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Ollie Robinson’s racist tweets prove English cricket still has much to learn

It was possible to feel sympathy and scorn for the bowler as the fallout from grotesque remarks marred best day of his careerThe clouds blew over Lord’s midway through the afternoon, when Ollie Robinson was deep into his second spell. He had bowled well, had won his first Test wicket that morning when he made Tom Latham play on, and was working away on his second, the great Ross Taylor, who he soon dismissed leg before wicket. It all seemed so sweet, but away from the middle it was already turning sour. There was no way for Robinson to know it then, but around that same time, screengrabs started circulating on social media, showing a series of offensive ‘jokes’ Robinson...

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Devon Conway’s century was worth the wait for patient New Zealand

Experienced debutant’s sudden rise to prominence has been a long time coming, partly thanks to a shift in national allegianceIf there is an advantage to making your Test debut a few weeks short of your 30th birthday, it must be the knowledge that you will have gained in those years about the game and yourself. Perhaps that is why Devon Conway, New Zealand’s latest international sensation, showed no signs of nerves on his first visit to Lord’s.There was one early scare, when he got a thick inside edge to a Stuart Broad delivery that was arrowing into his pads, leaving the bowler standing head in hands while Conway jogged through his first two runs in Test cricket. Two balls later...

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Kane's gang carved from same New Zealand granite as their No 1 batsman | Andy Bull

Modest, hard-working, undemonstrative – the world’s top-ranked Test team are shaped by their self-effacing skipperIt’s not clear exactly how much mind Christina Rossetti paid to the ins and outs of the New Zealand club cricket scene, but when the old sports journalist Sir Terry McLean wrote his short history of the sport in the country he still opened it with a quote from one of her poems. “Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end.”It was, McLean reckoned, “an exact and prophetic statement” about the way the game has been played in New Zealand, where they spent 90 years fighting for the right to play Test cricket, another 26 waiting for the first win, and...

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The Spin | Hutton and Carson: cricket prodigies who took different paths after 1937

England and New Zealand met at Lord’s this week 83 years ago with two gifted young batsmen in their ranksThe first Test between England and New Zealand at Lord’s, which started on this week in 1937, was interesting for several reasons, none of them apparent to Neville Cardus at the time. “The engagement will be a Test match only in name,” he wrote in his preview for the Guardian. “None of us would expect Derbyshire to give England a good match; yet Derbyshire are a better team than New Zealand. The MCC should put a limit to the occasions on which a cricketer in this country is able to pick up ‘international’ colours almost for nothing.” England, he wrote, “have...

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Time catches up with New Zealand, a nation in need of sporting solace | Matthew Engel

Cricket tour allows supporters to be enthusiastic again after semi-final defeat in the Rugby World CupWhichever side loses the Rugby World Cup final in Yokohama on Saturday, the country concerned will be plunged into what you might call shallow mourning. Or at least a portion of it will: largely but not wholly white, male and middle-class.But in a faraway and now, once again, more or less forgotten country, it goes deeper and wider than that. Continue reading...

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