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Pradeep hailed by his team for keeping them in the contest against Afghanistan

Sharda Ugra in Cardiff04-Jun-2019Two yorkers from Lasith Malinga crashed into the stumps and had zing bails light up the growing gloom around the Cardiff Wales Stadium and Afghan hearts, but by then Sri Lanka were as good as home.An oxygen-depleted win but a win all the same in their second game of the 2019 World Cup. Against the event’s sweetheart qualifiers, Afghanistan, by 34 runs (D/L method), which doesn’t prove anything except give Sri Lanka valuable points and a breather – and certainly for Malinga, his first win after 21 ODI defeats and one NR since July 6, 2017.WATCH – Highlights from the Afghanistan-Sri Lanka game on Hotstar (India only)Sri Lanka’s last ODI win against a frontline team outside of Asia was almost two years ago, against India at the Champions Trophy. In between then and now, purgatory, doubt, batting collapses (not that those have gone away) and one defeat after another.Tuesday’s win, says coach Chandika Hathurusingha gives the team the booster shot of confidence they needed. “We really needed a win. We haven’t got much success lately… We need this badly.”The Sri Lankans were to make the single change that may be what is needed to alter their narrative. Even if that meant putting all their eggs in the one basket that Cardiff offered them – picking five seamers in conditions with clouds overhead that made the swinging ball sing. It was this fifth horsemen that was to prevent their apocalypse.Nuwan Pradeep, hipster haircut, gunslinger walk, slinger action, biting pace and mean inswing – and left out on the weekend, turned up and did his job during the work week and produced his career-best ODI figures that made victory possible. Once it was done, the Sri Lankans gathered together in a huddle of relief, bunting Man of the Match Pradeep on his head over and over.Captain Dimuth Karunaratne’s grin was visible from a distance; never mind the fates and losing the toss again, his team had climbed out of the hole they had dug for themselves after recording the highest power play total of the competition and then imploding (7 for 36 in 11 overs.) Twenty runs across the last two wickets did take Sri Lanka past 200 but Hathurusingha said while the score had never seemed enough they had expected the seamers to “bowl well on the wicket, hit the deck hard and hit the seam”. The innings break had not featured a pep talk but a talking-to: “I tell them what has to be done. That they have to come and perform.”It is what the Sri Lankan bowlers did; the 15 wides at the end of the innings will cost them heavily elsewhere, but the extravagance of the Afghan batsmen allowed them to get away with it. The key was to just to pitch the ball up or back of a length, depending on who disliked what, hit the pitch hard when required to create dot ball pressure and extract the error. Or as Thisara Perera put it, “Keep our line and length and don’t panic.” Isuru Udana and Pradeep, the least experienced of the five, were particularly efficient in tandem, Pradeep sending home the two most dangerous Afghan batsmen on the day – the first, opener Hazratullah Zazai and the second captain, Gulbadin Naib.Hathurusingha said Pradeep had “single-handedly” kept Sri Lanka in the game. In conditions like Cardiff where the ball swings and often climbs, he finds himself in his element and there was no better day to put it out on display. Left-arm paceman Udana said of Pradeep: “He was the main man today he was the man who changed the game.” Pradeep had never played with a cricket ball until the age of 20, was discovered through a soft-ball competition, and has had a career for Sri Lanka restricted by a series of injuries. His last ODI was against New Zealand in January, missing out on the March tour of New Zealand due to injury. On Tuesday in Cardiff, Pradeep was quick enough and sharp enough to be the bowler Sri Lanka required to give their world cup campaign the buoyancy it needed.Nuwan Pradeep celebrates dismissing Rashid Khan•Getty Images

On our Smart Stats Forecaster, Naib’s wicket brought down Afghanistan’s win probability from 61% to just under 50%. When Mohammed Nabi went, it nosedived further from 44 to 28 and was spot on in predicting the trend of the contest. The Malinga yorkers were just the celebratory, flashy outlet Sri Lanka needed at the end of a tense game.The combined experience of the senior seamers – Malinga, Lakmal and Perera have played 455 ODIs between them – was to help pass on wisdom and calmness to the younger two. Udana, playing only his seventh ODI, used his experience from the Bangladesh and Afghan T20 leagues to offer insights into the Afghan batsmen to his team-mates. Malinga’s last two wickets with his signature yorkers were the Afghan Nos. 9 and 10 and ended the game, but it was Pradeep that had virtually dragged it out of Afghanistan’s reach and imagination.Sri Lanka on the field were far from ship-shape but they were to find moments of inspiration – Thisara’s diving catch off Zazai on the long-leg boundary, Karunaratne’s direct hit to run out Najibullah Zadran – that made them buzz, bouncing on the balls of their feet, backing each other up. There was Malinga, the angry lion in winter, patting Pradeep on the back after he conceded five wides in the 25th over in an attempt to bounce out the batsman. The Lankans had found the energy and the collective will to compete.Hathurusingha hoped this game was going to change Sri Lankan ODI fortunes, especially at the event where it is most urgent and most noticed. When asked about Malinga’s tongue lashing and whether he agreed with it, he said: “When you play for your country there is a lot of pride at stake. They are all hurting. I’m sure about that. They really, really want to perform well for the country. What Lasith said, whatever he said, is what he believes and I think all the players get a lot of confidence after this win for sure.”Now if only the batsmen could follow.

Hasin Jahan, the fast bowler’s wife, is understood to have backtracked on her original allegation about her husband accepting money during a recent stopover in Dubai

Nagraj Gollapudi22-Mar-2018Hasin Jahan, Mohammed Shami’s wife, is understood to have backtracked on her original allegation about her husband accepting money during a recent stopover in Dubai. That allegation was the basis for the BCCI anti-corruption unit’s (ACU) investigation into the matter while the board withheld Shami’s central contract.On March 13, the BCCI had asked the ACU, headed by former Delhi police chief Neeraj Kumar, to complete a limited-mandate probe, “preferably” within a week, to verify if Shami had breached its code of conduct. Kumar submitted his report on Wednesday, absolving Shami of any corrupt practice, following which the BCCI handed the fast bowler a Category B contract.One of the primary leads for the ACU to verify was whether Shami had indeed accepted any money, as alleged by Jahan, from a woman named Alisba, a Pakistan national, in Dubai, on his way back from India’s tour of South Africa. Jahan had said in her statement to the Kolkata Police that money had been sent by a certain Mohammad Bhai, who is based in the UK. Shami had vehemently denied the allegations, and is understood to have done the same to the ACU during his interrogation.The ACU team travelled to Kolkata and met Jahan in person. According to a BCCI official familiar with the investigation, Jahan is believed to have told the ACU that she never meant to say what she had. “During the ACU inquiry she [Jahan] herself said, “I never meant to make this allegation that he took money for match-fixing”,” the official said.The ACU then spoke to both Mohammad Bhai and Alisba by phone. The ACU found that the two did not know each other. The ACU also ran both names through their internal database and that of the ICC’s anti-corruption unit. “Their names were run through the databases and there was no match found for either Alisba or Mohammad Bhai. Nothing came up which showed their antecedents could be shady. They are not elusive, underground, unknown people. Both have proper identification and documentation.”According to the BCCI official Mohammad Bhai is “known to several other” Indian team players and is a British passport holder who hails originally from Gujarat. Alisba, too, was “up front” and clear about events during her chat with the ACU.

The Australian Cricketers Association’s proposal features a spending cap on Cricket Australia’s bureaucracy

Daniel Brettig24-Jan-2017A proposal by the Australian Cricketers Association (ACA) that calls for a cap on Cricket Australia’s (CA) administrative costs has been underlined by the Association as it chases full disclosure of the game’s finances ahead of the next round of MOU meetings, set for next week.The ACA executive, which includes Aaron Finch, Moises Henriques, Neil Maxwell, Lisa Sthalekar, Janet Torney and Shane Watson, met in Sydney on Monday ahead of the Allan Border Medal ceremony, which in itself is a vestige of warmer past relations between the players and CA.Negotiations for the next MOU broke down in December amid bitter sparring between the two parties, and though informal talks have resumed, the players remain convinced they are not being afforded the sort of transparency they had previously enjoyed when trying to reach an agreement with the board.Suggestions of “a ceiling on Cricket Australia’s administrative costs to create space for greater grassroots investment as future revenues grow” were included in the ACA’s original submission to the pay talks. That would appear to be a counter to CA’s claim that the longstanding fixed revenue percentage model by which players are paid needed to be pared back to only include the top male players, because more cash needed to be spent on the game’s grassroots.The ACA president Greg Dyer asserted that the players needed greater access to CA’s financial records than has presently been offered if talks are to progress.”The executive of the ACA are adamant that there must be greater financial disclosure from Cricket Australia if the talks are to meaningfully progress,” Dyer said in a statement. “Many players ask the very fair question: how does the game spend the revenue the players generate for it?”Players receive less than 20% of total revenue, and only 12% currently goes into grassroots investment. The players would like to see a greater investment in grassroots cricket, a better deal for female cricketers, and an ongoing share of BBL and WBBL revenue they generate.”We want the negotiations to be fully informed as due diligence demands. These are very fair questions and a very reasonable position for the players to take. Players regard themselves as genuine partners in the game. This is the strength of the current model – a partnership model which has grown the game and a partnership the players value and will fight for.”The ACA’s chief executive Alistair Nicholson, meanwhile, offered a reminder that fruitful talks needed to start in order to allow the new agreement to apply to the next round of contracts for all players, international and domestic, male and female.”Failure to get this sequencing right means that the contracts could include some of the out-of-date terms and conditions the ACA has acknowledged in our submission,” he said, “and could also create different types of contracts which create inequities from player to player. The MOU informs the contracts. That’s why the sequence needs to be MOU first and contracts second.”While there were few overt references to the MOU during the presentation ceremony, the Allan Border Medallist David Warner did make reference to the link between the present players and their forebears for helping to forge the path that has led to their current riches.

As selectors and medical staff fret over his workload, Josh Hazlewood thinks he is getting better with each successive spell this summer

Daniel Brettig in Hobart08-Dec-20151:36

‘Feel as good as I have in my career’ – Hazlewood

As selectors and medical staff fret over his workload, Josh Hazlewood thinks he is getting better with each successive spell this summer. Even so, he realises that a quick demolition job on West Indies in Hobart is likely to be his best chance of turning out in both the showpiece Melbourne and Sydney Test over the Christmas/New Year holidays.Much extra responsibility fell upon Hazlewood’s broad shoulders when Mitchell Johnson retired after the Perth Test and then Mitchell Starc suffered a foot fracture early in the Adelaide day/night match that followed it. His response was a commanding nine-wicket performance that suggested he thrived on being thrown the ball more expectantly by his captain Steven Smith.However the selection chairman Rod Marsh has stated that it is unlikely Hazlewood will be risked in all six Tests this summer, meaning it will be largely up to the bowler himself to earn the right to play by taking wickets in a swift enough manner to give him the required rest between matches – as was the case two summers ago when Johnson, Ryan Harris and Peter Siddle were retained throughout the 5-0 Ashes sweep due to matches ending quickly.”I definitely wouldn’t want to be rested for either of those last two games and especially not this one, the first against the West Indies,” Hazlewood said. “I hope I can play all of them, depending on how much workload we have. If we can take these 20 wickets as quickly as possible I don’t see why I can’t play all three Tests.”The quicker you get the 20 wickets obviously the easier it is on the body. We had a tough initiation in Brisbane and in Perth on those wickets but we will be patient, it’s something I think we need to work on against the West Indies, build pressure that way and then the wickets will come hopefully.”Marsh has previously been part of a selection panel that angered fast bowlers by withdrawing them from the Test team for preventative reasons. In 2012 both Harris and Starc were left nonplussed to be asked to cool their heels after strong performances in the previous match, the former missing a Trinidad Test after excelling in Barbados and Starc scratched from Boxing Day despite bowling Australia to victory over Sri Lanka in Hobart.”I guess with my history of injuries people are entitled to their opinion but I feel as good as I have through my career,” Hazlewood said. “I think I showed last summer I bowled quite a few overs in the Tests I played and got through the majority of the winter tours as well. I’m feeling better the further I get in my career.”You have got to be honest with the selectors and coach and Smithy. They value the fast bowlers’ opinions on how you feel, as long as you are honest it’s good communication to and fro. They take a lot from how the bowler feels and how the physio sees things.”There is another decent break after this game and then the hardest ones are probably the last two back to back. But I am feeling pretty good at the moment, and hopefully it stays that way.”Australia are in very much a transitional phase due to the aforementioned retirement of Johnson and Harris, plus those of Michael Clarke, Shane Watson and Chris Rogers. But in Hazlewood they appear to have a bowler who can thrive on the extra responsibility on home turf, while also knowing from the experiences of the Caribbean earlier this year how to bowl to a brittle West Indian line-up, who had their own preparation affected by rain on their afternoon training session at Bellerive Oval.”We are obviously going to miss both Mitches, they both bring different things to the bowling attack but I guess it is good that I am the one who Smithy turns to,” Hazlewood said. “Especially in that second innings in Adelaide, that added pressure I enjoy, hopefully it brings the best out of me, if I continue to bowl like that that would be good.”I thought we bowled quite well in the West Indies as a group, Nathan Lyon included. If we can do something like that in these three Tests and build pressure on them, keeping building those dots up, the wickets will come.”

The last time Somerset lost a Championship match at Taunton, the ground rang to raucous Lancastrian celebrations. This time it was deserted as Middlesex unexpectedly escaped the showers to pull off a three-day victory

David Hopps at Taunton17-May-2013
ScorecardTim Murtagh took 10 for 77 in the match•Middlesex CCC

The last time Somerset lost a Championship match at Taunton, the ground – not to mention the town centre hostelries – rang to raucous Lancastrian celebrations as the Red Rose celebrated their first outright title for 77 years. This time the ground was deserted as Middlesex unexpectedly escaped the showers to pull off a three-day victory after 7pm. But empty ground or not, 20 months later, the town might just have played host to another Championship winner.Middlesex went top, ahead of Durham, by virtue of this victory and with a third of the season gone the table is beginning to take an intriguing shape. Nobody looks more serious contenders than Middlesex. Durham are unexpected leaders, Warwickshire’s innings defeat against Yorkshire raised many questions about their ability to defend their title, and Somerset, so often nearly-men, will be grateful just to stabilise their season after this nine-wicket defeat.Dave Nosworthy, Somerset’s director of cricket, is still awaiting his first win after five matches. After eight weeks, he will be wondering whether the job is bigger than he realised. It was never going to be a matter of ticking things along; it was a matter of rebuilding with very few players clamouring for recognition in the 2nd XI.”Middlesex played very well and outplayed us,” he said. “That is two games in a row where we haven’t pitched and we will have to reassess things. Yorkshire was disappointing and now this, but sometimes the biggest punch comes from the back foot and we’ll see what sort of characters we’ve got. The individuals need to pinpoint themselves.”We haven’t played terrible cricket but after five games we should have won two of them and that lingers in the back of the mind.”Middlesex look to be quite a strong outfit. They look a very balanced and a settled side and playing some quality cricket. At the start of the season I don’t think you could say who was going to win the thing – it was an open race – but they have shown some good early form.”Somerset could at least draw heart from the signing of Dean Elgar, who replaces his fellow South African batsman, Alviro Petersen, while he is on Champions Trophy duty. He is expected to make his debut against Yorkshire in their next home Championship fixture at the end of the month. Nosworthy called him a fighter – and he needs others to show similar resolve.The game was all but up for Somerset from the second afternoon when they collapsed to 35 for 5, still 160 behind. Peter Trego and Jos Buttler brought a veneer of respectability with a pair of 80s, Somerset adding another 143 to their overnight 112 for 5 as the clouds began to build.This was not a game when Tim Murtagh could be kept out of the picture for long. He had Trego caught at short midwicket and later he rounded up the Somerset innings by having Steve Kirby lbw to the first over with the second new ball to finish with match figures of 10 for 77 – the third 10-wicket haul of his Championship career.The resistance meant most for Buttler, whose chequered Championship career has been strewn with careless dismissals, but who not for the first time this season showed a growing inclination to play in a more considered fashion and who bedded down dutifully to make 85 in nearly four-and-a-half hours.Perhaps this innings, even in defeat, will one day be seen as a breakthrough in the longer format. He is such an innovative and exciting one-day player that one wonders if he can ever really enjoy playing in such a restrained fashion, but he is beginning to broaden his range.Beneath the helmet one imagined that he might have the baleful expression of a captured antelope pining for the great outdoors. Somerset will hope that his discipline was proof of his gathering maturity because they need all the talent at their disposal to rescue a disappointing start to the season.The longest delay on an afternoon of heavy showers ripped 35 overs from the day. There was a time when it seemed inevitable that Middlesex would be back tomorrow, but the umpires’ determination to stick around proved shrewd. There were a few wet areas in front of the Ondaatje Pavilion and when Trego slipped with 17 runs needed, it was enough for the captain, Marcus Trescothick, to have a word and the umpires to be forced into a confab.The extra half-hour was claimed at 39 for 0 with Middlesex 32 short and a comfortable rate of four an over ahead of them. But there was enough in the pitch for Somerset to take a prize scalp or two and Jamie Overton bowled Chris Rogers in the first over of overtime. Rogers has always been one of the doughtiest batsman on the circuit, but since his selection for Australia’s Ashes tour, his wicket has become a collector’s item; it was another happy moment in Overton’s eye-catching season.

Andrew Strauss dropped three catches and scored just 2 as Michael Lumb’s 162 put Nottinghamshire in charge

Jon Culley at Trent Bridge10-May-2012
ScorecardMichael Lumb made his second century for Nottinghamshire since joining over the winter•Getty Images

When a fellow scores 162 it seems ridiculous to focus on the guy who makes only 2 but, on this occasion, it is unavoidable, given that their fortunes managed to intertwine. Michael Lumb made 162, Andrew Strauss 2.Needless to say, it is a score the England captain hoped he might exceed, especially after what had happened earlier. He owed his side a few runs, having dropped Lumb twice in two balls – on 95 and 99, both times off the medium pace of Neil Dexter – and put down Steven Mullaney, who made 61, on 34.Strauss’s latest brief encounter with county bowlers came at the end of a long day for Middlesex, who had watched Nottinghamshire put their own patchy batting form behind them to total 423, claiming maximum batting points after managing only one in total from their five previous matches.At the heart of this, clearly, was Lumb, who probably had a month’s worth of good fortune in one go after Middlesex revealed ways not to get him out that were not limited to Strauss’s error-prone day at first slip.The only consolation for Strauss, albeit a hollow one, was that he was not the sole guilty party. Taking catches at slip is always relatively difficult; holding steeplers at mid-on is meat and drink, yet Tim Murtagh dropped an absolute sitter there off Ollie Rayner, the tall off-spinner, when Lumb had made 86, just over half his final tally.Murtagh’s mistake, therefore, was the costlier, allowing Lumb the opportunity for another 76 runs. But with 27 added for his Mullaney mishap, when Rayner was again the man inclined to emit a shriek of frustration, Strauss trumped him with 94.He did hold on to a couple, it should be said. But, all in all, Strauss would not, you imagine, have been in the best frame of mind to face Stuart Broad under the Trent Bridge floodlights, without which he probably would not have made it beyond the indoor nets, such was the dark gloom cast by a leaden sky.Strauss has his own personal cloud, in any event. Yet it was not Broad who dealt another blow to his quest for runs, but Harry Gurney, a left-arm seamer he had never before encountered.Gurney, who followed James Taylor in moving from Leicestershire to Nottinghamshire during the winter, was signed primarily with one-day cricket in mind but made a good impression after filling in for Andre Adams against Somerset last month and is keeping the more experienced Luke Fletcher out of the team in this match.Quicker than Strauss might have expected, Gurney troubled the England captain more than Broad had in his opening over and claimed his wicket with the first ball of his second, drawing the left-hander to fence at one outside off stump and give Chris Read a low catch.Strauss will not need reminding that he has only one Test century in his last 50 innings, so often has that statistic been repeated. The other one he will be disappointed with is 57 runs from his four supposedly recuperative innings for Middlesex.Gurney did not add a second wicket but Andre Adams weighed in with two, bringing his tally for the season to 30, and Middlesex have some way to go even to reach the follow-on target of 274.Lumb might also have been stumped, off Rayner on 148, but given that he batted for six and a half hours and hit 23 boundaries, some handsome strokes among them, it would be churlish, really, to suggest he was lucky. This was his second century for Nottinghamshire, whom he joined from Hampshire in the winter, and will confirm his liking for Trent Bridge, which was the backdrop to his career-best 219 in 2009.His partnership with Alex Hales for the second wicket was worth 150 and he helped Riki Wessels put on a further 83 for the third. Lumb and Mullaney then added 95 for the fourth before Murtagh, at mid-off, belatedly put right his earlier mistake.Mullaney enjoyed himself hugely, achieving the not inconsiderable feat of hooking Gareth Berg over the tall Bridgford Road stand for six. His 60 off 95 balls, supplemented by some enthusiastic late-order biffing, notably from Adams, took Nottinghamshire past 400 in the first innings for the first time at Trent Bridge since last July.Steven Finn, the other Middlesex player with England on his mind, ended with four wickets but struggled for line and rhythm and conceded 14 boundaries. Then again, he is only 22 and his days under a cloud can be more readily excused.