The Surrey batter’s rich talent is clear but doubts had been raised about his ability to fulfil that promise at the highest level“Two!” shouted Ollie Pope. Joe Root wavered at the striker’s end, his bat in his ground, his weight on his front foot. “Two!” shouted his teammates on the balcony. Root had one eye on the ball racing away over the square and the other on the fielder haring in towards it from the deep. “TWO!” shouted the crowd. Pope was coming anyway, dead-set on finishing the last run he needed for his hundred. He, and everyone else in English cricket, had been waiting a long time for this, and he wasn’t going to waste even one more ball...
England set about chasing New Zealand’s first innings with an abandon not seen from them for several years in TestsTickets for this Test went on sale last September, and so the vast majority of fans at Trent Bridge on Sunday will have reserved their seats months in advance. Really, you have to admire the leap of faith involved there.Batting collapses. Erratic weather. Covid postponements. For much of the last few years, buying a ticket to watch England play Test cricket has been an act of the purest optimism: the sporting equivalent of playing the lottery. Continue reading...
For the new England Test coach Brendon McCullum, the job will be feeling a lot bigger now than it did this time last weekSome time in the middle of the afternoon Brendon McCullum quit his position on the balcony, where he had been sitting all through the morning, and disappeared back into the pavilion. He was gone for an hour or so, long enough that you started to wonder if he had clocked that he still had time to make the quarter-to-nine flight from London Heathrow which, with a couple of changes in Dubai and Melbourne, could have had him back in New Zealand by three o’clock Monday morning. Given the way the game was going at the time, he...
The New Zealand No 11 battles for personal milestones with Daryl Mitchell in a match-warping inningsThe batter powered a drive down the ground for four and punched the air with joy. His teammate approached from the other end to offer a fist-bump, then upgraded to a full hug. History had been made: Trent Boult had become the most prolific No 11 in Test history, level with Muttiah Muralitharan on 623 runs.Briefly and entertainingly, he and Daryl Mitchell, grinning behind their grilles, battled for personal milestones, Boult desperate to become the best of all worst batters, Mitchell to complete a first career double-century before he ran out of partners. Their team’s total was already good enough for little else to matter,...
The Trent Bridge groundsman’s warning proved prophetic as Ben Stokes made the right call but saw New Zealand benefitThere is a shamanistic mystery to the reading of a wicket. Many experienced players concede it is something they just aren’t good at, a mystical skill that never settled upon them, vaguely akin to the interpretation of tea leaves and the conjuring of visions from crystal balls. And Trent Bridge had produced a real puzzle.The groundsman, knowing more about this wicket than most, warned before play that this would be a good toss to lose. With grass on the pitch and clouds in the sky the obvious decision was to bowl – which is what Ben Stokes duly did – but there...