What the batsman lacks in flair he makes up for in stubbornness and patience, as New Zealand have discovered Has anyone ever been made so rapturously happy by Dom Sibley’s batting? Let loose at a Test match after 15 months of on-and-off lockdown, the crowd in the Hollies Stand were driven delirious by England’s odd-couple openers, Sibley and Rory Burns, as they batted through Thursday’s morning session for 72. That ranked surprisingly high in the list of England’s recent opening stands: fifth-best in a home Test since Andrew Strauss retired in 2012, and their biggest in a first innings at home since the last time New Zealand were here in 2015, when Alastair Cook and Adam Lyth put on 177...
The player’s place in the Test side has become temporarily untenable and the culture secretary Oliver Dowden is doing him no favours in making him a poster boy in culture warOne Test into the summer and English cricket already finds itself under siege. Were it simply criticism of the national team’s lack of ambition with the bat on the final day at Lord’s, it could at least be blocked out like Dom Sibley shovelling one off his pads.The far trickier delivery faced right now is the fallout from Ollie Robinson’s unacceptable past postings on Twitter, with the England and Wales Cricket Board on Sunday evening announcing his suspension from international duty pending the outcome of a disciplinary investigation. Related: Dom...
Debutant had an unsettling start but showed on the pitch that he has an authority that belies his inexperienceLord’s doesn’t have a James Anderson End; you’ll find that a couple of hundred miles north at Old Trafford. But if it did, it would be the one Ollie Robinson was bowling from first thing on Sunday morning. Anderson has preferred the Pavilion End right through his 18-year Test career, and has likely got through more work from it than any other fast bowler ever has from any single end in the history of Test cricket. He had his back to it when he bowled here for the first time, against Zimbabwe in 2003, and more often than not it has been...
Ollie Pope, Dan Lawrence and Zak Crawley the most egregious offenders as Tim Southee puts rash hosts in a great messIn December 2011, a group of 11 sports car enthusiasts from the Japanese island of Kyushu were driving in convoy north along the Chugoku Expressway when one botched a lane change, clipped the median barrier, spun round and scattered the cars behind him into a series of futile evasive manoeuvres that ended in what newspapers would describe as “the most expensive pile-up in history”.When the police arrived they found eight wrecked Ferraris, two Mercedes, and a Lamborghini strewn “in a great mess” along a long stretch of the motorway. The police chief described it as “a gathering of narcissists”. Related:...
England bowler took wickets having apologised for his offensive tweets but his future is now out of his handsThe day’s play was a half-hour old when Ollie Robinson came on to bowl, first change at the Nursery End. The applause was loud and conspicuous, an unexpected show of support for a man who surely must have been worried how the crowd were going to react to him. In a lot of ways the situation in front of him now was pretty similar to the one he’d faced when he was bowling the previous evening, Devon Conway and Henry Nicholls were still in, their partnership up to 160 now. In others, of course, it was a lot more challenging. You guess...