If the format is to thrive in the face of T20’s popularity, we must shelve old ideas about how the game is supposed to be playedLate Monday morning at Trent Bridge and Joe Root, 164 not out, is batting against Tim Southee. In the Daily Telegraph the previous week Geoffrey Boycott explained to his readers that Root is a better batsman than his teammates because, unlike them, he “doesn’t play” Twenty20 cricket. “You never see Root play the scoop, ramp or any fancy shots,” Boycott wrote. “His technique is honed and has been from a young age to play proper cricket.” Now Southee is bowling just outside Root’s off stump, looking to take the ball away. It is only the...
The batter forgot the typical Test rules and played as if it were a one-day game, destroying New Zealand with extravagant ease“Root’s bloody out,” the old man gasped. It had happened while he and his wife were fetching fresh cups of tea. “So who’s this batting?” she asked. He craned his head sideways so he could try to read from the big screen. “Jonny Bairstow. Then it’s Stokes, Foakes and the bowlers.” He sucked his teeth. “They ought to shut up shop or they could lose this.” She pursed her lips, clearly unsure whether or not she agreed. But he was wearing a Nottinghamshire cricket club tie and had, you guess, watched a lot of cricket here over the years....
Latest Ashes collapse is overly familiar and a backdrop to the beginning of the end for Stokes-Bairstow-Buttler middle orderTypical: Christmas evening, you turn on the television and it’s another bloody repeat. Although in fairness to England, pick through the dental records of their latest Ashes capitulation and you might just be able to identify a few distinguishing features. And above all the defining quality of their Boxing Day fiasco in Melbourne was the sense of hopelessness and predestination: of a team and a generation whose narrative arc has finally run dry.There was a time when England collapses had a kind of fascinating car-crash quality. These days, by contrast, they feel strangely banal: tedious, overfamiliar, predictable, like a recurring anxiety dream....
The wicketkeeper-batsman’s ever-changing Test role has not offered him the best chance to flourish in the longest formatOne summer, when he was 16 years old, carefree and on the very verge of life itself, Jonny Bairstow and a few of his friends went on a surfing holiday to Cornwall. One evening, he tells us in his autobiography, A Clear Blue Sky, they were sitting blissfully on the beach in Newquay when someone asked what everyone’s father did for a living. Bairstow explained in an even voice that his own father had died some years earlier. There was an awkward silence. And then someone laughed: a cruel, disbelieving, illogical laugh. Feeling the tears welling inside him, shaking with rage and embarrassment...
England are too reliant on their captain so I would bring in Bairstow at No 3 for the third Test against IndiaEngland are in Ahmedabad with the series tied at 1-1 with two to play and a day-night Test to come that might favour their seamers – we don’t know how the pink ball will react to the floodlights, but if anyone’s going to get it moving it’s Jimmy Anderson. It will also get soft quicker and tends to go dead after 20 overs, which means Ravi Ashwin should get less bounce, rag and spin and the batsmen get a fraction more time to react to it.If England’s seamers benefit from conditions Jasprit Bumrah will as well, but some of...