Neil Moody

@nimishdubey Interesting series. From England point of view, it saw Gatting finally deliver at test match level, and Robinson and Fowler at the top of the order got good runs. Foster had his best series with the ball. And all after getting tonked 5-0 at home by West Indies.

For those of us in India who followed cricket in the 1980s, the defeat against England at home in 1984-85 was particularly traumatising. This was because it was, well, it was simply not SUPPOSED to happen. How could it? England had lost three series in a row, the last being a 5-0 "Blackwash" against West Indies, and had been pushed even by Sri Lanka in a one-off Test. Its best player, Ian Botham, was skipping the tour, and among the rest of its line up, only Gower and Lamb were considered dangerous. The bowling was paper thin, with the likes of Cowans, Foster, Allot, Agnew, Ellison and Chris Cowdrey. Phil Edmonds and Pat Pocock were good spinners, but were supposed to be well past their best. Bob Willis had retired and Graham Gooch, Peter Willey, John Lever, John Emburey and Wayne Larkins were serving bans for touring South Africa. India on the other hand had arguably the best batsman in the world, Sunil Gavaskar, and one of the best bowlers and all rounders in Kapil Dev. Mohinder Amarnath was back in form, Dilip Vengsakar was looking good and so was Sandeep Patil. Add to that one of the best young all rounders in the world (Ravi Shastri) and the best wicket keeper in the world (Syed Kirmani), home conditions and England's legendary inability to handle spin, and it seemed India would coast to an easy win. I mean, India had beaten a much stronger, full strength England team 1-0 three years ago. And for a while, it seemed to go to script. England struggled against the spin of Laxman Sivaramakrishnan (and the umpiring, they claimed) and lost the first Test. David Gower would later wrote that they came across a bowler they had never seen before and an umpire they never wanted to see again. England seemed set for another hammering. So much so that some spectators were seen carrying banners saying "Brownwash" as the first Test was coming to an end. And then it all went horribly wrong. A single session of careless batting, highlighted by loose shots by Kapil Dev and Sandeep Patil, cost India the second Test. And things got worse when both Patil and Kapil Dev were dropped for disciplinary reasons. The deicison generated a lot of controversy and we saw the crowd at Kolkota booing and abusing their own captain so badly that Gavaskar swore he would never play in the city again (he actually refused to play against Pakistan in 1986-87 for that reason, although he changed his mind for the World Cup). Mohinder Amarnath and Shastri continued to bat well for India, although Shastri's insistence on batting at a snail's pace led to the first chants of "Shastri, hai, hai" at Kolkota. This was the match in which Phil Edmonds pretended to be so bored that he stood and read a newspaper while fielding. Azharuddin emerged as a new batting star. But as a team, there was absolutely nothing going for India. Sivramakrishnan took six wickets in each of the first three innings of the series, but got only five more in the next six innings as England seemed to have woked him out. Most shockingly, this was perhaps the first (and only) seiries in which both Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev failed. Kapil got 10 wickets in four Tests at 43.60 while Gavaskar got 140 runs in five Tests at 17.50. What's worse, for most of the series, the two seemed barely on talking terms, although some sort of patch up did occur before the series ended. India hardly ever had a good batting or bowling start in the series, and the English batsmen made merry. Oddly enough, the two English batsmen we had feared the most, Lamb and Gower, had mediocre series. Gatting, Robinson, Fowler, however, scored by the sackful. Their bowlers too struggled most of the time, but had the advantage of playing with big scores behind them - a key factor in their winning at Chennai. It was not a narrow win - India never had a chance after losing the first Test and seemed miles behing an English team that seemed to be enjoying itself under David Gower. Interestingly, many of the English players who did so well, would be out of the team barely a few years later. For India too, many careers came to an end - Anshuman Gaekwad, Ashok Malhotra and Sandeep Patil never played for India again, and Yashpal Sharma was never even considered after a poor ODI series. In the end, India lost a series it was supposed to have won easily against arguably the weakest English ever to tour the country. Many of us still cannot figure out how on earth it happened. It shouldn't have. It couldn't have. It did. #Cricket #80scricket #Gavaskar #KapilDev #Gower #IndianCricket #EnglandCricket #Nostalgia (@Raja_Sw, @SanjayK27310177, @alawyerwrites, @WG_RumblePants, @VatsMusings, @anandkumarn)

Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Keith Porter could not be reached for comment.

Amir walked 12 kilometres, barefoot, to get food. He kissed the hand of an American soldier, thanking him for a bag of rice and lentils. Then Israel K*LLED Amir, right in front of the soldier. A child, grateful for lentils. Executed in broad daylight. Amir was 5 years old.

VAR might have got him off...

fck FIFA, fck Israel.

Anti-Trump poster seen in Washington, DC.

Israeli adult "settlers" are not civilians, they are armed robbers who delight in the dispossession and slaughter of the indigenous Palestinian people.

This has been pinned to my profile since 1st of March. I've lived under the flight path of B-52 bombers leaving RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire, then returning. It's truly the stuff of nightmares, the deep growl of engines overhead twice a day. It's an illegal war & UK is assisting

This is just one trick media use to manufacture consent for war.

The ultimate double standard. Israel secretly holds 90 nuclear weapons, refuses to sign the non-proliferation treaty, and faces zero consequences, while the West bombs countries that actually comply with international law. The global arms control system is a total fraud.

When Eisenhower was asked why the United States did not allow the 1956 Vietnamese reunification elections agreed upon at Geneva, he answered with unusual honesty. He said that if elections were held, Hồ Chí Minh would win with approximately 80 percent of the vote. So they cancelled the elections. Think about that every time an American politician talks about "spreading democracy." They cancelled the democratic election because the "wrong" person would win. They then spent the next two decades killing people to prevent the government that would have been democratically elected from taking power. And they called the other side anti-democratic. This is not ancient history. This is the logic that still governs every "democracy promotion" operation today. Democracy is acceptable when it produces the "right" results. When it does not, you cancel the election, back a coup, fund the opposition, impose sanctions, and call the government that the people actually chose a "dictatorship." Vietnam exposed this logic completely. Not with arguments. With history. With the receipts.

PLEASE… more reporter questions like this.🔥

Remember that moment when the IDF was attacking Palestinian worshippers inside the Al Aqsa Mosque during the Ramadan prayers? Of course you don’t, because the Western mainstream media has done a damn good job making sure you stay in the dark....

"Shameful." In an extraordinary interview, Pentagon whistleblower @WesJBryant sounds the alarm about what he calls a lack of concern for civilian casualties by the US in Iran. He was part of a Pentagon unit tasked with mitigating civilian harm, but it was gutted last year in government cuts. Worth watching in full.

This is wild. The @WhiteHouse plagiarized its reason for launching a war on Iran from @FDD, a cutout of Israeli intelligence. Side-by-side screenshots in the 🧵

Israel wipes out village after village in South Lebanon. Centuries-old historic villages completely erased from the map. Then Israel builds illegal military bases on top of the homes it just destroyed. And the international community watches in silence.

Absolute insanity. Elizabeth Warren exposes how Pete Hegseth fired top military lawyers, calling them roadblocks, and installed his own personal lawyer to water down constraints on killing civilians. He is systematically dismantling the rules of engagement.

The West will never teach you this history. ElBaradei exposes how the CIA and MI6 overthrew Iran's democracy in 1953, installed a brutal dictator, and then financed Saddam Hussein to gas 100,000 Iranians with chemical weapons provided by Germany. Absolute hypocrisy.

As part of the 1956 invasion of Egypt. Ben-Gurion wanted to topple Abdel Nasser, take the Sinai, dissolve Jordan, and conquer and settle the south of Lebanon up to the Litani. This was 8 years before the founding of the PLO and a quarter century before Hezbollah existed.