Viewers watching England’s first Test of the summer were given an uncompromising alternative to cakes and sixesWest Indies were flying a Black Lives Matter flag from their balcony. It was one of the first things you saw as the cameras panned across the empty ground on the opening morning of the opening match of this strange and delayed cricket season.Later, when they came out on to the ground, you could see their players were wearing one black glove each. Both teams took the knee before the start of play and as they did it West Indies raised their gloved fists in salute, a clear, conscious echo of the protests made by the sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith as they...
Longest form of the game returns in England on Wednesday with the sport looking very different but with an opportunity to make some noise despite the silenceGreat news out of South Africa: 3 Team Cricket, the newest format of the game in which three teams play each other simultaneously, finally has a launch date. The inaugural 3TC event – featuring eight-man sides captained by AB de Villiers, Kagiso Rabada and Quinton de Kock – will be held at Pretoria’s SuperSport Park on 18 July.“I can’t think of a more appropriate day on which to hold this game than Nelson Mandela Day,” said Jacques Faul, chief executive of Cricket South Africa. And indeed, it’s possible this is exactly the utopian vision...
Against a backdrop of tight biosecurity and an empty stadium attention will centre on how the barnstorming all-rounder copes with being in charge against West IndiesAt last a Test match to preview. How do we go about that? It’s the clash of the great all-rounder captains, Jason Holder and Ben Stokes. Holder, ranked No 1 in the ICC all-rounder stats and about to embark on his 33rd Test as captain, is confronted by Stokes, ranked No 2 and leading England for the first time.The goal of Stokes and his team is to win back the Wisden Trophy, held by West Indies after their 2-1 victory in the Caribbean last year. Can West Indies win a series in England for the...
Rudder shares lyrics to an upcoming song about Windrush as West Indies head across the Atlantic to bail out English cricketThe arrival of West Indies for this summer’s Test series in England is not the first time that bright young people from the Caribbean have travelled across the Atlantic to bail out the country during an hour of need.It may be for the financial benefit of English cricket, rather than a nation on its knees after a bloody world war, but there is a parallel to be drawn with Jason Holder’s tourists and those aboard the Empire Windrush in 1948 – as well as a stirring anthem that connects the two generations. Related: Geoffrey Boycott aims dig at BBC as...
England’s 1968 tour of West Indies contained incident aplenty off the field but turgid cricket on it, until a gamble that failedThere can’t be many Tests with such an unexpected twist as that between England and West Indies in Port of Spain, 52 years ago this week. Here’s Bruce Barber in the Guardian at the end of day three, under the headline “A disgrace to the name of cricket”: “In the mid-afternoon hours the only critical problem was to decide whether the batting or the bowling plumbed the lower depths …“Some devil’s brew was served at lunch, for after that the name of cricket was tarnished. Carew, a second-change off-spinner who would be lucky to get on most Saturdays in...