Month: April 2020

9:51 AM GMT ESPNcricinfo staff Gloucestershire have confirmed that Cheteshwar Pujara will not play for the club this year. Pujara signed a deal to play the first six games of the County Championship season in February, and was set to become Gloucestershire’s first Indian player since Javagal Srinath in 1995. But with the first seven rounds of the Championship postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, and international travel severely limited,…

8:28 AM GMT Big picture It’s taken England longer than most countries to wake up to the fact that Sri Lanka aren’t just here to make up the numbers any more – but you get the impression that the penny might finally be dropping. For twice in the space of the last three years, Arjuna Ranatunga’s men have delivered upon England defeats so seismic, it’s hard to imagine a day…

Lancashire captain David Lloyd holds the Gillette Cup after their win over Middlesex  Apr 8, 2020 Jon Hotten Late last year, and with a heavy heart, I was rereading Bob Willis’s Diary of a Cricket Season, written in 1978. After only three paragraphs, Bob was in off the long run: “The early weeks are absurdly cluttered with one-day cricket; you either seem to be playing 55-over games or 40-over games;…

8:02 AM GMT Australia’s Test captain Tim Paine has rejected his predecessor Michael Clarke‘s contention that some members of the national team had been “too scared” to take on Virat Kohli too aggressively in their 2018-19 encounters for fear of what it would do to potentially lucrative IPL deals. With India scheduled to tour Australia for a Test series next summer, Clarke had reckoned that the prospect of endangering contracts…

4:46 AM GMT ESPNcricinfo staff Australia were “out of control” well before the ball-tampering scandal two years ago according to former international umpire Ian Gould who has recalled his role in the infamous Newlands Test. Gould, who retired from the international game after last year’s World Cup, was the TV official during the Cape Town Test and relayed what had been spotted on TV footage of Cameron Bancroft putting sandpaper…

Ryan ten Doeschate lifts the County Championship Division One Trophy as his Essex team-mates celebrate  3:27 PM GMT ESPNcricinfo staff The Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA) has agreed to reallocate £1 million of domestic prize money towards player contracts for 2020, after reaching an agreement with the ECB and the 18 first-class counties in response to the COVID-19 outbreak that has already delayed the start of the county season. Following discussions…

Pakistan’s players will be required to complete, among other things, 60 push-ups in a minute  1:11 PM GMT There’s no cricket on the horizon, yet, for Pakistan’s players, but lockdown or no lockdown, they’ll have to keep their fitness levels up. That’s the message from the PCB, which will conduct fitness tests for over 200 of its contracted domestic and international players, via video link, on April 20 and 21….

After a period of uncertainty and flux, the South African team is enjoying some stability under the care of coach Mark Boucher  11:29 AM GMT Mark Boucher has called South Africa’s win over Australia in the ODI series in March the “light at the end of the tunnel” after a difficult first season in charge of the men’s national side. Boucher took over in December and oversaw South Africa lose…

11:21 AM GMT ESPNcricinfo staff Yuvraj Singh believes the big difference between players of his generation and the ones today is how they dealt with seniors in the team, specifically in the “sense of respect towards seniors” and appreciating their work. “The youngsters say anything to anyone now,” Singh told Rohit Sharma during an Instagram chat hosted by the latter on Tuesday. According to Singh, the other key difference between…

8:50 AM GMT ESPNcricinfo staff Derbyshire have appointed former India coach and New Zealand batsman John Wright as their new club president. Wright scored almost 15,000 runs for Derbyshire in all formats between 1977 and 1988, and is widely regarded as one of the club’s finest batsmen. He returned to the club as a specialist T20 coach in 2017, and led an unfancied side to their first quarter-final in the…