Trevor Bayliss wants his bowling unit to improve but their performance at Eden Gardens is something to build on ahead of June’s tournamentThe day before the third and final one-day international Jason Roy told a mixed media gathering at Eden Gardens that England would be “taking the positives” from their two defeats to date, the bare-knuckle bowler-pummelings in Pune and Cuttack. Shortly afterwards, in a flagrant breach of international sports-speak code, Roy was asked by a curious Indian journalist to describe these “positives” he had identified. What were the positives exactly? And could he rank them in any specific order?Roy looked a bit stumped, as well he might given this is perhaps the first time in modern sporting history any...
Tourists will need to adopt fearless mode to bring India’s new one-day captain down from the rare levels at which he is batting in the 50-over gameVirat Kohli spoke engagingly for 10 minutes before sweeping out of the room and down the wide concrete stairs at the Maharashtra Cricket Association Stadium, trailed by an ever-thickening swarm of hangers-on, and drawing from somewhere a Beatlemania-style barrage of squeals as he emerged briefly into the light before heading out to the middle for practice.It seems fair to say there is not another cricketer quite like Kohli, if only because there never has been. Even other modern Indian heroes – the endlessly revered Sachin Tendulkar, the punchier, poppier MS Dhoni – have been...
His remarkable decision-making made him the limited-overs master and thereby inspired the IPL but he first led India only because top names – and the BCCI – were rejecting T20“The history of the world,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, “is but the biography of great men.” Carlyle held that history is determined by the actions of a handful of heroes. And if his ideas have been discredited since, in sport, at least, they’ve still some truth to them. As Matthew Engel wrote of Shane Warne’s performance in that Ashes match at Adelaide in 2006, for four days the Test looked set to “dribble away to an inevitable draw. Then came the Great Man.” That same week in December 2006, 6,000 miles away...
The opening batsman could not hide his disappointment at getting out on 199 despite a classic subcontinental innings for IndiaThe story goes that when KL Rahul was coming through the ranks of his Ranji Trophy side, Karnataka, he had a curious habit of playing out innings while he slept, with room-mates at away games startled in the night as he called for quick singles or celebrated centuries while making an almighty racket in the process.Following the third day against England at the MA Chidambaram Stadium, when India’s opener became just the ninth batsman in the history of Test cricket to fall on 199, you fancy the shot that resulted in his demise will be another such moment to be played out...
Most batsmen would be delighted with the year Root has had, but he is irked to have often fallen with a century there for the taking. In Chennai, the story was the sameIf Joe Root was just a regular batsman he would look back on 2016 with little but fondness, having scored more heavily in Test cricket than ever before and during this time produced a career-best score of 254 against Pakistan in the summer.With one innings to go in Chennai, Root has returned 1,471 runs – a total that has him two ahead of Jonny Bairstow as the pair vie to overhaul Michael Vaughan’s England record of 1,481 in 2002 – and for the second year running has matched...