The England and Wales Cricket Board has named England’s provisional 30-man squad for the ICC World Twenty20 tournament, starting in the Caribbean from April 30 – and the most significant omission is Alastair Cook.
Monday, February 22, 2010
“I’ve always enjoyed playing cricket in the UK and have very good memories of Headingley as I got my first World Cup hundred there in 1999. I’m really looking forward to playing over there and I’ll hopefully help to lead the troops towards some sort of success. I hope we’ll have some good weather and we can treat the home spectators to some very entertaining cricket” – Herschelle Gibbs joins Yorkshire for the Friends Provident T20 competition.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
“Eoin Morgan and Kevin Pietersen shared England’s best-ever stand in Twenty20 cricket to down world champions Pakistan by seven wickets in Dubai” – the perfect start to the weekend.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
“The South Africa-born keeper-batsman, who only qualified to play for England this month, hit 81 off 66 balls” – Craig Kieswetter makes his pitch after assisting the England Lions to a five-wicket victory over the senior team in Abu Dhabi.
Monday, February 15, 2010
“The way our schedules are because we’re the only northern hemisphere team, we are going to miss parts of the IPL here and there. That is a shame because ideally we’d be there all of the time. We do seem to be a team that, I wouldn’t say get picked on, but we are missing out on a fair bit. It is disappointing not to be able to play in the Champions League.” England Twenty20 captain Paul Collingwood hopes a deal can be done to maximise participation in the tournament.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
“I won’t even begin to attempt to assess the impact that the team could have on this riven nation. I only read the back pages. Of the free papers they hand outside the tube. But I don’t think that the heroics of 11 young men in blue pyjamas can melt away centuries of tribal strife” – Nick Harrison is mulling over the fortunes of the Afghanistan cricket team.
Friday, February 12, 2010
“The Champions League is not for international players. It is for the county lads to earn a few quid and get a massive buzz from playing in big grounds in front of decent crowds, something they never experience at home. It means a little bit more employment for some guys who face winters that are long and hard and full of nothing but netting from October to March” – The Champions League: Michael Vaughan thinks we should be in.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
“The pioneer years of Twenty20 are over. For the counties it is time to start swimming or sink like a stone. The IPL teams’ revenues are hindered by one obvious problem – they only play for a tiny fraction of the year. All of the franchises will, naturally, be looking to expand to become year-round operations. That is the natural course of remorseless profit-logic, and the biggest single force for change in cricket at the moment” – The Guardian’s Andy Bull on the implications of the Rajasthan Royals’ incursion into the home counties.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
“It will be harder to retain the World Twenty20 than it was to win it” – Claire Taylor considers the size of the task ahead of England Women this summer.
Monday, November 16, 2009
“The second game was an absolute thrashing and a real wake-up call as to what England face in the forthcoming one-day series” – Aggers tells it like it is.
Cricket Blips: England feed