Two appearances in two years is not a captain rebuilding his team for a title defence; it’s a bowler being managed purely for Tests. That protection has paid off in the format selectors value most, but it has left his one-day leadership almost dormant heading into a tournament Australia must defend. Warner, Smith, Maxwell, and […]
Two appearances in two years is not a captain rebuilding his team for a title defence; it’s a bowler being managed purely for Tests. That protection has paid off in the format selectors value most, but it has left his one-day leadership almost dormant heading into a tournament Australia must defend. Warner, Smith, Maxwell, and […]
Eleven wickets for 99 runs on a first-class debut would be a career highlight for most seamers. For an 18-year-old still sitting mock exams, it’s something else entirely. JJ Basson dismantled Boland’s batting line-up at the Wanderers this month, and the numbers alone justify the hype building around him. What South African cricket does next […]
The surprise isn’t that Iyer got the armband; it’s how fast the turnaround happened. Eight months ago, he was a last-minute injury replacement who never got to bat across an entire home series, benched for 63 consecutive T20Is while India rotated their World Cup-bound players. Now he leads the T20I side into a continental tournament […]
Donald gets his cap first, purely because of the calendar. He is already confirmed to open alongside Jos Buttler in the T20I opener at Southampton on 15 September, ten days before Crocombe’s ODI chance arrives. Both uncapped players earned their places on form, though injuries to Phil Salt, Jacob Bethell and Sam Curran opened the […]
The plan held up only somewhat, and largely because it never really got tested by its intended fix. Naveen-ul-Haq was in the squad for the series opener against India but wasn’t considered match-ready, leaving Fazalhaq Farooqi to carry the pace attack alone at the death. India chased 157 in just 13.4 overs, and the 20th […]
Root’s bat did the talking again on the fourth afternoon at Edgbaston, and the number that mattered was 69. That is now his tally of Test half-centuries, one more than the previous record, reached in the same innings that sealed a 3-0 sweep of Pakistan. Walking in at 2 wickets down for nothing, he steadied […]
The stake talks collapsed because the numbers never got close. Over three rounds of informal discussion, Dhoni moved from 25 percent down to 18, while CSK crept up from 3 percent to 5.5. That gap, at a valuation above sixteen thousand crore, represents thousands of crores in daylight between the two sides. CSK’s leadership has […]
England had never done this before against Pakistan at home, not once in 16 tours since 1954. That changed on September 12, when an eight-wicket win at Edgbaston completed a 3-0 clean sweep across Headingley, Lord’s and Birmingham. Joe Root’s unbeaten 62 sealed the chase of 130, with Ollie Robinson’s 21 wickets at an average […]
England have just completed a first-ever home Test whitewash of Pakistan, and on paper it looks as routine as a 3-0 series gets. Look closer at what happened on day three at Edgbaston, though, and the picture changes completely. Pakistan’s batters made England’s seamers work far harder than the scoreline suggests, piling on nearly a […]
Nine meetings between India and Afghanistan have produced only one five-wicket haul, and the bar Bhuvneshwar Kumar set with it is still untouched four years later. India open a three-match series on Sunday with a pace attack good enough to finally threaten it. Arshdeep Singh looks the closest thing to a genuine challenger, Jasprit Bumrah […]
He made his Test debut a decade ago as a 20-year-old prodigy, then spent years grinding through county cricket and domestic runs trying to force his way back in. Now, at 30, he is an incumbent in all three Australian formats at once, something almost nobody in the modern game manages anymore. A fresh one-day […]