England win a Test (against South Africa), England lose a Test (to New Zealand) – incredible, mind-blowing stats ensue…

3 minute read

It’s amazing to think that this week brought England’s first Test win since 2014 and even more amazing to think they haven’t beaten South Africa since 2003. The amazement then takes on a slightly different hue when you learn that they’ve also preserved their unbeaten record against the same opposition. Women’s Test statistics sometimes benefit from a bit of context.

The best way of presenting that context would be to say that the Test history between these two nations amounts to one four-match series in 1960, a two-match series in 2003, a one-off Test in 2022 and this one.

Maia Bouchier now stands eighth on the all-time list of English run scorers against South Africa, even though she’s only played one match and made a duck in the second innings. Nat Sciver-Brunt is top with two hundreds from three innings.

Sciver-Brunt and captain Heather Knight also soar up England’s all-time list for most Test victories having both now played a part in two. Molly Hide’s record of seven Test wins between 1934 and 1954 is probably safe for a good while though (although there is actually another England Test scheduled in 2025).

As far as the still-unchanged record for most South Africa Test wins goes, let’s just say that’s shared by 11 players.

(Yet) another Test

It’s not quite the same situation for England’s men, who played 17 Test matches in 2024 – two more than Hide played in her entire career.

Joe Root’s 1,556 runs this year would be enough for fourth place in England women’s list of all-time Test run scorers. Gus Atkinson’s 52 scalps would put him third on the wicket-takers list, ahead of Katherine Sciver-Brunt, whose Test career spanned 18 years.

It’s a different game really. New Zealand didn’t really seem ready to play cricket immediately after their series win over India, shelling an honestly rather unseemly number of chances in the first Test. By the third, they were up and running, at which point England – an unlikely series victory now in the bag – looked like they were already pondering what in-flight meals might be in store for them.

Ben Stokes has been given a mathematical lesson in the dangers of giving 110% within a schedule like this. These days he is only really an all-rounder in fits and starts. A lot of the time it is the mere notion that he could again become one that keeps him in the Test team with his claim for a place as a specialist batter a little questionable based on this year’s returns (602 runs at 28.66).

His team has done well to stand still this year after shedding a new ball bowling attack and a couple of wicketkeepers. Gus Atkinson, Brydon Carse and Jamie Smith have all improved the side to our eyes. Stasis has however been maintained by regression in other areas.

Shoaib Bashir doesn’t yet look like the next R Ashwin and a couple of batters – including the captain – aren’t really pulling their weight. To pick the most obvious example, Zak Crawley, with his average of 30.51, is now just one match away from having played twice as many Tests as any woman in the history of the game.

Is Zak Crawley the most gifted inside-edger in world cricket?

Last orders

At the start of this New Zealand tour, we generously and not-at-all-awkwardly invited you to buy us a pint for covering the series as a new, low commitment way to help fund the site. Being as the tour’s now over, we will soon be calling time.

The Border-Gavaskar bar will of course remain open, but you’ve only got a day or two to secure the two peculiar AI images associated with New Zealand v England pint-buying. The same goes for monthly subscribers, who are also entitled to these great works.

Here’s where you can find them, pint-buying art buffs.

Finally, here’s our habitual plea for you to sign up for our email which signals that the article is now over.

The post England win a Test (against South Africa), England lose a Test (to New Zealand) – incredible, mind-blowing stats ensue… first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. New Zealand were the ones who beat South Africa
2. A bit of posturing from England and South Africa
3. More Test cricket for South Africa

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R Ashwin: thinker, destroyer, weirdo

5 minute read

R Ashwin has exited Test cricket in idiosyncratic style and with a bunch of weird quotes. It’s a fitting departure really for a quirky sort of fella who has done as much as anyone to shape Test cricket over the last decade.

Ashwin has taken the Graeme Swann route of retiring halfway through a tour of Australia – albeit India haven’t lost the series, so in his case he’s exited a live contest.

Like Swann, he’s always been a man who’s spoken his own way as well. His comments on retirement aren’t classics, but you still got that sense of a man who wasn’t steered by the system around him.

“I must say I have created a lot of memories alongside Rohit and several of my other team-mates – even though I have lost some of them over the last few years. We’re the last bunch of OGs – if we can say that – left out in the dressing room, and I will be marking this as my date of having played at this level.”

That’s just an all-round peculiar series of sentences and we absolutely encourage that. Some of it’s down to a bit of clumsy English (Have you lost team-mates or memories?) and the last sentence reads like a phrase that fundamentally doesn’t translate from his native Tamil. At the same time, it’s all shot-through with original thought.

It reminds us a little of one of our favourite colourful-yet-baffling Ashwin quotes, about his lifestyle when he was younger.

“When I was playing first-class cricket, sometimes I used to go to sleep at 11.30 in the night. And wake up at 6.30. Not exactly have my box of nuts. Not exactly drink my water.”

That comes across as such a powerful salvo of rhetoric, while also being almost entirely incomprehensible. We love it.

The thinker

As much as any other cricketer in recent times, Ashwin has always come across as a man who has approached cricket with an open mind, looking for new ways of doing things and coming up with his own ways of solving problems.

He once described warm-up games as “a great laboratory” and described how he’d run experiments in them, bowling more side-on or more front-on; trying different wrist positions and different seam positions.

As he garbled away about the amount of finger-split he thought it was best to use, or the degree of additional coiling or uncoiling, you concluded two things:

1. You had no idea what he was on about
2. This man had ideas and he wasn’t afraid to try a few things

Some cricketers are factory-produced. They might have the odd distinctive blemish that helps you distinguish them from their production line siblings, but they’re fundamentally predictable things. You set them off into the world of cricket and you kind of already know where they’re going to go.

R Ashwin made his own decisions and took his own unpredictable path. He went down a few dead-ends, but there was often a freshness about his duels with batters, where you got to see the branches of a head-to-head tussle grow before your eyes.

The destroyer

Forget the wicket total. Forget the bowling average. Forget the fact he finished 1.75 runs in credit for batting v bowling – far superior to the vast majority who ply their trade with the ‘all-rounder’ label affixed to them.

The real stat that sums up R Ashwin’s impact on the game is the number of Test five-fors he took. He registered 37 – second only to Muttiah Muralitharan with a scarcely comprehensible 67. (Just the 22 10-wicket matches for Murali. Man, that guy could bowl.)

Ashwin took India from being a somewhat middling Test team to one that was so helplessly incapable of doing anything other than utterly steamrollering opponents at home that they were free to direct almost all of their effort towards finding ways to win overseas.

For 10 years touring Test teams arrived in India expecting to have to combat Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja on pitches that would more than likely turn a bit. Despite the complete transparency and predictability of that challenge, no-one ever really worked it out. When New Zealand came over and won 3-0 earlier this year, he blamed himself.

At the same time, Ashwin’s partnership with Ravindra Jadeja was also one of the great tragedies of our age. As fun as the other guy is, the fact that he could bat and field better than Ashwin, and bowl just as reliably, repeatedly denied us the chance to see our man in conditions that didn’t massively suit him.

The weight of Ashwin’s impact came from his 383 wickets at 21.57 at home, but his 154 wickets at 30.05 overseas – delivered in fits and starts and unhelpful one-off cameo appearances – will forever remain a source of frustration. We would have loved to have had more chances to watch him work it out.

The weirdo

Because if nothing else, Ashwin would have gone about things his own way.

We know this because he made a series of online videos with Grandmaster RB Ramesh titled “Learn the Basics of Chess”.

We know it because he went to Devon.

We know it because of everything we’ve already written.

R Ashwin is a man who finds his own way and right now he’s finding his way home, no longer a Test cricketer. Not that this will entirely be the end of his relationship with the format.

Because as he once said himself: “Tomorrow if I am not playing or if I quit or someone kicks me out, I will still watch the game. Because I love it.”

R Ashwin.

More about R Ashwin

A few of these are already linked above, but who can be bothered scrolling back up again?

• This one’s about how he wasn’t a robot – he just treated himself like one
• This one’s about when he went to Devon
• This one’s about how he was vulnerable to actual chess
• This one’s when we named him Lord Megachief of Gold 2016
• This one’s when we named him Lord Megachief of Gold 2023

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The post R Ashwin: thinker, destroyer, weirdo first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. Ashwin and Jadeja. Again.
2. R Ashwin: Lord Megachief of Gold 2016
3. R Ashwin is India’s best player and we won’t hear otherwise

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At least Zak Crawley has momentum

3 minute read

We appear to be back to what we call the Gaylian definition of ‘momentum’ where there’s a hard reset every Test match and recent history is more or less bunk. (Unless you’re Zak Crawley, of course, in which case momentum is very real and you’re almost certainly going to get out to Matt Henry again for another single-figure score.)

South Africa v England

You’d be hard pressed to carry much momentum in women’s Test cricket. One of the greats of the game has just played her 17th innings, 10 years after making her debut.

It wasn’t a colossal surprise that it resulted in a hundred for Nat Sciver-Brunt (her second in the format), but even here it’s hard to discern momentum. Her previous innings – a year ago today – was a golden duck.

At the time of writing, Sophie Ecclestone is yet to take a wicket. This is gravely concerning as it means it’s over a year since she took one in this format. (Update: Nope, stand down. She’s just taken one.)

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Australia v India

What is going on here? And by ‘is’ we mean ‘was’ and by ‘here’ we mean ‘in the first Test’.

Australia are habitually strong at home, but fresh from being whitewashed at home by New Zealand and despite being bowled out for 150 in their first innings, India positively detonated them in Perth. However, since then, the tourists have twice been bowled out for under 180 and are currently 51-4 after conceding 445.

If you’ve ever ambled around Rome, you’ll know that there’s a lot of graffiti and normal buildings and then suddenly you round a corner and there’s Trevi Fountain or the Colosseum or something. The second half of that first Test feels a bit like that. It was just such a bizarre and unexpected thing to have encountered given what surrounds it.

As far as the state of play in the third Test goes, that 51-4 also comes with the added weight of Rohit Sharma having just come in. Despite a couple of hundreds against England, India’s captain has averaged only 25.08 over the last 12 months.

Rohit’s average batting under Rohit this last year is in fact weirdly similar to Virat Kohli’s average batting under Rohit over the same period (24.06). Maybe he should try batting under Jasprit Bumrah. Kohli averages 105 doing that.

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New Zealand v England

The momentum from New Zealand’s momentous moment in India must surely be languishing on the seabed in the Bay of Bengal because it sure as stumps didn’t make it back home with them. England – fresh from a series defeat to Pakistan – dominated the first two Tests. Needless to say, they have now pressed home their advantage by utterly capitulating in the third.

If there is one seam of consistency running through their recent results, however, it comes in the form of Zak Crawley and his form in the other sense.

Crawley has made 52 runs from six innings this series at an average of 8.66. You’ll no doubt have seen it reported elsewhere that no England opener has batted so many times in a single series and finished with a lower average. (Almost a full run less than David Warner in the 2019 Ashes.)

He’s been out to Matt Henry every single time – although it’s not like his recent Henryless returns have been too hot either. He averaged 27.80 against Pakistan and 24.25 against the West Indies before that.

England’s assistant coach, Paul Collingwood, says Crawley’s “ready to hurt someone” – but it would be helpful if that someone were the opposition.

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The post At least Zak Crawley has momentum first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. Dissecting ‘momentum’ for the millionth time
2. Momentum’s back!
3. English cricket momentum – no-one knows where they’re heading

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Kiwis should hope Tim Southee goes out in a blaze of dross

2 minute read

This is the way careers are supposed to end: messily and unsatisfactorily. No wicket with your final ball and six with your final shot. No nonsense exhibition match seemingly played solely for your benefit. Tim Southee has a chance here to lessen the grief for his team-mates and countryfolk by making it abundantly clear that, yes, it definitely is time for a new opening bowler.

Tim Southee will play his final Test match this week. Unless New Zealand drop him – which would be quite the finish.

His departure was flagged before the series even began. We always think this is a bizarre move, sentencing the player to a weird and protacted zombie netherland where they are simultaneously still playing but also finished.

Many in New Zealand have taken issue with the move, turning on Southee for effectively booking himself in for three matches for which he hasn’t necessarily had to justify his worth. We can’t know which party opened negotiations though. Perhaps coach and selectors have forced their own hands here.

Should Southee have read the room and fallen on his sword midway through the series? For all we know, he doesn’t really think it’s time for retirement at all. Anyone who’s played Test cricket for 16 years knows that form waxes and wanes. After 23 successive innings in which he’s failed to take more than two wickets, maybe he thinks he’s due.

Where do we get this ridiculous notion that long-serving cricketers should go out in style? The birth of a career should be soundtracked by a scream (and Southee’s certainly was) but the end should come with a whimper or possibly a weird, unnerving gurgle.

You don’t want to go out at the top of your game. You want to go out when everything is unequivocally behind you. No regrets, nothing left to look forward to, time to move on.

You wouldn’t want it to continue indefinitely, but now that Southee’s departure is confirmed, this protracted malaise is good and helpful for anyone who has invested in his career. It helps us all come to terms with the loss of a man who has done a thing or two for this Test team over the years: 389 wickets, 95 sixes, a World Test Championship.

So as he runs in at Seddon Park this weekend, England and New Zealand fans alike should be yearning for the same thing from Tim Southee: an unremitting onslaught of 125km/h long hops.

Extras

• It ends for Rangana Herath the way it will end for all of us – sprawled on our faces in defeat
• Grim final Tests: 8 players who went out on a massive low
• Our crowdfunder – thanks to new contributors (and indeed ongoing thanks to old ones)
• Our email
• Our Bluesky account – what an incredible flashback it is to have human beings again responding to things you post on social media

The post Kiwis should hope Tim Southee goes out in a blaze of dross first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. Tim Southee suffers THE RAGE
2. When Southee and McCullum skinned England
3. Monty Panesar’s celebration

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Skipping, standing, slips and slogs: 5 peculiar highlights from England’s latest action-packed win over New Zealand

3 minute read

Back in the mists of time, whenever the digital rights for Test matches were last agreed, someone decided that the free YouTube highlights for a day’s play should be just 10 minutes long. That was when a day’s play was a fifth of a Test match though. Surely now they could be at least a quarter of an hour?

This is modern cricket. You don’t get many days and you don’t get many overs in those days, but somehow they pack way more in.

The second Test between New Zealand and England at the Basin Reserve was a pretty good example. Here are five things we very much enjoyed from the two-and-a-bit days it lasted.

1. Harry Brook’s attitude to England being 50-4

The image above is actually from 111-4, but it was much the same thing at 50-4: a cheeky little skitter down the pitch so he could slot a seam bowler over extra cover for six.

Harry Brook is a quite ludicrous cricketer who’s very definitely already on the slide – if only because what other direction could he go?

2. Gus Atkinson’s hat trick appeal

It’s fair to say Atkinson was pretty confident on this one – which is just as well because the wicket itself didn’t in fact fall until the third umpire had taken a look, by which point everyone had already left the field.

There are plenty of pros to the decision review system, but this is a thing we’ve disliked about it pretty much since day one. The great thing about wickets is that they provide that instant emotional impact. When the instant is stretched over several minutes of ambiguity, you piss away an awful lot of excitement.

3. Joe Root’s batting stance on 98

In a way this is a familar sight, but we really shouldn’t get too numb to how silly it is to stand like this when a seam bowler is flinging the ball right at you – doubly so when you only need two runs for a hundred.

We like to think that directly behind Tom Blundell there’s a long stop fielder squatting down in the same position with no pads or gloves to form some sort of batter-focused tribute to the famous ‘Road to Homo Sapiens’ diagram.

4. Tom Blundell’s whitewash

Quite a lot of New Zealand’s second innings comprised Tom Blundell lobbing wind-assisted straight sixes off Shoaib Bashir. One of them put a hole in the bedsheet that they use as a sightscreen in Wellington.

5. Ben Duckett’s slip catch

Blundell’s innings came to an end when slip fielder Ben Duckett caught him not at slip.

This is where he set off from:

And this is where he took the catch:

Note in particular the direction in which he’s diving to take that catch.

Yes, both those images are taken from the same delivery.

Extras

India have recorded such mad Test victories in Australia in recent years, it’s almost like they feel like they’ve completed the game of cricket and now all they’re left with is arbitrarily setting niche challenges for themselves.

“Hey, maybe we could try and win a day-night Test with Nitish Kumar Reddy top-scoring in both innings,” they wondered in Adelaide. “And maybe he only makes 42 on each occasion.”

Bit much, India. Bit much. Just try to win normally in Brisbane, hey?

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The post Skipping, standing, slips and slogs: 5 peculiar highlights from England’s latest action-packed win over New Zealand first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. Shane Bond highlights cricket’s self harm
2. Andy Caddick’s Test career – awkward bounce from an awkward bowling action from an awkward bloke
3. Six very important things to watch out for as New Zealand take on England in Big Man Cricket

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Are we already watching peak Harry Brook?

6 minute read

Brooks aren’t ordinarily associated with peaks – they tend to run beneath them – but Harry Brook might already be at one. We’ll tell you what stops a brook in its tracks though: a dam – or perhaps in this case, the giving of damns.

You may or may not have been fully cognisant of our wincing when we reported that Jacob Bethell was being described as a ‘generational talent’ ahead of this tour. Young players shouldn’t have to put up with that kind of crap.

It’s instructive though to consider how far that sort of reputation might carry a player when allied to even half the output of Bethell’s team-mate, Harry Brook. At the time of writing, midway through his 23rd Test, the Yorkshireman has hit eight hundreds and is averaging 61.80.

If this England team decided to commit to a perceived ‘generational talent’ and he went on to average 30.9 after the same number of games, with four hundreds, he wouldn’t be in much danger of being dropped, would he?

Ollie Pope averages 34.59 after 54 Tests. Slightly different job, but Zak Crawley averages 31.14 after 52 Tests (and has still only hit four hundreds). Youthful promise and an air of ‘talent’ can together do a pretty good job of deflecting the selectorial axe.

None of which is our point. Our point is there’s a guy who is almost twice as good. Harry Brook is consistently gambolling to the crease and lashing hundreds at a Shahid-Afridi-esque strike rate. His slowest was scored at 72.48 runs per 100 balls, his quickest at 131.89. Even his triple hundred came at almost a run a ball.

Five fantastic, nonsensical or terrible innings that together explain the eternal appeal of Shahid Afridi the batsman

Partly this is modern cricket, partly it is just how Brook plays. It’s also worth saying that, while it draws much mockery, it is also the environment. But at the same time, how easy is it to remain so productively carefree when people need you to score runs?

Brook is of course not actually carefree. It’s an illusion. And who knows what psychological chicanery he indulges in to persuade himself that he is. His consistency has been built on a method where preservation of his wicket is almost an afterthought – but as time wears on, wanting to stay in while simultaneously batting like you don’t care if you get out will become an increasingly difficult balancing act.

Brook’s walked that tightrope adeptly so far. But if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that the sidewind of responsibility will pretty soon blow far stronger.

Peter’s Principality

We don’t know whether it’s a broader British thing, but English cricket is infatuated with responsibility. Players come into a Test team shaped by the Peter principle.

After his first two one-day international series, against Zimbawe and South Africa, Kevin Pietersen was averaging 139.50 and he’d scored at a run a ball. He’d been batting at five, he’d batted extraordinarily, but he barely ever batted in that position again.

The move up the order made sense because obviously here was a batter England wanted to make maximum use of. At the same time, he’d not been massively hampered by lack of exposure. He’d made three hundreds in those two series and a couple of fifties and if you saw any of these innings it was obvious the time constraints had in many ways brought out the very best of him. We’ve often thought something similar about Jos Buttler.

In moving a batter up the order, sometimes you shear them of a little of their essence. No-one ever seems to worry about this too much.

Those are maybe less relevant examples given they’re in a format where overs are finite, but the same buoyancy pulls on batters in the Test team too. Most obviously, Joe Root’s never too far from a suggestion he move up to number three. In fact the better be performs at four, the greater the pressure to move. The same forces apply to any middle-order batter who does well.

Returning to Buttler, England’s white ball captain serves as a salutary example of how lightning can become that much harder to bottle in the open-ended world of Test cricket. Harry Brook seems to us to have that at the minute. He is such a wonderful and perfect Test five, we don’t especially see any allure in changing anything. Moving him up to four might not in itself free the lightning, but bottles can only take so many knocks.

Because of course there’s also the small matter of…

Captaincy

This is the other brand of responsibility that looms large for Brook – not least because he’s already done the job. He was, admittedly, only England’s fifth captain of the summer when he led against Australia a few months ago, but odds are he’ll be doing it again and it’s easy to see how the greater exposure might erode his game.

“If you get caught somewhere on the boundary or in the field then who cares?” he responded after England had been criticised for their batting when losing his first match in charge.

While robust feedback to that comment didn’t prevent him from making his first ODI hundred in the next game, are we really in a place where we want to even accidentally persuade Harry Brook to think differently about the art of batting?

Those numbers again: eight Test hundreds and an average of 61.80.

Sadly, this kind of extra scrutiny almost inevitably awaits. If the likes of Alastair Cook and Joe Root can rise to the Test captaincy on the basis that they’re really good batters, a player who’s also shown some sort of aptitude for leadership will be doing very well to sidestep the job.

Why not move him up to three as well and just watch the magic fizzle out?

High five

There are players in the history of Test cricket who’ve managed to bat well at five – or even six – without being invited to “take more responsibility” up the order.

Quite a few of them have been Australian, which is probably Allan Border’s fault. He made half of his 11,000 Test runs when batting at five or six and saw out the last few years of his career down there. This paved the way for Steve Waugh to bat there in basically every single Australia Test until he finally decided to stop playing cricket.

Waugh made 10,479 runs at an average of 52.13 when batting at five or lower with 31 hundreds. AND THEY NEVER MOVED HIM.

Border and Waugh did of course take on more responsibility by serving as captains – as did Michael Clarke (6,788 runs at 59.02 when batting at five or six). But there have been players who’ve managed to stay at five without too many distractions.

Shivnarine Chanderpaul was captain for just 14 of his 164 Tests but was still permitted to make 9,635 of his 11,867 Test runs batting at five or lower.

The most relevant comparison is probably AB de Villiers. Here was a batter who could perform in any position, in any format; a man known for his shot-making who could nevertheless dig in with the best of them. At various times, South Africa asked him to open, captain and keep wicket, but they also never strayed too far, for too long in how they made use of their most talented batter.

De Villiers scored 6,307 of his 8,765 Test runs and 19 of his 22 hundreds when batting at five or six. It was always a muddy picture with de Villiers, but 12 of those hundreds came when unburdened by either wicketkeeping or captaincy.

Conclusion

Is this what England should do with Harry Brook? Simply ink him in at five and free him of all distractions?

It doesn’t really work like that. Life is forever in flux. Players change. Enthusiasm fades. Even senior statesman status might temper his approach.

All we’re saying is that it’s an option. You don’t have to move your best batter up the order when things are going well. You don’t have to make him captain.

Someone has to take responsibility, of course. Someone has to give a damn – just ideally not the guy whose superpower is playing like he doesn’t.

Extras

1. Not entirely off topic, but Rohit hasn’t yet benefited from batting “somewhere in the middle,” has he? Maybe he should have let Jasprit Bumrah continue as captain.
2. The New Zealand v England bar is still very much open if you’d like to support both our short-term liquid input and medium-term literary output.
3. The email sign-up link is here if you’re new to the site.
4. This piece ended up pretty sizeable, so we’ve categorised it as a feature. Here are our other features and here’s how the Patreon campaign effectively funds them.

The post Are we already watching peak Harry Brook? first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. How do you stop Harry Brook? We’ll tell you how
2. Hats off to Harry Brook’s very particular ‘steamrollered pancake pitch’ set of skills
3. It’s Harry Brook’s turn at the bar

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Rohit Sharma has seen Steve Smith’s stellar recent success and he wants a piece of it

2 minute read

“I hear you’re a middle order batter now, Rohit. How did you get interested in that type of thing?”

Before this Australia-India series, we reported how failing failure Steve Smith was going to hide down the order following his abject failure as a Test opener.

The move has gone really, really well for him with a rate of improvement from one innings to the next that has been almost unquantifiably massive. After batting for one minute and one ball for zero runs in his first innings at four, he dropped to five for his next knock, where he batted for an hour and a half and made 17 runs.

Those spectacular returns haven’t escaped the eagle eye of Rohit Sharma, who has been opening with an almost Smithian level of ineffectiveness these last few months. After 133 runs in his last 10 innings, he says he will bat, “somewhere in the middle,” on his return to the India side in Adelaide.

It’s tempting to think Rohit might mean ‘middle’ in a more geographic sense here (i.e. near the stumps), but the comment was made while simultaneously confirming that KL Rahul will open. (Unless he’s saying that KL will be working at some sort of retail establishment that will be open specifically during the hours of play while Rohit’s otherwise engaged ‘somewhere in the middle’? Seems unlikely, but we can’t rule it out.)

Rohit is not bad in the middle order. He has hit three of his Test hundreds and six of his fifties from number six, where he averages 54.57. Of course he was six years younger back when all of that happened.

A mere six years doesn’t necessarily take much of a toll once you’re boisterously tramping your way through middle age – but that’s assuming you’re looking after yourself. A serious fried egg habit might accelerate the ageing process.

Extras

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The post Rohit Sharma has seen Steve Smith’s stellar recent success and he wants a piece of it first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. Steve Smith’s mountain-toppling attempt and Rohit Sharma’s potential landslide | an India v Australia preview
2. (Almost) everyone rejoice: India have picked Rohit Sharma for an away Test match again
3. Please can we talk about the time Rohit Sharma ate 25 fried eggs in one go?

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Who will stand in for Jimmy Anderson if England again lose by one run?

2 minute read

James Anderson had a great many attributes as a Test cricketer – none bigger than his ability to serve as a majestic island of chuntering irritation and sadness when England lost a Test match by a single run.

England are in Wellington again.

Bloody Wellington.

To recap what happened last time, England batted first and fell to 21-2, at which point Joe Root made a hundred, only no-one really noticed because the man who’d come in after him was by that point already on 184.

Five times Joe Root made a Test hundred and no-one really noticed

Ben Stokes declared on 435-8 and then asked New Zealand to follow-on after they were bowled out for 209. Their second innings went a little better. Kane Williamson was more than ready by then and his hundred left England chasing 258.

This time Root could only manage 95, while Harry Brook fared even worse, getting run out before he’d even faced a ball.

At 256-9, The Great Neil Wagner bowled a high wide that wasn’t called because not many people wanted the climax decided by extras. Next ball Anderson was out and, as we said at the time, sport’s whole meaning and impact is built on someone involved having and displaying the level of pissed-offedness Anderson then mustered.

It was quite magnificent.

Anderson stood, he stewed. He looked sad, he looked irritated. As Stokes waded onto the pitch, grinning and shaking hands, Jimmy chuntered into the void, probably griping about how the previous ball should have been a wide.

He did not want to lose. He did not want to have lost. On that day, James Anderson gave the concepts of victory and defeat a bit of weight and meaning.

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The post Who will stand in for Jimmy Anderson if England again lose by one run? first appeared on King Cricket.

Related posts:

1. James Anderson’s back
2. Jimmy Anderson, majestic island of chuntering irritation and sadness
3. James Anderson bowls England to victory

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