Infamously prickly, can-explode-will-explode India captain has been a man becalmed but there are hints the rage is returningHow are we doing? Hanging in there? I’m talking specifically to the cricket fans, a collective who will truly deserve their participation medal when the World Cup reaches its conclusion next weekend. Sure, football lovers may claim their work suffered when England’s women made it to the semi-finals. Wimbledon aficionados will soon be bragging that they’ve done nothing but secretly stream tennis on their phones for two weeks. To followers of the Cricket World Cup, however, they are as the mayfly.Even the most highly trained of box-set bingers would struggle to keep up with a regime of 58 eight‑hour games (yes, I’m including...
Jason Roy is on form, Jofra Archer indispensable, so India and Australia want group wins to miss World Cup hosts in the semisSuddenly the square pegs are fitting into square holes. England have their semi-final at Edgbaston, where they like playing, and when Eoin Morgan said he was not bothered which side he would be playing against, it felt as if he was telling the truth rather than dutifully spinning. Their opponents will be India or Australia.England are starting to play with confidence and captain Morgan now seems to know his preferred team; it is the one that played in the last two games. Unless conditions dictate otherwise – and this would only happen if there is a very dry,...
Bairstow may have misunderstood coverage of England defeats but the opener righted a few perceived wrongs with his centuryThere was something utterly inevitable about Jonny Bairstow notching up a century against India, even if the celebration that followed it was, outwardly at least, less pointed than some might have expected.In Perth, during England’s doomed Ashes campaign of 2017‑18, he greeted three figures by butting his helmet – a nod to his infamous nightclub greeting for Australia’s Cameron Bancroft at the start of the tour. And in Colombo last year, when plonked at No 3 against his wishes and shorn of his beloved Test wicketkeeping gloves, came the beetroot-faced guttural roar. Related: Jonny Bairstow blasts critics ‘waiting for England to fail’...
The physical distance between the two cricket teams in recent years has created an emotional distance tooWhen Yuvraj Singh, the Indian all-rounder with balls and bravado, ice-cold chaser and hot-flush finisher, announced his retirement last week – there was a flood of love on social media. Not only from his brothers in blue – Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli – but his cousins the other side of the great partition: Shoaib Malik and Shoaib Akhtar.Yuvraj, whose career included India’s world T20 win in 2007 and their 2011 World Cup victory, as well as a cancer diagnosis and a subsequent recovery, made all of his three Test centuries against Pakistan, one in Lahore, one in Karachi and one on home soil...
Largely forgotten match saw both teams score at more than seven an over, something which is now more commonplaceWhen England successfully chased a target of 359 to win the third ODI against Pakistan at Bristol last month it was the third time in five days that both teams in an unabbreviated ODI had scored at seven or more runs an over. Never in the history of cricket had it happened thrice in a single week but increasingly high-scoring has come to seem commonplace, assisted by powerplays, fielding restrictions, multiple new balls and countless technical and physical improvements and innovations.In 1,322 ODI innings in the 20 years following the first ODI in January 1971, despite many of them lasting 60 or...