This was an important day for India even though it won’t have much say on this Test

Sidharth Monga26-Aug-20213:10

Maninder Singh: Ishant Sharma seemed to be lacking in confidence

This day of cricket was supposed to be a rude reality check for the utterly pampered and spoiled followers of Indian cricket who started post 2015. They had been bowled out for 78, the pitch had flattened out, the opposition had got off to a start and there was a long day staring them in the face. They knew they couldn’t bowl as full as England did because any assistance from the pitch had vanished. They knew the batters were under no scoreboard pressure.This was the kind of day that had become commonplace watching India’s rag-tag bowling attack in 2011 and 2011-12. It was as though India were providing writing and meme material to Sacred Games: “utho, nahao, pito, so jao (wake up, take a bath, get hit, go back to sleep).” Such a day was feared in Australia earlier this year when almost all of India’s first-choice bowling unit was out with injury. It didn’t materialise.For patches on day two, especially when Ishant Sharma was having his rare bad Test, it seemed finally the sufferers of 2011 and 2011-12 might be able to tell younger followers, this is what it feels like. And still, India came out with 303 for 8, which, in isolation, is not a bad effort at all in the best batting conditions of the series and in a match situation where there is no pressure on the batters. Five wickets in the final session is something they can even be proud of.Related

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These days are a lose-lose day. If you bowl a side out on such a day, it is probably worse news for your team because that means batting in the second innings is not going to be easy. So all you hope for is to stick to restrictive plans and slowly work towards the odd wicket.Only problem is, Ishant was truly off colour. Ishant was having perhaps his first ordinary Test in seven years. He was cut away for three boundaries in his first four overs. The last time he conceded more than three boundaries in a whole Test – to the cut shot – was in December 2017*. It doesn’t need GPS trackers to know he was slower in his run-up than he probably has ever been. The speeds were down too. He bowled 22 overs without a maiden, the longest an opening bowler has gone without one in England since 2002.All bar four of Ishant’s dearer spells than this came before 2015. That he has had to be so drastically off rhythm to be reminded of those bad old days is testament to his turnaround. Those bad old days were when often he would be the only bowler fit enough to toil for long spells. Here he had Mohammed Shami and Jasprit Bumrah to pick up the slack. In an innings that Ishant and Mohammed Siraj drew a mistake once every 10 balls or slower, Bumrah and Shami kept doing so once an over.Mohammed Shami celebrates a wicket with team-mates•Getty ImagesShami of late has become a bowler whom you can wake up in the middle of the night and he will run up and start bowling with an upright seam on the shorter part of the good-length band. If Shami doesn’t draw any movement from a pitch, you can call an excavation party, you won’t find it. The only drawback with Shami on days like this one is that he is an aggressive bowler and keeps attacking the stumps. Over time, though, he has eliminated some of the deliveries that used to end up on leg.The Rory Burns wicket he took was a perfect illustration: hitting top of off after seaming the ball in. Jonny Bairstow went fishing outside off, and Jos Buttler fell to the leg trap. If Shami brought the run rate down through wickets, Bumrah was more methodical. He just bowled lengths that were hard to hit, resulting in 10 maidens out of 27 and an economy rate of 2.14 in an innings that went at 3.27 an over.Joe Root has been batting like a dream, averaging 126.75 in the series, but Bumrah has dismissed him three times for an average of 33. All three have been great deliveries, making him play without being full, moving the ball each way. Twice coming into this Test, it had been outside edges; at Leeds he managed to go past the inside edge from a similar pitching point.This was an important day for India even though it won’t have much say on this Test. Any salvaging process will have to start with the bat. But this is the start of three back-to-back Tests, and India would have hated to be kept in the field for two days. It is hard to make a comeback in a series after successive bad days in the field; imagine if England had made it three in a row.Shami said it was a day when it is the bowler’s responsibility to not let their heads go down, but to keep finding a way to make it difficult for the batters. While Ishant’s fitness and form will be a matter of concern, the two big fast bowlers managed to achieve that fairly well given the conditions and match situation. In the process they avoided an encore of the bad old days.

On the eve of a T20 World Cup, England allrounder knows it’s ok to put herself first

Valkerie Baynes10-Feb-2023Success looks a little bit different for Nat Sciver-Brunt these days.If she learned anything from taking time out of the game last year to care for her mental health and wellbeing, it was how to become – selfish is too strong – willing to put herself first.In fact, many lessons came from that time, including how to develop strategies to ensure she doesn’t reach “boiling point” again. But as she prepares to take England into a T20 World Cup campaign as Heather Knight’s deputy and her country’s most influential player of the previous, turbulent year, the consummate team-player knows she has to take care of herself.Sciver-Brunt enjoyed a successful return from her three-month absence to be England’s leading run-scorer on their combined ODI-T20I tour of West Indies and Player of the Series in the 50-over format. After a conversation with Knight following that tour, Sciver-Brunt decided she was ready to resume the vice-captaincy duties she had kept on hold initially when she made her playing comeback. After a half-century as England beat hosts South Africa in an official warm-up game ahead of the World Cup (she didn’t bat or bowl during a five-wicket win against New Zealand on Wednesday), all is going well so far.”Taking myself out, it’s not really a thing that I’ve had to do previously in my career,” Sciver-Brunt told ESPNcricinfo after the second warm-up game at Western Province Cricket Club in Cape Town. “I’d always try and give my everything to the team and for us to win, to the group, so actually taking the time to think am I going to be okay with it? Is it going to affect my performance, that was really what I wanted to try and figure out and I was happy that I was in a place where it wouldn’t.”I didn’t know how it was going to go. Before the tour I didn’t want my expectations to be that I want to make a score in every game or I want to take wickets. It was more about me feeling comfortable on the pitch and able to contribute in that way, not skill-wise or numbers or anything but yeah, was I able to be part of the group and enjoy myself. So success looked a bit different.”Success does look different now. Obviously you want to win and you want to perform for your team and everything like that but being okay for myself was more important.”Related

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Sciver-Brunt admits that the desire to always do her bit for the team had made stepping away for herself very difficult. But in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the bio-secure bubble touring that followed – an away Ashes campaign, an ODI World Cup (where she was key to England’s runner-up finish) and a home Commonwealth Games – she felt she had little choice but to stop. Speaking to the England Women’s team doctor, though, gave her reassurance.”It was a weird place,” she reflected. “I’d not really felt like that at all in my life before. Normally I don’t want to miss anything, I don’t want to let anyone down. I don’t want to not be there for everyone. And so realising that allowing myself to leave or take myself out of it was the hardest thing to get over because I’ve never really gotten to that point before or felt like that at all.”Once I did go home, it just felt like it was the right thing. I might have got home and thought, ‘I feel fine, I should go back,’ but taking myself out of it and getting home, then I knew that it was definitely the right thing to do. Allowing myself to take myself out, it was a weird thing because in our team that’s not really happened before and I don’t like to miss things. I want to do absolutely everything that we need to do in order to play, so my mentality is not usually, ‘this isn’t right, I need to step back.'”Someone else who knew things weren’t right was her wife and team-mate, Katherine Sciver-Brunt.”Because I’m such a sort of steady character, Katherine can tell when I’m not right as well,” Sciver-Brunt says. “So she sort of knew that I wasn’t okay. Having that person there who, almost she knows me better than I know myself, was good to have, someone there, like, batting for you, basically.”The couple recently switched to using their married name ‘Sciver-Brunt’•Getty ImagesThe couple recently switched to using their married name while playing and will wear shirts to reflect that for the first time while in South Africa.”Everyone already knows we’re married so it’s not like, ‘oh, hi, it’s obvious now’, but it’s something nice to represent us both on the pitch,” Sciver-Brunt says. “And yeah, having a bit of Brunt in my bowling is definitely a good thing!”Katherine, who turns 38 in July, was rested during India’s tour of England late last summer and she wasn’t part of the ODI squad in the Caribbean, but she returned for the T20I part of that tour and is now primed for what could well be her last World Cup.Katherine was part of the England side which won the T20 crown in 2009 and finished runners-up to Australia in 2012, while Sciver-Brunt has twice played in losing finals against Australia, in 2014 and 2018. Sciver-Brunt also scored a gallant 148 not out as England lost the ODI World Cup final to Australia last year. But one result sticking in England’s craw in the lead-up to this event is their washed-out semi-final at the last T20 World Cup in Australia, where India advanced as group winners instead and lost to the hosts in the decider.So when Sciver-Brunt says through clenched teeth and raised eyebrows, “I don’t want to be runner-up anymore” it doesn’t sound like a predictable, throw-away line uttered by an athlete on the eve of a tournament. It sounds and looks like a pledge. And again, when she says: “I’d like to be in the final.””Especially in T20, we always seem to sort of do well and then get to the end and something happens, rain, or we don’t play as we have been playing,” she says. “There’s a lot of us who have experienced those tournaments who are, ‘right, I just don’t want to it do anymore’. We must go for it!'”As a team, we are in a really good place and I think the way that we want to play, as long as we’re able to put that into practice on the pitch and do it against the best teams, I think we’re in a really good spot to make the knockout stages. We say in tournaments you don’t want to think too far ahead and try and keep the next game in your mind as much as possible so I guess that’s what we’ll do. I think I once the tournament starts, it’ll go so quickly that all you can focus on is the next match. But at the moment, I’d like to be in the final.”

A lack of bench strength, especially with the bat, could be a weakness over a long season

Sreshth Shah20-Mar-2022

Potential first XI

1 KL Rahul (capt), 2 Quinton de Kock (wk), 3 Manish Pandey, 4 Marcus Stoinis, 5 Deepak Hooda, 6 Krunal Pandya, 7 Jason Holder, 8 K Gowtham, 9 Ravi Bishnoi, 10 Avesh Khan, 11 Dushmantha Chameera

Availability

Signed for INR 7.5 crore at the auction, England quick Mark Wood has been ruled out of the entire season with an elbow injury sustained in the West Indies. The team has named the Australian slower-ball specialist Andrew Tye as his replacement. Marcus Stoinis, Jason Holder and Kyle Mayers are also expected to be available only after the first week of the IPL due to their respective national commitments.

Batting

Quinton de Kock can be aggressive in the powerplay and can play the long innings too. But whether KL Rahul chooses to anchor or go all-out is the big question.Related

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With Manish Pandey, who has gone a strike rate of 127.52 in the last three IPL seasons, likely to slot in at No. 3, Rahul could possibly be the second powerplay attacker alongside de Kock, leaving Pandey to hold one end up if an early wicket falls.In Stoinis and Deepak Hooda, Lucknow Super Giants have players who can attack from ball one, and a left-hand option in Krunal Pandya along with Holder to cap off the batting order gives Super Giants the flexibility to exploit any available match-up. A deep line-up could also allow the likes of Rahul and Pandey to go harder at the top than they did at their earlier franchises, which both suffered from a lack of depth.As the season progresses, and depending on how the team balances out, Stoinis could also open the batting – as he did with Delhi Capitals as a one-off, and has regularly done with Melbourne Stars in the Big Bash League.But that’s about it for the batting. Beyond the first-choice players, Super Giants lack solid back-up options other than Evin Lewis. He could be a like-for-like switch for de Kock since Rahul can keep wickets. The other choices are Mayers, who has T20 strike rate of 116 and is an unknown IPL quantity, and Manan Vohra, who generally bats at top of the order, an area where Super Giants are well-stocked.ESPNcricinfo Ltd

Bowling

Super Giants’ bowling options might make other teams envious. They have eight bowlers in their potential first XI. Avesh Khan and Dushmantha Chameera bring pace, Holder offers control and poses problems with his high release point, Stoinis bowls cutters that can be useful at the death, and there is a smorgasbord of spin options with wristspinner Ravi Bishnoi, offspinner K Gowtham, left-arm spinner Krunal and the part-time offbreaks of Hooda.Beyond the first XI, Indian quick Ankit Rajpoot is a like-for-like replacement for the Sri Lankan Chameera, in case Super Giants want to bring in an extra overseas batter like Lewis or Mayers. Tye’s pace variations, meanwhile, make him a useful option on slower pitches.Shahbaz Nadeem is another experienced left-arm spin option, while left-arm seamer Mohsin Khan from Uttar Pradesh, who has spent considerable time with Mumbai Indians, could offer something different. He has an impressive average of 19.33 and an economy rate of 7.08 in 26 T20 games.Ravi Bishnoi, who has now made his India debut, was the emerging player of the tournament in IPL 2020•BCCI

Young player to watch out for

At 21, wristspinner Bishnoi is the most exciting young prospect in the team, and one who has a realistic chance of being a regular in the XI. He was given a massive boost of confidence after being retained pre-auction for INR 4 crore, and is now part of India’s T20I squad too, and won the Player-of-the-Match award on international debut.Last season, he went for 25 runs or fewer – in four-over spells – in six of his seven outings for Punjab Kings, and his quick-arm mix of predominantly googlies with the odd legbreak thrown in makes him hard to put away. He attacks the right-handers’ stumps, and uses his wrong’un to make left-handers reach for the ball and take the leg side out of the equation.Bishnoi was the emerging player of the tournament in IPL 2020, his first season, and is a livewire on the field.

Coaching staff

Andy Flower (head coach), Vijay Dahiya (assistant coach), Gautam Gambhir (mentor) and Andy Bichel (bowling coach)

Poll

The Pakistan side has toured the world more than any other since the pandemic began, hoping for reciprocity – which has not materialised

Osman Samiuddin22-Sep-2021Here is a list. It is of cricketers who have played the most international games away from home in the time of the pandemic.Eight of the top ten are Pakistan players. Pakistan might not be the biggest draw in cricket, though they are enough of one in England to have been invited for bilateral contests in five of the last six years, and enough of one for games with India to regularly feature in ICC press releases about being the most-watched ever.Two of the top three in that list – and arguably all three of Babar Azam, Shaheen Shah Afridi and Mohammad Rizwan – would walk into any national side’s squad. Into any T20 league too, including, if it was allowed, the IPL. Babar and Afridi, especially, are bona fide superstars. They are players you’d pay to watch.Related

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In the 18 months or so since Covid hit in a big way, these three have toured England twice, played a full tour in New Zealand, played a white-ball series in South Africa, Tests and T20Is in Zimbabwe, and then Tests and T20Is in the West Indies. If the world had corners, they would have been to all of them.At a time when, for much of the world, air travel has represented a serious health threat, they have flown on commercial planes, on chartered planes, through large, busy airports. They have then lived through some of the strictest periods of isolation; for ten days in England last year; for 14 days in New Zealand, when the only time they could open their hotel-room doors was to pick up a tray of food; for ten days in England again this summer.The intensity of those periods of isolation has since eased. In each of South Africa, Zimbabwe and the West Indies, for instance, they had to undergo three days of isolation before they could get out. But it adds up quickly, and New Zealand apart – where there were no restrictions once isolation was over – they have had to live in biosecure bubbles of varying stringency over six tours. On some of these tours they have not even been allowed out of their hotels.They have gone through it in silence. Part of it is because Pakistani players don’t talk about mental health, and so, though we know it must have had an impact, we have no idea of the extent of it. Shan Masood did talk a little but he’s an exception. Pakistan’s players have also gone through it all out of compulsion because there is no players’ body to articulate and represent their views, and more importantly, to protect their right to air those views. The PCB agrees to a tour, the players have little choice but to agree, because, to its enduring shame, Pakistan cricket remains an insecure place of employment for a player. Speaking out about bubble fatigue, or voicing concerns about well-being and acting on those concerns means risking a place in the side.ESPNcricinfo LtdQuite a few of them have contracted Covid in this time, yet they have continued, selling their labour here, there and everywhere. They are never paid especially well for it, yet off the back of that very labour other boards have also profited.These players helped save a summer last year in England. They not only did not ditch South Africa when their original tour, in September-October 2020, was postponed because of the pandemic, they made sure to return to fulfil that obligation in six months. And they tacked on an extra T20I, recognising that CSA had been hit by England’s abrupt departure earlier that season.They played Zimbabwe, one of the three most neglected Full Members, in not one but two series. They would have played the other two – Ireland and Afghanistan – as well, had it not been impossible for the ECB to find space in their calendar to allow use of their grounds, or had the Taliban not taken over Afghanistan.In this time, Pakistan have been the most frequent contributors to ensuring that cricket continues around the world. They didn’t do it solely out of the goodness of their hearts, or out of a sense of wider responsibility to the game. They expected reciprocity. They expected that their sacrifices would pave the way for the final step of the return to international cricket to Pakistan: the visit of teams such as England, New Zealand and Australia.Instead, what they have got from the ECB and its players is not just a withdrawal from a tour and an apology, but the middle finger. The fans and the PCB, of course, but most of all, a finger to those at the very front end of this: Babar, Afridi and the players, because it is their mental and physical health that has been at most risk in all those days of travel and competition.For all the days spent in isolation, away from their families, from their homes, for all the admonishment in New Zealand, for all the accommodation made in England this year in the wake of the Covid outbreak within the England camp, a middle finger, right back at them.What they have got is a reminder that the Big Three’s real mistake in 2014 was to put out a position paper and attempt to formalise the new order. All they needed to do was simply start playing as if the new order existed.Pakistan have toured England twice since the pandemic hit, last playing to packed stadiums in July this year•Getty ImagesFor example, let’s be generous and give Cricket Australia’s cancellation of their Test against Afghanistan its moment. But the pandemic has hit their scheduling with a – help me out here – pattern? They have toured England, and not hosted the T20 World Cup but hosted India. They pulled out of a tour to South Africa because they were worried about the health of their players during what was the second wave of the pandemic there, but the day after that decision, were happy to issue NOCs for players to go to the IPL in India (where a second wave was beginning) based on the biosecurity protocols of the previous IPL, held in a different country, during a different phase of the pandemic.England have pulled out of tours to Bangladesh and Pakistan but have squeezed in eight Tests against India this year and are smarting from not playing one more; and are willing to field an under-strength side and risk a player boycott to get to a country that has shut its borders harder than any other save New Zealand for three more Tests this year.Officially, the Big Three was disbanded back in February 2017. Since then, nearly half of all Australia’s international matches have been against England and India; a third of England’s have been against the other two; and 35% of India’s have been against the other two.What Pakistan have got is the irony of a Big Three board cancelling a bilateral series, while still being a Big Three board that wants more bilateral cricket in the next calendar at the expense of an extra ICC event (with the support of the ICC chair, by the way). An extra ICC event that offers a majority of Full Members a more reliable guarantee of revenue than the currently empty promises of bilateral cricket the Big Three make to those teams, because what the Big Three really mean by more bilateral cricket is bilateral cricket among themselves.What Babar, Afridi and Pakistan cricket have got, above all else, is a reminder of how broken international cricket already was before the pandemic broke it further. This is the epiphany that struck Ramiz Raja, the PCB chairman, on Tuesday, when he responded to a question about what the PCB could do next: “Withdrawal doesn’t have an answer, frankly speaking.”Pakistan has no real recourse to recouping the losses incurred by these two withdrawals other than to bear it. They cannot go to the ICC because, hello, there is no such thing really as the ICC, not beyond, as senior Australian journalist Gideon Haigh has often put it, an event-management company. Instead the real governors of the game are the very same ones whose middle finger Pakistan, along with the rest of cricket, are staring at.