Despite plenty of misgivings about the new competition – even from those voting in favour – the promise of £1.3m for each county has stifled measured debateThe panacea of English cricket, the new T20 competition scheduled to start in 2020, will be significantly advanced at the start of this week with the representatives of the counties meeting in London in advance of their Article 50 moment. At Lord’s they are poised to wave through a change in the constitution that will allow the England and Wales Cricket Board to create a tournament that does not include all the counties. Thus the way will be open for the promised T20 extravaganza.There is no indication at this late stage that things will fail...
A life-changing back injury, an in-demand angle of delivery and an impressive contacts book have paved the way to riches for the bright EnglishmanThe 21st-century cricketer is so much better at “taking the positives” out of a seemingly bleak situation than predecessors were. This week for Tymal Mills, currently in Dubai playing for the Quetta Gladiators alongside Kevin Pietersen in the Pakistan Super League against players such as Chris Gayle and Kumar Sangakkara, every cloud really does seem to have a silver lining.Two years ago Mills was diagnosed with a congenital back condition: his spinal cord and his vertebrae are too close together, meaning the former can become seriously aggravated. The experts decided that bowling fast over long periods of...
Trevor Bayliss wants his bowling unit to improve but their performance at Eden Gardens is something to build on ahead of June’s tournamentThe day before the third and final one-day international Jason Roy told a mixed media gathering at Eden Gardens that England would be “taking the positives” from their two defeats to date, the bare-knuckle bowler-pummelings in Pune and Cuttack. Shortly afterwards, in a flagrant breach of international sports-speak code, Roy was asked by a curious Indian journalist to describe these “positives” he had identified. What were the positives exactly? And could he rank them in any specific order?Roy looked a bit stumped, as well he might given this is perhaps the first time in modern sporting history any...
Tours begin to resemble auditions as several of England’s limited overs tourists have already expressed interest in being offered for sale in February’s IPL auctionDaniel Vettori was driving his car when he found out the results of the first IPL auction, in 2008. Vettori was 29 and in his pomp, a senior cricketer long-established on the New Zealand board’s highest pay grade. Related: Eoin Morgan laments England’s failure to execute plans in India victory Continue reading...
His remarkable decision-making made him the limited-overs master and thereby inspired the IPL but he first led India only because top names – and the BCCI – were rejecting T20“The history of the world,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, “is but the biography of great men.” Carlyle held that history is determined by the actions of a handful of heroes. And if his ideas have been discredited since, in sport, at least, they’ve still some truth to them. As Matthew Engel wrote of Shane Warne’s performance in that Ashes match at Adelaide in 2006, for four days the Test looked set to “dribble away to an inevitable draw. Then came the Great Man.” That same week in December 2006, 6,000 miles away...