Finals Day is one of the few constants in the domestic game with the sport becoming bewildering and exhausting to followThe woman in the bird costume can scarcely believe what she’s seeing. The man dressed as a bottle of mustard is mesmerised by the flight of the white ball against the dark night sky. The pair of jockeys leaping in anticipation of a Somerset six now clutch their heads as Jordan Cox of Kent hurls himself skywards, flips the ball back over the boundary rope and into play again. By the time Cox has finally hit the turf, Matt Milnes has grasped the catch off the bowling of Darren Stevens, and Kent are on the way to becoming men’s Twenty20...
A crowded calendar is causing injuries and a player like Jos Buttler could miss matches because of his young familyCricket has become a sport that never stops, but though the Indian Premier League restarts this weekend and the bandwagon keeps rolling we have also reached the end of the British summer, as good a time as any to take stock and assess where we are and what the future holds.For England, there are some easy answers and some harder ones. In terms of cricket it has been a solid few months, with success in the short-form game balancing out some disappointment in the Tests. But the way the men’s international summer ended, with the abandonment of the fifth Test of...
The league restarts in the UAE on Sunday and has shown its power by bending the global schedule to accommodate itWho could forget the Indian Premier League 2021 part one? All aboard the franchise flagship, fingers pushed firmly in ears, as a deadly Covid surge ran through India.While the players were trapped in bio-bubbles – Covid-tested every two days, surrounded by healthcare professionals, three ambulances outside every ground – the general public wept outside hospitals, pleading for beds for their desperately ill relatives, and repeated, heartbreaking calls went out on social media for oxygen cylinders. Continue reading...
The unspoken, unexamined decision of the Indian Premier League to ignore one country has turned the dressing room into a proxy battlefield, the auction into a theatre of warLast week, the England and Wales Cricket Board announced it is in the process of organising the first official England tour of Pakistan in 15 years. This is, self‑evidently, the right thing to do. Since England’s last visit in 2005-06, Pakistan have toured this country eight times for various tournaments and series. From the ECB’s perspective, their decision to brave the pandemic and send a team this summer may well have proven the difference between financial ruin and mere recession.And so naturally the decision to consider the possibility of maybe, potentially, exploring...
It is fascinating to recall now that when Twenty20 was starting out there were real questions about who would come to colonise this new worldThe weather forecast for Birmingham this weekend isn’t messing about. Usually weather in this country is described in gentle language, using words such as patchy or intermittent, and reflecting the fluid nature of these things on an island of mild fronts and shifting breezes.Not so here. Frankly the weather forecast is annoyed you’re even asking these questions. “Yellow warning: rain,” was the Met Office’s first draft. This was updated on Thursday to a Danger To Life Alert. To be clear, the Met Office thinks it’s going to rain so much in Birmingham this weekend it might...