The oil giant’s place in cricket’s landscape shows once more the Saudi regime’s art of blending into the sporting canvasThree years ago, Aramco, the oil giant predominantly owned by the Saudi royal family, underwent a subtle rebrand. And subtle is the operative word here: the company’s distinctive logo, a white star on a blue and green background, remained in place. But somehow the blue was rendered just a little bluer, the green just a little greener, the typeface softened into grey lowercase, the word “Saudi” and the Arabic script above it quietly removed.This was the logo upon which Sam Curran stood as he prepared to bowl for England against Pakistan in their final Twenty20 World Cup warm-up on Monday, a...
The IPL’s £5.2bn deal shows where the game is headed but less international cricket might actually make it feel more specialSo what did you do during the great English Cricket Culture Wars? Did you set up a burner Twitter account and start spamming George Dobell? Did you start a furious argument about state schools and free-to-air television with a man who lists his interests as “Wife – Manchester Originals – UFC – but not necessarily in that order!!!!”? Did you share a video of Alice Capsey just doing Alice Capsey things?Alternatively it is entirely possible that you have no idea what any of the last paragraph was about, in which case you enjoy not simply my admiration but my deepest...
The new T20 trend for replacing batters at crucial moments will upset traditionalists, but that doesn’t necessarily make it wrongFor a game rooted in centuries of tradition, cricket has often found itself curiously susceptible to fashion. Did you spot the moment, about five or six years ago, when it quietly became mandatory for any good fielder to be described as a “gun”? Bowling attacks were “the bowling unit” for most of the 2000s before imperceptibly morphing into “the bowling group”. Left-arm wrist-spin is having its long-awaited moment in the sun, itself a reaction to the 2010s trend for spinners who didn’t really spin the ball at all, but just did funny flicky things with their fingers while going “oooh” and...
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,...
A team based upon their powerful Test bowling lineup had enough power to carry them to victory over their determined New Zealand opponentsAustralia’s relationship with Twenty20 international cricket has always been strained. When Ricky Ponting captained the first ever match in 2005, with players in fancy dress wearing contrived nicknames on their shirts, even smoking an unbeaten 98 couldn’t stop him looking like an unimpressed cat unable to bring up a hairball.Influential people shared his disdain, but even after taking the format seriously, and developing one of the better domestic leagues, Australian teams in T20 World Cups fell flat. It was easy to dismiss the importance of the condensed form, but for a dominant Test power that also collected 50-over...