. In that time he’s played 162 games, which puts him top of the list, one ahead of his great mate Alastair Cook. Luck and hunger. It’s a short reply to a...
This is a weirdly muddled England Test side, planning for the Ashes while the best team in the world are in townAdam Gilchrist’s autobiography True Colours: My Story is one of the great “unreliable narrator” sports books. Not because there’s a single false note in its 500 pages of tearful, heartfelt authenticity, but because it’s not really His Story but is instead a meditation on his own obsession with certain concepts – Australianism, Baggy Greenism, Good Blokeism, and above all the good health, the sacred vibes of the Aussie Test team.Changes of personnel are agonised over. Gilchrist worries endlessly about morale. There are 34 entries in the index under the heading “Team Feeling”. In the Gilchrist universe Test cricket, teamship...
What the batsman lacks in flair he makes up for in stubbornness and patience, as New Zealand have discovered Has anyone ever been made so rapturously happy by Dom Sibley’s batting? Let loose at a Test match after 15 months of on-and-off lockdown, the crowd in the Hollies Stand were driven delirious by England’s odd-couple openers, Sibley and Rory Burns, as they batted through Thursday’s morning session for 72. That ranked surprisingly high in the list of England’s recent opening stands: fifth-best in a home Test since Andrew Strauss retired in 2012, and their biggest in a first innings at home since the last time New Zealand were here in 2015, when Alastair Cook and Adam Lyth put on 177...
The current furore risks obscuring how the ECB has made similar promises to tackle racism for a couple of decadesSince we are all looking backwards, let’s go a little further, beyond 2018, when Eoin Morgan sent a tweet saying “sir, you’re my favourite batsman”, spoofing comments he receives on social media from Indian cricket fans; beyond 2017, when Jos Buttler sent a similar one reading “much beauty batting you are on fire, sir”; beyond 2012, when Ollie Robinson “joked” “my new Muslim friend is the bomb #wheeyyyyy”; beyond 2010, when Jimmy Anderson wrote one in which he said Stuart Broad’s new haircut made him look like “a 15yr old lesbian”; all the way back to 1999, when the England and...
The player’s place in the Test side has become temporarily untenable and the culture secretary Oliver Dowden is doing him no favours in making him a poster boy in culture warOne Test into the summer and English cricket already finds itself under siege. Were it simply criticism of the national team’s lack of ambition with the bat on the final day at Lord’s, it could at least be blocked out like Dom Sibley shovelling one off his pads.The far trickier delivery faced right now is the fallout from Ollie Robinson’s unacceptable past postings on Twitter, with the England and Wales Cricket Board on Sunday evening announcing his suspension from international duty pending the outcome of a disciplinary investigation. Related: Dom...