Can international cricket stay relevant with dead rubbers cropping up all over a dead-rubber logjam of a schedule?If you were listening carefully you might just have learned the answer to an ancient riddle in Melbourne, where Australia finished off their whitewash of England in the Contractual Obligation one-day international series on Tuesday. They won the third game by 221 runs, the largest ODI defeat in England’s history. A record, then, and not the game’s only one. There were 10,406 paying spectators in the ground, the smallest recorded audience for an Australia one-day game at the MCG.It turns out a team falling down when there’s no one around to hear it do still make a sound and it’s something like Jos...
Discarded by England, Buttler has been a revelation in the latest iteration of a successful tournament that the English game has long tried, and failed, to emulateJos Buttler stands outside a hotel room door bouncing a ball on his bat. Trent Boult opens the door carrying a guitar, which he strums as they stroll off together. Buttler plays a game where the object is to throw nuts and berries into your partner’s mouth, Buttler cradling the baby-faced left-handed opener Yashasvi Jaiswal in his arms and saying: “Yes, yes, get in there mate,” with a surprising degree of tenderness.Buttler sits on a stool as Ravichandran Ashwin describes his earliest memory of cricket: an enormous tree where, as a very young child,...
The white-ball expert seems more like an overwhelmed shopper at the crease for England in the red-ball gameIt’s a familiar scene. You’re perched in front of the TV, remote in hand, “deciding” on something to watch. There’s that show about the mafia, or the one about drugs, or that one about drugs and mafia? What about this new police one? It’s written by that bloke who did that other police one, I think he used to be in the police, or the mafia, or both? No? Well there’s that subtitled one we recorded? Mmm, bit too much of an investment, it’s only a Tuesday night after all and I sort of don’t want to have to watch the screen all...
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....
England’s most flamboyant batsman has finally come of age as a Test player after making an uncharacteristic, patient 152As a warm and windswept afternoon wound down, the fun and games could begin. The pitch was behaving, there were more than enough runs on the board, Pakistan’s attack were beaten and broken, and with Jos Buttler settled and comfortable the big shots could come out. The devastating reverse sweep. The disdainful ramp over the shoulder. The beefy off-side punch. Only there was something strange. Buttler wasn’t the one playing any of these shots at all.Instead, in a curious reversal of roles it was Zak Crawley, the new crown prince of English batting, who was flaying Pakistan to all parts with a...