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The Hundred’s having a player auction so that it can be even more like a watered-down version of the IPL

3 minute read

The IPL has been such a colossal success, it makes total sense to slavishly copy every aspect of it so that it’s much easier for everyone to make direct comparisons and see exactly how your short format competition pales in comparison. The Hundred’s going to start having auctions, everyone!

If you were to ask UK sports fans which aspect best sums up the worst qualities of the IPL, a large percentage of people would say the auctions.

Even if it doesn’t exactly stand up to much scrutiny any more, most of us in this country still have a notion of sports teams as being defined by (a) the regions they represent and (b) the people who go out on the field to play the game. Football and county cricket clubs’ identities are to a great extent built on their best-known and longest-serving players, many of whom will also have been locals.

We have one big question about The Hundred TV graphics

Given that it demands the players are intermittently rounded up for redistribution, a player auction absolutely flies in the face of this. Each reboot of human resources means fans are subsequently invited to either (a) continue supporting a team which will now have a strikingly different on-field presence, or (b) switch allegiance to follow a favourite player at a different club.

For a lot of people, neither of these options quite sits right.

But that’s what the IPL does, and the IPL is massive, and IPL teams now own a bunch of Hundred teams, so that is what The Hundred is going to do.

How will it work?

Hundred franchises were permitted to sign or retain up to four players each prior to the auction. To give one example, Manchester Giants have retained well-known Mancunians Jos Buttler, Noor Ahmad, Heinrich Klaasen and Liam Dawson.

Admittedly, they’ve also kept hold of Sophie Ecclestone, who is at least from the North-West, and if you look around the other teams you can just about perceive the faintest air of regional identity if you squint hard enough: Harry Brook at Sunrisers Leeds, say, or Will Jacks at MI London – although that’s about it. (Speaking of regional identity, where do we stand on the name ‘Mumbai Indians London’? The most generous assessment is that it constitutes a delightfully broad celebration of contemporary urban multiculturalism.)

Observations after half-watching the Hundred on TV with a couple of kids milling about the place

Other than the four player allowance, everyone else has gone back in the bag and an auction will be held in London on March 11 and 12.

The IPL auction is a huge deal and this one will be just like it, only the sums will be smaller, and there won’t be quite as many top players, and the franchises they’ll be signing to will be B-grade feeder teams for the proper ones in the bigger tournament.

Once again, the big selling point here seems to be that this is the same as the IPL, only less. Personally, we’d aim higher, but The Clone Roses, Oasish and The Faux Fighters will tell you there’s a living to be made with this kind of thing.

How popular are all these Not-Quite-The-IPL franchise leagues actually likely to be?

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Lord Megachief of Gold 2025

5 minute read

Our annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners.

Ben Stokes earned the Lord Megachief of Gold 2022 title largely off the back of his transformational captaincy of an England team that had previously been very shit. Shubman Gill is Lord Megachief of Gold 2025 for his transformational captaincy of himself.

Honourable mentions

Mitchell Starc had a real hot streak for a month or two. However, while he took 6-9(!), 7-58 and 6-75 in successive matches, he played eight other Tests in which he failed to take more than three wickets in an innings. We kind of love Starc and he would have been the easiest player to write about because we could have gone on about all his undervalued qualities again, but as admirable as they are, low-cost three-fors aren’t really what we’re after here, even if a number of them did come in conditions that didn’t aid fast bowling.

Over at the top of the New Zealand order, Devon Conway hit three hundreds, including a double, and Rachin Ravindra hit two and averaged 117.25, but they only played five Tests, which isn’t really enough. This is a growing problem for the one-person Lord Megachief of Gold adjudication panel.

Similarly, if it weren’t for the fact he only turned up halfway through the year, Simon Harmer might have made the strongest case. He took 30 wickets in four Tests at 14.3 and was justifiably player of the series for South Africa’s 2-0 win in India. But four Tests is not enough.

Shubman Gill: Lord Megachief of Gold

India’s captain kind of missed that South Africa series after suffering neck spasms (which sound very, very horrible) midway through the first Test. Would they have won had he been present? Probably not. The only obvious upside to Gill’s captaincy so far has been the effect it has had on his batting.

In his very first innings as leader, against England at Headingley, he made 147. In marked contrast to one of his predecessors, he was only semi-livid about this feat.

Shubman Gill seems only half angry about hitting Test hundreds

Gill continued his ambiguous celebratory facial messaging in the next Test when he made 269 in the first innings. Then he had another go after making 161 in the second. This was very silly stuff; almost as silly as seeing fit to set England 608 runs to win.

Speaking afterwards, Gill pointed out that India aren’t really used to these kinds of matches any more – not many home Tests last five days. “Luckily, most of the days when we are playing here, we are batting and not fielding,” he pointed out.

Gill himself spent 12 and a half hours batting in that match, which might partly explain why he didn’t make too many in the Lord’s Test that started four days later. He did however add a further ton (a trifling 103) at Old Trafford and then three innings against the West Indies later in the year were enough for him to add a 50 and 129 not out.

All in all, this is a lot of batting from a man who hadn’t previously shown any extraordinary aptitude for such endeavours. The year as a whole brought him 983 runs at 70.21 and he currently averages 79.16 as captain.

Where did this come from? He averaged 35.05 in the 32 Tests leading up to his appointment, which is the kind of nondescript shrug-inducing zone where you’ll find the likes of Mike Gatting, Marcus North, Litton Das, Alviro Petersen, John Crawley, Shaun Marsh, Ollie Pope, Wasim Jaffer, Shane Watson and Lou Vincent. Oh and also Ben Stokes.

Just eight matches as captain have lifted Gill out of that company and ahead of Desmond Haynes, Sourav Ganguly, Ian Chappell and Graham Gooch.

As changes in status go, it was almost as marked and rapid as Sean Connery peeling off his frogman outfit to reveal an immaculate white tuxedo underneath at the start of Goldfinger.

During the England tour, we theorised this shift was actually a form of escapism. Escapism is possibly not the word. Avoidance.

When Stokes hit him with a bouncer at Old Trafford, Gill shed his gloves to reveal hands that were by that point 90 per cent Elastoplast. The mental pain seemed greater, however, and the mental pain had nothing to do with what had just happened to his hands. To our eyes, Gill’s greatest fear is captaincy. He therefore continued avoiding doing any of it by making his way to three figures.

We asked at the time whether this brand of self-care is sustainable. Will Gill be driven to ever-greater feats of captaincy avoidance, perhaps culminating in five solid days of batting without a declaration? The speed with which he distanced himself from Gatting et al certainly makes such an eventuality plausible.

Five minutes ago, the man was emerging from the water with a seagull on his head. A handful of explosions and the shedding of his outer layer and now he’s standing there ordering a martini with a carnation in his lapel.

Congratulations, Shubman Gill, you are 2025’s Lord Megachief of Gold.

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Book review: The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments by Dan Liebke and Alex Bowden, foreword by Pat Cummins

3 minute read

We don’t often review cricket books these days because reading about cricket is not generally what we want to do once we’ve finished reading about cricket for the day. King Cricket reader Sam Blackledge has read one though and he sent us this review.

Journalism has come a long way in recent years. The old toxic culture of nepotism, favours for favours and ‘It’s all about who you know’ are consigned to the rubbish bin, like so many copies of the News of the World and Piers Morgan’s autobiography.

We cancelled our expense accounts, cleaned up our collective act, and now everything is totally above board and completely fine.

So, with that in mind, here is my entirely impartial review of a new book by a pair of promising young writers, which I happened to stumble across while idly browsing the internet for Christmas gifts and have no previous connection with, honest.

The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments by Dan Liebke and Alex Bowden is a witty, clever and highly detailed book, taking what PR people would no doubt term a ‘sideways glance’ at everyone’s favourite/most painful cricketing rivalry*.

All of your favourite nonsense is here: Botham’s Headingley heroics; Waugh’s career-saving ton; Broad not walking; Broad shouting at a robot; Broad adjusting a sightscreen for 15 minutes before getting bowled for a golden duck.

Leafing through the pages, I was transported back to watching the Top of the Pops chart rundown circa 1996. As each entry ticked by, and we got closer to the summit, the permutations narrowed. Either ‘Return of the Mack’ by Mark Morrison had made it to number one, or he hadn’t placed at all.

Suffice to say, readers will not be disappointed by what Messrs Liebke and Bowden have chosen to nominate as the most ridiculous Ashes moment of the past 50 years.

Cricket books are ten-a-penny in my house, particularly over the festive period. For every Art of Captaincy by Mike Brearley, there’s a Year in the Sun by Michael Vaughan. (Summary: I was really good at batting for a bit.)

Early January is boom time for my local Oxfam branch, volunteers gasping with delight as canvas bags filled with multiple untouched copies of Tuffers’ Cricket Tales are dumped at their feet. (Summary: I smoked some fags and got told off by Goochie.)

The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments is different. This is a book which will sit proudly on my shelves, despite the fact that – as previously stated – I have no connection with the authors whatsoever.

As demonstrated this winter, wherever The Ashes goes, nonsense inevitably follows. This book will be surely be called into action repeatedly over the coming years, whenever a friend or family member exclaims, upon seeing another England batter sashay down the track and spaz one to deep extra cover, ‘That is absolutely ridiculous’.

All hail Liebke and Bowden, whomsoever they may be. Apparently they have a podcast, too. I wonder if it’s any good?

* Delete as appropriate depending on whether your chosen country is currently holding the urn or carrying out another post-series root and branch structural review.

If we were a little less lazy, we’d have put together a STAR BUY! or RECOMMENDED! logo together with some 5/5 style imagery to go with the above impartial review. But we are lazy, so we haven’t.

We will however include this link so that you can buy the book and support (a) UK independent bookshops and (b) us. Sam for some reason fails to mention how shiny and full colour it is and how it’s therefore definitely worth £19, even from an unbiased point of view.

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Steve Smith, Mitch Marsh, Jonny Bairstow and Joe Denly… now THAT was a fifth Ashes Test

< 1 minute read

If you’ve developed a taste for fifth Ashes Test dead rubbers then good news! We’ve a contrived one to tell you about. The final episode of the latest series of our Ridiculous Ashes podcast is now up and (spoiler!) there was nothing to play for but pride (in one’s own ridiculousness).

Going by standard scoring, the 2019 Ashes stood at 2-1 as the teams headed to the Oval, so it was a sort of quasi-dead rubber in that Australia had already retained the Ashes even though England could still level the series. Ridiculousness-wise, however, the series had already been definitively won. We won’t say which way in case you’re behind and want to listen to the series from the start (and actually give a shit about the outcome, which seems vanishingly unlikely).

But of course every Ridiculous Ashes Test is important and there were some unlikely star performers in this match: Jos Buttler in England’s first innings, Joe Denly in the second, Mitch Marsh with the ball. Elsewhere, Jonny Bairstow delivered a grand wicketkeeping cameo, while Steve Smith was again predictably prominent, as were Stuart Broad and David Warner.

Have a listen! Here’s a link to all the episodes in this series, including this latest one. You can also find previous Ridiculous Ashes series on the same page if you want to go back and listen to those.

And hey! Why not also buy the book? (Shiny, full colour, utterly devoid of 2026/26 Ashes content.)

Subscribe to the King Cricket email to ensure you’re hectored about Ridiculous Ashes books and podcast episodes whenever they appear.

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Did you see… Harry Brook’s first ball in Melbourne? Unquestionably the 2025/26 Ashes’ finest moment

5 minute read

Harry Brook walked out at 8-3 in England’s first innings in Melbourne. Mitchell Starc ran in and bowled at 145.1km/h. Brook ran at it, swung with all his might… and completely missed it. It was one of the most glorious arrivals we can ever remember seeing.

This was, let’s be clear, a breath-takingly awful shot, but therein lies its magnificence. Because how can you not admire a man who must surely know what people are already saying about him and what they will go on to say, who digests all that, processes it, and then decides on this as a course of action?

“Disgrace! Send him home!”

At times it’s hard to tell whether the BBC’s cricket coverage sets, captures or reflects the wider mood of English cricket. Perhaps it’s all three.

“Oh dear me,” said Jonathan Agnew on commentary. “Has nothing that’s been said these last few weeks – nothing – gone in at all? I’m sorry. This is the vice captain.”

This was the backdrop to Brook’s shot. England had lost the Ashes. They hadn’t batted well. They’d gone to Noosa and some of them had drunk beer.

Brook, for some reason, was a bit of a lightning rod for all of this.

We’d later learn that Brook had been lamped by a Kiwi bouncer the night before captaining England to a defeat on the previous tour. This casts his broader decision-making in a rather different light, but not all his on-field decisions are bad ones – even the ones that most definitely are when viewed in isolation.

A certain sort of England fan believes there is one specific, correct way to bat in Test cricket and anything that falls outside of that must by definition reduce a player’s effectiveness. Brook has the highest Test average of any England batter this century and he has achieved that with almost complete disregard for preservation of his wicket.

He has not achieved this despite that approach. He has achieved it because of it. If his method is imperfect in places, there are more pluses than minuses. Some cannot see what he has gained (and what we have gained) from playing this way. They for some reason take his achievements as proof he would obviously be better still if only he were to approach Test match batting in an entirely different way.

Witless?

After the Adelaide Test – the match before this innings – The Telegraph ran an article headlined “Harry Brook’s witless self-destruction sums him and England up.”

Just to hammer the point home, the standfirst began, “Batsman’s addiction to circus flourishes undermine [sic] his immense talent.”

The carefree approach has unquestionably worked for Brook, but jeez, how do you maintain that when you’re being endlessly pressured by this crap? More than ever right now, we worry how it’ll erode him. To come out and play not merely a daft shot, but a shot almost wilfully antagonistic in its daftness in Melbourne was therefore positively heroic in our eyes.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: the thing about performing mad, unlikely, incredible feats is that you first have to attempt them.

Just over a year ago, Brook responded to his team being 26-3 and soon after 43-4 by hitting 123 off 115 balls against New Zealand. We felt that this was Peak Harry Brook and we were already afraid for him, wondering what psychological chicanery he must indulge in to keep those troublesome cares away.

Are we already watching peak Harry Brook?

It’s vital that he does. If this one specific shot against Starc was bad, Brook’s overall output has been massively enhanced by the strategy that gave rise to it. And it’s not like he even got out.

Similarly, batting like Joe Root works for Joe Root… usually. But on day one in Melbourne, Root played his first 14 balls very sensibly and was then out for a duck off the 15th.

So it’s not like England threw every last bit of caution to the wind that day. Someone gave a more cautious approach a go, and that someone was Joe Root… and he didn’t score a run.

In contrast, Brook wasn’t deterred by his air swipe. He in fact advanced at quick bowlers five times in his first 15 balls.

The man is not cowed by the scorecard. This is actually a good thing.

We are not here to say that running down the wicket first ball to disturb only some Melbourne air constitutes a great move from anyone. We are saying that, for Brook at least, this kind of mad, brave, bold proactivity drags his finer qualities along in its wake. Why put so much emphasis on just one ball?

Against India, last summer, Brook came out late in the day and largely played for the close against Jasprit Bumrah. It was sensible cricket, but he looked terrible. The one attacking shot he played, he was caught off a no-ball.

The next morning everyone was excited to see the pair resume hostilities. Ollie Pope had just been dismissed for 106 in the previous over; the match was in the balance. Brook ran down the pitch at the finest bowler in the world and hit the most exquisite drive you’ll ever see. He made 99 and lost his wicket playing a jumping hook shot that made a lot of people very angry. England won the match.

Did you see… Harry Brook charge Jasprit Bumrah?

The Melbourne shot was Brook at his maddest, bravest and boldest and if all of his greatest innings have been carved out of madness, bravery and boldness, how much do you really want to chip away at those things?

Shortly afterwards, he slapped Starc over extra cover for six, having attempted pretty much exactly the same shot. He wristed another six over long-on when the score was still 39-4.

Twenty wickets fell on day one at Melbourne and no-one else passed 40. Brook was unbeaten in the second innings and the winning runs came off his thigh pad.

The one time he was dismissed, LBW, he was trying to defend. Watching it again, we cannot fathom why he didn’t take the safe option of running down the pitch and carting it over extra cover for six.

He’s the vice captain. Has nothing gone in at all? Brook’s witless addiction to passive defensive strokes undermines his immense talent.

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Did you see… Steve Smith backed into a corner by the legendary finger spin of Will Jacks?

5 minute read

“I hate doing it,” claimed Steve Smith at the toss. “But as I’ve said, we keep producing wickets that we don’t think is going to spin.” As it turned out, the more accurate assessment came from Ben Stokes. “We try and act like we know what we’re doing when we’re looking down at the pitch and rubbing it and, you know, knocking it. No one really has a clue.”

This was the first time in 138 years that Australia had gone into a Sydney Test without a spin bowler, but it was also the fourth time in six matches they’ve done without one.

Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for anyone following the series, Australia have been up against an England team who haven’t picked a spinner even once.

Still no Shoaib Bashir then. Do you remember when Ben Stokes used to back his spinners?

Will Jacks, you say? Will Jacks is willing and not incompetent, but he is not a spin bowler; he is a cricketer who sometimes bowls spin.

Jacks’ spin has taken fewer first-class wickets than Dawid Malan’s spin – and at a worse average too. No-one called Dawid Malan a spin bowler.

One of the least helpful things to happen to England this series was when Jacks and Stokes put on 96 runs in the second Test defeat in Brisbane. This pointless pride-salvaging rearguard convinced the tourists that the quasi-all-rounder was somehow cumulatively worth a place in their XI based on his batting and bowling combined.

Test cricket doesn’t work like that. We said at the time the ‘promise’ of that innings of 41 would have a ‘false’ inserted before it with the benefit of greater hindsight. And so it proved.

When has your eighth best batter ever swung a Test for you? It was pure wishful thinking to imagine a man with Jacks’ career record would make meaningful runs when those ahead of him couldn’t. You could say something similar of his bowling.

In Test cricket, right now, Jacks is a buyer of wickets and a scorer of meaningless consolation runs. He finished the series with 145 runs at 20.71 and six wickets at 53.66. He conceded 4.9 runs an over – more than any England bowler bar poor Matt Potts.

To contextualise that, Potts was sentenced to just the one nightmare innings on a flat pitch having not played competitive cricket since September – and he was massively out of form even back then. That was the kind of level Jacks was operating at.

It wasn’t a series for spinners, of course. but given that in three of the matches Jacks was the closest thing to a spinner on either side, such an assessment became more than a little self-fulfilling.

“You kind of get pushed into a corner in a way,” explained Smith before the Sydney Test. “So that’s the way we’ve gone.”

As it was, Beau Webster took 3-64 in England’s second innings, bowling spin. Those wickets included Jacks, who went out of his way to slog his second ball to Cameron Green in the deep.

Like Jacks, Webster is not a spin bowler, but a cricketer who sometimes bowls spin. It’s not even his first-choice bowling style any more to the extent he consciously avoids practising it because he thinks doing so only makes him worse.

“I don’t think I’d be standing here if I was still wheeling out the offspinners,” he said when he was given his Test debut last year.

You can take that two ways. You can say that someone who doesn’t even practise spin bowling can successfully function as your spinner, or you can say, shit, what would an actual, proper, spin bowler have done to the opposition on that pitch?

Smith himself is very strong against spin and he was also in decent nick having made 138 in the first innings when Will Jacks clean bowled him through the gate after turning one two foot.

Never one to camouflage his feelings, Smith was left literally open-mouthed by what had happened. Holding his position, he turned to double-check where the ball had come from, as if someone had rotated the SCG around him just before ball was released.

The ball hadn’t merely beaten Smith. He’d missed it by the full width of a bat.

“We keep producing wickets that we don’t think is going to spin.”

But enough is enough. If that’s what you think, maybe you should start thinking differently. Not just Smith. Maybe they should all start thinking differently.

As Stokes said, “No-one really has a clue. You can only try and give yourself the best chance of getting the XI needed to get a chance of winning.”

And if you don’t have a clue, maybe start by furnishing yourself with all the options – don’t just pay lip service to one of them by picking some dilettante.

Australia won, so was their selection justified? “It is now,” answered Smith. “We’re standing here winning, right? Had we not, there’s maybe a bit to answer for there, potentially.”

So what of the team standing there losing? By the exact same rationale, England’s team selection – shaped by their squad selection before the tour even began – was presumably dead wrong.

Sometimes you reverse into a corner of your own volition.

Sky Sports has boiled its Ashes coverage down to its purest and greatest form: Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain standing there talking about what’s gone wrong

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They got there in the end: England have finally brought a timeless, familiar, seemingly unavoidable brand of agony to this Ashes series

2 minute read

Finally, belatedly, on day three of the fifth Test, the normal Ashes began: flat pitch, hot sun… how are you going to handle this? Australia handled it with bats in their hands. England handled it the way they’ve so often handled it in the past: with an endlessly rotating cast of right-arm fast-medium bowlers trending bleakly towards military-medium as the day wore on.

“How can the ball hurt you?” asked Brian Close, once upon a time. “It’s only on you for a second.”

It’s one of cricket’s great ridiculous quotes, but there’s a kernel of something in there all the same. Brevity brings a different brand of pain. How could the first Test defeat in Perth have hurt you, England fans? It didn’t even last two days. On a very basic level, England’s worst Ashes defeats have always been so much more than that.

We’ve railed against the notion that Perth was an all-timer. The second Test in Brisbane was worse, we argued, because that one was a more comprehensive failure.

It too wasn’t a classic though. With no Australia batter making a hundred, it lacked those long, hopeless sessions where there’s no end in sight. England had a fast bowler too. There was plenty of scope for things to be worse.

But now we’re here. We’ve made it. One opening bowler isn’t an opening bowler. The other hasn’t really played cricket since the summer. The fast bowlers are gone. The spin bowler is no such thing. Left hands are purely for the rubbing of temples after Travis Head has sent yet another short, wide one to the fence. It’s the Ashes we all know so well!

England have ended up looking a bit fast-medium.

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The 5 best/worst aspects of Jamie Smith’s gruesome and deplorable dismissal to Marnus Labuschagne’s abject filth

4 minute read

You expect the unexpected in this Ashes, but we didn’t see the prospect of Jamie Smith getting bounced out by Marnus Labuschagne mentioned in any of the previews. This was obviously gloriously awful cricket all round, but which was the worst (and therefore also, in some weird sense, the best) aspect of this immediately legendary moment?

1. It was unnecessary

You don’t need us to tell you that there’s no need – absolutely zero need whatsoever – to get out to Marnus Labuschagne at even the best of times. Such an outcome is even more easily avoidable when he’s bowling medium-pace. And if he’s deliberately bowling bouncers? Well, you really have to go out of your way to secure your own downfall in that scenario. We’ll return to that last point in a moment.

It’s also worth mentioning that Joe Root was at the other end. In the previous Test, Root played like Root and made a 15-ball duck, so it made total sense for England’s other batters to instead copy Harry Brook, the highest scorer in either team’s first innings with 41 off 34 balls.

Conversely, in Sydney, Root was playing like Root and he was still at the crease with 129 to his name, so being calm and measured was proving a pretty good approach. Even if Jamie Smith wasn’t going to ape Root’s method, he could at least have tried to hang around and let him continue being brilliant. That really isn’t such an impossible goal when all you have to survive is a bunch of half-trackers from Marnus.

Why does Joe Root always seem to work it out and no-one else does?

2. It was ugly

All the footage we’ve seen of this wicket has been unusual blurry.

We presume this is not an accident.

3. The delivery was entirely predictable

A peculiar corollary to being incredibly well grooved against 85mph deliveries targeting off stump is that Test batters are actually quite unfamiliar with facing outright cack. This can, at times, become a weakness.

Presented with a looping 65mph long hop, it can sometimes take a top flight batter a moment to track down and activate the relevant neural pathway. As the ball makes its leisurely way towards them, they sometimes find there are a great many possible shots vying for supremacy and the disagreements between these courses of action may prevent natural movement and result in an embarrassing demise.

Let us be clear: this was not one of those occasions. When he took it upon himself to jump-spoon the ball straight to a fielder, Smith hadn’t been mugged by an unexpectedly awful delivery teleported in from some back yard cricket game. He knew exactly what was coming. Marnus had just bowled – Lord help us – four short balls in a row. This was the fifth.

4. It took considerable effort to engineer failure

As mentioned earlier, Smith really had to go out of his way to lose his wicket to this one. First of all, on a very basic level, he first had to decide to try to hit the thing.

Marnus’s previous bouncer had been so short it had been called a wide, so we were already in a world where hitting the ball was arguably counterproductive. Having decided to do so, Smith then had to actually manage it. Again, it was a very high bouncer, so this necessitated momentarily becoming airborne. (There is no textbook for how you should play Marnus Labuschagne’s bowling, but if there were, it most definitely would not begin, “First, launch yourself into the air.”)

Having successfully made contact, Smith then contrived to loft the ball into the hands of the only fielder in front of square on the off side.

Job done. Job laboriously and unnecessarily done.

5. Marnus’s vindicated celebrations

There’s a TV programme called Ultra City Smiths – a stop motion doll puppet dark comedy detective noir musical.

About 90 per cent of the characters are called Smith and they live in a squalid, depraved world where people are reduced to selling their trousers and where the riverbed is thick with guns which have been discarded after being used in crimes.

Ultra City is not even half as wretched and unsavoury as what Steve Smith and Jamie Smith gave us.

Marnus shouldn’t have been bowling. Marnus shouldn’t have taken a wicket.

The resultant celebrations must surely therefore be the worst aspect of this wicket – although drawing that conclusion rather makes a mockery of our opening paragraph suggestion that the worst aspect must surely also double as the best.

There is nothing good about Marnus Labuschagne running around looking pleased with himself because his stupid, stupid plan to burgle a wicket with military medium half-trackers has been vindicated. Nothing good at all.

The post The 5 best/worst aspects of Jamie Smith’s gruesome and deplorable dismissal to Marnus Labuschagne’s abject filth first appeared on King Cricket.

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Mutual dullness shall pass, but for now Australia and England deserve each other | an Ashes 5th Test preview

3 minute read

Sydney has a reputation for being spin friendly, but it’s a reputation like your fat, wheezing mate who used to be good at gymnastics. Some of the raw ingredients are presumably still in there somewhere, but no-one’s seriously expecting anything.

Shane Warne is the top Test wicket-taker at this ground – no surprises there – but Stuart MacGill actually edges the equally predictable Glenn McGrath into third place with 53 wickets in just eight games. After McGrath, it’s Nathan Lyon ahead of the rather misleadingly named Charlie Turner.

So a spin-heavy top four, but shorten the timeframe to the last five years and Pat Cummins, Scott Boland and Josh Hazlewood rank ahead of Lyon, even though Boland only played two of the matches and Hazlewood three.

Lyon played all five games and averaged 43.53 in that timespan. Boland averaged 8.35; Hazlewood 15.71; and Cummins 20.45.

Modern Sydney has been The Home of Accurate Right-Arm Fast-Medium.

Given that only nine wickets have fallen to spin in the first four Tests of this series, you imagine both Australia and England might continue to play this rather depressing diminuendo where all else is being stripped away.

Those incredible recent bowling records for Boland, Hazlewood and Cummins haven’t however come about in isolation. They may not have taken so many wickets, but Lyon and Mitchell Starc delivered almost as many overs as the other three across those five most recent matches. The contrast that provided will have made a difference and there will also have been a couple of times where batters who had got the measure of all the meat and potatoes stuff met a premature end against one of these two tangier side dishes.

It doesn’t often pay to take these blunt statistics and run with them to their logical conclusions.

This is the beating ischemic heart of Test cricket, right? The more you hone in on one thing, the more vulnerable you become to something else. You can get away with a narrow approach (whether batting or bowling) for a session, or an innings, or a Test, or even for a whole series, but the more you specialise, the more your Achilles heels will proliferate, until eventually you’re a great knackered-up limping millipede, still desperately trying to pull off your one lame trick.

It’s probably no coincidence that recent Australian Test conditions have suited a fantastic yet ageing first-choice pace attack that would lose its edge and the majority of its components in a war of attrition. A series in which Lyon was reduced to a Rex Kwon Do-sized cameo must surely be as far as this trend goes though – not just because of how Australia surrendered the Boxing Day Test, but because it’s also allowed a touring team that is obviously hugely distrustful of its spin bowlers to pass an entire summer without at any point picking anyone who truly warrants that label.

So you imagine things bottomed-out in Melbourne, but there’s still a long way to bounce back. Last year, neither Australia nor India made it to 200 in either innings. We could be in for more of the same.

The overbearing seam-centric context to this fifth Test might continue to perpetuate this dull, annoying notion that This Is The Way simply by shaping team selection. Even if the pitch turns out a complete flatty, it’s not easy to envisage Will Jacks reshaping the statistical backdrop for future matches. As for the home team, will Todd Murphy even play?

Bleak stuff – but this too shall pass. Test cricket will turn on this thinking eventually. Maybe there’ll be some early sighter of that this week. Maybe we’ll see One Of Those Days for one team or both. Frankly, after this series, they both deserve a long, arduous reminder that variety is the spice of life.

The post Mutual dullness shall pass, but for now Australia and England deserve each other | an Ashes 5th Test preview first appeared on King Cricket.

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1. It was unnecessary

2. It was ugly

3. The delivery was entirely predictable

4. It took considerable effort to engineer failure

5. Marnus’s vindicated celebrations

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Mutual dullness shall pass, but for now Australia and England deserve each other | an Ashes 5th Test preview

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