Busted fingers have been a bit of a theme in this Test series.

Shan Masood started the series with a fractured finger after copping a nasty blow in the Caribbean. Apart from the many fumbles he has made in the field, it has also cost him runs. Across 50 Tests, Shan has averaged in and around 30 with the bat. It might change on Day 3 at Edgbaston, but as things stand, he has not scored 30 runs in an innings on this tour. Shan was also dropped on 13 by Ben Duckett, which means he might just complete his version of thirteen going on thirty, with Jennifer Garner nowhere to be seen.

Babar Azam missed the Headingley Test due to a finger injury as well. No broken bones, just a ball that rose sharply off the deck in Beckenham. He mentioned in a press conference prior to the Lord’s Test that he was 90 percent fit. Babar hasn’t managed to get to double digits across three innings thus far, so that last 10 percent has well and truly held him back. Perhaps he could have scored more runs than Gus Atkinson with a fully functioning finger.

Mohammad Rizwan also hurt his fingers plenty of times at Lord’s, keeping up to the stumps. He is currently looking for a shrink back in Pakistan, after being flown back prematurely.

Jamie Smith joined Pakistan’s former and current captains with what has been described as his finger being in a splint. He was deemed unfit to keep wicket, but fit enough to smash Pakistan’s bowlers for a counterattacking knock of 69. Jamie’s stiff, bruised, or potentially dislocated finger has proven to be stronger than Imam-ul-Haq’s calf.

Busted fingers may well have been a theme in this series, but only one team has truly felt the pain.

- by Behram Qazi

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England’s runline was 329.5 overnight, meaning there was about a 50% chance that they’d score fewer than 330 runs in their first innings. At 156/4, with Pakistan’s random team generator machine of utter and complete nonsense fighting to salvage something - anything - from a series which has seen them lurch from chaos to omnishambles, there should’ve been a rallying cry this morning. Razaullah firing 90mph bombs from one end with Abbas’ metronomic meddling at the other. Get rid of Lawrence early, let Brook get himself out in his 55-75 danger zone, give the fans something to cheer about. At least tell the fielders that their fans had paid an average of £100 for a ticket to watch them today, and suggest they look like they were trying to stop the ball, run after it and so on. They conceded 52 in the first six overs. Fifty two. England should’ve declared there and then and they could’ve booked a teatime tee-time for their post-series pub golf.

Shakeel aside, Pakistan haven’t really fought on this tour and my word they didn’t really fight today. They did manage to get the sixth wicket they needed to bowl England out on the stroke of tea, but by then England had added 297 runs in 50 overs. 453 all out. England have only had to bat four times across the three Test Matches. England’s 8-11 have averaged 24; Pakistan’s 1-7 have averaged sixteen. Josh Tongue, the number 11 who boasted a Test batting average of FOUR POINT EIGHT SIX before Pakistan came to town, hit his eleventh four of the series this afternoon. At that point, only Saud Shakeel, from all the Pakistan players, had hit more. Than JOSH TONGUE. England’s number 10 had hit more sixes than all sixteen of the opposition players put together.

We’ve seen sides in disarray, in bad form, with off-field dramas, carrying injuries, struck down with Covid and not bothering to turn up in dead rubbers. In my 25 years of covering cricket, I can’t remember seeing a team who has tried less hard to win a Test. Being outplayed is fine. It not being the players’ fault is a completely fair argument. The board, the management, the selectors and everyone involved with this clusterfuck of a tour don’t just have blood on their hands, they look like a DMX album cover. Nevertheless, eleven men were picked to play for their country in this match, three of whom for the first time. They didn’t try hard enough. The only acceptable tactic this game has been the batters all aiming at Ben Duckett, whose catching has made Mr Magoo look like a peregrine falcon.

This was more boxed kittens than cornered tigers. The fielding went from lamentable to pathetic to deplorable. Masood’s game-within-a-game was seeing how many times he could field the ball before he picked it up cleanly. Zero intensity, hands in pockets or on hips. The players can’t wash their hands of this, no matter how impossibly poorly they’ve been managed. A reminder that before this series England weren’t a very good cricket team, having orchestrated their own drunken circus whilst throwing away their previous series against an injury-stricken New Zealand.

At 4.05pm this afternoon, they announced an ominous-sounding CODE RED in the press box. All stewards were to report immediately. At exactly that moment, Robinson took England’s second wicket. The innings had been going for 5 balls. Half of us were expecting the stewards to eject Pakistan from the ground for wasting everyone’s time. Instead, thanks to some crease occupation from Azan and Masood, we’ll be back tomorrow. They did show a bit of fight, in the same way a discombobulated fighter’s fists flail through muscle memory alone as he descends to the canvas. 3-0 it will be, and it’s a scoreline which flatters Pakistan.

- by Rob Barron

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The ball is possessed. It should, by all rights, be at square leg, or maybe back down the pitch. At worst, heading off towards legside safely. But instead it floats, unnaturally, towards wide mid-on.

The laws of nature cannot explain it. The laws of man would not allow it. The laws of cricket consent to it.

And so another Pakistani batter is out, in the ugliest, weirdest and most horrific way possible.

There is still nearly two hours until lunch, and it will only get worse.

***

There is an old man crying right now; he doesn’t know why. Tears run down his cheek; his copy of the newspaper is stained. His grief sticks him to his ergonomically designed rocking chair.

The reason for his pain is that Test cricket has changed. And it terrifies him.

This old man knows the game, has lived it all his life, and this mutant hybrid sharktopus in front of him is not his sport. It has changed, and every single moment of the first session at Edgbaston reminds him of this.

The first ball of the day moves violently down the onside, so it was four leg byes. Technically, this is a win for the batting team. But really, it is a jump scare.

This is a delivery that was pitched a mile outside off stump; how has it ended up outside leg? It isn’t often you see a terrifying four leg byes, but this is one.

There is a trope in horror movies of the comically unaware being murdered early because they have not read the news. Saim Ayub played a bunch of on-the-up drives in a way that suggests he has not seen a Test match since January 2025 because he’s been watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives on loop. Dude, look behind you, there is a grim reaper with a giant scythe who has been taking the souls of every single batter. Why on earth are you loosely driving at balls?

There is always one character who does the worst thing possible in every situation. Shan Masood’s shot was like running into the woods at midnight barefoot and basically naked bleeding from every orifice and hoping you outrun werewolves. On a wicket with up-and-down bounce, he played a half-hearted chip pull.

This is the face of a man who knows he did something very wrong.

Babar Azam was bowled. When he walked off, he gestured that the ball kept low; it did, it also came back in violently. But at a certain point, when it comes to Babar’s career, the call is coming from inside the house, and he is making the call. He is the killer, and the victim.

So at this point, Pakistan had been the prey, but of course, you need one person who doesn’t get stabbed or eaten. And again, that is Saud Shakeel.

There is always a moment when it feels like it should go wrong for him. He is not cautious; he doesn’t do the sensible things. He stands in his crease and wafts his bat around. And so it feels like he should be a victim.

But he also hit a lot of fours, with this exact method. Concrete feet, artist’s hands, and a perfect offside shot.

The ball runs away to the rope like it was predestined. You have to suspend your belief a little to trust that he can keep pumping offside boundaries while his team can’t even defend a ball. But it works. While his teammates play as if their bats were replaced by a magic spell that turns their willow into their aunties’ spines, he has some kind of alien blade that can only blast through the offside.

But he was not the only one to make runs. Pakistan chose Razaullah, a 21-year-old puppy dog fast bowler, who batted like he was unaware he was at a Test match. So a bowler and an offside stylist was why Pakistan made 100 runs. They were the only two players to make it to double figures by the break.

But Razaullah was Pakistan’s third top-scorer, because of leg byes. England allowed 14 of them as they chased LBWs and bowleds like they were reverse swinging the ball to the tail. Modern bowling is just lateral movement and constant appeals. Jofra Archer went up when the ball went down for four. Luckily the innings are so short, otherwise the bowlers would hurt their arms from raising them so often.

But the real shock here is not that Pakistan can’t bat, or that Ollie Robinson is dicing them up with rusty razorblades. It’s that they still scored 100 runs in the session.

That was the third time in history that a normal first session of a Test had 100 runs and seven wickets. Those are two pretty big extremes. It is not easy to lose that many straight up, and if you do, the idea of 100 runs with that many wickets is insane.

This didn’t even feel like an outlier. It felt like modern normal cricket. A team lost lots of wickets, they scored quick while doing it.

And somewhere, an old man cried. Not from the horror, but the grief of losing something. Pakistan never looked to shut up shop, England bowled algorithmic preformulated plans, there were heaps of wickets and heaps of runs. It felt like a highlights package more than a Test.

Well, some were lowlights. The comedy death had to be Azan Awais.

He got a delivery back of the length, he tried to push it around the corner, and he was caught at mid-on. This had happened in cricket for hundreds of years without this kind of dismissal. It wasn’t even one thing. Try getting out this way with a toothpick bat, or on old pitches without this kind of bounce. No, this was something that could only happen now.

Tests have been mutilated beyond belief by the modern era. Like someone dunked them in radioactive acid. They’re part T20, a little ODI, and barely any Test has survived.

What happened, WHAT FUCKEN HAPPENED, you scream into your woolen sweater, while Pakistan make 100 runs and lose seven wickets in a session that feels totally normal now.

Test cricket is possessed.

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Take a look at these seven names: Abdullah Fazal, T20 batting strike rate of 153. Saim Ayub, who has played a few Test matches and has a high score of 77. Arafat Minhas, an allrounder who bowls a little bit of spin, and whose bowling average in international cricket currently is 13.45. Saad Baig, a 19-year-old batter. Razaullah, a bowler who has played 24 games of professional cricket.

And then two men who are both called Mohammad Imran.

If you’ve followed cricket headlines, you know where this is going. These are the seven players the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) have decided to fly in to replace five others before their third Test against England.

The way I think about this is, Pakistan were desperate to get Mohammad Imran, but they couldn’t remember which one. So they figured, “Let’s just take both to England, and we’ll work it out when we get there.”

Pakistan are already 2-0 down against England, and they believe a wholesale change like this can alter their fortunes.

The only important thing to note here is that I have absolutely faked the photos above. I just picked random images because I assumed that you, like most cricket fans, have no idea who most of these potential new saviours are.

It’s because Pakistan are just clutching at straws. This mass sacking and picking is one of the least professional things we have ever seen a modern cricket team do. This is even unprofessional by Pakistan’s standards.

In fact, let’s take it a step further. If you’re bringing out your Unremarkable Seven, or whatever they’re calling this, you’re not only doing that. Because Pakistan are sending home five more players, including Mohammad Rizwan.

And it doesn’t stop there, because of course, they’re also sending home a bowling coach and a head coach. Which means you also need to bring in a new bowling coach and head coach.

So that means in the eight-nine days between the second and the third Test, we are going to see 16 people involved with Pakistan cricket – professionals doing their job – change places. Nine flying in (seven players and two coaches) and seven flying out (five players and two coaches). That is bigger than the average squad size.

When you factor in that it is 2026, this has to be one of the most staggering and unexplainable moments you will ever see in cricket.

****

We can give a pretty thorough retelling of Pakistan’s modern Test history through this. If you go back before then, they had some success at times in the 1950s and ‘60s and even ‘70s, but it’s really the 1980s when they become the fully fledged team that we know today.

In 1980 with an incredible allrounder and Javed Miandad’s moustache, they are ranked fifth in the world. In 1981, that goes up to No.4, and in 1982, that goes drops to No.6. At this stage, no one’s expecting that this is about to become a powerhouse of cricket.

But then to finish off the 1980s, they are ranked second in the world and then third. And remember, being ranked second in the world in the 1980s is a whole different kind of universe because you have the West Indies at their peak that point. And Pakistan were really good against West Indies. In fact, the two best sides of that era were the West Indies and New Zealand, and Pakistan played very good cricket against both of them.

They were a brilliant team who would’ve been the best in the world had not the greatest team of all time also played at the exact same period.

Then, the 1990s start, and even though Imran Khan will retire in this period, they remain the second-best team in the world. That moves on to the third-best, partly because South Africa come along and they are fantastic from the beginning.

They have one year where they slip back to No.4, but they are pretty consistent all the way from the early ‘80s to the late ‘90s. They are fantastic. Their bowling is ridiculous.

There’s lots of really talented players coming through, and an absolute ton of all-rounders. Javed Miandad’s moustache is taken over by Inzamam-ul-Haq’s surprisingly fast feet. There’s just a ton of talent in Pakistan cricket right up until the new millennium.

But as Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis start to age out and Shoaib Akhtar doesn’t play that many games – and their allrounders are good, but they need to supplement better bowlers that they can’t find anymore – it gets, well, a lot rougher

And then they have a huge period where they’re ranked sixth every year, like they’re almost stuck there and they can’t move. It is of course during this period that they lose a Test captain to fixing as well. They’re a very inconsistent team, except for the fact that they are consistent in being fairly ordinary.

But then they improve a little bit. Yes, they have one year where they’re sixth, but you can see now they regularly rank fourth. And remember, there’s more teams playing Test cricket. It’s a little bit more competitive than it was in some of the other eras.

Being the fourth-best team three times out of four is actually not that bad, all things considered. So there’s something to work with in that 2010s period. And we know that because they end up being the world’s number one ranked side too.

It was an excellent effort from a well-drilled team who couldn’t play at home because of what happened with the terrorism, who had lost a captain to a fixing ban, and yet somehow they ended up – for the first time in their history – as the No.1 ranked team in the world. This was a huge deal for Pakistan cricket.

But what happened straight after that? They went all the way back to No.6 again, as if the peak was a mistake, as if it never actually happened. They go back to their rightful place, back end of the middle of the pack.

And after that, they actually get worse. They’re ranked seventh in the world for a little while before coming back to that number six position. And they were NO.7 last year. At the moment, the Pakistan men’s Test cricket team is ranked eighth in the ICC rankings.

There’s something else that their history shows. When they were great in the 1980s through to the 1990s, it was a period before cricket was truly professional.

Most players around the world would’ve been amateurs who would have had second jobs, or wouldn’t have been paid enough to make cricket their main income source.

If they did get paid, it was usually fairly small amounts. So this is largely an amateur era. By the ‘90s, things do start to change. Australian cricket gets a lot more professional. You would probably put South Africa there as well.

From 2000 to 2010, I would say is probably the first international professional level of cricket we have ever had. From 2010 to 2020, it is very similar.

That No.1 ranking that they had, that was probably the most professional team that Pakistan has ever had. The preparation they had before the England tour in 2016, for example, was absolutely extraordinary.

And in the last couple of years, we have seen a boom in thinking, planning, money, and professionalism, around cricket. And during that time, Pakistan have got consistently worse.

They may not end up at eighth in Tests at the end of the year, but spiritually, they feel like they should be there. So, as money has come into cricket, Pakistan have got worse.

This is not an accident. This is a clear pattern of what happens when you don’t keep up with the sport. The Misbah-ul-Haq era was the one time they finally got their act together, and they ended up doing well. But again, that’s a one-off. I won’t call it a fluke because they definitely earned it.

But it is a moment that is all on its own. It doesn’t even have other years around it. They just went on a really good run. They thought about their cricket a lot. They got the trophy that they deserved. But outside of that, there’s nothing else.

Are we really saying that over this period of time, that Pakistan don’t create the same level of cricketers that they did in the 1980s, when they were mostly picking from the same schools over and over again, and people who spoke English a lot?

It’s impossible to believe that since the year 2000, they haven’t actually had more players available to them. And yet somehow, even with the talent that we see occasionally creep through their system, they’ve been so much worse than they used to be in Test cricket. And it’s not just Test cricket.

In 1992, they win the ODI World Cup.

And for the T20 World Cup, they were still good enough to win one of the early editions and being at the business end of the tournament in others. But, you’d have to say that T20 was played in a much more amateur way than it is now.

You also have the Champions Trophy in 2017, in which they started about as badly as you can as a team and ended very, very well in the final. So it isn’t as if this era is completely devoid of any success, but what it is lacking is professionalism, consistency, and getting the most out of your players.

Cricket has slowly been dragged into being a more well-run sport, and Pakistan seem to be getting, if anything, maybe even worse than where they used to be.

The PCB could not have less of an idea on how to run modern-day sports teams. They are completely bereft of ideas, and they make changes all the time. Nothing ever makes sense. No players ever feel safe. No coaches ever feel safe. And they’ve just made 16 changes in the middle of a Test series that they have already lost.

This is an organisation that has been running cricket for a long time, and they seemingly have learnt very little. After going 2-0 down against England, they have made 16 changes.

How is that professional? How is that smart? How is that helping Pakistan cricket in any way? It’s just more panic and chaos when there should be plans and systems and thoughts in place.

Cricket has a very long history of what we would call ‘tours of hell’, where teams go away for a huge amount of time to some far-flung place, and just everything falls apart. Pakistan are not the first team to go on tour to somewhere like England and for it just not to work out for them.

But how you deal with crises is just as important as how you got there in the first place. Yes, the selection was a bit poor and uninspired, and the team really hasn’t made much sense on paper and has played slightly worse on the field.

But when it comes down to this, how can you see this as a failure of the 12 men on the field, or the selectors, or the coaches who are involved with this when there is a very, very long history of Pakistan cricket being well behind the times?

Yes, this current Pakistan team is bad, but the PCB have had 25 years to fix this nonsense, and instead the best they could do after all of this chaos and losses is to move 16 people around in one of the stupidest moves we have ever seen in professional cricket.

Dan Lawrence was shuffling outside offstump, thrusting his hip at the ball, trying to play weirdly defensive shots to Mohammad Ali. He missed them all. Then he moved away from the stumps, gave himself some room and tried to hit over extra cover. Instead, he sliced it to backward point for a boundary. Next delivery, he played the same shot, but with a stiller head and straighter blade, and the ball ended up in the crowd over cover.

England were not in trouble at this point, but Lawrence was. So he went into the Bazball bag of bashing, and found a way to change the game. If Pakistan were about to roll him and England, Lawrence basically ended their chance, and went on to make another half-century (he must be sick of them now - he’s got six without hitting a century) on a difficult pitch.

Not everyone likes this style, but this is how it should be used. A nick is coming, the ball is keeping low for LBW, you need to do something to upset the game plan.

Dan Lawrence is a fringe player, yet he can change moments of games so quickly.

Compare that to Mohammad Rizwan’s new obsession: the slog sweep when he comes to the crease. It changes the game quickly, but towards the bowling team.

It was a disgusting attempt at disruption.

****

Pakistan have used 12 players in this series so far. Which is remarkable, as they came third at Headingley in a contest of two teams. If Babar Azam was fit, they may have been unchanged.

Imam-ul-Haq is a 30-year-old who doesn’t average 30 when he travels, and doesn’t score quick. On top of that, he will forever be known for this ghost calf injury scandal. He’s unlikley to shake up many games, if he gets picked again.

Azan Awais shapes up well, is compact and disciplined, and he can play a lovely whip over midwicket. But he’s never been asked to play T20, and rarely even gets a go in List A cricket. He is one of the most orthodox young players in the game.

Shan Masood has changed his cricket so many times it is hard to remember what his current version is. He did have a couple of years where he played aggressively, but has started to slow down again. But even when upping the tempo, he’s fairly consistent with his play. He takes clever, simple chances. It isn’t game-changing, even when scoring fast.

Salman Ali Agha is in a similar position. He can score quickly, but it’s fairly normy behaviour.

Abdullah Shafique and Saud Shakeel are cut from the same cloth too: both can score, but there is nothing transformative about them. Shafique batted well at Leeds, but it was playing normal shots at the right moment.

Shakeel should have got a hundred in the final innings at Lord’s at a decent clip, but it wasn’t counter-attacking. It was just that England bowled short and he kept pulling and hooking. There was a lovely cover drive on one knee, and some smart play in difficult cirmtsances. But it was what you expect a traditional player to try. This time, unlike all the other moments for Pakistan, it worked. Mostly their normal batting has faltered.

In a world of Rishabh Pant, Travis Head and Glenn Phillips, the Pakistan team bat normy.

Pakistan are not a slow-scoring team, but they’re also not fast over the last two years. While this tells us something, in a world filled with the Scott Boland/Ollie Robinson/Mohammad Abbas type of bowlers, they don’t do anything to upset the bowler’s rhythm. They are trying to beat the best bowlers in the world with conventional techniques, and that seems almost impossible now thanks to wobbelaball, DRS and friendly surfaces.

They need a disrupting tactic. But at the moment, they stand there looking afraid until their innings are over.

Usually Pakistan would bat out of their crease, but Tom Blundell has inspired a revolution by coming up to the stumps. So against Robinson, Pakistan’s choice was to hope he gets tired. Which is hard to do when their innings never even teases getting to the second new ball. They are just trapped on the crease, waiting for another nick or LBW.

Jamie Smith up at the stumps has been good, but he doesn’t really have to be. He could just stand there eating a sandwich and checking the racing results. His job is to stop Pakistan using the crease. With their batting being so orthodox in every other way, they are just waiting for Robinson to dismiss them.

This kind of bowler is a revolution in our game. And Pakistan are so obsessed, they also chose three of those kinds of new-fashioned wobble-ball medium-fast bowlers. It is not Pakistan’s fault that Ali and Khurram Shahzad bowled arse in the first Test. But when they bowled well in the second, with Abbas in even better form, they still had the issue that they picked the same type of bowler three times.

Josh Tongue could lean on his front foot without any worry, as he was facing 124-135kph bowling. England put on 68 runs for the last two wickets. There was no point of difference they could use, because it was just three seamers of similar pace and style. So once in, the tail felt really comfortable.

Abbas can obviously change a game. Ali and Shahzad also could, on certain days. But their attack has no height, no pace, and the same arm. There is no flat-pitch specialist, and even their left-arm finger spin from Ali Usman is a very normal orthodox choice.

Once a game goes in one direction, there seems to be no one from their team – with bat or ball – who can change it.

They are a sepia-toned team in a rainbow era.

Not that all of them haven’t tried. Today Rizwan tried to disrupt.

OK, so, umm, how do I put this - if your outlier batter is someone who bats so slow in T20 that it seems like he is unaware what format he’s in, it’s probably not the guy who shakes things up.

On top of that, Rizwan is obsessed with playing the slog sweep to fast bowlers. Often to the worst options: Jasprit Bumrah in T20Is, Robinson in Tests. And I am not sure he is good at the shot.

But even then, the attempt at Lord’s on an up-and-down surface was about as bad as it gets. He was lucky to only be dismissed from a very groiny LBW.

If he’d tried the ramp, or to flat-bat down the ground, you could understand it. Or, if like Lawrence, he found a gap and shot combo that could upset the bowler, it would make sense. But Pakistan either played straight, batted orthodox until getting out, or Rizwan slogged hard and was trapped nuts before wicket.

England remain undisrupted; Pakistan remain disgusted.

Dan Lawrence takes centre stage

by Behram Qazi

Jonathan Norman on talkSPORT commentary called Dan Lawrence one of the most watchable players in world cricket.

He was not talking about his frog-in-a-blender bowling action either.

It was a soggy affair at Lords on Day 3 of a dead Test match. England’s eventual lead at stumps was 357 runs, and the way Pakistan have batted this series, they might not get close to that score even if they were awarded a third dig.

Norman is a Surrey fan. Lawrence is a Surrey player. Some bias might have been at play, but if you tuned into the limited action sandwiched between all the rain, you would not have disagreed with him, entirely.

The Lord’s pitch has been a hot topic in recent times. Diabolical for batting, and a demerit point in the kitty from earlier this summer.

The first two days yielded no such discussion, but uneven bounce on a damp Day 3 meant that it might be all the rage again.

Emilio Gay was trapped LBW by a Mohammad Abbas nip-backer that kissed the floor. Later, our man Lawrence was hit in the rib cage by not the kind of Mohammad Ali who used to do that for a living.

The floodlights were on, the clouds were clouding, and batting was incredibly difficult.

That did not phase Lawrence though. He might have lost a rib, and got hit in the box as well, but still walked back unbeaten on 50 from 66 deliveries.

The first runs he scored were over the slip cordon off Abbas, as a result of charging at him. Rizwan, who might not have fingers left on either hand by the end of the series, came up to the stumps next ball.

Lawrence chose to defend against Abbas, but looked like Martin Lawrence batting when he tried.

He picked his battles wisely, taking on Khurram Shahzad, scoring three fours off his bowling in quick succession.

Against Ali, who had shattered his ribs a few balls earlier, he used his feet again.

The penultimate delivery of the over was carved above the gully fielder for four. Not in a sexy, aesthetically pleasing way though. You would not see anything like it on the Thanksgiving episode of an American sitcom.

The ball after, however, was the shot of the Test. A skip down the track, red cherry met with the full face of the blade, bludgeoned up and over the covers for a gigantic six.

On any other day his methods were questionable. On a Lord’s surface with inconsistent bounce, his tactics were spot on.

He walloped Ali Usman later to reach his second half century in three innings since his comeback. Upset spectators, who had spent 150 quid on their ticket, losing half of them because 15-plus overs were bowled, had something to cheer about.

Jonathan Norman had something to cheer about.

Dan Lawrence is not the most watchable player in world cricket, but on a rain hit day at Lords, he probably was.

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***
Pakistan’s much-needed boot camp

by Rob Barron

There was an incredible woman on the tube this morning. She was wearing a massive black woolly cardigan and her face was redder than the beetroot sandwiches they knocked up in the press box at Lord’s during the middle session. There wasn’t any heat for her to have been struggling with but the reason for the redness became apparent very quickly as she got into her routine. And what a routine it was.

Off came the cardigan and she did chin-ups on the hand rail until we got to Earl’s Court. The tube was packed. Then she hung from the bar until we stopped at Gloucester Road. When the train pulled in to South Kensington our heroine got the cardigan, wiped her face with it, put it back on and sat down, profusely apologising to everyone as she did so. Then she did it again.

Next stop- off came the cardigan, chin-ups all the way to Victoria, hanging to St James’s Park, cardigan on to Westminster. As I was getting off, the chin-ups were starting again. Legend. Miss-Bar-Ul-Haq.

Alright, it was press-ups for Misbah, at this ground 10 years ago. He’d made a promise to the ‘army guys’ who took Pakistan’s pre-tour boot camp that he’d bring out the press-ups if he scored a century, which he duly did as a Pakistan side full of substance and style beat England by 75 runs at the London Spirit Stadium.

Maybe Pakistan could do with a boot camp before Edgbaston next week. They could certainly do with some substance, or any style. With the conditions favourable for the bits of cricket we did have, Pakistan got some wickets, but it’s the kind of wickets which have no bearing on the result. Dan Lawrence played beautifully. It’s up to the weather whether England win in four days or five.

Unless we see something more surprising than a woman in a massive woolly cardigan doing chin-ups on the tube.

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Uncorked, and spilling all over

by Rob Barron

The steward in front of us on Day 2 of the second England vs Pakistan Lord’s Test provided a wonderful example of main character syndrome. While every other blue-jacketed official glanced around quietly and kept themselves to themselves, this guy was different.

His antics started at 11.30am, some time before Pakistan’s attack remembered they had to bowl a ball that got the 10th wicket rather than waiting for England to hand it to them. He was goading the crowd into firing champagne corks in his direction so that he could have a chance at catching them. Fair enough, got to pass the time and all that.

He was finally presented with a chance that was even easier than the one Harry Brook was gifted to get rid of Pakistan opener Azan Awais for 8. Unlike Brook, he caught it. He celebrated more than Salman Ali Agha did yesterday when he took the catch of the summer. But then he really started showing off.

Some bloke in the front row made the decision to move the fence very slightly and walk the four yards to the exit instead of not moving the fence and making 10 people stand up. A reasonable decision, you’d think. Absolutely not worthy of comment. The steward knew the rules though and sped towards the poor chap like a rat up a drainpipe. Then he radioed for utterly unnecessary help which came in the form of another steward who ran exactly six times as fast as Dan Lawrence did yesterday when he was trying to make his ground. The bemused man was tackled, a few people shouted ‘jobsworth’ and, for a while, that was that. Say what you like about the steward, he was certainly a character and he’s one of those guys who makes things happen. A bit like Ben Stokes. You might like Ben Stokes or you might think he was so caught up in main character syndrome that he cost his country multiple series victories but, unequivocally, he’s a character.

Pakistan are desperately in need of some character. They had Babar Azam back to marshal the troops but his charisma was as lacking in the field as it was when he nicked off for 8. Everyone seemed to be looking to someone else for inspiration. At least Awais knuckled down after Brook added to his catalogue of catching calamity but nobody else did.

Josh Tongue averaged five in Test cricket before today. He ended up with 30 not out, outscoring all but one of the Pakistan batters (Awais, who ended up with 46). It was nothing short of embarrassing that Pakistan couldn’t even get him out. Meanwhile, the bloke who was tackled earlier went to the champagne bar, got a bag full of popped corks, came back and threw them onto the steward’s patch when his back was turned. Good, reactive plan, well executed. Pakistan, take note.

It’s hard to see where they go from here. Pakistan always used to have magic, charisma, character. They now have none of these. They’re so bad at the moment, that they’re making England look like a decent cricket team.

Dominic, the bloke with the corks, predictably, was ejected. Pakistan’s bubble burst on the first ball of the series and they’ve not found their bottle since.

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‘Look Ma, no hands’ - Pakistan’s batting day

by Behram Qazi

Calling Pakistan’s performance on Day 2 at Lord’s ‘pedestrian’ would be harsh - on the word ‘pedestrian’.

They had ended Day 1 in a reasonable position, with England 248 for 9. On the second day, they allowed that total to burgeon to 290, and then lasted all of 37.2 overs to be shot out for 110. By stumps, England were 81 for 3, with the lead stretching to 261.

The only bright spot in Pakistan’s batting was young Azan Awais. Before his 46 in the first innings, Awais had a batting average of 60-plus in first innings in first-class cricket. He had earned his stripes in domestic cricket, averaging close to 50 while opening the batting in 33 games.

Then on debut in Bangladesh, the 21-year-old, hit a hundred and it seemed like Pakistan could have unearthed their next batting superstar.

Pakistan’s two best Test batters - Younis Khan and Javed Miandad - both made centuries on debut. You can make arguments about which of Younis or Miandad are one and two, but they are both on top of the tree, and that is not subjective. If you have either of them third (or lower)… well, you’re just wrong.

Overall, 14 Pakistan batters have tonned up in their first Test. But of course, not everyone’s career trajectory has been the same. Awais could follow in illustrious footsteps, or he could go down the Umar Akmal route and completely miss the freeway to greatness.

On a good day, Awais is a compact batter who nudges the ball around on the on-side, and relies heavily on his punchy off-side drives. He is a touch artist who plays the ball beneath his eyeline, and quite late.

Conventional wisdom suggests that he will be able to crack Test cricket eventually, and he was Pakistan’s saving grace on what was a deplorable Day 2 at Lords.

He scored almost 42 percent of Pakistan’s runs in the first innings, before getting bounced out by Ollie Robinson. Some would say that dismissal is an achievement on its own.

He tried to dig in but had a false shot percentage of over 42 percent. His innings was gritty, but not without flaws. The most obvious one was of course an edge to slip when he was on 8, which was dropped by Harry Brook. Then there were plays and misses, and more plays, and more misses.

A batting average of 60-plus - in first innings in first-class matches - does not guarantee success at Test level, but Pakistan are a team clutching at straws with no hands.

Azan Awais was the only straw worth clutching at on Day 2 at Lord’s.

England vs Pakistan? Don’t bet on it

by Rob Barron

Sixteen years ago today, I was at Lord’s when my mate AJ had quite possibly the worst bet anyone’s ever had at a cricket match.

England were 102 for 7 against Pakistan, with Mohammad Amir borderline unplayable. He wasn’t allowed to play, or indeed go outside, for a considerable amount of time after the match, but you know that story. AJ ‘sold’ the fall of the next wicket at 124 for £10 a run, meaning he’d win a tenner if the 8th wicket went down at 123, £40 if it fell at 120 etc, etc. Much to the amusement of all around us, every run England scored after 124 would cost AJ £10, until someone got out. But England were in all sorts, it was only Stuart Broad and he’d be out soon, right?

Well, actually, the partnership lasted longer than both of Pakistan’s innings combined at Headingley last week: 96 overs. A partnership of 332 extremely funny runs. Outstanding.

Then some tabloid broke the bad news and three of the Pakistan players went to prison. Such a ridiculous sport, cricket.

Sixteen years on, we’re back at Lord’s with the same two teams playing - and it’s England’s handcuffery drawing the headlines. But at least there’s a sensible chap - albeit a ‘hacked off’ one - at the helm rather than a 35-year-old father of two who likes going to nightclubs.

Back in 2010, it was Jonathan Trott steering the ship from No. 3 as everyone else was jumping overboard. On the first day of the second England-Pakistan Test, it was Jordan Cox, a man playing his third ever game at first drop, looking more accomplished with every flick and nudge. It was almost looking too easy for him as he moved to 36 from 35 balls. Then the waters became choppier and he got stuck, scoring 19 off his next 70 before Salman Ali Agha pulled off a stunner at slip. Let’s pause there for a moment.

Last week Agha was Pakistan captain, he had a routine chance at slip to get rid of Harry Brook for 1, which he grassed. Brook scored another 90. Agha then got dropped as Babar Azam came back but came on as sub fielder at Lord’s and took a screamer at slip to break the only fifty-plus partnership of the day. Because, cricket.

Cox was accumulating nicely with Jamie Smith as the pair put on 67 for the sixth wicket. Smith was fighting every urge he had to pull the ball straight down deep midwicket’s throat, and he did so admirably. Then he got bowled by a nip-backer from Mohammad Ali, just like Harry Brook did.

With two fifties in two goes at No. 3, you’d assume England will stick with Cox for the foreseeable future. You’d assume that if you didn’t know anything about England. When Jacob Bethell comes back he could easily be shoved down the order, maybe at the expense of Jamie Smith.

Such a ridiculous sport, cricket.

****

The worst Pakistan side to tour England in 50 years?

by Behram Qazi

Scyld Berry called this the weakest Pakistan Test team to tour England in 50 years.

Losing by an innings and 103 runs in the first Test of a series tends to strip away any defense from that sort of criticism.

The second Test, however, was in London. And that’s a city in which Pakistan have won each of the last three Tests they played - albeit the most recent one was in 2018.

Then too, there must have been some fire in the belly for Pakistan after a humiliation in the field in the first Test. And finally, they had their best batter and captain returning from injury.

Babar Azam won an important toss at Lord’s, and Mohammad Abbas vindicated the decision to bowl first with three new-ball wickets.

That Abbas has over 900 first-class wickets at less than 21 apiece is staggering. That he has the best bowling average for a Pakistan bowler with more than 100 Test wickets is even more staggering. But, most staggering of all is that this is only his 32nd Test match, and Pakistan have played 67 Tests since his debut.

Abbas would end Day 1 with 4 for 56 in 15 overs. Mohammad Ali complemented him well with 3 for 67 in 17, accounting for all of Harry Brook, Jamie Smith and Ollie Robinson with balls that jagged back into the batters.

Ali also cranked up his pace early on, which was a welcome sight for Pakistan fans who were sick of military medium garbage.

Pakistan did field at times like a club cricket team, dropping three chances and mis-fielding plenty. But they also held on to two other-worldly catches. Mohammad Rizwan took a one-handed blinder down legside, and Salman Ali Agha flung himself to his right to complete one of the greatest grabs in slip cordon history, going from stand-in captain to bench warmer to super-sub super-human.

England were 120 for 5 and then 187 for 6, and it could have ended up being a day of uninterrupted dominance by Pakistan. However, if cricket history has taught us anything it’s that what is expected diverges widely from what happens when Pakistan take the field.

England did have a fight-back with the bat of sorts, to end the first day on 248 for 9. Jordan Cox had his second consecutive half-century at first-drop in Tests, and Jamie Smith finally delivered a counter-attacking knock, with 61 off 80.

That meant England are still in the game, and could even win the Test.

Pakistan, however, will be pleased to go to bed knowing that Scyld Berry might be wrong. Many teams from Pakistan have gone winless on tours of England. Good ones too. If this lot can come away with a win at Lord’s, they surely won’t be the worst Pakistan Test team to tour England in the last 50 years.

It’s dark. If you squint, somewhere in the orange dusk light, there is a snarling fast bowler. No cowardly batter is coming out. They pretend it is beneath them, but in truth, it’s fear. This is a horrible place, and their chances of success are low. So they want a human shield.

They send out a bowler, who has already done their work for the day. They have blood under their toenails, microfractures of their spine, and their knee is already swelling to twice its size. Yet they are strapping up again, this time in protection. Their skills are running in and bowling. They have little to do with batting, even in the best conditions.

Here they are asked to do something they are not made for, and they do it almost unthinkingly.

There is no proof it works; in fact, they have seen the opposite. But they believe in the concept, so they put their body and wicket on the line for the greater good.

The Nightwatch position is silly and anachronistic. Yet, we do it because we want to help however we can. That in sacrificing, we can build something more. That the many is more important than the one.

Cricket is a selfish team sport, and yet even in that, we have this moment.

And all I am saying is that if there was an alien invasion, this kind of weird cricket shit would be really handy.

****

For too long in my life, I have been planning for an alien invasion and trying to work out how cricket could help.

Maybe what started it was Raphael vs Casey Jones in the first Ninja Turtles movie. Or perhaps Shaun and his friend with the cricket bat taking on zombies? In Signs they used a bat (albeit a different one) to take on the visiting aliens. Actually, it was probably none of them; I’ve always been obsessed by things like this. I wrote a script about an alien invasion of a club cricket changeroom.

I don’t want to come across as one of those people who believes in aliens because a US President released a bunch of blurry photos to stop people talking about his paedophile friend. I have no idea if aliens are real, but I find it weird in a world where we all have smartphones, we don’t have any pictures.

None of that matters here, because we are assuming that some carbon-based life forms have attacked Earth, and that we as cricketers will have to help save this planet.

So I’ve come up with a very non-conclusive list of things that I think cricket could bring to the party in such an event.

Running between the wickets

Okay, this will seem odd. But most people can run, well some can, others do that weird pointy elbow thing. But running with things on is what only long-distance runners do with those skinny little backpacks.

Batters run with all sorts of stuff on them. Big heavy helmet that makes a weird, tinny sound when you’re moving, chest and arm pads, thigh and inner thigh, plus gloves, leg guards and of course a bat. And we can do that for hours.

Our greatest batters have the ability to move things around an inner-city inter-species battlefield. Short targeted runs, for hours on end. With the occasional tea break.

Fielding Angles

Old men spend years poring over old battle plans in books, which is mostly two sides lined up against each other in NFL or rugby style. We would have a clear technological disadvantage against any alien incursion (I shudder to think how many of us die listening to ChatGPT.)

This won’t do, so what we need is people who see things in 3D. Which is what captaining on a cricket ground is all about. Finding their hitting zones, blocking off their best shots.

This might sound like pro-human hyperbole, but good luck to the aliens against an in-out field.

Throwing arms

There are other sports like javelin that could help more with pure power throws. But cricket is unique in that you have to do all sorts of different throws. Underhand, backhand, mid-range, and long.

I assume that at one point the aliens, having studied our culture, will have seen movies from the 1990s and drop some kind of non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generator to make all our puny tech even less important.

So throwing shit will become important.

Batters’ eyes

Steve Smith can see a haemorrhoid on a gnat’s arse at 1000 yards. Before eating his breakfast, Sachin Tendulkar puts on dark shades so he doesn’t see what people are eating in neighbouring towns. And Jacques Kallis’s eyes are so good that he can see the earth is not flat.

These are incredible scouts.

They will be able to see things that the rest of us cannot.

Sledging

This could be controversial, because we don’t know of the language capabilities of these aliens (that absolutely do not exist). But I believe that in a world of smart glasses that translate for you, the aliens will probably have something to try and understand what we are saying.

Now, this will prove a negative in most ways, but the one way to turn this to our advantage is through sledging. Chirping. Mental disintegration. Whatever it is.

At its best, sledging can upset the opposition’s thought process. And it usually works better on those who are not brought up with it.

A few well-timed “I’ve eaten better crabs than you” could be an essential part of our defence.

Draws

Most sports are played until a team wins. That means at a certain point, a team knows they can only lose from here. Cricket has draws. Which means you can be beaten all the way through, and still not lose.

The Peloponnesian War kind of stopped when both sides realised no one could win. The Korean War is a modern example of this. Sometimes you fight, and neither side wins.

Not only are we comfortable with a draw, we know how to play for one. Against an advanced civilisation, perhaps going for the draw is our better option.

Follow-on

This is really a subsection of the draw. But the follow-on is an incredible device for teaching large sections of society about the fact that sometimes, if you are going to lose, and that is the only option, it is better to do it quickly, and then fight another day.

I assume we will be doing a lot of following on early in the conflict.

Cricket bats

This is obvious, but there are a lot of cricket bats in the world. I have like ten in my house, actually, probably more than that. Most cricketers have one, and after doing some research, I’ve found estimates suggesting there are three to four times as many cricket bats as baseball bats.

Now, baseball bats are handy, but the issue is they are one-dimensional. There is only one shot. Cricket has a load. We don’t know how many heads these things will have, and where their heart is. We can’t just be playing one shot against them. We need sweeps, pulls and drives, and then we can still use our bat to slog to cow corner in that familiar baseball style.

There are a lot of bats around sheds and spare rooms of this planet, let’s use them to bash in some alien skulls (if they in fact have skulls).

Bowling

It is pain. Every day. For pace bowlers, this is obvious; any group of people who have to drill into their own toenails to release the pressure from blood welling up is a different breed. And spinners pee on their hands to toughen up their callouses.

But also, a bowler’s main skill is hunting. Glenn McGrath has an elephantine memory, which is weird, because of that time he had a photo in front of a dead elephant.

What bowlers are doing is looking for weaknesses in near-perfect batting machines. The aliens will come with technology we don’t understand; sending out Murali and Vernon Philander to work them out seems like as good a plan as any.

Local knowledge of the pitch

Our sport is built on using conditions. Most sports have the same ones continually, but we have to exploit, adapt and change at a moment’s notice. It breeds a different kind of skill set.

Now, I have personally never fought an alien species, but I assume lots of variables come up, so you want the ability to change very quickly. Not to mention that our best defence is understanding our local environment.

Short leg

We sit a person within bat distance of someone who is trying to hit the ball incredibly hard. At any stage, we could have brought in a rule to say that you can’t have someone within half a pitch distance of the batter. Especially as players got stronger and started to hit the ball harder. We could have allowed some kind of full-body armour.

Cricket hasn’t done either. It has kept people in danger, for tactical reasons, for more than 100 years.

I don’t know how squatting near an alien’s bum would help, but I am excited about the opportunities that it affords.

Prediction

It is impossible to face a delivery at 90mph without making predictions. That is what our batters do.

I am going to assume it is impossible for us to take on an alien invading horde, so again, that is what we are asking our batters to do.

We want them to stand very still, study the enemy, the formation, the local terrain and then formulate a plan before the battle starts.

Flight

Most people in the world can throw straight and hard, or at least attempt that. But I would assume the aliens know that and have counters ready.

That is where spinners and their flight come in.

Also, they will be expecting us to be meat-eating man animals. But they will be captivated by the grace and poetic dance routine that a spinner has, before they crane their necks up to realise they have been beaten in flight by a grenade.

Ducking bouncers

Most people don’t want to get hit in the face, but have no idea how to stop it. Our sport has that built in. Dropping to a knee, getting inside the line or limboing under danger, that is what we do.

It is cricket’s rope-a-dope, a way of slowing down the threat without actually doing anything. Also, if a laser is being shot at your head, the ability to weave is probably a plus.

Number Elevens

I have been thinking about this a lot, maybe too much. But I keep coming back to one thing: in a war between people who can travel at lightspeed and sacks of meat who pick their nose, chances are, we are fucked. They will kill and eat us, maybe not in that order.

You know what we are in that situation. Number Elevens.

Most sports have some kind of equal battle between two skilled athletes. Only cricket can have Mike Whitney trying to save a match against Richard Hadlee at the MCG 40 years ago. The best in the world up against the worst. Someone who is completely out of their depth, without the skill or ability to handle themselves. Having to go up against a legend. Cricket has David vs Goliath all the time.

That is us against the aliens. We will be outgunned, outthought, and outplanned.

They are Richard Hadlee; we are Mike Whitney.

But the thing is, some of the greatest triumphs have come from the number eleven just holding on.

Can we beat the imaginary aliens I made up in my head? I am not sure, but can we score Jack Leach’s single? Thanks to cricket, yes we can.

by Jarrod Kimber

Is Pakistan a very poor team?

Stuart Broad called Pakistan a very poor team and said England should win 3-0. Salman Butt said, “Pakistan isn’t playing good cricket at the moment, but what is this ‘poor team’ comment? You have a very good team, so what happens to you when you go to Australia? You lose 5-0 every time.”

England are a poor team when they lose 5-0, and most people say that.

But if there was a person who shouldn’t be mentioning Pakistan’s tours to England, it would be the only Test captain to receive a lengthy jail sentence after one.

Also, Broad is in the media, it is his job to rate cricket teams now.

But is he right? Is Pakistan a good team, a poor team, a very poor team, or complete and utter rubbish?

Josh Tongue, in the first innings, was bowling to Ali Usman, who was playing his third Test. In his career, the 33-year-old spinner has 12 runs, but was in at number eight as he bats well in first-class cricket. But Tongue treated him like a tailender and went straight for the yorker. Usman was out off the first ball he faced in England.

In England’s innings, Tongue himself came out to bat and he was facing Khurram Shahzad. Tongue is not a strong bat, and the idea would be similar: straight and full first ball.

Instead, Shahzad bowled a ball down the legside.

Now, in itself, it’s just two balls. But I think there is a bigger story here.

Tongue is a fast bowler who sprays it; you expect him to get things wrong a bit. Shahzad is a medium-fast bowler who is supposed to be line and length, and yet he almost never bowled the same ball twice.

Which is odd, because Pakistan has a samey attack that never bowls the same ball twice. Somehow they have a line up that is utterly boring and bereft of pace, an enforcer, and bounce. It’s Abbas, and then two really bad photocopies of him. But is still not accurate.

It is ok for your bowlers to be outdone by the opposition; England’s lot also had the better of the conditions. But if you come into a game with three right-arm medium-fast seamers and two of them bowl the ball everywhere, then something has gone horribly wrong.

When your seamer is so bad his teammates have to trick him into bowling one side of the wicket, like what happened yesterday with Shahzad and the 7-2 field, something is very wrong.

Mohammed Ali was just as random. In the 10th over of England’s innings, his first ball was good, and was edged to the rope. His next ball was squirted down legside, before a juicy full ball is slapped to cover and then a leg-stump half-volley. Emilio Gay is facing and is almost dizzy because of the pure chaos of the bowling. You can barely blame him when he’s out to a decent ball, finishing Ali’s first over in England.

In the 14th, there is a leg-stump half-volley, wide one, a beautiful delivery edged past third slip, short and wide, and the last ball of the over is fired down leg. Both of these overs go for over ten runs. There were chances in them, and even a wicket. But this is not Test bowling, and it is not what you expect when you pick bowlers of this speed.

Pakistan’s attack was three accurate seamers and a finger spinner. Why were they bowling so much utter shit?

Mohammad Abbas didn’t take wickets, but he went at 3.1 runs an over. Shahzad was 6.1 and Ali was 4.7 (but he also over a run-a-ball for ages).

Ali Usman’s game looks fine on paper. He got the ball to spin, and while he was a little too high with his economy, at 3.95, the five wickets he took make up for it. But there was also the period where he just kept bowling down the leg side to Dan Lawrence and Harry Brook.

This might seem harsh, but Pakistan’s best spinner was on the field for most of their innings and never bowled. That is because Sajid Khan was in as a sub fielder. Even after Usman’s haul, it’s hard to ignore that beautiful moustache out in the field.

This also brings us back to selection. As Steve Harmison said on talkSPORT, are we really to believe that in a nation the size of Pakistan this is the best XI players. Their team was not ideal, their squad isn’t either. And if someone gets injured, they will likely get that wrong too.

So while Usman took wickets, he played the same role as the other bowlers, which was to find ways to release the pressure on England.

Twice Pakistan got themselves in the game when they took the wickets of Gay and Ben Duckett, before Jordan Cox and Joe Root made a partnership. They broke that, and then allowed Brook and Lawrence to do the same.

That happened because of Salman Ali Agha’s drop of Brook. Shahzad took the edge; it went, at a very catchable height, to the right of second slip, and he barely got a finger on it. Shahzad could have been angry, but he had dropped Cox on a caught and bowled earlier. And my personal favourite, when Mohammed Rizwan was appealing for an LBW, and did not realise that the ball had come off the bat. So instead of taking an easy chance, the ball hit him as he pleaded for an LBW that was nowhere near out. And then they reviewed it.

Oh wait, that is not even the best one. That was when Usman delivered a full toss that somehow Lawrence ran past, and the ball went to slip. Pakistan were appealing for the LBW, while Lawrence was still out of his crease, so slip threw the ball towards the stumps, and instead of completing the run out or stumping, he hit Rizwan in the arse. Then they reviewed the LBW that was nowhere near out again.

Sigh.

In the first innings they did get the worst of the batting conditions, so you can allow for some low totals, plus they didn’t have Babar Azam’s finger to help them out. In the second, they were worse.

They kept finding catchers on the legside, which is a bizarre pattern. And the pitch had the odd ball lift at them. But really, they were just horrible. At no stage did they look like they were making any runs in conditions way easier than day one.

At the start of day three, Mohammad Ali escorted the ball to the boundary. He just kinda wandered behind it, like he was escorting a drunk from the premises while wanting to keep his distance.

It would be hard to watch Pakistan’s performance in this Test and think it was very poor. They were so much worse than that.

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by Behram Qazi

Shan Masood is a lot of things.

A left handed top-order batter who has been playing international cricket for over a decade, albeit sporadically. A few months ago he was Pakistan’s captain, and he has also skippered Yorkshire for a couple of seasons.

Darren Gough was impressed with Shan’s prolific run-scoring for Derbyshire, and wanted him over at Headingley. The southpaw did not disappoint, averaging 53.9 runs per dismissal in 25 innings for the White Roses.

Gough did not hold back his words during a commentary stint, showering praise on Shan. He rated his batting, his work ethic, his general demeanor, and his character. There was a mention of how Shan underwent a lot of mental turmoil when he lost his sister a few years back, and then bounced back from it.

In an off-air conversation with me between commentary stints, Gough revealed the most fascinating anecdote of all. Shan, through the help of Gough’s wife, has been working on breathing techniques, in order to get into a good mental head space.

Shan has not always held on to his spot in the Test team, but runs are his currency, and he has made his comebacks on the back of heaps of them. He has been accused of being a product of nepotism, and even if connections helped Shan get his foot in the door, he used his own feet to walk through it. For all his failures, merit should never be questioned while talking about his 348th comeback.

You can understand why he needs those breathing exercises, because a vast majority of critics are breathing down his neck.

There is no doubting that he failed this week at Headingley, scoring 34 runs across two innings. Pakistan needed him to do more.

A batting average of 30-odd in Test cricket does not flatter Shan, that too across 48 Tests. As captain, he led Pakistan to four victories in 16 Tests, losing the other 12; an unwanted record that does not augur well for his legacy.

The one thing Shan does have though, that many others in Pakistan’s setup lack, is professionalism. Whether it’s on his batting or breathing, he always puts in the work.

Shan Masood is a lot of things, but above all else, he is a thorough professional.

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by Rob Barron

Darren Gough is responsible for one of my favourite cricket quotes. ‘Why do they call you Rhino?’ he was asked. ‘Because I’m as strong as an ox’ came the reply.

I got to sit with him for an hour or so today and he was everything you’d expect- gregarious, engaging, funny. His insight on how he reads pitches was extraordinary - he’s able to have a look at a surface and tell you roughly what the score’s going to be at lunch. He’d be a good gambler, but people pay him to go on cruise holidays and talk to other people so he knows far more about playing the Game of Life than I do.

Obviously, we spoke about gambling and beer (he drinks Bud Light, but none of us are perfect). He gave me some great advice on how to courtside which I shan’t be taking up because I like both my betting accounts and my kneecaps.

Then I saw my hero. One of the cameramen in front of us on the gantry brings a hammock with him wherever he goes, and whenever there’s a break in the cricket he ties it up somewhere and goes to sleep in it. What a magnificent human being.

Gough told me he thought Pakistan would score 275. I think he meant across both innings.

Behind us, the inevitability of ineptitude was playing out.

Initially, Pakistan’s fielders, each with a hammock under one arm, set the tone for the day by trying as hard as they did yesterday. This shouldn’t be allowed under a proper coaching set-up. Mohammad Ali ran like Sonny Liston as he escorted a ball to the boundary that was barely quicker than he was.

Jofra whacked one into the Western Terrace. Jamie Smith got an innocuous-looking short ball from Khurram and, as he so often does, flapped it to a fielder on the leg side and trudged off disconsolately. It didn’t matter for the match - England would’ve won if they declared at tea yesterday - but it matters for Smith’s future. His ‘if it is broke, don’t fix it’ approach simply isn’t working, and if he’s not been found out already at this level, he’s dangerously close.

England led by 238. Pakistan laid down and had their belly rubbed again for 135 insipid, pathetic runs. Were it not for the rain this Test would’ve been done in two extremely unmemorable days. There was barely time for Rizwan to pretend to be injured 3 times before the presentation ceremony started.

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Dale Steyn, CEO. Khurram Shahzad, intern?

by Behram Qazi

Khurram Shahzad is a skilful bowler. He can swing the ball in the air, seam it off the deck, and his bowling action has been likened to Dale Steyn’s.

He delivered the first ball of Day Two at Headingley, after what was a near four-hour rain delay in the first England v Pakistan Test. Big booming outswinger, beating the outside edge of Joe Root’s bat. Steyn would have approved.

Two balls later, Khurram nipped one back into Root, striking his pad. A vociferous appeal followed, but to no avail.

The second-highest run-scorer in Test history pinched a single off the last ball of the over, only to get beaten by Khurram again the next time he faced him, an over later. The ball angled in on this occasion, seaming away from Root, leaving him flummoxed.

For a moment, this looked like it would be Khurram’s day.

The third over of his spell started and ended with a freebie on Cox’s pads, dealt with a flick of the wrist to the fence both times. In between, he bowled his second no-ball in less than two and a half overs, and was squeezed away for two more boundaries by Cox on the offside.

He had conceded 17 runs in the over, and was taken out of the attack immediately. No one was comparing him to Steyn today.

Ten overs later, Khurram was back for another go at Root and Cox. Both batters had ignored the windy conditions with overcast skies, leaving well, running hard, and cashing in on looseners. They were also half-centurions by now.

The first ball of Khurram’s new spell was banged in short. Cox flayed at it, only for the return catch to be dropped.

He tried his luck again, bowling the same delivery right after, only for Cox to swat it to the midwicket fence. Then, with his seamer bowling short slow filth, Salman Ali Agha moved his midwicket to the offside. This was Pakistan’s 7-2 field. This is often used as a tactic, but let’s be clear: they were desperately trying to get their seamer to bowl on one side of the wicket.

Instead, the next ball went through the vacancy.

In the space of a few balls all four of Mohammad Rizwan, Saud Shakeel, Abdullah Shafique and Salman Ali Agha had a word with Khurram. What he lacked in skill in comparison to Steyn, was also what he lacked in wits.

The next ball was delivered outside off, and punched to the fence by Cox. Three boundaries in the over. Pakistan had most of their fit men on the offside, plus a few spare sweaters, and it still didn’t matter.

However, his teammates’ words got through to Khurram thereafter, who delivered his first maiden over of the series, with all six balls in and around off-stump. In his next over, he bowled a straight one to Root with that same 7-2 field, which England’s skipper missed, and was pinned leg before wicket.

At the start of Khurram’s next over, he drew Harry Brook’s edge, which was shelled in the slip cordon by Agha. The ball also went to the rope.

That moment changed the spell entirely. Three more boundaries in his next 11 balls, and then Khurram was taken out of the attack.

When he came back on, he was dreadful.

Khurram is skilful, but when your senior players have to trick you into bowling straight, swinging, seaming and a vague likeness to Dale Steyn may not be enough to save you.

If Steyn is a CEO, Khurram is a 26-year-old intern.

***

Origami veterans or plastic cups? Take your pick, Pakistan

by Rob Barron

Plastic glasses were the oxymoronic talking point in the row in front of me today.

According to one actual moron, they exist because of 9/11. Pakistan’s 9-11 may as well not exist, as they average 8, 6 and 0. Plastic glasses do certainly exist, as I’m sure they did before 2001, and they provided the highlight of the session to a number of the crowd who were bored, because England had decided to play proper cricket.

An old bloke in a green jacket was carrying 4 plastic pints back down the stairs to his mates. He stumbled. £30 on the floor, raucous laughter everywhere, the bloke with the trumpet played circus music. Lovely stuff.

On the field, Pakistan saw some clouds yesterday and folded like the origami veterans they are. They got to bowl under those clouds today, and they weren’t up to it. They made Jordan Cox - batting number three for the second time in his whole life - look like Joe Root and they made Joe Root look like Joe Root. Too many Roots.

If this post-Ben Stokes side is actually developing sentience, employing such tactics as ‘playing the match situation’ and not just trying to belt every ball into the car park, they might actually become a decent cricket team.

They brought up a chanceless 150-run stand of consummate ease and looked set for another 150.

Then Cox feathered one behind. Root got out straight after. And Harry Brook came in and nicked one straight to second slip.

Salman Ali Agha dropped it, cut his right hand, stormed off the field, booted the Toblerone, and tried to cut his left hand on the advertising boards.

There was a whole session left, but Pakistan fielded like pantomime horses and are staring firmly down the barrel.

Maybe nothing’s changed after all. Pakistan played cricket like they were plastic cups.

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by Jarrod Kimber

Cover drives are overrated.

They’re pretty, I get it. The flow is nice, and they paint well. But it’s not that hard a shot to master. If you make it to international cricket as a batter, and often even the bowlers, you can play that shot. It is because the ball is kind of served up for it.

The hard shot is the on-drive.

Part of the reason is your pad; it is big and in the way. It means the bat path is really straight, and so the ball for the on-drive is dragged to midwicket, or square leg. That can be pretty, like a flick of the wrists. Or ugly, like a drag across the line.

But for Abdullah Shafique, the on-drive is as easy as breathing, or telling if it is raining by standing outside. Water is wet, Shafique on drives.

****

Most players are likelier to be dismissed from the outside edge. That is what all the slips are for. It is why the ball moving away is the most dangerous.

But that is not how every player goes about their work. Shafique is someone who plays on the outside of the ball.

This is the first delivery that he faced, on Day 1 of the first Test between England and Pakistan. The ball went to square leg for a single. But you can see that his head is slightly outside the blade. This is where he is most comfortable.

This is not long after, and he’s still just outside the blade, forcing it to leg.

Other than balls that were well wide of the stumps, his head was almost always on the outside of the ball. And it isn’t him falling over, this is him with balance. He often has that and is in control, but the ball squeezes off the inside part of the bat anyway.

But most of these are defensive shots, or pushes.

The more fun ones are the proper on-drives. This is usually a sign that someone has technical mastery, but in Shafique’s case, it’s far more interesting.

His front leg is not out of the way for his on drives in a way you would see for Sachin Tendulkar or Virat Kohli. Instead, it’s on offstump. But his hands and head are out the way. So he is on-driving balls that others would hit straight.

And he does all this, with his head almost behind his gloves. It is like he’s playing peekaboo, but with on-drives.

So he’s manufacturing on-drives. And then, because of his head position, he kind of runs down the pitch with hands in front of his face.

Peekaboo, I on-drive you.

It’s not even just one type of on-drive he has. Mostly, he plays what would be straight drives for anyone else between the mid-on fielder and the umpire. But then, when his head drops, he can flick it wider. That means that setting a field to him when you’re bowling straight and full is an issue.

In his innings on Day 1 at Headingley, he struck eight fours, and half of them were that shot.

It is not a very common boundary option in Tests. To do it that often is wild.

This should be a very good sign, but it is also an issue.

He is very prone, far more than other top-order players, to be out LBW and bowled. He is taking away his chance of an outside edge, but bringing in the occasional miss.

According to statistician Garry Morgan, against pace since 2024, Shafique has 14 outside edges, and 32 inside. That is quite the stat.

England started attacking his outside edge, and ended up going for the inside.

Eventually it was missing the inside edge that brought about his wicket. It was a great ball from Ollie Robinson, nipping back a long way. But Shafique was already outside it to begin with.

Shafique is as pretty as a picture when he plays the on drive, but he’s like a painting that is hung, with a tilt to one side.

England will adore you for a day, Mr Robinson

by Behram Qazi

Happy Ollie Robinson day to those who celebrate.

After six long years since their last Test on English soil, Pakistan found themselves reeling at 6 for 2 on the morning of Day 1.

Ollie went the full Robinson, pinning Azan Awais in front on the first ball of the series, and former Yorkshire captain Shan Masood soon after. He would do the same to Saud Shakeel later in the day, which the southpaw was too late to review, making it a hattrick of LBWs.

On a nippy morning in Leeds, the former Wisden columnist was hooping the ball around like a hummingbird in a thunderstorm. It took an actual burst of rain for Pakistan to get to the lunch break, with the sun beating down at Headingley after, easing the conditions for batting.

Two of the four Yorkshire batters from Pakistan - Abdullah Shafique and Imam-ul-Haq - made hay, before it was back to being Robinson’s feast.

Imam, after having weathered the storm so well, playing with soft hands and within himself, chased at one in signature fashion, completing his trademark edge to the cordon. Abdullah, after driving the ball well enough to make Jarrod rave about him, was cleaned up by a Robinson peach, becoming his fourth victim.

Pakistan lost 8 wickets for just 74 runs, succumbing to 171 all out after being 2 down for 97 runs, staying true to their identity. Shafique’s half century in his first ever Test innings in England was the only effort worth writing home about for the touring side.

Josh Tongue got a good lick in as well, sending stand-in captain Salman Ali Agha’s bails for a vacation, and destroying Ali Usman’s shin off successive deliveries. He had accounted for Imam and Mohammad Rizwan, and then Mohammad Abbas later to grab five wickets of his own.

Robinson, however, remained the main protagonist. He ended with 5 for 51 in 18 overs, his fifth five-wicket haul in 40 Test innings. Four of his scalps were frontline batters, and his 88 wickets in the format have come at a touch over 21 apiece.

England’s finest Ollie, Simoned and Garfunkeled Pakistan with Jamie Smith standing both well behind and up to the stumps. The metronome went nip, nip, nip, yo-yoing Pakistan’s batters on a string. If there was a kingdom of one-trick ponies, Robinson would be a unicorn. A true master of one.

So here’s to you, Mr. Robinson; England will adore you for a day. Hey, hey, hey.

A Pakistan kind of story for England

by Rob Barron

The first Test of a new regime. An interim coach and a returning captain, when it should’ve been the other way round. Anticipation of certain chaos. This is Pakistan’s kind of story, but England were living it.

Even the weather played a part, it was inevitable. It’s been glorious sunshine every day for months and the first Test was starting in 15 minutes. Everything seemed to be pointing to a disappointing home performance, including underwhelming flag-waving by some grown adults who looked like they’d been asked to get the attention of an ice cream van. Bemused players wandering through . Surely a forlorn hope to expect something beautiful would ignite the mayhem.

And then it happened. Laura Wright sang.

We’ve heard the Pakistan anthem hundreds of times and while - like basically every song ever written - it’s miles better than England’s wishing that a man with sausages instead of fingers will rule over them for ages, we’d never really noticed it. Then Wright sang. No accompaniment. A haunting, pitch-perfect, ethereal opus of a performance. The perfect prelude to the certain chaos.

Then Ollie Robinson trundled in, nipped one back into Azan Awais’s pads and Pakistan lost a wicket off the first ball of the series. Of course they did.

In 2008, Australia were due to host Bangladesh for a two-Test series. They scrapped it. The reason given was that they had only just realised that these matches would clash with the Beijing Olympics.

That is a long time ago, but let me fill you in. From the moment China was awarded the Olympic games, they made a very big deal of the fact the Oympics would start at 08:08 on the 8th of the eighth month in the year 2008. China loves that number, and they talked about it for years.

It wasn’t until 2008 that someone at Cricket Australia looked at a calendar and realised they had planned Tests at that time. But there is weird wording in that: it wasn’t that the series was scrapped, it was just postponed. And because it was Bangladesh, it was barely reported at the time. Someone just erased the schedule, and the world moved on.

And in 2010 these two teams would play again, free of the Chinese Olympic party.

Yet I can find no official fixture list, or tour announcement, and in 2010, Bangladesh did not tour Australia. Maybe the Winter Olympics clashed this time.

In 2018, (a decade later) another tour to Australia was finally scheduled for Bangladesh. That did not happen. This time, Australia were not hiding their reasons; they just said, they wouldn’t make money off it so why bother.

But of course, it gets funnier. Then CEO James Sutherland actually said that it was because it was up against footy season.

So Cricket Australia’s official response to cancelling this tour was that they scheduled a series during the Australian Rules and Rugby League season, and now those sports were so big that cricket couldn’t get a foot in.

Those two sports had reigned supreme in the Australian winter for more than 100 years by this point. Sutherland was based in Melbourne (as is Cricket Australia), yet he planned a tour during footy season and then used that as a reason to cancel it.

It’s like saying I planned a cricket match in the Swiss Alps for December, but am sad to find out it has been snowed off.

It is a lie, an obvious one.

It also came only a few years after Australia decided not to tour Bangladesh for safety concerns, and then also didn’t send their team to the 2016 Under-19 World Cup. So for those keeping score at home: 2008, 2010, 2018, in addition to 2015 and 2016, Australia did not want to play against or in Bangladesh. In 2020, Australia were due to tour when Covid hit, and the tour was mutually called off.

That means for 12 years, Australia barely played Bangladesh because of the Olympics, fFootball, money, security, and a global pandemic. It’s quite the list, and really what it says is, “we just don’t want to play you”.

Sutherland basically admitted this when he said that Australia would only play Bangladesh at home when the World Test Championship made them.

And even then, it was because turning down Bangladesh for a Test might hurt their chance of winning the WTC. And Australia like winning things.

For a more honest view, let’s turn to a media figure.

Ian Higgins was very clear on the Grade Cricketer podcast beforehand that he did not want to “learn the Bangladeshi players’ names” and that “this is about my boys do(ing) it in August in Darwin. That is what this is about. I don’t give a fuck about some Bangladeshi player doing his best”.

This is a comedy cricket podcast, but with two Australians. It is not meant to be taken seriously, and of course, after saying this, they will get roasted online for days while also getting heaps of engagement at the same time.

The problem isn’t with Higgo. It’s that his comments are basically what Cricket Australia has been saying in coded language since 2008. One is a podcaster, the other is running the game for Australia.

After all these fake excuses and disappearing tours, Bangladesh turn up to Australia because the WTC compels them to, and the Aussies want to win that, so they happily lose some money this time in order to get a chance at another trophy, and then their team is utterly embarrassed at the start of their epic one-year campaign.

Does it make up for all the disrespect Cricket Australia has shown Bangladesh cricket? No. Is it funny as fuck? Yes.

Bangladesh have now won 100% of their Tests in Australia over the last 15 years. And Cricket Australia made that happen. Quite a punchline.

****

For eleven overs, Australia had won the toss on a greenish pitch and survived the new ball. Not always well. Jake Weatherald was playing some extraordinary leaves, withdrawing his bat like it was a magic trick he had learned from one YouTube tutorial. Travis Head looked very much like a middle-order player thrown up the order. But they survived.

When Weatherald was playing shots, he was putting everything into them. Part of that was that he was trying to lay into wide, full balls. So he chased them and played them like a man who misread his train timetable. Eventually, he was close enough to nick one behind.

Day one at Darwin, most of Australia’s dismissals followed this pattern. It was tough: plays and misses, movement both ways, but then a fairly cheap wicket. They had no real idea what to do on this pitch.

Bangladesh did. Ebadot Hossain bowled a beautiful line just outside off, with constant changes of his length. Taskin Ahmed was slow around off stump, keeping edges and the wickets in play at all times. And Hasan Mahmud wobbled the ball in both directions. He beat the outside edge, and then hit the batters.

He took the wickets, but the others bowled every bit as well. It was a team effort by Bangladesh seamers, even without Nahid Rana.

Then Bangladesh batted. Where the Australians (outside of Steve Smith) seemed to have no real idea what to do on this surface, the touring batters on a very foreign pitch to them realised you could survive. And over time, slow runs would come. It wasn’t Bazballian; it was old-fashioned Test batting, 426 runs at 3.08 runs an over. They ground out the impatient Australians who used eight bowlers.

The Aussies now had a template on how to score runs on this pitch. Instead, Mahmud delivered a hard-length ball around the top of offstump which Weatherald tried to score off, and was bowled. Then he did the same to Head, with the same result. When Smith departed, the game needed a miracle for Australia, but the markets still believed in them. Instead, Bangladesh produced a nine-wicket win.

To put this in a context that Cricket Australia would understand: Bangladesh won gold, and Australia did not qualify for the finals.

****

Bangladesh have beaten Pakistan in Pakistan, New Zealand in New Zealand, Zimbabwe in Zimbabwe, West Indies in West Indies and Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka within the last ten years. Before that, they had won three away Tests in their history. Two against a striking West Indies team (which almost doesn’t count), and one in Zimbabwe.

Compare that to the last four years where they have beaten Pakistan twice, and with ease, the West Indies, and now this win in Darwin.

This is a different Bangladesh. It is not full of big names, but it has solid batting, a decent allrounder, and multiple seam-bowling options. The last bit is probably the most important, as it makes them a spoiler team, like the win in New Zealand.

But this is a better team than anything they’ve ever had, made for touring in a way previous sides were not.

However, this is not just the story of Bangladesh; 2024 had some epic upsets. And if you look at the trend, it is clear: that’s from fewer draws. The wobbleball, teams playing for points in WTC matches and Bazball have sped up Tests. None of this is a shock to anyone.

But what happens to those former draws?

If you look at home team wins compared to away wins and draws, it is a little messy, but there is a pattern.

Subtracting the home wins, you can see that draws went down, but away victories did not go up. So what happened here was that those former draws became wins by the home team. But in 2024, our magical year of Tests, that changes. Suddenly, draws disappeared, and most of those ended up as wins for the away team.

This is the age of the upset. Test cricket has never been more competitive. And because of that, we are seeing away wins at record rates.

You might think we are overstating that a little, but this is Tests since 1950. And away teams have never been this good.

Yet, nothing I have just told you will change your surprise at this result. Especially if you were following the tour game before, where Bangladesh were rolled for 54 by a 22-year-old with one first-class game.

This is an upset, a surprise, a huge moment - no matter the numbers and the changes in our game.

Bangladesh went from not being deemed worthy of playing Australia to pantsing them.

For Bangladesh cricket, this is huge. Beating Pakistan in Pakistan was the gold standard; winning that Test in New Zealand was the hope of a new day. But rolling into Darwin and destroying the team that didn’t even see any point in hosting them? The biggest, baddest team in cricket history. And not just winning it, but to use the local vernacular, spanking them - this is something else.

Bangladesh came in as a well-drilled professional team; they were handed the best conditions, and they milked them until they were well ahead of the game. When the opposition fought back, they were patient and waited them out.

For a very long time, Australian cricket treated Bangladesh like they were a joke. Who is laughing now?

I was ‘Shazamed’ in the middle of a cricket pitch, and it was one of the greatest moments of my life.

My batting partner comes towards me at the end of the over for a meeting mid-pitch. His pads are wrong; it feels like a chest-bursting alien is about to jump out of him. Because of it, he doesn’t really walk, but sort of waddles. His helmet isn’t straight; the straps are pointing in every direction, and he’s wearing a shirt two or three sizes too big. We briefly discuss our batting plan for the bowler, and then he lifts up his glove for a punch.

Nothing better has ever happened to me on a field. It is not a wrong’un some guy didn’t pick, a stunning one-hander that my teammates can’t believe, or winning a final. It is a Shazam, followed by three words and a wink.

When I was young, I didn’t know that not everyone played cricket. I had no idea you could do other things on a Saturday. My father, aunty, uncle and mother all had roles on their cricket committee at the same time at Campbellfield Cricket Club, which at times was called Kimberfield. At the club, I would be there all day Saturday, then come back on Sunday to clean up. I was first allowed to field when I was six-years-old. At seven, I was playing. Later on, I would bowl all morning in the juniors, then all afternoon in the seniors. It was 130 overs a day, on top of three other training sessions.

Before Boxing Day became a huge cricket carnival in Melbourne, my family would play backyard cricket on that day.

Cricket was part of my identity. I never even knew if I chose it; it was just all around me. It was a family heirloom that was passed down.

Ricky Ponting calls a glove punch a ‘Shazam’. He hates the glove punch, like only an old man can hate something that changes during their career. I have been Shazaming batting partnerships for probably 30 years, and playing cricket for 40.

My batting partner punches my gloves and then says, “I’m lovin’ this”, before winking at me and going back down his end to bat.

That Shazam was from my son, Ezekiel.

I never thought a glove punch would make me cry.

****

My dad, Peter, was a fast bowler with a big hooping outswinger. He would pick up the most raggedy arsed ball in the nets, come in off two steps, and bowl me almost every time. Others in my club would talk about never seeing him suggest a loose ball. He had not always been that way. When he was young, he was quick. But when his athleticism faded, his stomach took over, and he became another bowler entirely. He would deliver 20, 30, 40-over spells.

And that strain eventually was felt in his knees. By the time he was 40, he needed replacements in both. I was eight then.

It meant that he was unable to play cricket regulary. Our first game was a friendly, where he hit a six (perhaps one of the only in his life) and I took a bunch of wickets with my spin as the men tried to hit maximums.

The second match, he was a last-minute replacement early on in my senior cricket. My captain used to play against him, and convinced my old man he had to come out and just stand in one place, and then begged him to deliver a few overs. When he did, they thought it would be cool if I came into the slips. He was a bit slower by then, so the keeper went up, and it was one of the first times I’d ever been up at slip to a seamer. As often happened with Dad’s bowling, there was an edge, but like when I faced him, it seemed to be through me before I was ready. I knew that was probably my only chance of taking a catch off his bowling. To this day I can remember seeing the ball behind me.

We only played together once more after that.

Because I missed out on playing with my father outside of a few times, it was really important that I play with my kids if possible.

Early in fatherhood, I realised that kids do make choices. I had always assumed cricket was forced on me, but now I know that I chose it, probably several times a day. When my oldest boy came through, Zachariah, I showed him the sport, and he played early on. But by 12, he just didn’t want to do it anymore.

I had lost 33.33% of my chance to play cricket with my kid.

It was almost 100% when I fell off a skateboard.

Earlier that day, I’d been skating around The Oval. And then on the way home, I came off, and later my arm almost came off.

When the surgeon told me it might need to be removed, I thought about the fact I’d never played backyard cricket with my daughter Clementine or a real game with the boys. The surgeons found a way to save it, albeit without medication.

The pain of having an arm relocated with a dislocated wrist and elbow - with everything else broken in between - was about the same as the thought of never playing cricket with my kids.

****

My first net session when I was six, I put all the pads on, which I had seen adults do thousands of times before. I missed one piece of kit, the box, because I didn’t want anything on my dick. The first ball I faced hit where the box should have been. And I’ve never batted without it since.

I am very aware of the transition to hardball cricket. I remember when kids would turn up to training having never seen a real cricket ball before, and suddenly have to handle it in the nets. Fear and backing away were a familiar sight.

My son is still in the transition. In the field, it never bothers him, but batting, if there is any pace, he suddenly remembers this is a hard ball. If you throw a windball at him at max pace, he is fine; a way slower leather one has him backing away. This is not a big issue. I was backing away to pace until I was 13, and yet was still making lots of runs. But when you face adults, the hard ball feels harder.

So when Ezekiel was asked to play senior games, he was fine with the bowling and fielding, but the idea of batting terrified him.

The team he was playing for was Andy Zaltzman’s comedian cricket team called Four Candles. Originally Ezekiel was going to be 12th man, but with a few last-minute dropouts, he got in the XI.

The fact that they were comedians made him more eager, but he was worried about batting. Zaltzman was assured the boy could field and bowl straight, so Ezekiel made his debut at point.

The ground was formerly Earl of Leicester’s Park, but is now Penshurst Park. The first recorded cricket match there was 1724. (290 years before Ezekiel popped out). There was a big old Downton Abbey-type building next to it. But in true English style, the ground is not flat. And this is not some funny Lord’s slope. At point from the clubhouse end, there is a two-metre drop-off on what is an incredibly small boundary. So after a couple of balls went past him, it meant Ezekiel was now on the boundary, which meant we could basically only see the top of his head.

He’s played a lot of cricket, but never on a hill like this. The first ball hit to him raced down the mountain and he missed it. Later a ball flew and he had to run up the hill and dropped the catch (though from a no-ball). It was without doubt the worst place to field, so Zaltzman moved him to somewhere easier.

But at this point it didn’t matter much, the score was 163 for 2. Without disparaging the comedian XI, it felt like the game was getting away from us.

Ezekiel was moping around, near tears, from his misfields and dropped catch. Zaltzman asked if he would want to bowl, and seeing us getting smashed everywhere, I thought we might as well give him a go.

He marked his run-up like he’d been doing it for years, and ran into two players well set, with very “I’ve-had-coaching” techniques. The first one was defended off the middle of the bat. They got a couple of singles with the field spread. The last ball was an inswinger back to the top of off, and this one hit it.

His teammates couldn’t believe it, and neither could he.

At that time, the wicket didn’t feel that important. But it was.

During his spell, he was at short fine-leg when someone tried to sweep me but got a top edge. I have a rule in low-quality cricket: if the ball goes up off my bowling, I don’t look. I find it harder to be upset with the eventual drop.

So as the ball flew, I started to turn away, and then at the last moment, I realised who was coming around. There is a chance I didn’t actually see my son take the catch. It was a blur at best, but somehow he got low and kept it.

For the second time in a few minutes, I lifted him up. And he was pretty unfazed by it all. The team was excited, as somehow we’d turned a sure loss into a potential win.

Ezekiel ended with 1/20 from his four overs, while I burgled all the wickets at the other end. It was a small, yet completely game-changing spell. And he was on a complete high.

But, those hard balls.

When Zaltzman gave him the chance to bat higher up the order, he shied away and batted at eight.

When he saw the bowling, he changed his mind very quickly. In fact, he turned into Virender Sehwag. From the safety of the boundary, he was calling which balls he’d smack.

Sadly for him, the top order made runs, then Zaltzman and I mopped up the rest. So we had won the game, largely all from the moment he first ran through the crease.

In the space of a day, he went from being terrified of the ball to pissed off he wasn’t allowed to smash it.

****

When he was little, my son faced a ball in the backyard, and swung his bat. It hit the middle, and he squealed. I don’t know if I’d ever been there for a moment like this before. That first time the ball hits the middle, and a cricketer gets it. It’s a magical feeling.

That wasn’t Ezekiel, that was his brother Zachariah.

I spent years playing backyard cricket with him, and other sports. Throwing, kicking and hitting balls. I remember his excitement when he took a one-handed catch. The first time he kicked a goal past me, he ran around the backyard with his arms out like an airplane.

Actually, come to think of it, he enjoyed the celebration more than the sport. It just wasn’t for him. He played a few hardball games, did a bit of football, had a go at tennis and learned to swim. He was in a sport-obsessed family on the field or watching on TV. But he likes bees, computer games and airplanes.

The thing I learned early in parenting is that your hopes and dreams on a child don’t mean much, when they are what they are.

Ezekiel had sport pushed on him less, as did his sister Clementine. Not because I didn’t think they would like it, but because I wanted them to try so many things and discover their love that way. Both had that moment of first hitting the ball, but the difference is, they have so far kept wanting to do it.

One day, that might change. That’s okay. Because what I have learnt is that one moment is enough as a parent. The rest is their life.

****

A week after his successful senior debut, Ezekiel was supposed to be 12th for his mum’s work team. At the last minute, everyone pulled out. Again.

This time, the game was at his home team’s ground, but, weirdly, against them. He made this very clear when I tried to wear the club shirt and took me through all the reasons I could not.

Again we were getting smashed around a little until he came on to bowl. Again he only took the one wicket, but was still way straighter than the adults, and kept the pressure on.

One guy was nearing his hundred, and he was hitting them very well, so I worried about Ezekiel’s position at short midwicket. I offered him an easier spot, but he wanted to stay there.

Two deliveries later, the ball was hit straight to him, and perhaps not noticing the left-hander, the batter took off. Ezekiel got to it quickly, but fumbled. He then said “sorry guys”, picked the ball up and knocked back the middle stump. He was pissed at the mistake, and didn’t notice running out the bloke about to make it to his hundred.

The 12-year-old was calm, while the adults were ecstatic.

He almost played it cool, but actually he played it oblivious.

****

The third time I played with my father, it was at Altona, on a giant playing surface. It was a two-day game, and we lost in the first innings really quickly, and most of the second day was us trying to hold on for a draw. I went in first-drop and just blocked.

Outside of being injured, I’ve never been this defensive in my life. I made one run in my first hour as two older spinners bowled really well. There were seven fielders around the bat who never shut up. And the more they moaned, the harder I tried to ruin their chance of an early finish.

After a while, the reason for staying in changed, because I’d batted so long that now my dad was due in soon. He was batting at eight, with my friend Kevin at seven. By the time Kev got in, I’d been batting for three hours, and had roughly four runs.

Batting with a childhood friend relaxed me a little, and so when I got a half-tracker I went for it. These two old fellas had been so disciplined that it was the first real poor ball. Muscle memory kicked in, I went to pull it, but dragged it onto my stumps.

The walk-off was huge on this MCG-sized ground, so I had plenty of seconds to watch my dad walk towards me. Of all the times he had looked at me disappointed after I’d given my wicket away (and he was my coach for eight years), this was the one that hurt me the most.

As I took my pads off, my old man slogged his first ball out to deep square leg. Kevin ran three, before he noticed my dad was walking down the middle of the pitch with his arms raised like he’d won a World Cup.

We lost the game outright, and never played together again.

****

The umpire turned to me and said casually, “If a wicket goes now, your son will come in next.”

Ezekiel was scheduled to bat at eight for his mum’s work side, but with me in the middle and set on our home pitch, I think, off-field, they realised it would be cool to see father and son together rather than my wife’s work team getting anywhere near the huge chase (which was never that likely).

When my friend Akbar was out, I waited for Ezekiel to walk in. It felt like forever. In fact, it was longer.

No one entered the pitch at all. If the opposition had wanted to, they could have pulled a Shakib Al Hasan and appealed for a timeout. Eventually Ryan came in to bat, and he told me the problem was Ezekiel couldn’t work out how to put his chest pad on.

Which I thought was weird, as he didn’t own one.

At this point, I was seeing the ball like a watermelon; sadly I was also hitting it that way. Nothing was coming from the middle, even though everything was hitting the bat. But my batting changed for another reason. I was happy to attack and score earlier, but now I started to feel this deep fear.

What if I went out again, like I did to my dad?

Now clearly, there are still lots of chances to play cricket again with Ezekiel. But maybe my arm has another issue, or he stops wanting to play cricket.

I was suddenly batting for my family in what was one of least serious matches I’d ever been in.

All of this swarmed around my head, as Ryan swung wildly at the other end. He was dropped and almost ran me out. He brought this charming chaos to the crease that I would have enjoyed, but my mind was on something else.

The result of the match meant little to me now, as did my score. I just wanted to stay in longer than Ryan. Usually I bat for my partner, this time I was desperate to outlast him.

I dug in for a few balls, at one stage playing a forward defence and holding the pose for seconds to ensure I’d done it right. I have hit the winning runs in close games, made hundreds and done just about everything with a bat, but for these few balls, I was at my most vulnerable.

My backlift, guard and grip were all changed. I wanted to be there when he was. I was a whole different batter than at any other point in my life; a father hoping to survive.

Ryan’s batting could best be described as enthusiastic bursts of swipes. Usually, I would have talked him through the innings and tried to protect him a little early on. Now I sat back, waiting for his powerful fours or a quick exit. When he lofted one from the offie, I broke my own rule of never watching high catches when I’m invested, and looked close enough to see a loose thread on the ball until it was safely nestled into the hands of the fielder.

This time Ezekiel did come in. The slowest walk ever, I met him closer to the boundary than the pitch. Behind him Clementine was playing, far too young and bored to understand what is happening all the way out in the middle. She will ask me later if she can play “real cricket” with me and Ezekiel. When we get home, Zachariah will ask how we went the minute the door opens.

For now, I am Ezekiel’s batting partner and dad. So I go about fixing whatever is going on beneath his shirt. It turned out that he’d got confused, and instead of borrowing someone’s chest pad, he’s ended up with two thigh pads. The second one had slipped to just above his waist. So I fixed this, and let him know he was facing an off-spinner.

This should have been the easy bit, I’d avenged the error with my dad. But now I was just a father, hoping his son could get a run.

So when Ezekiel got an inside edge to short fine-leg, I screamed yes and ran as fast as my old body allows for. I made it easy, but I turned around, Ezekiel was a jumble of oversized shirts, extra thigh pads, and a helmet that almost covered his eyes, so he was only halfway down the pitch. A good throw could have run him out.

But I’d taken them off guard. They were playing a friendly cricket match; I was doing something far more important.

Ezekiel had his first senior run because I’d stolen it for him.

At this point, I went back to normal, started looking for gaps or just hitting the ball hard in the air. I was just enjoying the moment, and without really noticing, I passed 50. There was no raising my arms like I’d won a World Cup, I just had a quick bat lift to my teammates and then shared another Shazam with my son.

It was our third or fourth Shazam in our 21-run partnership. Each one welled me up.

My arm never came off, I didn’t go out this time, and my son still loves playing cricket.

Marking my guard at the beginning of the next over after the wink Shazam was hard. A lifetime of cricket and family went into my eyes.

My grandfather jumped the fence to see Bradman fail.

My mum, sledging opposition batters after my dad had got them out.

My uncle’s leg-slip.

Teaching my cousin how to bowl legspin.

Captaining another cousin’s leggies in a match.

My grandmother’s irrational hatred for Brett Lee.

I think I marked leg guard, but I was also floating above the crease.

Soon after, I was out slogging; normal service had resumed. But Ezekiel stayed around for a while before finally missing a straight one.

When he was out, he cried. Which is funny, because when he was in, I cried.

We lost by 131 runs.

Australia destroyed Pakistan in a Test in 1984 - and yet it is the scary bedtime story that Aussie fans have swapped ever since.

Pakistan batted first and Dennis Lillee’s four-wicket haul helped Australia mop them up cheaply enough. Then Greg Chappell made 182, and Lillee went back out to add another four, as their keeper Rod Marsh took five catches. The Australians eventallty won by 10 wickets. It was the fifth Test, and it secured them the series.

A big win, against a quickly improving side. Job done, get the beers ready.

However, Australia weren’t celebrating the win. They were toasting three players who retired at the same time: Greg Chappell, Rod Marsh and Dennis Lillee.

Their best bat, their best bowler, and the keeper. If a cricket team had a spine, it would look like this, and these three men, good enough for fantastic performances in their last matches, just yanked it out.

Australian cricket collapsed.

In the next eight series, they didn’t win any. That included their first home loss to New Zealand and an Ashes beating that wouldn’t happen again for generations. This was Australia’s worst period in Tests. Their rolling win/loss ratio for 20 matches dropped to 0.14; they had never been under 0.2 before.

They had been poor during and after World Series Cricket - especially by their standards - but this was an all-time low. Australia had never been this bad, and it happened even though they were not playing West Indies or Pakistan, who were the two best teams in the world. Australian cricket had been kept competent by the old guard, and when it went, there was nothing left.

As often happens in a period like this, it was the bowling.

When Dennis Lillee retired, Australia stopped taking wickets. From 1980 until the year 2000 they had three years averaging more than 35 with the ball: 1984, ‘85 and ‘86. By 1987 it was over, and slowly Australia built themselves not just into a good cricket team, but arguably the best of all time.

So it was a happy ending.

But Australia never forgot what it was like during that period. A team used to winning lost all the time, and it haunted them, even in their greatest period. Especially when they realised that Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath were basically the same age.

The same kind of drop-off happened, albeit from a freakishly high mark. But there, Australia lost McGrath and Warne in the same Test, where Justin Langer went as well. Then Adam Gilchrist was gone not long after. And despite being way younger, Jason Gillespie lost his athleticism a year before. So Australia had two solid studies on what happens when you have a generation of greats all going at the same time.

So for no reason at all, let me put down these random people’s birthdates:

Pat Cummins – born 8 May 1993
Josh Hazlewood – born 8 January 1991
James Pattinson – born 3 May 1990
Mitchell Starc – born 30 January 1990
Nathan Lyon – born 20 November 1987

Yes, despite the fear, the worry and the planning, it is happening again.

There’s a new American sports phrase called “two-timeline.” The concept is old, even if the name is new. It is when you have a team that is really good, maybe has already won, but you’re also looking to protect the next generation of the side so that they continue to be good.

The Golden State Warriors tried it in the NBA a couple of years ago. They ended up with three high draft picks, and instead of trading them for talent around their ageing core, they selected young prospects to secure the future. But the draft players never helped for another run at a title, and the older players started to age out.

As it currently stands, the next generation is mostly no longer on their roster, and their legends are either old or finished.

Two timelines is the dream; the issue is, you are risking your present and it’s hard to really commit to the future. Most teams want to do this when they are good, but usually, it fails.

Think of the three greatest modern cricket sides: Australia of 1995-2007, South Africa of 2005-2013 and India 2015-2024. All of them had plans to regen their side on the run. But no matter how they tried, they couldn’t keep it up; great players aged out, and even the very talented ones behind them couldn’t keep it going.

The West Indies of the 1980s is the big outlier; their original four pacemen moved on, and they replaced them with four more like it was nothing. Viv Richards retired, and Brian Lara made his debut.

But was that planning, or was it just how talent sometimes works? West Indies had never had that level of bowling depth before, or since. But they had it twice in a row then.

Australia in this period may not have had the level of success of the other sides, but they have a generation that is all of similar age who will leave the game if not together, then at least close to each other.

And I’ve heard and read many things about how Australia should fix this. But here’s the thing: I don’t really know how they would do that.

In franchise leagues it can be done: trade or transfer a big player when you think their stock is at its highest, and use what you get back to restock quickly and go again. Of course it can, and often does, go wrong. But it’s possible to do.

But Australia can’t trade Hazlewood to India for some young batters, Lyon to England for the rights to Ben Stokes, or offload Scott Boland to a team desperate for instant success, to take a flyer on some raw talent.

So Australia’s only option is to grandfather in the change, by finding a chance to play a bunch of youngsters. But even when they’ve had injuries to quicks, look who has come in. Scott Boland who is 37, Michael Neser who is 36, Brendon Doggett who is 32, and Jhye Richardson who is 29.

They’re making a clear decision: they want to win, now, for as long as they can. But also, again, look at those ages. They are the backups, but they are also old.

For the batting, I am not sure they really have backups; their two most recent additions are two 31-year-olds: Josh Inglis and Jake Weatherald. There are younger options in Cooper Connolly, Sam Konstas and Nathan McSweeney. You could try one of them, but that would not really change the issue. And two of them have already had some chances. If they had worked, they’d be in the team. It’s not as if the Australians are making lots of runs.

The spinners are the most interesting option: Todd Murphy is 25, and Matt Kuhnemann is 29. With Lyon’s injury, they could have made their debut against Bangladesh, but with the offie back to fitness and needing match practice, they’re stuck there.

Australia could pension off Boland and Lyon; and with Usman Khawaja retired, it opens up three spots. Jhye Richardson becomes first-choice back-up seamer (when fit). Todd Murphy found some form in the most recent Sheffield Shield, so he comes in for less crucial matches, and Cooper Connolly comes into the number six or seven position.

But what would that do? Does it revolutionise the team? Murphy is a good prospect, although the chances of him replacing Lyon’s career are nearly 500-1. Connolly had an incredible IPL, but also before that was struggling a lot. Even if either of these guys came good, it’s probably two or three years away. And with Richardson, he doesn’t change things much, unless he is fit.

So the changes Australia can make are largely around the margins. But the issue is that over the next year(ish), they are playing 20 (or even 21) Tests.

Bangladesh (home): 2
South Africa (away): 3
New Zealand (home): 4
India (away): 5
England (home, MCG 150th anniversary): 1
WTC Final (Maybe): 1
England (away): 5

This is perhaps the most hardcore year any team has had. And it’s not even just normal weird; the two one-off matches make it even stranger.

Knowing the pragmatic thinking of leaders Cummins, George Bailey and Andrew McDonald, I can see why they’d just play for the now.

And looking at the squad to play Bangladesh, they are trying to win their matches this year, and less concerned with the future. They are committed on this timeline. The future is not for them.

This is probably not what most people think, but the way I would look at this is: they’re not really keeping out many great young prospects, and they have a chance of beating South Africa in South Africa, India in India, and of winning the Ashes and the World Test Championship. If they had a bunch of youthful bowlers pushing through, I might feel differently. But I think the best idea is to ride this current bowling lineup until the end.

And it might only be this one year. Which is unlike anything else.

Their decision to make this call is not the real issue, whichever side you are on.

The actual problem is the lack of talent coming through, with the fact that those five bowlers they had - Cummins, Hazlewood, Pattinson, Starc and Lyon - were all more or less the same age.

Obviously Pattinson never made it as his body fell apart, but it is incredible that Australia had three world-class bowlers born within a year of each other. With Lyon born three years earlier, which puts him on a similar timeline as a spinner. Add in Cummins two years later, and it’s a truly remarkable position to be in.

It also means that for the last ten years they had one of the most complete bowling attacks around, and there was little chance of bringing in others. But let’s be honest, they didn’t really find anyone either. This is one of the luckiest situations a team can ever find itself in - until it isn’t.

And that is the reality they are living through now.

Hazlewood feels like he might have many soft-tissue injuries before retirement. Lyon is one more major incident away from the end. Cummins has played a lot, but also had stress fractures. So only Starc has been the iron man. But if you have four bowlers in their mid-to-late 30s, having three with fairly serious physical issues is a problem.

What is the over/under line on them playing together as a foursome again - maybe five more matches?

When they are not fit, they will have to bring in others. But maybe that means more Richardson than Boland. Otherwise, it’s going to be more of the same.

It seems like Australia has two timelines to choose from, but maybe there is only one.

This generation was blessed with a harmonious bowling attack, and one way or another, nothing else came. It seems like their choice is to ride it until it’s done.

When it’s over, they will be worse. But there was little they could do about that. That is just what happens sometimes. Australia win a lot, then their bowlers age out, and they have to re-start. They live the dream, survive the nightmare, and go again.

You may not know it, but this is who every Englishman wanted to be in the 1980s. This is their idea of peak masculinity.

This is the great man explaining how he doesn’t help with his kids. “I was asked if I changed nappies and I said no”. He goes on ,“I spent time on the road in hotels, airplanes, coaches and around the world. If you want to send me the nappies to the post, I’ll wash them and send them back”.

There can be only one Ian “Beefy” Botham.

Yet, England spent all the 90s searching for the next one. Despite the fact that there is only one man in the history of the game with 10 Test hundreds and 15 five wicket hauls. Not only that, Botham actually has 14 tons and 27 hauls.

Botham truly is a one of one. For years, the search for ‘the next Botham’ became a punchline.

However, after him, they only went and found two more world class all-rounders.

Freddie Flintoff was a vibe, before the word was even used. Since retiring, he has arguably become even more famous. He has his own Ashes, and was pretty good in the most famous one too.

Then we end up with Ben Stokes, who mid-career asked James Bond director Sam Mendes to make a film about him.

These men are not famous cricketers, they are famous, despite being cricketers. Bad boys with rough edges and colourful resumes. And when they are good, everyone in the country notices. Three cricketers have won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award since 1975. Ian Botham 1981, Andrew Flintoff 2005 and Ben Stokes 2019.

The important thing is the years. England all-rounders win Ashes and World Cups, then are given roses for life.

For the rest of the World, England’s obsession with the Ashes is like that one friend that keeps telling you Harry Potter is the best series ever, despite the fact that it is also the only one they have ever actually finished.

1981 is Botham’s Ashes. His Headingley performance is one of the greatest all-round games we’ve ever seen. The man was a run short of 400, and took 34 wickets. He averaged 36 with the bat and 21 with the ball. He was also England’s leading run-scorer and wicket-taker when they lost 3-0 on the away tour in 1979/80.

Freddie Flintoff had the 2005 Ashes where he scored over 400 runs and took 24 wickets. He was only behind Shane Warne on wickets and Kevin Pietersen and Marcus Trescothick on runs. In 2009, he won the game with the ball at Lord’s on the last day, and ran out Ricky Ponting at the Oval to finish the series.

Ben Stokes at Headingley played one of the greatest innings in Test history. It may not have been the best innings that year, and it still might be the second-best performance ever. He struggled with the ball, though in very Stokes fashion does bowl a grueling 15 over spell at Headingley. That series, which was the same year he helped them win the 2019 World Cup, he made 441 runs at an average of 55 including two centuries. However, unlike the other two, he didn’t win the Urn.

So all three had series and moments that stopped the nation.

This is not the list of the three greatest English players of all time, but this is the group of players that Englishmen most wanted to be. You can say Alastair Cook was a better player than Stokes if you want, but no one who owns a St George’s flag wants to be the opener over the ginger genius.

This is a very special group of players within English cricket culture. They are forever linked. England’s golden talismans. One was a freak, but they somehow cloned two more.

***

On raw stats, Ian Botham clearly has the best bowling average. With the bat, they’re all roughly in the same territory.

But you can’t take averages at face value, especially for all-rounders. They require context.

A top six batter roughly scores 66 runs a game. None of them match the baseline, though Stokes is the closest. And he does have a higher innings per Test ratio, so he’s more likely to bat twice in a game. Part of that is down to the era he’s played in and Bazball’s result oriented nature. Flintoff is the only one of the three with less than thirty runs per knock, but they’re all in the 29 to 33 bracket.

None of them particularly shine on batting match factor either with all being below neutral. Stokes and Botham are both about 0.97 and 0.96 respectively, while Flintoff is 21% worse than the other top six batters in his games. This makes sense; Flintoff had periods where he was a proper batter, but a lot of time he struggled. His average is almost 32, but it was a great batting era.

All three mainly batted at number six. This is very important because an all-rounder at that position allows the team to play five bowlers without compromising the batting. So they accomplished a huge goal, and in Stokes and Botham’s case, without giving much back in terms of batting.

But they were different eras. Botham played when they were keeper-batters, not batter-keepers. And in fact, he played with Bob Taylor, who was pretty much a specialist keeper. Flintoff allowed Geraint Jones to bat at seven. Stokes allowed England to play Jonny Bairstow or Jos Buttler at seven (sometimes both in the same XI, let’s not go there). Botham allowed for a great keeper, Flintoff and Stokes got an extra bowler into the side.

Great all-rounders are shapeshifters, all three of them did that.

Batting in the same position is fine, but it depends on your era or team. It’s very different entering when the ball is soft compared to walking in when the ball is moving. Where ball data is known, only Shakib Al Hasan with a median entry over of 29 had an earlier walk in coming at four down than Stokes’ at 33. For a number six, this is what the US Marines would call, in the shit.

Botham and Flintoff are at around 48 overs. However, due to the prosaic way England played cricket in the 80s, Botham came in when the ball was older, but the scores were almost identical. (For Beefy, 127/4 and Ben’s was 124/4). Both their top fives averaged around 36. Flintoff played with the strongest batting lineup, where they averaged 42. That was England’s greatest modern era with the bat.

They’re all quick scorers, but Stokes is actually the slowest on strike factor. Bazball plays a part in that; he showed them how to attack in the first few matches and then actually went back to his normal speed. Flintoff could smash the ball, but Botham did it the best.

He was a genuine big hitter in an era when only Viv Richards and Kapil Dev smashed the ball harder.

Home and away has a very interesting pattern. Botham was extremely even, while Freddie and Stokes made almost all their runs in England. Stokes is basically a frontline batter at home, but then drops off.

Flintoff was not really an all-rounder on the road, he was more of a handy bat, perhaps like R Ashwin.

One of the key narratives about Stokes is that he performs when his team falls apart. The man certainly has iconic knocks, but how does it stand up over an entire career? He performs 25% better in the games where the average is under 30, and you’d certainly take that from your all-rounder. He did like it, in the shit.

But Botham did it even better. And of course, Headingley 1981 will always be famous for his 149* after the follow-on.

But notice how none of them are great at cashing in when the others also make runs. And that is an important skill for any frontline Test batter, even if it is considered statpadding. The difference between mediocre batters and greats often comes down to the ability to statpad.

All three of them needed drama, juice and energy, otherwise batting got a little boring or mundane to them. They wanted to have to put on their capes to save the day.

Australian Keith Miller was famous for only trying with the bat when needed. So this is a popular all-rounder trait.

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It’s almost as if Laura Wolvaardt is trying to hypnotise herself. She gets into a comfortable position on the bench, clears her mind, and focuses on the ball. Then she watches the green golf ball bounce up and down on her bat.

She picked the practice up at an U19 tournament. She saw a teammate doing it before a match and then tried it out. She scored good runs in the match and a superstition was born. It was only later that it ceased being a superstition and developed into a routine. Wolvaardt used different balls at first. Then Lizelle Lee gave her the green golf ball in 2020. She has used that one since.

After two minutes of self-hypnosis, Wolvaardt dons her helmet, tucks the bat under her arm, and wears her gloves as she strides out to face Nat Sciver-Brunt and England. The South African captain doesn’t need a sighter before she gets going. She captivates spectators as she leans into a Lauren Bell half-volley and launches her innings with a cover drive to the boundary.

To say that Wolvaardt followed that boundary with a brilliant innings sounds like an understatement. She cuts, she pulls, she sweeps, and time stands still when she punches the ball through the covers. Fans will pay just to watch Wolvaardt play a cover drive. The crowd present at Guwahati is treated to it several times and she plunders 42 runs from it.

South Africa makes 319 runs and 53% of them come from Wolvaardt’s bat. None of her teammates makes more than 45 runs. England, on the other hand, combine to reach a total only 25 runs more than Wolvaardt’s 169, which features 20 fours and 4 sixes.

Four days later, South Africa struggle to read the Indian spinners at the DY Patil and collapse in a heap. Wolvaardt ignores the storm around her, side steps the debris of wickets, and cruises to a 98-ball 101. South Africa had an outside chance of winning as long as she was out in the middle. She is the seventh wicket to fall, and their title hopes perish with her exit.

The twin tons make her the first South African player to score back-to-back centuries at an ICC ODI World Cup. The milestone is one of the many firsts Wolvaardt has racked in her international career.

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***

Wolvaardt’s journey began in the dark ages of women’s cricket in South Africa. The women’s national team performed out of sight and the media did not give them a voice. It took extraordinary circumstances for them to get in the news. She didn’t know of any women cricketers, so she looked up to Herschelle Gibbs, Jacques Kallis, AB de Villiers, and Quinton de Kock.

There was no pipeline for emerging talent. Young girls found the game through playing with boys and then headed straight into the U19 side if they had the ability, before making a professional debut. Wolvaardt was so good that she made her inter-provincial U19 debut at 11.

Her mother had to travel with her to Jo’burg and slept with her at a guest house because she was too young to be with the team. Wolvaardt only joined the team for meetings and at the ground for training or matches. Her highest score at the tournament was a 43-ball 25. She was one of only two batters who got beyond the 20-run mark. Saarah Smith top-scored with a 64-ball 30.

Wolvaardt struck two fours in her 48-minute stay at the crease. There is no information on whether the fours were off cover drives, but it is safe to assume that they were. She might not have had the power to split the field at will, but at 11, she was already proficient in the cover drive.

Wolvaardt started working with Laurie Ward when she was five. Ward had Pitch Vision recording equipment and a screen in her nets. Wolvaardt would always consult it after unfurling one to see if she had nailed it. She didn’t stop until she was MCC Manual perfect.

She made her Western Province senior debut two years later. Wolvaardt had developed a little more strength, and she registered her first half-century for them shortly afterwards. The national team was not far off, and CSA called her up at 16-years-old. Wolvaardt scored her first WODI half-century in her second match and raised her bat to celebrate her maiden century in her seventh outing.

Her brilliance was easy to see. She was the future. It wasn’t long before the country was demanding more of her time, so the teenager started cutting school to serve them. Most sports inclined teenagers revel at such a proposition. Not Laura Wolvaardt. She dreamt of becoming a medical doctor, so she took schoolwork on the road.

She also fooled around with music. But she found her calling in ODI cricket. She has outperformed all who came before her and is showing those that will come after that there are no limits. Wolvaardt has the most hundreds, most fifties, and most runs for South Africa. There is no point in comparing her stats to those of her countrywomen.

Wolvaardt’s peers are the best in the world. Only six women have scored 5000 or more WODI runs since the inception of the format. She is fifth on that list. She is tied with Suzie Bates for the third most centuries in the format. Wolvaardt also highest boasts the best average among the 10 top scorers and slips to second, behind Meg Lanning, when you expand the list to 20.

But Wolvaardt isn’t just a WODI great. She is a South African ODI legend. The 27-year-old’s tally of 5695 runs places her at number nine on the all-time list of South Africans with the most runs in 50-over cricket. She is just 240 runs behind Jonty Rhodes who accumulated 5935 runs in his 11-year ODI career. She will pass him in five or six innings if she bats to her overall average, and in just four if she bats as she has been for the last couple of years.

***

The social media universe disagrees on a lot of things but one of the few things that unites them is the beauty and elegance of Wolvaardt’s cover drive. Many believe it deserves a spot in the Louvre.

However, her greatest strength was also her biggest weakness. Teams worked out that her inclination to go for the cover drive exposed her to bowled and lbw dismissals when the ball was swinging. Then caught behind when it stopped moving. The first port of call for Wolvaardt and her coaches was to tweak her footwork.

Her left foot closed her off from accessing more shots. Therefore, improving where it landed didn’t just open her up to more shots, lending her a 360-degree approach – it also improved her contact points, improved her bat flow, and took care of the bowled and lbw dismissals against the swinging ball. It also took care of the caught behinds when it stopped moving.

Wolvaardt’s centuries against England and India in the semifinal and final of the 2025 ICC Women’s World Cup are great examples of the fruits of the technical change. India attacked the line of off-stump and the channel just outside it. Wolvaardt feasted off those deliveries. England on the other hand, targeted the stumps, and Wolvaardt opened up the leg side.

The technical tweak was one of a few changes that Wolvaardt made from late 2023, when South Africa decided that they wanted to move away from their conservative brand of cricket to a more ‘exciting and positive’ approach. The South African captain, whom many have described as always looking for ways to improve her game, bought into the plan.

Wolvaardt went from good to great. She spent the first seven years of her career grappling with adolescence, trying to understand herself as an individual, and then develop as a player while opening for South Africa. She showed glimpses of her ceiling with the five centuries.

Wolvaardt has been living up to her potential since the tweak. She has scored eight hundreds and nine half-centuries since January 2024. Her average of 63.3 is brilliant, while her strike rate of 90.7 is a long way from her pedestrian pace in her early years.

The change didn’t just help her 50-over game, it also pushed her T20I game forward. From her debut to the end of 2023, Wolvaardt made 1362 runs at an average of 34 while striking at a modest 110.9. The South African skipper supersized her batting since the start of 2024.

Wolvaardt almost doubled what she managed in seven years in less than two. She crammed 1163 runs into the period between January 2024 and August 2026. It’s not just more runs, it’s more runs at a faster rate. Wolvaardt has averaged 41.5 runs at 132.

It is not a coincidence that her evolution coincided with South Africa women closing the gap between them and the leading teams. South Africa scored at just over 4.5 runs an over in 50-over cricket in the first seven years of Wolvaardt’s career. They have been cruising at over five and a half since January 2024. Laura Wolvaardt’s intent has permeated all parts of the team.

In many ways, it is apt that the person who evolved from girl to woman at the top of the order for South Africa is leading their transformation.

***

Laura Wolvaardt the player has changed. She first took guard as a pre-teen with a beautiful cover drive. She grew into a one-dimensional international cricketer. Now, she is no longer easy to tie down at the crease. She has a plethora of options at her disposal. England and India learned that first hand. But Laura Wolvaardt the individual has stayed the same. She is the same reserved pre-adolescent girl who walked into the Western Province u19 dressing room.

Maybe her two minutes with the golf ball and the bat is her way of keeping herself attached to the girl who left school to pursue a cricket dream. Maybe that is what keeps her grounded. On the other hand, it could be her way of releasing stress before walking out to bat. And if there is anyone who gets hypnotised, it’s not her. It is the spectators who watch her in full flow as she peels one of her glorious cover drives.

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Stephen Fleming paused the great killing machine of Australia with point fielders.

Damien Martyn was one of the best strikers of the ball in the world. That is the wrong word; he caressed deliveries in a minimalist fashion to places he wished them to go. There was no huge foot movement or jerkiness, just short perfect touches and half-brush strokes that painted perhaps one of the most beautiful pictures in batting.

Fleming was not like this. He always moved like his bat was too heavy for him. It was a long flow that almost hinted it would be too late, but it caught up to the ball. His feet were like Martyn’s in that they didn’t move much. But they felt stuck on the surface, as if on his part of the pitch were an invisible tar pit. It was a different kind of elegance; Fleming flowed runs. He was all bat path, almost looking like he was using a gymnastics ribbon. At times his blade seemed to transform into rubber.

Damien Martyn was supposed to be the Australian captain for a long time and never did the job. Stephen Fleming was the New Zealand captain who briefly interrupted Australia’s dominance.

There is no magic to it; he just works the machine any way he can.

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England could not have been luckier to land Stephen Fleming as their coach. They did it in the same arse backwards way they’ve run their cricket for a while.

If they were going to move on their coach, the Ashes was the right time. They did not do that. If they were thinking of making off-field changes, then keeping their captain happy and loved was the right idea. They did not do that. If they were going to make a huge change of captain and coach, they needed to be sure this is the Director of Cricket who will be around for ages. They did not do that. And if they had another person who they were desperate to bring in, they should have been sure before sacking their current coach. They did not do that.

Let’s run it back a little.

The director of cricket picks the coach and has a major say in who the captain is. After the Ashes, Rob Key really struggled to explain anything in a rational or coherent way. Whether Key is good at his job or not isn’t the issue here. Because at that point he was clearly the wrong person to lead Brendon McCullum. Maybe he always was. But something was missing; England needed a vice principal at a school with talented little shits everywhere. And instead he was none of that.

If Key was removed then, that allows a nice long look at his replacement. But from a sports perspective, it also permits something really important: for the new leader to take over and have a say in the main decision they will make. If you’re picking a director of cricket you want their vision and plan; can you have that when the coach isn’t their pick? Yes, but it makes it way harder and brings about complications you don’t need.

So moving on from Key, bringing in a new director of cricket and their choice as coach would have allowed England to spend more time on their fractured relationship with Ben Stokes. Instead, they’ve ended up with a new coach and captain. Chosen by a director of cricket whose job was actually the most tenuous of the three.

But they ended up with Stephen Fleming, so clearly they know what they’re doing.

Except, again, no. Andy Flower knocked them back; they then went through a bunch of good and terrible options, but they were lucky that the Chennai Super Kings decided to change tack and Fleming was around.

It may not end up successful for Fleming’s reign. England still have a caretaker captain and someone not long for this job as director of cricket. Fleming will struggle to find them another all-rounder, any spinner, and the idea of a secure top three seems like a fairytale. He might also not gel with a team that believes their job is to supply vibes. Or he could be a poor coach in red ball cricket.

However, England got a very experienced, successful and smart cricket coach. And like most things in English cricket, it was almost entirely by accident.

But after a crash, you need a mechanic.

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Weirdly, I have worked for Stephen Fleming. There used to be a cricket team called the Melbourne Stars, and he was the coach there. For one season, I was their remote analyst. I couldn’t have been further away, as I was in the West Indies commentating a Test series while working for them.

So it was not a normal job where we sit around and talk nonsense about cricket after the day’s play. However, I did get a good idea of how he worked, and what his vision was.

The year before, we spent more time together when I was covering the Stars, but also around the team hotel a lot.

On top of all this, I have also spent a lot of time watching CSK; in many ways, they were one of my earlier obsessions as they were really good when I was learning about cricket data and T20 analysis.

So I don’t have a PhD in Stephen Fleming as a coach, but I feel like I understand him pretty well.

The main thing I have noticed is his love of all-rounders. Chennai have had some of the longest batting line-ups ever, and at other stages they had six bowling options. When we were at the Stars, we had to replace a specialist bowler, and we did that by bringing in Liam Plunkett. Part of the reason was the extra batting he could provide.

It was also there that I came up with the Evan Gulbis effect, when the Stars dropped him for a final and batted slowly because of the shorter line-up. Gulbis’ career was largely shaped by Fleming’s love of all-rounders. But in that side he also had Marcus Stoinis, Glenn Maxwell, Dwayne Bravo and occasionally Plunkett.

England aren’t quite in the Stokes/Moeen/Woakes territory anymore. So that will be harder for Fleming, but there is Sam Curran, Rehan Ahmed and even Craig Overton if they feel the need.

However, will Fleming’s white ball coaching be how he thinks about Tests?

The short answer is we don’t know.

Fleming won five titles with CSK, they dominated the IPL with different teams, not just one golden generation. Dhoni gets a lot of rightful praise, but Fleming was the other main constant.

One thing the men share is role definition. Part of that might overlap with Dhoni’s thoughts. But even if you go back to his New Zealand teams, players always seemed to be in the side for a reason. I wouldn’t say he backs fit over talent, but he lets players know they have a job, and keeps cricket simple for them.

One thing you can see with his teams is that they are largely built on traditional methods; he likes slow starters in T20 and usually has a lot more finger spin than mystery or wrist. Then there is the home grounds; Chennai rode a lot of their success on picking the right team for their surfaces. At the MCG, the Stars played the longer boundaries well.

Also worth noting, all teams he’s led played a different style of cricket. Some coaches just rehash one idea; New Zealand, Chennai and the Stars were all very different.

Fleming is smart and thorough; he finds a method that fits each team, and then makes small changes around the edges. Tactically, he is clever, but he is also not afraid of conventional wisdom too. He will use what works when he needs to.

He is many things, and none of them is Brendon McCullum. Baz is a magician, Flem is a machinist.

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Stephen Fleming could bat; he averaged 40, largely as an opener, which, by New Zealand pitch standards, is pretty good. However, during his time as captain, that was the second-best mark. Only his occasional opening partner Mark Richardson was higher, and that was a spectacularly short and weird career.

But Fleming’s was bizarre too.

Fleming averaged 34 at home, 46 away. In terms of Tests’ heaviest scorers, only one player has a better away ratio than this. So Fleming truly never worked out the long white cloud at home, but on the road he was incredible, averaging over 45 in South Africa and 100 when touring Murali in Sri Lanka as a left-hander.

The weirdness continues: in 111 Tests, he has nine hundreds.

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Fleming was still feet, some pokes outside off-stump, and then a long flowing drive followed by a dismissal between 30 and 70.

He was dismissed seven times with the score on 30 and 31. With another 15 innings in the 60s. It was like Fleming built himself a glass floor and ceiling.

Fleming had the starts of a world-class batter, but then the conversion of a number seven.

It is partly why he ends up averaging 40, when clearly there were more runs in him. But most players with that kind of record are stuck with a lower average because they never score big tons. Fleming’s nine hundreds include five of more than 150, and three of those are doubles.

Beyond Cow Corner

The Statistical Silliness of Stephen Fleming

Long before he was Thala’s right-hand man, the CSK coaching maestro behind five IPL titles, all decked out in yellow, Stephen Fleming was more commonly associated with the colour black; a tactical savant carrying the batting hopes of a nation. My clearest memories of Fleming are not in a coaching box, nor even at the batting crease, but standing expectantly at slip, hands larger than those nets they use to catch stray dogs. To throw you an early statistical bone, Fleming’s catches per innings ratio of 171 catches in 199 innings (0.86) is bested only by Steve Smith, with 200 catches in 221 innings (0.9). When it comes to Fleming’s career, that’s just the tip of the iceberg…

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a year ago · 19 likes · 3 comments · Beyond Cow Corner

So Fleming never passes 60, and if he does, chances are he might make a double hundred.

He was the best Kiwi batter in his era, and yet also the most frustrating.

It is why many people see him as a slip fielder (he was one of the best of all time) and as a leader.

To most fans, they only know Fleming as a captain in Tests. In more than 70% of his matches, he was in charge. That is a huge number. It’s very rare for a player to lead more than not, and in his case, it’s not even close.

It puts him on a short list of guys who really do the job a lot. The fourth highest percentage ever. One of them was Graeme Smith, and they are linked by a story from an ODI in Auckland, where Fleming hurled abuse at the massive South African skipper.

It was against type for Fleming, but it also made sense. He felt that young Smith could be very emotional, so he used the tool to win the match. That is what his captaincy was.

And in many ways, his reputation and career are defined by how he led. He took over the role early because of a leadership vacuum; their previous captain was Lee Germon. A keeper who had never played a Test when he received the job. The very definition of a stopgap, and Fleming has said before, he got the job because there were no other options. He was 23, and two years earlier he’d been caught smoking weed.

And his team was not great; coming off their high in the 80s had led to a real struggle in the 90s. But a young herb-smoking Fleming did very well at rebuilding them, without much batting, or really bowling.

While most teams in the world had a great new ball partnership, or an awesome spinner, New Zealand had bits and pieces. They were not bad; when fit, he had Chris Cairns, a great all-rounder, but he was not always available. He had the ends of Simon Doull and Dion Nash’s careers, and got the best out of James Franklin’s left-arm seam. The bowler he had the most was Dan Vettori, someone picked years before he was ready, and who did a very good job as a spinner in a country that didn’t need that skill much.

But the bowler that Fleming only used 16 times was Shane Bond. New Zealand only ever had one bowler like this. Richard Hadlee was better, but they’ve had other versions like him, the same with Boult and Southee. Bond was quicker than all of them, but also skilled. He could get lateral movement, his bounce was off-putting, and no one liked facing him. In those few matches, he took 66 wickets at 22.

Fleming was smart with all his bowlers because he had no choice; everyone had to chip in. But he used Bond like the perfect weapon. Catching fielders, short spells, targeted match-ups. The Blackcaps skipper was finally using all of his bag.

It was fun watching Fleming set a trap for someone against medium-fast seam. But that was chess. When he had Bond, it was poetic violence.

With Shane in full flow, Fleming was turned into a Bond Villain with access to Thanos’ army.

Fleming fully came alive when he had quick; and he made it feel like there were two of him in the attack such was the genius of how he used him. But sadly, it never lasted.

It meant that Fleming usually had to squeeze every inch of talent out of his team, which never had great bowlers or batters.

Somehow he ended up dragging New Zealand to a 50/50 win-loss record. Now it was still a long way from the good teams, but it was hard to watch his side in this era and not think he made it better. That is the job of a skipper. You don’t always get the best players; it is how you use the talent you have.

He was not given a big, powerful V8, but he tricked out his hatchback anyway he could.

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In 2001/02 Australia were the best team. They had just set a world record of 16 straight Test wins. And turning up to play was New Zealand. The same team who almost two years earlier hosted Australia and lost 3-0.

At the Gabba for the first Test, the Kiwis were behind when Australia made a big first innings total, but the hosts were pretty confident. They set the Blackcaps 284 to win, but probably thought a bowling attack of Glenn McGrath, Jason Gillespie, Brett Lee and Shane Warne was enough. Instead, New Zealand spanked the ball around, and in the end, just ran out of time.

It would have been a stolen Test, but in that era, chasing nearly 300 at five runs an over was an incredible effort.

The second Test was washed out, which saved the Kiwis as they were a long way behind.

For the third at the WACA, the Blackcaps smashed the Aussies’ all-star line-up. Fleming made one of his nine hundreds as they passed 500. Australia stuttered, but in the end, Shane Warne’s career-high of 99 saved them some face. New Zealand set 440 for Australia, but the Aussies lost early wickets, and found themselves 220/5 with heaps of time left. Then Steve Waugh and Adam Gilchrist fought to save the Test with three wickets in hand.

In 1949, New Zealand cricket changed its future by drawing three matches against England; half a century later they did the same thing against the world-conquering Australia.

But it was how. Vettori and Cairns took 23 wickets combined; their next best was batter Craig McMillan with four. But that was ok; McGrath and Warne were completely nullified.

They’d had off-series before, but it was worse because several Australian batters also couldn’t get going. Fleming did two things in that series that worked. He used his medium-fast bowlers to bounce ageing twins Steve and Mark Waugh. Neither had a big series.

That is not what people remember; it was the fielding plan for Damien Martyn.

By modern times, this will not sound like a dynamic act, but Fleming packed the point gully area. That is where Martyn was at his best, and so Fleming regularly had multiple catchers, or many in the ring, just where the Australian wanted to hit the ball. If this was modern England, they’d have had five guys there.

This simple tweak really messed up Martyn; he didn’t know how to deal with it. He was in the form of his life, but never passed 60 in the series, averaging 23. In his following five innings, he made three hundreds.

Stephen Fleming bounced with slow bowlers and set funky fields before cricket thought of either. But mostly, he did whatever was needed to make his team better. As a player, and now a coach.

England don’t have any answers for their vacant all-rounder, a viable spin prospect or a functioning top three. Fleming may not be able to fix those issues.

But England wanted magic before; that didn’t work, so now they’re trying a mechanic.

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Cricket has a new soundtrack.

Clicky Ponting. That is what they are calling him.

Many cricketers have been said to have magic fingers, especially the spinners, but could any of them get wickets when they were standing at slip or silly point without ever touching the ball? Brian Devine is in a league of his own.

With every click of his fingers, he was tricking batters and umpires into believing there was an edge being taken.

He turned the internet into Good Areas, as they started an investigation into Devine’s assistance to his wicketkeepers. The stats are clear, the video even more so. When he is around, you are far more likely to be out caught behind because of Devine’s black magic fingers.

It is a weird story that is captivating people around the world, even outside of cricket. This is about the club game, not even a first XI, and yet it’s everywhere. So far we’ve had statements from his mother-in-law, and he has lost his local sponsorship from a restaurant.

All because, as the ball passes the bat in amateur cricket, he clicks his fingers to try to get wickets.

If anything good has come from this, it’s that his fingers have completely disproved the ‘they always know when they’ve hit it’ myth. As some of Devine’s victims are walking after his clicks. His fingers are creating a Pavlovian dog reaction from poor unsuspecting amateurs who just wanted to make some runs on their weekend.

Of course, what the man from Saltburn Cricket Club has done is nothing new. Players have tried clicking sounds with their mouths or fingers for years. It’s remarkable how successful it can be. But Devine turned it into an art form. The click of his fingers was clearly better timing than his batting.

Piers Morgan, a noted expert on clickbaiting, said he was “the biggest cheat in cricket history.”

But cricket is built on cheats, sharp practice, and all sorts of dodgy reimaginings of the game. At Lord’s, the main gates are named after W.G. Grace.

That is a man so famous that he has featured in a major film as God almost 100 years after his peak. He was a great player, and yet was happy enough to use any means necessary to win a game. Someone who would put the bails back on when he was bowled, yet they called him the Doctor.

Grace helped build cricket. And our sport would not be what it is without its dodgy bastards.

In 1771, a man called Thomas ‘Daddy’ White was playing for Chertsey against Hambledon and he came out to bat with a piece of wood that covered the stumps entirely. It was a close match, and lots were being bet on the result. So this annoyed the opposition and many bettors.

Daddy White was impossible to bowl, but also couldn’t score. Either way, we needed a law to stop this happening again.

Not long after, again at Hambledon, Tom Walker, or as he was known then, Ol’ Everlastin, bowled a delivery with a round arm. He was told very sternly as a professional to stop that nonsense.

You have probably not heard of Walker, but perhaps the story of John Willes has been told to you. He did the same thing decades later, having been inspired by his sister bowling in hooped dresses. That fashion and sister story is not true, but Willes did bowl round-arm. What he did was start a huge cricket civil war between normal modern bowling and under-arm factions that lasted more than 40 years. It was Edgar Willsher’s overarm blasphemy that finally took cricket to what we have today.

All three of these men broke the laws of the game. But without them, the sport would be largely insignificant in the modern world.

Would we really want to watch five days of underarm bowling?

Hilariously, you know who didn’t break the laws of cricket? Greg Chappell, when he insisted his bowler (and brother, Trevor) deliver the last ball under-arm to beat New Zealand. With six runs to tie (not even win), Trevor rolled the ball along the ground to Brian McKechnie so he couldn’t hit a six. That was perfectly legal at the time. Not cheating at all, just an Australian captain knowing the laws really well.

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That kind of behaviour from the Aussies dates back to Warwick Armstrong. The Big Ship, as he was called, was an Australian captain who basically pioneered Aussies being dicks on the field. And in terms of cricket laws, he did all sorts of weird things. He was the first to bowl down the legside on purpose to slow down run scoring (now you can be called for wides) and he knew the declaration laws better than the umpires, which also led to him bowling two overs in a row in a Test.

But the best story has to be when young allrounder Frank Woolley made his debut. He came out to bat and then had to wait roughly 18 minutes before facing a ball. Armstrong, understanding the laws better than those who wrote them, bowled warm-up deliveries while Woolley just had to wait for ages before facing his first ball in Tests.

The Big Ship was almost always within the laws, but he knew them so well he’d turn them into a shiv to shank the opposition.

Cricketers have eternally looked for loopholes. Batters using their pads to stop being bowled led to LBW. Bodyline and creepy inswing bowling led to only two fielders behind square on the legside. Putting all the men out on the boundary made us invent the ring for limited overs. Cricketers push the limits of the game.

Like South Australian David Hookes when going up against Victoria in a Shield match. They put everyone on the boundary when he was with the tail, so Hookes hit the ball out to the deep, and then purposefully ran one short so he could get singles and keep the strike. Kieron Pollard would do the same years later, which is when the loophole was finally closed.

Steve Harmison tells stories about how Freddie Flintoff was so strong that on days when the ball was doing nothing, he could squeeze it out of shape so it had to be replaced.

That is technically ball tampering, and that has been going on for about 100 years. Before reverse swing there were people picking at the seam to get it lifted for the ball to dart more. But there were also players who put things on the ball to get it to swing more.

There is a short Wikipedia article on the Vaseline Affair, when English seam bowler John Lever was accused of putting vaseline on his forehead, and then rubbing the ball there to get more swing. Before that bowlers tried hair gel like Brylcreem. After that would include sunscreen, Murray Mints and cough drops. After Covid, some players put furniture polish on their trousers to shine the ball more.

For reverse swing, we’ve had bottle tops, sandpaper, zips on their trousers, and picking the ball up from the gutters at grounds and dragging it across the concrete. Not to mention that in modern cricket, it is basically impossible for a fielder to throw more than 25 metres without “accidentally” bouncing the ball onto the square.

Some players actually go as far as using the same things vets use to strengthen horses’ hooves so they can better scratch the ball. Oh, and Shahid Boom Boom Afridi bit it.

The Pakistani legend also got caught running, or dancing, maybe twirling, on the pitch. Matthew Wade did as well. Not to mention the many players who have done that by bowling or running down the surface too.

That is old-school stuff, but we’ve had modern techno-shenanigans. Remember when Australia worked out the DRS system by checking in with the changeroom who were looking at the replays? That was called Brain Fart Gate, if I remember correctly. You can’t do that any more. We used to have a technology called Hot Spot that would show if an edge was taken, but batters were using lubricant on blades to try to nullify the thermal signal.

How much would the Big Ship have liked to try that in his day? He would have nullified the shit out of thermal signals - his blade would have been fully lubed up.

If that is hi-tech, a rudimentary version was fake fielding. It may not be everyone’s thing, but there is a devious art in this. A wicketkeeper up at the stumps jumps down the legside, swears like they have missed the ball, and then looks back over their shoulder to sell the lie, waiting for the batter to start their run and to quickly take off the bails. Fake fielding has also become illegal, after every time in a limited-overs game the ball would be fake thrown once, and then really thrown a second later.

Another newer law change is that if a bowler hits the stumps on the way in, it is a no ball. This would be Finn’s Law. After the tall England seamer Steven Finn who would run into the stumps when bowling. This was one of those things that really should have been fixed years prior, but is also worth a shoutout because Graeme “Biff” Smith largely used it to get into England’s head, and then later to save his own wicket.

And then there was Vinoo Mankad. He saw Australian Bill Brown leaving his crease early, and decided to run him out, twice. Some things within the game need to be fixed, but they paint the line down on the ground before the start of play. Jonny Bairstow, Bill Brown, or Sammy Jones can be upset, but they also could have been behind the line while the ball was live.

Those run outs and stumpings are legal, but they hurt some people’s feelings. And those apart, there are plenty of dodgy things that happen all the time in cricket.

With the advent of better cameras for TV, we started seeing that a lot of pro players were appealing for one hand, one bounce. These were the sorts of things that we just couldn’t see earlier.

When it came to slowing cricket down for tactical reasons, we have maybe our longest list. Ishant Sharma coming out with two of the same gloves, Stuart Broad taking off a shoe to ensure he didn’t have to bowl extra overs, or Moin Khan stopping the world entirely to try to save a game against England. A crowd favourite would have to be Gulbadin Naib’s exploding hamstring. If you are a batter in the potential final over of the day, and you haven’t stopped to garden the pitch, are you even really cricketing?

Cricket’s greatest cheats are different from other sports. Our game is so fucked up that our biggest villains are actively trying to lose games. Forget steroids to make you big and strong so you can be the fastest runner ever, in cricket, we try to lose so Hansie Cronje can get a leather jacket for his wife. Making our cheating dirtier, but also more stylish.

Australia have been world leaders in cricket and sharp practice. In the 1999 World Cup, they wanted to keep their points going into the Super Six round, so they needed the West Indies NRR to be higher. They required 49 runs to win with Michael Bevan and Steve Waugh at the crease. They took 127 balls to get the runs . At one stage Phil Simmons’ mild medium-pace wobblers went for two runs in three overs. Eventually the West Indies finished the game with wides and no balls.

But Australia also have a thing with touching the wickets. Brad Haddin claims that he did not know his hands punched the stumps before the ball even got to him in an ODI against New Zealand. Neil Broom was “bowled.”

Weirdly, Australian hands are odd. Years before, Australia appealed when a bail was on the ground against Sri Lanka, and here is Justin Langer, who claimed to not know his hands knocked it off.

But that is where we started, right. With the man famous for bails, WG Grace.

The actual story about him replacing them after being bowled is probably not true. If anything, it was maybe another player who did that.

But WG was a man who believed the rules (or laws) did not apply to him. When Sammy Jones went to garden down the wicket, Grace ran him out and sort of created the Ashes as a billion-dollar industry. Another time he was upset that a player was not available to him, so he travelled across the town and basically kidnapped him from the Australian side. He pressured umpires and scorers numerous times. He was certainly involved in betting on matches one way or another. And he scammed the cricket world by telling everyone he was an amateur while actually making more money than professionals.

The Doctor was the name given to him because of his profession. But it’s also about reverence. If you call someone ‘doctor’, you are giving them respect. And yet that man had little of that for the game.

Brian Devine is just a club cricketer with an opposable thumb fixation and a twitter friendly nickname.

Unlike him, the Doctor, and many others, built cricket, one dodgy action at a time.

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There you have it, Elon Musk likes cricket.

It should not be a big surprise, he is South African, and cricket is great. There have been various breadcrumbs over the years.

There was the time that Musk retweeted a post on Rohit Sharma. That is a pretty cricket thing to do.

Another time Google head Sundar Pichai talked about Jasprit Bumrah’s batting, and Musk replied with “Nice”. That was followed by Mr Google suggesting they should hit up an India South Africa match together.

This is clearly a cricket fan.

While also being a man with an all-time low approval rating. He is not the first world’s richest dude to annoy most people.

Last year, a Gallup poll had him as the most unfavourable US newsmaker. Other sites have tracked his decline in the US alone, and outside it is often lower. Billionaires - or I suppose briefly, trillionaires - are rarely liked. But he seems to be even more hated.

Recently, even he has started to backtrack on his own dodgy DOGE decisions. It seems even Elon doesn’t like Elon.

So how could he change that? Is there a way to bring nothing but joy into the world that he could put his name to? Something that is not AI overlords or racing to Mars because it’s cheaper than fixing the planet we have.

What he needs is some of that sportswashing we are all talking about.

There are other sports that need help and advisors, but Test cricket is something else. It’s a fading relic of society that is actually perfect for the modern streaming social media age. It has genuine fans and perhaps the worst marketing of any billion dollar business.

When he invented DOGE to clean up the government, he brought with him a man called Big Balls. But what Elon really needs to protect is the red ball.

Cricket is so poorly run, it is ripe for a takeover.

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Here is step one of what Elon could do to change his image, women’s Test cricket. You saw the video at the top, Elon loves a cover drive. And who doesn’t? It is almost cricket’s best drive. So who plays it the best right now? We can all argue, but let’s save some time, and go straight to a rough draft of three - Virat Kohli, Babar Azam and Laura Wolvaardt.

The first two seemingly need little saving, you can find them everywhere. Well, at least for a few minutes before Babar is out.

But the Wolf has played her cover drive in four Tests.

She might be the best bat in the history of the game by the time her career is finished, and at the moment her cover drive is being used to hit the ball out to a sweeper on the boundary. And being that she averages 51 in ODIs with more than 5000 runs, we’ve seen it a lot. But in four Tests, she’s not made many.

And it’s the world that misses out, because cover drives in Test cricket hit different. They pierce the field. They are somehow longer and more graceful. Hell, they just look better in whites. For a 50 million USD investment over five years, Musk would be sitting on a half a billion product not long into the future.

Cricket boards say that they cannot afford to host women’s Tests, while also playing tons of first-class and List A games that are lossmakers for the men.

But part of the issue for cricket is the simple mess of it all. The ICC is in charge of men’s and women’s cricket, except they absolutely are not. They are the organisation who hosts ICC events, which are not Tests (outside the one-off WTC, which the women don’t play).

Individual cricket boards run bilateral Tests, and also T20 and ODIs. None of these boards seem to ever agree. And very rarely is democracy used.

And the ICC, or each of these cricket boards, first look after the men’s game and then the women’s - in that order.

So cricket has no leadership, split loyalties, and women are an add on.

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It means that Test matches for women have dried up. Now some of this is a good thing, as Women’s Tests were mostly in an amateur era where the players needed permission to play. And now you have professionals around the world playing for country and in franchises.

But Women’s ODI cricket is played all the time, and there have not been more than three Tests played in a year since 2003.

For those unaware, the ICC took over women’s cricket in 2005. So in this international era of women’s cricket, Tests have been almost shadowbanned.

That is a real shame, because professionalism and white ball cricket have meant that Women’s Tests had a run rate boost. For decades, women’s Tests were nil-all draws played with lead balls.

The runs per over usually hovered around two, as women with perfect high elbows would defend slow inswingers with the keeper up and a ring field to stop any thought of a run.

That isn’t Women’s Tests now.

The last match at Lord’s had bouncer spells, attacking batting and in/out fields. Women’s cricket has evolved, far more dramatically than the men’s in the last few years (and the fellas are changing fast too).

But how much does this matter when you play at most three Tests a year? By the time the next match comes around, often in a different timezone, chances are you’ve forgotten these new changes.

So Women’s Tests need cash.

If you have the kind of money to, say buy a James Bond submarine car to make it work again, then I can only assume you have enough money to fund women’s Tests around the world.

Not one-off exhibition matches, but perhaps the first tier of a properly run and planned World Test Championship. But not as a donation. If this league was run right, and sold as a package, not as bilaterals, it could easily be revenue neutral within a few years.

There is no cricket organisation that could (or would) do that. Perhaps if women’s cricket were to split off from the major boards and run themselves for the betterment of the sport, they could raise that money. But it seems unlikely.

The people who could are billionaires and one occasional trillionaire.

But this isn’t actually about women’s cricket. Because what we have set up in our sport is a situation where increasingly the only thing that matters is T20, regardless of gender.

Hilariously often financed by older men who grew up loving Test cricket first.

Our sport is for sale, as long as you want nothing more than a quick hit.

Every time I meet a fan, I am asked about what the future of ODIs and Tests are. And no one can really answer that. They exist now, because they have for a while. But no one is really sure what to do with them. The IPL keeps growing, there are tournaments in Belgium and the Cayman Islands you probably don’t know about.

Cricket has been liberalised economically. But for internationals, it’s still run by committees, if it is run at all.

At the moment, the world’s best paid cricketers, like Virat Kohli, make their money not from the sport itself, but from outside companies sponsoring them. In the NBA, a ten year vet on a minimum contract makes nearly 4 million USD a year, more than Kohli makes from RCB and BCCI (officially at least). Babar Azam is occasionally Pakistan captain, and their most known star, while playing in cricket’s billion dollar game. And to make money, he has to become a meme for the Sydney Sixers.

No other major sport pays their players a smaller amount of the profit, meaning they are very poachable. I would say cricket is a ponzi scheme, but I think scheme is too strong a word.

No one runs the game, we play too much cricket, and too little at the same time. It is a sport that is literally eating itself, and not even enjoying the taste.

So that leads us back to the start. Cricket is so broken that only Elon Musk can save it.

Now, that is obviously not true. He did repost a tweet about Rohit Sharma, but only when he was seen in a Tesla. There was a conversation with the head of Google, but in that he only wrote the word nice. And that video of him loving cover drives is a deepfake.

I have no idea if Musk loves cricket. Considering he lives much of his life online, it seems like we’d know if he did. We know he likes caffeine free coke and toy guns. But at this point, we have never seen a signed picture of Nicky Boje beside his bed.

But what cricket has done is open itself up to people like Musk, who in our late-stage capitalist world are accruing wealth of levels never seen before.

How long before one of these people realises that they could buy huge chunks of cricket - the world’s second most viewed sport - and just, you know, mess around with it? We have already lived through LIV golf, and the UFC had a fight at the White House.

What we have created with cricket is a sport so badly pieced together that people say they want Tests protected, without realising no one is in charge of it. The problem is that’s exactly what billionaires look for. Most of cricket is a distressed asset waiting for a Private Equity company with plenty of borrowed money to turn it into something far more horrible.

Elon Musk may not love cover drives, but you know some do.

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Recently, Ben Stokes and I intersected after midnight.

At talkSPORT, Matt Prior, Jon Norman and I chatted about how Jacob Bethell was not a number three, and how he really should be batting down the order. It was a fairly normal discussion, well for me at least.

Then talkSPORT put up a clip on Instagram, and next thing you know, it found a late-night doomscrolling former England captain.

For what happened next, how about we let social media member Kieran Hyde explain:

“So talkSPORT have put a clip out today, and it’s Jarrod Kimber talking about Jacob Bethell. He’s a cricket journalist for talkSPORT, and in the video he says that Jacob Bethell looks a million dollars when the pitch is flat and the ball’s not doing anything. But when the ball’s doing something, he looks like he can’t hit to run.

Who’s that repost? Ben Stokes reposting that?”

Yes, this actually happened.

“By Stokes reposting this, I think we’re all very clear that Key and McCullum were very pro-Bethell at number three. Let’s throw him in. While Stokes was probably, ‘Let’s keep Pope in. He’s done the job before. We’re gonna keep Pope.’”

This is a valid theory, but we must always remember Hanlon’s Razor, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

What I think happened is probably Stokes was up late at night looking at Instagram well beyond his former team’s curfew, and he accidentally shared the video.

Because it is very possible that Stokes just pressed the wrong button on his phone. It is also possible that he, like me, is obsessed with this new trend.

It feels like a new world order. Right now, teams feel like they have to enter a match with a real fifth bowler. We want wickets, as many of them as we can stuff in our pockets, fuck the consequences. But there is an aftermath from this; we are seeing the death of the specialist number six, and the sacrifice of young batters at three.

***

Six batters, four bowlers and a keeper, 6/4/1. The two greatest teams ever, Australia and the West Indies dominated cricket with this.

Yet weirdly, the ideal team is not this. That is when you can find an allrounder who can transform your team into six batters, five bowlers and one keeper. 6/5/1. Mathematically, this makes no sense, but that is what Jacques Kallis, Ian Botham and Garfield Sobers make it feel like. They bend the reality of cricket.

It is why, for generations, teams have searched for these unicorns, despite the fact that only one player has averaged less than 30 with the ball and 40 plus when batting.

The 1980s and 90s revolution into keepers who bat has actually led us to a different formation, 6 batters, 5 bowlers, or 6/5.

Of course, there is an extreme version of that. Some of Gautam Gambhir’s recent lineups for team India have been - 5 batters, three all rounders, three bowlers, which in his head is 8 batters and six bowlers (8/6). But really ends up being more like seven batters and four bowlers.

South Africa pioneered lineups like this more than 100 years ago and did it again in the 90s after their readmission. They had Kallis, Shaun Pollock, Lance Klusener, Brian McMillan and whatever Nicky Boje was. Bob Woolmer was their coach, with a big old brain, and again the idea was that they had eight batters and six bowlers, but again the reality didn’t quite match that. It was more like 7/4.

And these eight-batter lineups aren’t often that successful, as you end up with part-timer bowlers who are moonlighting as frontline, or worse, so many bowlers that no one ever gets into rhythm at all.

What modern teams have worked out, though, is that you need to take 20 wickets to win a match. Which sounds weird, but was not always the aim in heavy draw eras. The priority in cricket wasn’t to win but rather to not lose.

Compare that to the gambling you see in the WTC era, as teams attack for results. And the final change is back-to-back Tests. Four bowlers get tired far quicker. Plus it allows bowlers to deliver closer to their max zone for more spells. Teams don’t like to rest their best bowlers for games; they would rather use them within.

That means selection has changed, and sides ensure they have a decent fifth bowling option in most matches.

With an average of 35, this has been the best decade for the fifth bowlers since the 1950s. Even Australia, who didn’t feel the need to have a fifth bowler in the 2000s, have regularly fielded Mitchell Marsh, Cameron Green, Beau Webster and sometimes multiple all-rounders in the same game. This is really something Australia haven’t done since the 1960s.

Other teams have gone extreme at times; England with Ben Stokes, Moeen Ali, Sam Curran and Chris Woakes, and India with Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel, Nitish Kumar Reddy and Washington Sundar.

But the fun one is South Africa with Wiaan Mulder and Marco Jansen. Even though Jansen doesn’t always bowl in the fifth position, his ability (or at least the experiment) to bat in the top seven allowed South Africa to have five genuine bowling options.

That is all anyone wants now, but it was not always the case.

In a traditional Test team since World War II, the best batters occupied the top four - often specialists. The wicketkeeper batted at seven, because unlike now teams actually used to pick keepers who could keep. Leaving numbers five and six as the two weakest specialist batters in the side.

That structure limited bowling options and made taking 20 wickets harder, but it came with a significant benefit: it gave younger batters a sheltered entry point into Test cricket. A team could blood a promising player at five or six, let them acclimatise for a year or two, and push them up the order once they were ready or if a spot opened up. Think of it as a graduate programme: you identify potential early, invest in it, and trust that in time they will take over from an ageing top four.

Mark Butcher batted at number six once, and couldn’t believe how much easier it was. Most players say the same. Old ball and tired bowlers make it the easiest and most forgiving positions to bat.

It isn’t a job without complications; the second new ball often appears, batting with the tail is a skill, big totals are hard to find and they often have to bat to the theme of the game more than top order players.

So there are issues there, but let’s look closer at them.

Since 2000, the median entry point for a number six batter is around the 40th over. By the time new ball arrives, a number six is well and truly in. This is not the issue people think it is.

Batting with the tail can be tough, but it’s rare that a number six is actually in with ten and eleven. And batting with seven, eight and nine is actually fairly normal. Number sixes bat 84% of the time with the top seven, 13% with number eight and nine and only 3% with number ten and eleven.

Obviously, it is true that players don’t score as many huge totals at six, and for averages, that is not ideal. However, they get double the amount of not outs as openers. So it does even out.

But if you bat at six, you are the least likely player to convert a start to a hundred of the batters. And by a lot. This is precisely why you don’t want your best bat there. They can’t maximise their scores, whereas at three and four they can.

For years, the number six spot was used in two ways. For a player with a second skill like keeping or bowling, or as a graduate position for young players coming through.

Just under half of the highest scorers ever at positions three and four began their careers batting at five or six in their first twenty innings. Or, to rephrase that, nearly half of the great number threes and fours in Test history started at a position that teams are now handing to all-rounders and wicket-keepers.

We didn’t include openers in this list because the adjustment to Test cricket is less steep for them. The way first-class teams are set up, the openers face the opposition’s best bowlers. Whereas, for a number three or four, the drop in quality from the new ball bowlers to the first and second change in first class cricket is far more pronounced than it is at Test level. That is precisely why they needed the cushion of batting at six to find their feet.

Let’s take Ricky Ponting and Virat Kohli as examples. Both were already batting at four for Tasmania and Delhi respectively.

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