He may look like he should still be playing for the colts but after bursting on to the Test scene in the summer England’s tyro has pocketed a lucrative IPL contract to crown his 2018Last year my kids went to do some holiday cricket training at Surrey’s practice ground at New Malden. When they came back I asked my wife if she’d found the right place, and she said, oh yeah, I got a bit lost but there was a very nice boy who was having his foot massaged and I asked him where to go and he got up and showed us the right place, we had a bit of a chat he was lovely, very nice, very polite.While...
England are missing a trick by waiting until the gifted Sussex all-rounder is 27 and need to put a yorker through the rule bookEven with a week to sit on it there is no obvious easing of the dunder-headed inanity that surrounds the England and Wales Cricket Board’s proposed 100-ball competition. On wider reflection this isn’t just a bad idea. It’s more out-there than that, the kind of idea you might expect a precocious toddler to come up with, or some other species altogether: an ambitious sports-marketing chicken with a below average IQ, or a squirrel promoted by a series of unlikely events to a key management role in the national summer sport.Perhaps the only real purpose it has at...
‘It’s amazing how quickly things can change in cricket,’ says Sunrisers Hyderabad’s late pick-up for the 2018 IPLWhen Cameron Bancroft took sandpaper to the ball on the third day in Cape Town, it was not just the spark for a funeral pyre that a seemingly unpopular Australian team had been dousing in gasoline for some time.Indeed the ripple effect caused by this spot of DIY – one that has seen three hefty bans handed down, the head coach quit, tears flow like the Wallaman Falls and Australia’s cricket culture become the subject of a review – has spread far, with one beneficiary being an Englishman who, for all his ability to cudgel a cricket ball, has recently appeared to be...
Cricket was set on its lucrative path to the IPL by sport’s first super-agent and an all-star Sunday afternoon competition that forced the MCC into desperate actionIt was exactly 50 years ago this week that the MCC’s Advisory County Cricket Committee took a decision that they hoped might, as the Guardian’s John Arlott put it in a news story, “change the shape and mathematics of county cricket” forever. That, as it turned out, was a significant understatement.Their decision was to introduce, from the 1969 season onwards, a Sunday County League, with matches to be composed of two innings of no more than 40 overs. This, Arlott said, would “present the County game in a fresh way, which may well recall...
Stunning performances with bat and ball for Rising Pune Supergiant are signs of a player flourishing in a domestic scene stronger than some international matchesJignesh runs a bottle shop off the Caledonian Road, a short walk north of King’s Cross. He keeps a TV by the till, to kill time between customers. It only ever seems to be tuned to one of two things: Indian soap operas and Indian cricket. He talks about the sport as much as English people do the weather. If there’s a game going, he will have the IPL on. So at this time of year the commentators are always chatting away, part of the backing track to his little corner of the city, along with...