Caught At Silly Point

If Shubman Gill stood up tomorrow and claimed he is the best ODI batter alive, the numbers would let him say it with a straight face. ODIs are Shubman Gill’s best format, and If he stood up tomorrow and declared himself the best ODI batter on the planet right now, he could argue that case without being laughed out of the room. The credentials are genuinely there. Because Gill has mastered the single thing that decides modern ODI cricket. And that is the Tempo. He knows exactly how to pace an innings, and whatever fear once gnawed at him has been silenced for good. Watch how he reads a game now. Powerplay? Hit your boundaries. Wickets falling? Start the rebuild. Matchup in your favour? Attack again. his spin game is climbing fast too. He reads length early, uses the crease beautifully, and the key to all of it is one adjustment: the trigger movement, back and across. That single change unlocks everything, powering the short-arm pull and freeing the cut when the ball leaves him. And seems like the the appetite keeps growing. Series after series he sharpens something new, and even batting alongside Rohit, he has never once backed down. Run a ball or faster, every single time.

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England spent years searching for a left-arm spinner who could bat. Liam Dawson, 10,000 first-class runs, was right there the whole time. Liam Dawson should have played far more limited-overs cricket for England by now. He has always been a genuinely useful cricketer in these formats, and years were squandered by simply not selecting him. Think about the T20 era we just lived through. Every side in the world craved the same profile: a left-arm spinner who could hold a bat. Franchises paid fortunes for it. England had exactly that player sitting in their own county system, and overlooked him again and again. And the batting is the part people undersold most. Dawson has 18 centuries and 56 half-centuries in first-class cricket, with over 10,000 first-class runs. Add 4 hundreds and 20 fifties in List A cricket. This is not a bowler who slogs a bit. He can bat. The record he has just set says everything about the wasted years and the ability in one line: Liam Dawson is England’s oldest ODI half-centurion since Alec Stewart made 60 against Namibia at the 2003 World Cup. That is a stat of vindication, and of what might have been. The talent was never the question. The selection was.

England’s ODI side lost its identity in last few years. Today proved the one thing that never changed: Joe Root is still the man you trust. It has been slightly unfortunate for England that Joe Root never quite clicked in ODIs these past few years the way he did in Tests. Some of that is hardly his fault. The whole unit lost form, and England’s white-ball identity has been genuinely confused, nobody quite knowing what the side was building towards, and that drift touched everyone in it. But today’s innings was a reminder of the thing that never actually changed. If England need one word to describe one batter, dependable still belongs to Joe Root, and only Joe Root. This is the man who was integral to the 2019 World Cup win, the quiet engine of the loudest team England ever built. And his ODI average still sits at 50, through all the drift and all the noise. Players like that are not selections to debate. They are non-negotiable, whatever the recent form says. Formats change, teams lose their way, generations move on. Joe Root remains the boss.

He did not even have a domestic contract until 25. At 31, he is tearing through the West Indies with five-fors. Development done the New Zealand way. Franchise cricket says if you have not debuted by 21, you are finished. Jayden Lennox debuted at 31 and has taken a wicket in every ODI since. Jayden Lennox ripped through the West Indies with 5 for 19 in Guyana. That gives him 14 wickets at 19.7 with an economy of just 4.1 to start his ODI career, a wicket in every single one of his seven ODIs, and the title of New Zealand’s leading ODI wicket-taker this year. This is such a clever operator. The intellect gets the applause, but watch the mastery of pace and length underneath it, and an action owing plenty to Santner. Nothing about him looks like a man in his first year of international cricket, and there is a reason for that. Because Lennox is the ultimate contrarian case study. Modern franchise cricket is obsessed with rushing teenagers onto the biggest stage. Lennox did not make his List A debut until nearly 25. First-class debut at 26. First domestic contract only in 2020-21. International debut at 31. Instead of being thrown to the wolves, he spent over half a decade in the New Zealand domestic system, taking 90 List A wickets and earning the captaincy of the Central Stags along the way. So when the call finally came in 2026, New Zealand did not receive a nervous prospect. They received a fully formed tactician, and international pressure barely registered. Some players need hype. Some need time. New Zealand keep proving they know the difference.

@Aintn0waySwag There’s a level to this game

No ego No attitude No jealousy No toxicity No trolling No friends No flirting No groupism No reach Am I the nicest guy on this app or what?

His captain taped a prophecy to a ball: Fawad will score a hundred. He scored 168 on overseas debut. Pakistan lost anyway, and then lost him for years. On this day in 2009, Pakistan lost a Test in Colombo. But the day belongs to Fawad Alam, and to one of the strangest, loveliest stories Pakistan cricket has produced. It begins with a prophecy. With Pakistan in desperate trouble on day one, Younis Khan taped a note to a ball. It said Fawad Alam would score a hundred in this game. Fawad promptly got out for 16, Pakistan folded for 90, and Younis quietly tucked the ball away. Then came the fightback. Umar Gul and Saeed Ajmal took four wickets each to bowl Sri Lanka out for 240, and Fawad walked out to do exactly what his captain had written. He wiped off the deficit and kept going, all the way to 168, becoming the first Pakistan batter ever to score a century on overseas debut. A debutant, in Colombo, against a proper attack, playing the innings his captain had predicted onto a piece of tape. And then, because this is Pakistan, the rest of the story. At lunch on day three they were 294 for 2, in complete command. By tea, Sri Lanka were already 41 into a chase of 171, which they finished the same evening. From prophecy to collapse in a session. Sri Lanka took the series 2-0. But the real tragedy came after. A player who announces himself like that should have been backed for a decade. Instead, the selectors let him drift into the wilderness for years. The story could have been so much better. A shame, and one Pakistan cricket should still feel.

He scored over 10,000 international runs, carried South Africa's rebuild, and was still making 199 at 36. And we spent his whole career no valuing him too much. Happy birthday to Faf du Plessis, owner of the most overshadowed great career in modern South African cricket. The record is substantial by any standard. over 10,000 international runs across all formats before he left the international game in 2021. Yet for more than a decade, almost none of it got discussed on its own terms, because everything Faf did happened next to the cultural phenomenon that was AB de Villiers, his childhood friend, his teammate, and the man the world could not look away from. But look at what the shadow actually contained. When de Villiers stepped away in 2018 citing burnout, it was du Plessis who stayed and shouldered the entire transition era, captaining a side losing its golden generation, absorbing the pressure, and still producing, an extraordinary 199 against Sri Lanka in December 2020, at 36 years old. And even in white-ball cricket, the territory AB's genius defined, Faf's individual bests quietly sit above his friend's. AB's ODI best is 162. Faf's is 185. AB's T20I best is 79. Faf's is 119. Read those again. Not proof he was the better batter, but proof of how much substance we never bothered to notice. the craft deserved noticing too. His game had its own peculiar quirks, jolly effective ones. Those towering lofted hits, struck like a golfing maestro. The eyes locked on the ball, never flustered, always on task. Above all, a completely honest understanding of his own strengths and weaknesses, knowing exactly what he could and could not do, and playing within it with precision and aplomb. AB was the genius, and nobody disputes it. But resilience, loyalty, and fifteen years of quiet excellence are a greatness of their own. Happy birthday, Faf. The shadow deserved a spotlight all along.

Bazball did not die at the hands of aggressive batting. It was killed by its own hype machine and one decision Atherton called suicidal. So it had to happen. Brendon McCullum has been sacked, and after how Stokes went, it was always on the cards. Now that the era is officially over, let us talk about Bazball honestly, because the obituary deserves more fairness than the coverage ever showed. Start with what it got right, because it got real things right. When McCullum arrived, England built a genuinely wonderful environment in that Test unit. And for me, Bazball was never supposed to mean aggressive batting alone. It was an out-of-the-box, aggressive approach across the board, selection, fields, declarations, and above all the backing of bowlers, the confidence poured into them, which was the true beauty of the thing. For the first year and a half it delivered, in England, in New Zealand, and on the flat pitches of Pakistan. It was unique, it was refreshing for Test cricket, and for a time we genuinely loved it. Now the negatives, and the first is not the players. It is the England media and the unnecessary hype. The endless articles and podcasts about Bazball “changing” and “saving” Test cricket did nothing for England except stack impossible expectations on top of a method that needed patience. By the time the Ashes arrived, the team was playing at gunpoint, and the hype had loaded the weapon. The second, and the fatal mistake, was making McCullum the all-format coach. It muddled expectations and broke the player coordination system, and Michael Atherton called the move something close to suicidal. What followed was exactly that: a slow loss of player confidence in the management, ending where we are today. Bazball is gone. The idea deserved better guardians than its own hype. Now the hope is England find the right combinations and rebuild their Test cricket properly.

He could have chased the leagues like everyone else. Instead he stayed, averaged 50 in ODIs, and carried West Indies. Talk about Shai Hope more. It is genuine good fortune for West Indies cricket that Shai Hope is still here, still in touch, and still theirs. In an era when player after player has gone the way of the leagues, Hope stayed with the international game, and he has repaid that loyalty by being one of their main performers, year after year. The ODI record is pretty insane: 145 innings, 6,256 runs, an average of 50.86 at a strike rate of 80.03, with 19 hundreds and 32 fifties. An average above 50 sustained across 145 innings is elite in any era, for any team, and he has done it for a side that so often depends on him entirely. And it holds across conditions, home, away, wherever. This is what I would call excellent grunt work, the unglamorous, repeated carrying of a batting order, done for years now without the spotlight that others get for less. I hope people start recognising him properly, because Shai Hope deserves to be spoken of among the best in the format. The consistency is remarkable. The loyalty makes it more so.

Anchor like Kohli, hit like Russell, dominate like Gayle. One man did all three, and his name is Jos Buttler. It is sad that we do not see much of Jos Buttler these days. Age and form catch up with everyone, and it is an unfortunate turn in his story. So before the memory fades, let me say it plainly: I have yet to find a better T20 opener than Jos Buttler. White-ball elite, full stop. What made him unique was never just the talent. It was the reading of the game, and then the execution to match. He is perhaps the only player to whom the phrase “playing according to demand” truly fits. The proof is in how deliberately he built it. In a pre-World Cup 2022 interview with Cricinfo, Buttler explained his chasing method: assess how many boundaries and runs the target actually needs, then prepare for exactly that. If the chase needs an anchor, he anchors. If it needs an assault from ball one, he attacks. No ego, no fixed template, just the demand of the day, met precisely. That is why he is the complete package. An anchor, a power hitter, and an incredibly skilful manipulator of the field, the closest thing T20 has produced to a blend of Kohli, Russell, and Gayle in one player. Plenty of aggressive batters define modern T20. Almost none of them adapt to everything the way Buttler did, turning pitch or flat track, day one form or off day. And the off days are where the intelligence really showed. Even struggling, he would hunt like a hawk, spotting the smallest weakness in an attack and exploiting it until the game turned. Hands down the smartest T20 batsman I have ever seen, and I doubt anyone tops him. The boss of T20 cricket.

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Australia's captain threw the ball to Steve Smith to break the stand. Jason Roy hit his next three balls for six, one of them 101 metres. On this day in 2019, one of the reasons Australia do not have a sixth World Cup happened. That reason was Jason Roy. You could have been forgiven for thinking Australia's total was defendable in a semi-final. Roy disagreed. Alongside Jonny Bairstow he piled on 124 in no time, and the chase never really felt like one after that. The moment everyone remembers came in the 16th over. Aaron Finch, desperate to break the opening stand, made the unorthodox call to bring on part-time leg-spinner Steve Smith. Roy's response was to end Smith's bowling credibility inside three deliveries, launching three consecutive massive sixes, the last one measured at a staggering 101 metres, clearing the Edgbaston grandstand. A World Cup semi-final, and he treated it like a net session. If you had told me in 2019 that Roy would fade from relevance within a few years, I would have laughed at you. It is a little sad that we only catch him in a handful of matches now. But everyone has their peak time, and peak Jason Roy in ODIs was one of the finest executioners of pace bowling I have watched. Through 2018, 2019, and that World Cup, he was central to the greatest ODI side England ever built. Good memories, Jason.

AB de Villiers had one year with a true strike rate that insane. Shahid Afridi’s whole career looked like that, and we called him inconsistent. Before anyone talks about Afridi the T20 player, you have to go back to Afridi the ODI player, because that is where it all started, and that is where the misunderstanding started too. The pattern is right there once you know how to look. The man simply refused to bat within himself. During his best years, his true strike rate, his rate relative to the average batter in the same matches, was regularly over 40. His lowest in any calendar year was still slightly below 14. To put that in perspective, AB de Villiers had one year like that, 2015, and we still talk about it as a freak season. Afridi’s entire career was that season. For years, we mocked him for it. The inconsistency, the low scores, the refusal to compile like proper batters. But metrics like true values have finally caught up with what he was actually doing: playing T20 cricket in ODIs before T20 cricket existed. He was not failing at the old game. He was early to the new one. And the bat is only half of it. As a bowler, Afridi sat well above par on both true economy and true wickets per 10 overs across his five best years. His true economy beat par by 0.2 or more in nine separate calendar years. He finishes as a negative just twice in an international career that ran for more than two decades. Those are elite leg spinner’s returns on their own, before you add a single run he scored. Cricket has produced players ahead of their time before. Victor Trumper. Viv Richards. It is time to say it plainly: Shahid Afridi belongs on that list. (Content copied from @ajarrodkimber video

He conquered Roberts, Holding and Marshall without a helmet. The only people he ever truly frightened were the men running Indian cricket. Happy birthday, Sunil Gavaskar. Start with what everyone knows, because it deserves repeating. The first man in the history of Test cricket to reach 10,000 runs. 34 Test centuries, a world record that stood for nearly two decades. 774 runs in his very first series, against West Indies in 1971, as complete an arrival as the game has ever seen. And he did it all as an opener, staring down Roberts, Holding, Marshall, Lillee and Thomson, for most of his career with no helmet between his skull and the fastest bowling ever unleashed. The bravest technique in cricket, wrapped in the calmest mind. Now the chapter fewer people know, from 1979. That year, before a major England tour, the BCCI abruptly took the captaincy off him and gave it to Srinivas Venkataraghavan. Officially, it was about experience in English conditions. Almost nobody believed that. As the retrospectives record, most observers were convinced Gavaskar was being punished because the board feared he was about to defect to Kerry Packer's World Series Cricket, and take India's best players with him. The fear was not baseless paranoia either. Gavaskar, with Bishen Singh Bedi and Venkataraghavan, had been trying to form India's first players' association, a simple demand for basic rights and fair pay, in a system built to give players neither. The BCCI crushed it. But the point had been made: the greatest batsman in the country was no longer asking permission. They took the armband. They killed the union. What they could not undo was the shift underneath: for the first time, Indian cricket's rulers had been made to fear a player. The runs made Sunil Gavaskar a legend. The fight made him a pioneer. Happy birthday to both men.

People slate Harry Brook for getting out, but the truth is his approach is working, and asking him to change it is the real risk. Harry Brook’s level has been so high that even a fifty gets him criticised. When a fifty from a batter is treated as a failure, it is because he has quietly set a standard most players will never reach. He is an instinctive genius, and a lot of the criticism he gets for his dismissals is unfair, because he is so often the man expected to carry an order full of bad batting around him. So people line up with the same advice: play more maturely, play smartly, trust your defence. But if a batter is already getting results with his approach, the odds are he keeps getting results by staying true to it. Ask him to change, and he might not just fail to improve, he might end up worse off than before, because there is no guarantee the new method works at all. You would be trading a proven path for an unproven one. And It is this exact approach, the risk-taking, that pulls the best out of Harry and makes him believe he can win games. Take the risks away and what are you left with? Nobody knows, and that is precisely the problem.

He had been scoring international hundreds for years, and then a routine eye test in 2017 found he had been doing it short-sighted the whole time. Happy birthday, Shaun Marsh, and here is a story about him that still feels barely believable. In 2017, Marsh had a simple eye test. It showed he was short-sighted, and that he had been batting and fielding at the top level of international cricket with the condition, undiagnosed, for a considerable time. He started wearing contact lenses to see the ball better, and that was that. What made it a genuine talking point was how it even came to light. Ricky Ponting revealed it live on BT Sport during the third Ashes Test on 16 December 2017, and it caused real surprise across the game, because Test contracts normally include sight tests as a routine requirement. Somehow, this one had slipped through. And that is the remarkable part. By the time anyone worked out his eyes were not quite right, Shaun Marsh had already scored multiple international centuries and anchored elite innings, all while unknowingly managing a vision problem most players would never have batted through. Some cricketers need everything to be perfect. Marsh built a Test career without even knowing his eyesight was not. Happy birthday to one of the game's quiet curiosities.

There is a proven law in cricket: drop the gloves, and your batting average jumps. One man broke that law completely, and it made him his country's greatest ever keeper. Happy birthday, BJ Watling, cricket's great anomaly. There is a well-documented law in this game: shed the gruelling physical baggage of wicketkeeping and you become a deadlier batsman. The evidence is everywhere. Kumar Sangakkara averaged 40.48 with the gloves and soared to a legendary 66.78 without them. Brendon McCullum climbed from 34.18 to 42.94 the moment he handed the keeping duties on. BJ Watling's entire career ran in complete reverse. As a specialist opening batsman early on, he averaged a modest 28.00 across 8 Tests. Then he pulled on the gloves full-time, and his batting defied all physical logic, skyrocketing to 39.05 across 67 Tests as the designated gloveman. He is one of the very few players in cricket history who actively needed the fatigue of keeping 90 overs to anchor his batting mindset. The tiredness that breaks everyone else somehow settled him. And it built a legacy no New Zealander can touch. Among Kiwi keepers he has the most Tests, the most dismissals, the most runs, the most centuries, and he remains the only one to score a Test double hundred. The finest Test keeper of his time, and the best his country has ever produced. Happy birthday, BJ.

They spent years calling him a home-track bully. Then he went away from home after turning 35 and took 95 wickets at 23. There was always one bittersweet thing about Jimmy Anderson’s career: the labels. “Clouderson.” “Home-track bully.” The idea, clung to for years, that he only shone when the ball was hooping around in England. And the reason it is bittersweet is that the numbers demolishing that idea had been sitting in plain sight all along. In the last five years of his career, Anderson averaged 20.79 away from home, with 69 wickets in 20 away Tests. Narrow it to the period since January 2020 and it gets even better: 57 wickets at a jaw-dropping 18.84 in 16 away Tests. This was not 2015 anymore. The older Anderson got, the better his away record became, pure skill, discipline, and experience compounding with age. The post-35 numbers might be the most remarkable of all. Away and neutral venues combined, he had 95 wickets at 23.29 with an economy of 2.32, and in that entire period only one bowler with 10-plus wickets had a tighter economy. The second half of this man’s career outshone most players’ entire careers. Or maybe I am wasting my breath. There is a peculiar brand of cricket “fan” who cannot bear to give credit no matter what evidence you place in front of them.

His first ever T20I, at his home ground, and he bowled an unplayable spell. England may have stumbled onto their World Cup X-factor. Josh Tongue can be a genuine wicket-taker even in T20s, and his debut just made the case for him. And it was exactly the method you want from Tongue. The hard length, pounded relentlessly, and those awkward angles that batters never quite get comfortable against. That kind of middle-overs wicket-taking, a bowler hitting his natural length and still taking the game forward, is precisely what England have needed in this format. The bigger picture makes it more exciting. England have won 19 of their last 29 T20Is since January 2025, so this is a side already moving in the right direction, and now imagine Tongue and Jofra Archer operating together at high-octane pace at the T20 World Cup in Australia, then the ODI World Cup in South Africa. Add Sam Curran, still one of the most underrated T20 cricketers around, doing his work with the old ball, and the attack starts to look genuinely layered. The only job now is managing Tongue and Jofra carefully, because fast bowlers like these are worth protecting. Get that right, and England have found something.