ISSUE 76
Isthat it then? Is that really all India and England have to offer? Not in terms of the on-field action, which broadly lived up to the billing, but everything else. These were the teams that gave us the jelly beans incident, that employed the best QCs in the land to argue over who had started a corridor kerfuffle between James Anderson and Ravindra Jadeja. Now all they can muster is some podcast sledging, grumbling about Hawk-Eye, and a few press conference potshots about who invented attacking batting.
Really, they should be taking their lead from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, a rivalry borne purely out of cricketing animosity. They don’t like each other much, and, gloriously, they aren’t afraid to make that abundantly clear, trading inflammatory Naagin dances, smashing glass doors in anger, and deriding each other’s bowling attacks to the press. Now that India have grown tired of never-ending bilateral engagements with Sri Lanka, the two sides play each other a lot, and it’s not just familiarity, but also similarity that breeds contempt. Each riles up the other by mimicking something the other has done to them in the past, then gets criticised by the other side for stooping so low, and the cycle repeats.
Rumbling on this month is the fallout from Angelo Mathews’ timed-out dismissal in the 2023 World Cup, ironically the controversy that just won’t end. At the time, Mathews, who delayed taking guard after discovering his helmet was broken, was incensed – “obviously disgraceful”, was how he put it – and no attempt has been made by Bangladesh to mollify their opponents, with their seamer Shoriful Islam tapping an invisible watch after the very first wicket of a recent T20I series between the two.