Cricket loves its impossibilities: winning a Test after following on, defending 120 on a flat deck, or convincing fans that the DLS sheet actually makes sense. But among the sport’s rarest feats, nothing bends belief quite like an all-rounder scoring a half-century and taking a five-for in the same World Cup match. It’s a statistical […]
Cricket loves its impossibilities: winning a Test after following on, defending 120 on a flat deck, or convincing fans that the DLS sheet actually makes sense. But among the sport’s rarest feats, nothing bends belief quite like an all-rounder scoring a half-century and taking a five-for in the same World Cup match. It’s a statistical […]
Some T20Is feel like chaos wearing cricket spikes; others feel like a quiet detective story where every clue is hiding in plain sight. India’s five-wicket win over Australia at Hobart was the second kind a match that looked straightforward on the scoreboard yet hid a series of turning points that revealed how both teams are […]
India has experienced many heartbreaking losses; yet, their path to the current World Cup has been by far the most emotional of any previous occasion. The next night, after beating Australia in the semi-finals, Harmanpreet Kaur was crying alone in a dug-out; it wasn’t from losing or being sad, it was from exhaustion, shock, and […]
Indian cricket seems to have an unusual pattern; each time it finds a world-class fast bowler, it appears to find no space to bowl him. Arshdeep Singh joins the strange trend as the most successful (in terms of wickets) Indian in Twenty20 International Cricket, and one of ten Indians with 50-plus wickets, for he can […]
IPL trades are supposed to be elegant little chess moves, two teams swapping pieces to fix structural weaknesses. But truth be told, most trades resemble a lopsided gully-cricket barter: you give away your best bat and somehow end up with the broken tennis ball. The latest rumored blockbuster, Sanju Samson to the Delhi Capitals in […]
Some cricketing omens arrive with trumpets. Others arrive when Ollie Pope checks his phone in the middle of the night in Clapham to discover Jacob Bethell edging to slip for 11. By sunrise, Pope was sleeping peacefully again, partly because he’s pencilled in at No. 3 for Perth, partly because Bethell finished the tour with […]
Every Ashes year has its selection dramas, but this one feels like a full-blown reality show, part talent hunt, part injury watch, and part psychological thriller. The Sheffield Shield’s latest round didn’t just produce runs and wickets; it produced questions. Big, messy, deliciously complex selection questions. Green’s Delayed Bowling Return Shifts the Balance […]
On occasion, cricket will produce an afternoon that is so contradictory (the team losing) and yet so rewarding (an individual has won something for themselves in the future). England’s third ODI in Wellington was just such a day. At 97-6, England were facing a typical downward spiral that typically concludes with a dignified handshake and […]
Every time Shubman Gill walks out in Australia, you can almost hear three different factions forming in real time: those who swear he’s India’s long-term white-ball anchor, those who insist he’s a red-ball prodigy miscast into sprint-format cricket, and those who simply want to know why he suddenly forgets where his off stump is. […]
There are defeats, and then there are the kind that whisper something more worrying beneath the surface. India’s four-wicket loss to Australia at the MCG felt like the second type, not a disaster, not a meltdown, but a familiar riddle resurfacing at an inconvenient time. A total of 125 in 18.4 overs on a true […]