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Having postponed talks on a new deal until next month, Anthony McGrath is putting up a strong case to continue a county career already spanning 17 years.

Myles Hodgson at Headingley16-Aug-2012
ScorecardAnthony McGrath reminded the Yorkshire management of his ability•PA Photos

As a negotiating tactic to try and secure another contract, scoring a century to guide Yorkshire to maximum batting points against one of their main promotion rivals is probably as good as any. Having postponed talks on a new deal until next month, Anthony McGrath is putting up a strong case to continue a county career already spanning 17 years.Expected to be the player most under threat by the emergence of Joe Root at the start of the summer, McGrath has responded to the challenge impressively. He scored his first century in a year earlier this summer against Hampshire and has now followed that with 104 against Derbyshire, the Division Two leaders, to put Yorkshire in command of a rain-affected match.His innings, which included 10 fours and a six, helped secure maximum batting points with three balls of their allocated 110 overs remaining with McGrath bringing up the landmark in conjunction with his century by on-driving Tim Groenewald. It laid the platform for Yorkshire to either declare immediately to give themselves more time to bowl at Derbyshire, or advance quickly towards a major first innings total.In the event they did neither, losing five wickets for nine runs in the next 15 balls to a succession of ill-conceived shots and were dismissed for 420. They only recovered their momentum when Tim Bresnan, who raced up the M1 to join the match after being overlooked by England for the final Test, won an lbw decision against Wayne Madsen with the final delivery of the day.”The bonus points system always keeps it interesting at the end,” McGrath admitted. “Derbyshire probably did us a bit of a favour by sticking people on the fence, which made it a bit easier. Three, four or five runs were available every over from 98 overs, so we were confident of getting there. We wanted to bowl at them, but we also wanted to try and get as many as possible.”Yorkshire’s equation was complicated by the 26-point lead Derbyshire had secured at the top of Division Two, ensuring they have little to gain in engineering a finish should more time be lost in the match. It put the onus on quick run-scoring when Yorkshire resumed on 127 for 2 having lost the final two sessions of the opening day to rain.Adam Lyth and Gary Ballance provided that impetus, scoring at nearly four an over throughout the morning session during a 116-run partnership. Lyth fell seven short of his century and Ballance followed shortly after lunch for an eye-catching 79, both perishing to loose shots attempting to push the scoreboard along.Restricted to only two runs an over for the first half hour after lunch, McGrath teamed up with Andrew Hodd, making his debut as a loan signing from Sussex and also hoping to secure a new contract at the end of the summer. They were both frustrated by Derbyshire’s initial accuracy, but needing 24 off the final four overs of allocated bonus point overs, they accelerated to reach their objective during a 131-run stand.They fell in quick succession with Wes Durston, Derbyshire’s off-spinner, exploiting Yorkshire’s desire for rapid runs to finish with career-best figures of 5 for 34, although Hodd must also have gone a long way towards securing a permanent contract by scoring 58 precious runs on debut.”It’s probably different to what he’s used to down in Sussex because the wickets are different up here, especially this one because there’s more grass on this pitch than there has been for a long time,” McGrath explained. “If you bowl straight with pace it’s difficult to score. He found it tough during that period, but got through that and played really well and was integral towards us getting full batting points.”Having given themselves only 11 overs to bowl at Derbyshire, Yorkshire looked likely to be frustrated until Bresnan struck with the final ball, but it will take fair weather and an exceptional performance on an easy-paced wicket to contrive the victory they require to close the gap on the leaders.

Spinner’s fifty and four-for helps seal victory as Warwickshire stay in hunt for top-two spot

ECB Reporters' Network30-May-2021Warwickshire blew Group One of the LV= Insurance County Championship wide open after beating Nottinghamshire by 170 runs in a pulsating contest at Edgbaston. Set a victory target of 309 in 74 overs, the visitors were bowled out for 138 with eight overs to spare as spinner Danny Briggs followed up his important runs in the match with a decisive spell of 24.3-14-36-4.After the Bears took their overnight 201 for 6 to 264 all out, with Briggs scoring a round 50 and Michael Burgess 80, they bowled with collective skill to close out a thrilling victory. At 89 for 5, Nottinghamshire had no choice but to abandon their quest for a fourth successive victory and their hopes of defending out for a draw were scuppered as the Bears maintained the pressure with disciplined bowling supported by excellent fielding.Related

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“It was a great game on a good pitch and a good contest between bat and ball for four days which is what you want,” Briggs said. “Then for us to come out on top at the end is just great.”It was pleasing for me to have an opportunity for a long bowl on the final day and really embrace it and push the game home with the support of the other bowlers. We bowled and caught really well and I think the calmness we showed the whole way through was probably what enabled us to win.”In the morning, Burgess and Briggs took their partnership to 103 in 33 overs before the former top-edged a sweep at Liam Patterson-White to slip. Craig Miles was soon run out by Ben Slater’s direct hit, before Luke Fletcher rattled the stumps of Briggs and Liam Norwell.Norwell soon struck with the ball as Haseeb Hameed edged to wicketkeeper Burgess and two big wickets fell in successive overs when Ben Duckett swept Briggs to Rob Yates at deep square and Ben Slater nicked Tim Bresnan behind. A brilliant leg-side stumping by Burgess off seamer Olly Hannon-Dalby dismiss the dangerous Joe Clarke and when Steven Mullaney pulled Hannon-Dalby to deep square, Notts were five down and in trouble.”We feel absolutely gutted,” Notts head coach, Peter Moores, said. “They bowled well but I think, in some ways, we caused our own demise a little bit, but we have got to dust ourselves down and come back strong against Essex next week.”It was a tight game all the way through. Probably the key time was the third day when they played really well but we managed to stay in the game. Then we cleaned them out this morning to leave all three results possible but I think we got a bit distracted by looking for the win a little bit when we first started batting and made some mistakes.”Lyndon James and Tom Moores ate up valuable time in a stand of 16 overs, but when both fell in quick succession, Moores leaving a straight one from Will Rhodes and James edging Briggs behind, the visitors were vulnerable again. Briggs winkled out Zak Chappell, caught at silly point, for post-tea figures of 10-10-0-2, and Patterson-White’s 72 minutes of defiance ended rather unluckily when a defensive shot off Miles dropped the ball back on to the stumps.That left Nos. 10 and 11 with 11 overs to survive – and they managed just three before Fletcher was bowled an absolute pearler from Biggs to the delight of a boisterous crowd in the Birmingham sunshine, giving the spinner his best figures since joining Warwickshire over the winter.”Having the fans back in the ground was amazing,” Briggs said. “There was a great at atmosphere. It was my first experience of having the crowd behind me at Edgbaston and I loved it. They got behind us when we needed it and it was great to see the excitement in the stands.”

ESPNcricinfo previews the Group 2 Super Eights World T20 match between India and Pakistan

The Preview by Sidharth Monga29-Sep-2012

Match facts

September 30, 2012
Start time 1930 (1400 GMT)With problems aplenty, no wonder MS Dhoni has greyed already•Associated Press

Big picture

There was a time when all an out-of-form Pakistan cricketer needed to do was turn up against India, and he would magically regain his touch. How India will be hoping they can do some of that when they play Pakistan in their middle Super Eight match on Sunday.Confused, low on confidence, playing as if with the weight of the world on their shoulders, India find themselves in a tight corner. Their trusted players are not performing, and some of the reserves provided by the selectors are not good enough. And for the first time there are questions around the captain’s place in the side: he strikes at 110 runs per 100 balls, has never scored a T20I fifty, and twice in India’s three last defeats he has hurt the side’s momentum, failing to score a run a ball in the latter half of the innings. One more defeat, and India won’t even have a backdoor entry left after their massive negative run-rate.India do seem to have turned the tables from the time Pakistan used to dominate this “rivalry”. Since the start of 2006, India have won 15 and lost eight internationals against Pakistan, but still trail the head-to-head 58 to 81. Pakistan, though, will be feeling good about their game after having pulled off an improbable win over South Africa. And their bowlers might not have had the best of tournaments until Friday, but they do remain a threat. They will also know from first-hand experience during the warm-up game that Indian bowlers can be bossed when put under the slightest of pumps.Pakistan have a statistic to set right, though: they have never beaten India in any 50-over or 20-over World Cup match.

Form guide (completed matches, most recent first)

India LWWLW
Pakistan WWWLW

Watch out for

Nasir Jamshed scored a fine century the last time Pakistan played India, but was denied a win by a superlative 183 from Virat Kohli. The two are the most promising young batting talents from the respective countries, both have been batting at No. 3 so far, and hold the key to a solid innings for their side.India’s opening – whether with the bat or with the ball – is now a matter of major speculation after the Irfan Pathan experiment with the bat and the R Ashwin one with the ball. Surely Irfan has got to get the new ball if he is to be used as a bowler? And surely India must want their specialist batsmen to get most of the overs?Umar Gul may have won the previous match with the bat, but where has Gul the yorker-bowler disappeared? In 10 T20 matches this year, Gul has conceded runs at 8.4 an over, as opposed to an impressive career economy-rate of 6.88.

Team news

After the England match, Dhoni said he had problems of plenty at his hand. Less than 35 overs of cricket later, he has plenty of problems. Does he stand by his decision of keeping Virender Sehwag out and playing five bowlers? Does he look at the place of Yuvraj Singh and Rohit Sharma in that middle order? Will Manoj Tiwary ever get to play a live game? What does he do with an under-performing Zaheer Khan? What does he do with his own form? Only one thing might be certain at this time: Piyush Chawla’s yet other, inexplicable, comeback might have ended.India (probable): 1 Virender Sehwag, 2 Gautam Gambhir, 3 Virat Kohli, 4 Yuvraj Singh, 5 Suresh Raina, 6 Rohit Sharma/Manoj Tiwary, 7 MS Dhoni (capt. & wk), 8 Irfan Pathan, 9 R Ashwin, 10 Harbhajan Singh, 11 Zaheer KhanPakistan will be questioning Shahid Afridi’s utility as a bowler who bats at No. 7. He has done his bit with the ball so far. He is the only Pakistan bowler other than Saeed Ajmal to have bowled all his overs in every match so far, and has conceded runs at only 6.33 an over. That should be enough to keep his place in the XI, but his six-or-nothing batting at No. 7 will remain a cause for worry.Pakistan (probable) 1 Mohammad Hafeez (capt.), 2 Imran Nazir, 3 Nasir Jamshed, 4 Kamran Akmal (wk), 5 Shoaib Malik, 6 Umar Akmal, 7 Shahid Afridi, 8 Umar Gul, 9 Yasir Arafat, 10 Saeed Ajmal, 11 Raza Hasan.

Pitch and conditions

Conditions at the R Premadasa Stadium now present an interesting dilemma. The curator has now begun to leave the pitch dry, which should make you want to bat first. However, with the ever-present threat of the rain you also want to exploit the Duckworth-Lewis anomaly and avoid the wet outfield.

Stats and trivia

• Shoaib Malik loves playing India. His overall international average is 31.67 over 282 matches, but in 38 matches against India he has scored four of those nine centuries and has averaged 46.41. In an unrelated incident he has married an Indian, tennis player Sania Mirza.
• Pakistan and India have never played each other in a T20 international outside the World Twenty20.
  

  Quotes

  “For me I think Virender Sehwag can be very dangerous. I hope he’ll play the next two games. I think it won’t be easy to play the next two games without him.”
  BBC”When we play India there is lot of pressure because our people always want us to win. The same is the case in India, so there will be pressure on both teams.”

Six teams, 33 matches, a majority under lights, all of them in a bio-bubble – the tournament begins Nov 24

ESPNcricinfo staff18-Nov-2020Bengal captain Abhimanyu Easwaran, one of the state’s stalwarts Anustup Majumdar, and up-and-coming allrounder Shahbaz Ahmed will lead three of the six teams at the inaugural chapter of the Bengal T20 Challenge, to be played at Eden Gardens in “a bio-bubble eco-system” from November 24.Each of the teams (all clubs) – Mohun Bagan, East Bengal, Tapan Memorial, Town, Kalighat and Customs – have 15 players in their ranks; seven of these were retained by the teams from their existing squads, and eight were picked up at a draft, with four more players named as stand-bys. There will be a total of 33 games in the tournament, with each team playing the others twice, followed by the semi-finals and the final, with a “majority” of them under lights. The schedule is expected on Saturday, which may include triple-headers on some days.”Majority of the matches will be played under the floodlights at Eden Gardens. All the players, coaches and match officials will continue to remain in the bio bubble during the entire course of the tournament,” Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) president Avishek Dalmiya said after the draft, conducted on Tuesday at a Kolkata hotel. “The thought process behind this tournament is to nurture the talents of the state of West Bengal and also enable this competition to act as a talent feeder to the various age groups representing the association.”

Abhimanyu Easwaran tests positive for Covid-19

Bengal captain Abhimanyu Easwaran tested positive for Covid-19 on Wednesday and will be in quarantine for the next two weeks. His participation in the inaugural Bengal T20 Challenge, therefore, becomes doubtful.
“He underwent a mandatory COVID-19 test and was found positive. He is however asymptotic. He is now quarantined and under the treatment of medical panel of CAB,” CAB joint-secretary Debabrata Das said in a media statement.
Easwaran had joined Bengal’s pre-season training a few days back, PTI reported.

On the absence of corporate-owned teams, and the decision to field prominent cricket clubs of the region, Dalmiya said, “This tournament is a CAB property and it will continue to remain the same without franchises. We are trying to ensure all the top brands are associated, top players are associated. We took suggestions from our think tank, the Bengal support staff and the coaches.”Similar T20 tournaments have been organised by some of the state cricket associations around the country over the past few years – Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Saurashtra, Jharkhand, Andhra, Mumbai, for example – and, like them, the CAB is also hoping to make the competition an annual affair. This year, though, the Covid-19 situation has made things slightly more complex that it would be otherwise.”These are very difficult times and to make this tournament successful, we must adhere to the (Covid-19) guidelines and protocols,” Dalmiya said. “There will be health officers who will be ensuring that the bio-bubble norms are followed and if anyone’s out of the bio-bubble, he’s out of the tournament.”For the duration of the tournament, expected to be around three weeks, all the players, support staff, and everyone else associated with the tournament will be stay in a city hotel and not interact with anyone from outside the “safety zone”.The timing of the tournament is a good one from the point of view of Bengal-based cricketers, as it will end before the BCCI’s domestic season kicks off – on January 1, according to board president Sourav Ganguly.”If one can perform here, he can open the gates to greater opportunities. I have been telling the marquee players that this is a godsent opportunity; this has never happened to any of the Bengal players before. By the time we start the season, a couple of board tournaments are over and for the selection process we have to look into last year’s performance,” Arun Lal, the state team coach, was quoted as saying on the CAB’s Facebook page. “I believe you can do a great service to Bengal cricket if you can dislodge the entrenched players, they are the ones under pressure not the youngsters. This is a great opportunity for the youngsters and the players who are forgotten.”While Mohammed Shami and Wriddhiman Saha, senior Bengal players, are in Australia with the Indian side and Ishan Porel, the young quick, has also travelled with the team as a net bowler, there is no dearth of prominent players in the teams. Apart from Abhimanyu, Majumdar and Ahmed, there are the likes of Manoj Tiwary, Shreevats Goswami, Abhishek Raman, Mukesh Kumar, Debabrata Das, Akash Deep, Sudip Chatterjee and Aamir Gani scattered among the six teams.

He made 65 international appearances after becoming Test cricket’s youngest wicketkeeper in 2002

Shashank Kishore09-Dec-2020Eighteen years after becoming Test cricket’s youngest wicketkeeper as a baby-faced 17-year-old in Nottingham, Parthiv Patel has announced his retirement from all forms of the game.Patel finished with 25 Tests, 38 ODIs and two T20Is, his last international appearance coming in India’s famous Test win in Johannesburg in January 2018. A year later, he was also part of the squad when India won a Test series in Australia for the first time in their history.Apart from playing for India, Patel will be remembered for his contributions to Gujarat. He led the side to the Vijay Hazare Trophy in 2015, scoring a match-winning maiden List A century in the final against Delhi. He outdid that achievement the next season, when he made 143 against Mumbai to help Gujarat pull off the highest successful run-chase in a Ranji Trophy final.Only two months before that Ranji Trophy triumph, Patel had earned a Test recall after eight years, ahead of the third Test against England in Mohali. So abrupt was his inclusion that Patel, who was captaining Gujarat in a first-class game in Hubli at the time, had to make an eight-hour road trip to Goa before arriving in Chandigarh via a stopover in New Delhi on the eve of the match. Patel was always a gutsy batsman, a quality he displayed even on his Test debut when he occupied the crease for 84 minutes and helped save the game with an unbeaten 19. This facet of his game earned him the occasional promotion to open the batting, which he did most memorably while keeping out the fiery Shoaib Akhtar and scoring 69 in the deciding Rawalpindi Test of India’s 2004 tour to Pakistan. In all, he scored six half-centuries in Tests, with a highest of 71 against England in Chennai in 2016.Patel took an unusual route to the top level: he captained India at the 2002 Under-19 World Cup, played for India A, played Test cricket before playing senior domestic cricket. He settled into the Test team quickly, playing 19 out of India’s 20 Tests from his debut, but a drop-off in the quality of his glovework – the missed stumping of Ricky Ponting on the final day of the 2004 Sydney Test was a particularly noteworthy error – led to his exclusion. The emergence of Dinesh Karthik and later MS Dhoni pushed him further down the pecking order, and his appearances thereafter were sporadic: a one-off Test in 2008 when Dhoni opted out of a Test series in Sri Lanka, a handful of white-ball games as a specialist opener in 2011 and early 2012, and five more Tests in the 2016-2018 period.While his international career was a stop-start affair, Patel was an IPL regular, usually as a punchy presence at the top of the order. He was part of three title-winning teams – the Chennai Super Kings in 2010 and the Mumbai Indians in 2015 and 2017 – and was Mumbai’s highest run-getter in 2017 with 395 runs at a strike rate of 134.81. He played for six IPL franchises in all, most recently for the Royal Challengers Bangalore in 2019. He was part of their squad in 2020 as well, but didn’t get a game with the team preferring to use AB de Villiers as their first-choice keeper and promoting Devdutt Padikkal to open the batting.Patel ended his career with numbers that put him in elite company. In all first-class cricket in India, he scored 9500 runs at an average of 44.18; only Wasim Jaffer, Cheteshwar Pujara, Sachin Tendulkar and Gautam Gambhir have scored more. Overall, he finished with 11,240 first-class runs at an average of 43.49, with 27 hundreds, including a best of 206 against Odisha in the 2008-09 season, as well as 486 catches and 77 stumpings.He remains the fourth-youngest Test debutant for India, behind only Tendulkar, Piyush Chawla and L Sivaramakrishnan.

Mohammad Rizwan, the leading run-scorer, jumped 116 places to 42nd in the batting list

ESPNcricinfo staff15-Feb-2021South Africa’s left-arm wristspinner Tabraiz Shamsi has risen to a career-best second position in the ICC T20I rankings for bowlers, following his four-wicket haul against Pakistan in Lahore. Shamsi was the joint leading wicket-taker in the three-match series, picking up six scalps at an average of 10.16 and an economy rate of 5.08. He went past Adam Zampa, Adil Rashid and Mujeeb ur Rahman on the list, and is now just three points behind Afghanistan’s Rashid Khan, who occupies the top spot.Related

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For Pakistan, wicketkeeper-batsman Mohammad Rizwan was the biggest mover, jumping up 116 slots to 42nd position in the T20I batting list. Rizwan was the leading run-scorer in the series, having hit 104*, 51 and 42 in the three matches. Rizwan had also been named the Player of the Series in the recently concluded Tests.The other Pakistan players to get a boost were Haider Ali (137th), Shaheen Afridi (11th), Hasan Ali (82nd), Mohammad Nawaz (64th) and Usman Qadir (92nd).Fast bowler Dwaine Pretorius, who shared the wicket-taking honours with Shamsi, also made a significant climb in the rankings, moving from 121st to 51st on the list; his previous best ranking was 107th. Reeza Hendricks’ 98 runs in the series lifted him to 17th in the rankings, while David Miller, who smashed an unbeaten 85 in the second match, gained seven places to take the 22nd position. England’s Dawid Malan is still the top-ranked batsman in the T20I list.Pakistan, despite winning the series 2-1, remained in fourth position in the T20I ranking list with 260 points, while South Africa stayed at fifth with 259.

RCB are still No. 2, but if they lose both their remaining matches, things could get sticky for them

S Rajesh28-Oct-2020
Mumbai Indians: Played 12, Points 16, NRR 1.186

Mumbai’s fantastic net run-rate of 1.186 means they are through to the playoffs for all practical purposes. Not only that, they are also almost certain of a top two finish.Given how the points table stands at the moment, only five teams can make it to 16 or more, and one of them is the Kolkata Knight Riders, who have a terrible NRR of -0.479.ESPNcricinfo Ltd

Just how far in front the Mumbai Indians are will be clear from this example: For their NRR to fall below that of the Knight Riders’, these are the results necessary in the remaining matches:

• The Mumbai Indians lose their last two by an aggregate run margin of around 190 runs (that is, the margins of the two losses add up to 190 runs)
• The Knight Riders win their last two by an aggregate margin of 200

If these improbable results take place, the Mumbai Indians will have an NRR of around 0.31, while the Knight Riders will sneak ahead on 0.32.The Mumbai Indians’ excellent NRR also means they are almost sure to finish in the top two, because the Royal Challengers have a game to play against the Capitals, which means only one of those teams can reach 18. A run-rate battle with the other teams, which will finish on 16, will have only one winner.Royal Challengers Bangalore: Played 12, Points 14, NRR 0.048

The relatively narrow margin of defeat against the Mumbai Indians means that the Royal Challengers are still second on the points table, with an excellent chance of making the playoffs if they win one of their two remaining games. If they lose both, though, then things will get sticky, as seven teams can still potentially make it to 14 or more points.

Michael Hussey has no intention of calling time on his international career at the end of a triumphant series against India, and believes the next generation of batsmen are still to earn the chance to snatch the No. 6 berth from him at a time when Austral

Daniel Brettig in Adelaide22-Jan-2012Michael Hussey has no intention of calling time on his international career at the end of a triumphant series against India, and believes the next generation of batsmen are still to earn the chance to snatch the No. 6 berth from him at a time when Australia’s resurgence is giving him plenty of reasons to stay on.The last Test of the home summer is commonly a time for ruminations on the future, and many had expected one of Hussey, Ricky Ponting or Brad Haddin to venture into life beyond the Australian dressing room at the end of the India series. However Hussey said neither he nor any of the other senior members of the team had given any indication of marking a finish line, and that Australia’s return to the winning habit had only added to their sense of vitality.”Throughout the whole summer I have just tried to set myself for this series but my body feels good, I still feel I’m playing well, and mentally I’m still keen to turn up to training and mentally keen for the battle out in the middle,” Hussey said. “From that point of view I am definitely thinking of continuing on. I’d love to go to the West Indies.”I just watch the guys and how they go about their training and you can still see the hunger is there, so I would be very surprised if the other guys wanted to move on. I certainly see them playing well enough, I still see them doing the work and I still see them wanting to part of the team. I haven’t picked up any hints that they’re going to leave the game.”Any enthusiasm among the national selectors to usher in another young batsman has been dampened this summer by a lack of stand-out performances from those who might have been considered contenders for middle order positions. Usman Khawaja has endured a difficult summer with the bat and needs to improve his fielding and broader team contributions, while Callum Ferguson seems likely to lose his Cricket Australia contract after a summer of meagre returns. Phillip Hughes’ technical problems, meanwhile, have been documented in detail.”The culture I was brought up in is that the next generation has to earn their right to play for Australia,” Hussey said. “It took me over ten years of first-class cricket to just get one game so I don’t feel the responsibility to pass the baton on.”I still feel I’ve got a big role to play in the team with experience to help some of the younger members of the team but I still feel I can contribute to Australia working their way back to where they want to be which is to be the No.1 team in the world. I still feel I have a role to play in that journey.”Hussey’s journey, should he choose to take it, will include a tour of the West Indies in March and April, ODIs in England in June, and the World Twenty20 in Sri Lanka in September. Beyond that tournament are home Tests against South Africa and Sri Lanka, before the team embarks on the vexing task of touring India then England in 2013.”I will sit down and have a think about that after this series, I basically tried to set all my energies towards this Indian series, that’s what I really wanted to be a part of and part of a winning team, and probably re-assess after that,” Hussey said. “But certainly the Twenty20 World Cup there’s a bit of a carrot dangling there, and I’d love to be a part of the World Cup again, and there’s some big cricket still to come.”I didn’t perform as well as I’d have liked in the West Indies last time I toured there [in 2008] for a Test tour, so that’s something I’d really like to go on and play well at. One-day cricket in England is always a fantastic tour to be a part of. But I just really want to be part of Australia’s success, being part of helping Australia get back to being No.1.”I was lucky enough to come into the team when we were possibly the best team I’ve ever played for, to then go through some more turbulent and difficult times, and I’d love to be part of the team that can work our way back up, that’d be a fantastic international journey.”

Former England fast bowler honoured for services to cricket and charity

ESPNcricinfo staff10-Oct-2020Darren Gough, the former England fast bowler, has been awarded an MBE for services to cricket and charity in the Queen’s birthday honours list.Gough, 50, took 229 wickets in 58 Tests for England between 1994 and 2003, as well as playing 159 ODIs and two T20Is. He represented Yorkshire and Essex in county cricket, before retiring in 2008 and moving into a career in broadcasting. He currently hosts a radio show on talkSPORT.A Level 3 qualified coach, Gough was used as a bowling consultant by England on their tour of New Zealand last year, and was credited with helping the likes of Chris Woakes make better use of the Kookaburra ball.He has also dedicated much of his time to raising money for charity, in particular wildlife and conservation efforts. Earlier this year, he donated memorabilia to an auction for the Centre for Disaster Philanthropy in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.The Queen’s birthday honours are usually announced in June, but this year were held back in order to recognise the efforts of those helping to deal with the coronavirus.

West Indies captain Darren Sammy is the first guest on Alison’s Tea Break and by the end of a packed summer, the ESPN cricinfo teapot should have witnessed interviews with some of the biggest names in world cricket.

David Hopps17-May-2012Darren Sammy does not drink tea, but at the start of the opening Test the West Indies captain qualifies as a perfect first guest nevertheless on Alison’s Tea Break – a monthly video chat between the highly regarded cricket commentator, Alison Mitchell, and some of cricket’s leading lights.By the end of another packed England international summer, the ESPN cricinfo teapot should have witnessed interviews with some of the biggest names in world cricket.Watch Sammy speak here about those who doubted his ability to make a success of the West Indies captaincy, about his method of leadership and his inspiration (including an unusual set of middle names).He also chats about the level of involvement he believes the former West Indian greats should have in the game, the welcome Chris Gayle will get if he does indeed return to international cricket and the time Dwayne Bravo tried to steal some turf from Lord’s.Alison’s Tea Break is just one aspect of ESPNcricinfo’s growing commitment to an English cricketing summer.Mark Nicholas is another influential addition to the ESPNcricinfo stable and in his latest column he tells A tale of two Yorkshiremen , reflecting on the contrasting fortunes of Jonny Bairstow, who is poised to make his Test debut at Lord’s today, and Ajmal Shahzad, who found such disfavour with Yorkshire that he was forced to make an early-season loan transfer to Lancashire.George Dobell, our senior correspondent, is already renowned as one of the most informed cricket writers on the England scene and he will be leading our extensive Test coverage. He begins by reflecting on West Indies’ dismal recent record in England.As well as our unsurpassed ball-by-ball coverage, a host of other writers will be providing their distinctive take on the summer from the trenchant analysis of Geoffrey Boycott to the iconoclastic wit of Jarrod Kimber.Neither will there be any let up in our strongest-ever commitment to county cricket – including our increasingly popular live county championship blog.There is no better place to follow the English cricketing summer, whether on the web or on our improved UK mobile service.Welcome to our cricketing summer. We hope you will enjoy it as much as we will.