We are absolutely adamant that England cannot possibly withstand public and media appetite for change in the wake of the Ashes drubbing. (Does 4-1 actually qualify as a drubbing given the three previous scorelines Down Under were all worse than that?) One way or another, rightly or wrongly, action must be seen to be taken and if the captain, coach and managing director of men’s cricket are all keeping their jobs then other heads will have to roll instead – players’ heads.

This is the way it has to work. If people want skulls and you explain that, “actually, sorry, no skulls – we’re just going to do things slightly differently instead,” then you absolutely cannot just carry on much as you were doing previously. England have to demonstrate how they’ve changed. They have to put forward clear, visible differences.

In short, there still have to be skulls.

“We’ve overvalued loyalty and overvalued having a settled team” 

That’s what Rob Key apparently concluded recently.

“We thought what we wanted to do is make sure we have a team that is settled out there. But what that does is it creates an environment where there’s not enough consequence. We need to be more ruthless with our selection.”

It’s time to unsettle everyone with disloyalty, basically. So who’s in the firing line?

Zak Crawley – OUT

Honestly? We think he’s out. After all these years of Teflon mediocrity, there are visible holes in Crawley’s protective coating now. If the loyalty threshold truly has moved then he surely now finds himself on the wrong side of it as an exemplary victim.

Unless he makes a million runs in the early weeks of the County Championship – which unfortunately for him is a thing he’s never before been able to do – then Crawley will surely become a warning to all of the England players that actually, you know what, we’ve decided there should be consequences.

This would be quite a peculiar development given the batter’s been such a fixture of the side and it could also prove terminal for his Test career. While he is still young for a Test opener – during the Ashes we pointed out that Mike Carberry, Nick Compton, Mark Stoneman, Jason Roy, Rory Burns and Alex Lees were all older than he is now when they made their debuts – it’s quite hard to go back on dropping someone who has already amassed such a sizeable body of so-so work.

See, told you Zak Crawley was the very best batter in the whole wide world

Crawley has been given a great many opportunities to prove himself – enough, you could argue, that he has already done precisely that. For years and years, he has generally done just enough to maintain the idea of Zak Crawley, without ever really managing to move things beyond that.

Crawley’s upcoming task is therefore not really to prove himself, but to disprove himself.

Ollie Pope – STILL OUT

Technically, Pope’s been dropped already, which is just one of several reasons why it’s probably a little unfair that he’s so often lumped in with Crawley as a batter who deserves to face sterner judgement.

While the two men have played the same number of Tests and roughly the same number of first-class matches, Pope has hit nine Test hundreds to Crawley’s five and also averages almost 50 per cent more than him in first-class cricket with twice as many three-figure scores.

He is, in short, a far better batter and could probably do okay if someone could prevent him falling victim to some of the more broad brush team messaging that doesn’t really benefit him.

Jamie Smith – NOT OUT

Jamie Smith played the worst shot of the winter, but the brain of many an otherwise excellent cricketer has momentarily melted in the Ashes environment before now and Smith had also been shouldering a sizeable workload in the field.

The 5 best/worst aspects of Jamie Smith’s gruesome and deplorable dismissal to Marnus Labuschagne’s abject filth

His first Ashes went wrong, but that alone shouldn’t see him ejected from the side, should it? He might need to find a bit of early season form, but England want to do well in five-Test series and in the one before the Ashes, less than a year ago, Smith made 184 not out against India as well as several other useful scores.

Will Jacks – OUT

If anything Will Jacks’ fantastic T20 World Cup performances served only to better highlight the utter pointlessness of his presence in England’s Test team.

Did you see… Steve Smith backed into a corner by the legendary finger spin of Will Jacks?

With the red ball, he is not a spin bowler, but a cricketer who sometimes bowls spin. This would be a lot more useful to England if he also happened to be a Test batter, but unfortunately, as things stand, he is not.

In the longest format, Jacks is a buyer of wickets and a scorer of meaningless consolation runs. England need more than that.

Brydon Carse – PROBABLY NOT OUT

Brydon Carse had a terrible Ashes in which he was the second-highest wicket-taker. This combination of facts is still hard to make sense of. We feel we summed up the essence of his experience in the article linked below.

Someone tell Brydon Carse he’s getting tonked –  we’re not sure he’s noticed

If England can avoid giving him the new ball, we’d guess Carse is probably still in the team? Isn’t he? Maybe not. We have no idea.

Matt Potts – A BIT FURTHER OUT

Matt Potts is in that age-old position where he shouldn’t really be judged too harshly based on one hospital pass appearance at the arse end of a disastrous Ashes tour, but he also unavoidably will be.

England had worked their way down the pecking order when Potts played in Sydney but you feel they’ll have to get a little bit lower still before he gets to play again.

Jofra Archer and Mark Wood – NOT OUT, BUT ARE THEY EVER TRULY IN ANYWAY?

It seems faintly insane to suggest Jofra Archer or Mark Wood might be members of England’s first XI given the availability disclaimers inherent in such an assertion. In that respect, it’s business as usual really.

Wood is currently recovering from what he was told was “an explosion” in his knee during the Ashes. Archer is in the equally familiar position where he’s fit enough to bowl four overs but no-one seems much inclined to engineer a situation where he might prove himself capable of bowling a greater number.

Likely openings

So what are we looking for then? One opener and one spinner, plus maybe an opening bowler if they conclude that a Gus Atkinson, Brydon Carse and Josh Tongue attack is a bit too first-changey?

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“In terms of skulls… how many skulls? Do you think?”

There are plenty of England fans and a good few in the cricket press who have a Tom Wambsgans-esque appetite for skulls right now.

England lost the Ashes and no-one has been sacked. It’s an unusual scenario. 

The boring story without skulls

The more strategic layers of power at the ECB have tried to explain their reasoning this week. Chief executive Richard Gould said that Rob Key, Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes would all carry on but would do things slightly differently.

Well would you spend £1m to not have Brendon McCullum as England coach?

“We have seen that there are ways that we can do things in a different way and ensure that we’ve got more options,” he told Cricinfo. “We don’t want to be painted into a corner by being perceived that we can only do things in one particular way… There is the belief that we can adapt, and I think we’ve seen good evidence of that and we will continue to drive that forward.”

Visceral stuff, isn’t it? Who couldn’t get enthused about corporate strategy, reading abstract assertions like that? 

Key then came out to say that they’re going to change a few of the things that everyone has been telling them they need to change. 

The problem is that if you’re upset about something – as England fans are with the last Ashes – then reading that England broadly agree with some criticism and are going to make changes doesn’t really hit the spot the way the more traditional therapeutic phlebotomy does.

It also makes for quite boring articles and videos. Other than entertaining yourself with Status Quo references, it’s hard to get much out of grand announcements that nobody’s being dismissed. (Shockin’ All Over The World, In the Barmy Army Now, etc.)

Rip it up and start again hasn’t worked previously, but it’s undeniably clearer action than whatever this is. To hell with your learnings and evolution as leaders. Bring us some skulls!

The Frittening

So no skulls and nothing much to chew on. What we’re therefore left with is The Boneless – a large, constantly shifting blob of pale organic matter that induces a state of madness in all who gaze upon it. (Make your Rob Key jokes… NOW!)

If, like us, your are feeling a bit untethered from the game right now, the problem, perhaps, is not what is and isn’t being done in response to a crap Ashes, but that there’s not yet anything better to talk about. 

What we could do really with at this point is some cricket. You know, cricketers playing cricket against other cricketers – that thing. 

The County Championship starts next week.

Why didn’t Liam Livingstone get the message that “Who cares?” wins?

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Top level cricketers really care about what they do. Caring is the basic fuel for their careers. But whether it’s an Iranian gasfield, a Tesla Cybertruck battery or merely the giving of shits, sometimes fuel can also finish you. Part of an international coach’s job is therefore to protect players from self combustion. It’s a tricky one to pull off though because the flipside is you’re going to look massively uncaring whenever things go awry.

Back to the hotel!

Whatever language Brendon McCullum and his coaching team are speaking, Liam Livingstone isn’t fluent in it.

“I was just trying to ask for help to get better,” lamented Livingstone this week. “What do they see that isn’t going right?” 

A man looking for medicinal specifics, Livingstone was apparently instead prescribed the kind of positive visualisation favoured by Christopher Moltisanti.

“You’d hit a couple out of the middle of the bat and they’d go, ‘Great, you found it. Let’s go back to the hotel’,” he revealed. “It wasn’t the most enjoyable experience for me.”

Who cares?

If the England cricket teams run by McCullum have a coherent philosophy running through them, it hangs off the notion that most international cricketers have more to gain from caring a little less about their cricket than from caring a little more. 

Why Stokes and McCullum aren’t worried about bad shots, only bad innings

We’d broadly agree with that. It’s such a single-minded professional age nowadays that a promising teenager will be following a plan, tailoring their diet, tracking their sleep and heart rate variability, and just generally investing everything they possibly can to fulfil a dream that was around long before biomechanics, Whoop bands and watching YouTube videos on how to bowl the knuckleball.

In England at least, “the system” has bled out way beyond the top level England teams. The wider sport has been reshaped by single-minded competitive professionalism. One way or another, all these guys have bet significant proportions of their lives on succeeding as top level cricketers. This means that even when you factor in some of the more whimsical selections, nobody has fluked their way into the national side without seriously giving a shit. 

Shit-giving provides impetus and focus to a career, but on the international stage it often becomes stifling. Those big matches are when players are most brutally judged – and they, of all people, know that.

“This is what it’s all been leading up to,” they tell themselves. “This, right now. Your whole life hinges on what happens next. Get it right.”

We all know that a little anxiety sharpens, but too much short circuits synapses and disrupts the unconscious movements that define these people. 

There’s a fragility in that, but it also means that if a coach can knock the “caring” back a few a notches, they’ll usually move the player closer to their psychological performance sweet spot.

It’s easier said than done though. You absolutely cannot just bark, “Care less!” and expect that to have any impact.

Messaging

Captains and coaches often talk about ‘the messaging’. They have an idea about how the game should be played and their job is to endlessly explain this so that everyone understands what they’re after. 

The problem is when you’re communicating sometimes counterintuitive ideas to a large group of people, some of them will be more receptive than others. Some will be in a position where what you’re saying makes immediate sense; others will be sceptical or won’t really grasp what you’re driving at. There might also be one or two who are honestly kind of thick. (These people probably aren’t crippling themselves with overthinking, so maybe just send them to another room and keep them busy with some Lego.)

You may also find yourself advocating broadly useful approaches that are in fact massively unhelpful for a small minority

Ollie Pope, for example.

“I was probably just too eager to put the bowlers under pressure without necessarily realising it at the time,” he told Cricinfo this week, when reflecting on his crap Ashes.

Group messaging is a blunt tool. We’re all individuals. (Except for that one guy.)

Private messaging

Even dealing with players one on one, if you’re trying to communicate an idea like, “Caring a great deal has fulfilled your dreams and got you into the England team, but actually at this point we’d now like you to start caring a fair bit less,” then you may have to work quite hard to get your audience on board. 

Players who would surely benefit might not actually agree and even if they do, changing ingrained thinking and behaviour isn’t as simple as just telling someone to do something and then them going away and putting into practice. 

Have you ever tried telling yourself to relax? How did you get on with that?

What Jonny Bairstow’s Kingsman church scene innings tells us about the ‘throwing off the shackles’ cliché

We only have Livingstone’s account of the support he was given by England, but it’s embarrassing for the coaching setup if his version of events is even halfway true.

“I was asking for help and pretty much all I got was that I care too much and I need to chill out a little bit, and everything will take care of itself,” he claims.

Has anyone in the history of the world ever responded to an instruction to “chill out” by actually chilling out? If anything the phrase “chill out” is a good way to identify those in need of far more nuanced attention. 

You can’t just tell someone to chill out and care less and expect them to actually do it. You can’t tell a batter short on confidence that they’ve middled a couple so now everything’s fine. Naming psychological destinations is not even half a job. You need to persuade people to set off for these places and also help them navigate their way there.

The message a coach tries to put out is rarely the exact message that’s received by the player. That’s the nature of communication. You have to acknowledge that fact, gauge the player’s response and then repeatedly refine what you’re saying. We’re confident England did try a few more things with Livingstone than what he has described, but we’re equally sure that if he was left feeling how he so clearly does then none of those messages meaningfully landed.

A given coaching method is always going to work way better with some players than others, but there’s a risk of a uniquely bad look with this particular one. You need to make a significant extra effort to support the non-responders when your central message is, “Hey, let’s try not to give a shit.”

Why Liam Livingstone’s huge six v Pakistan was just about the most satisfying shot ever played and also why it was not

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Send your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Please consider putting the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself. We like those ones.

Doyen of King Cricket reader submissions, Ged Ladd, writes…

Daisy and I chose to take a short, restful winter break in Sri Lanka in early January 2026. Naturally, I took my copy of The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments with me. The photo below highlights a lagoony backdrop behind the book, as seen from poolside. Someone has to do this sort of vacationing; we hadn’t done so for many years.

One of my first dips (into the book, not the swimming pool) found an amusing item on 50 years of women’s Test cricket, in which the authors suggest that Avril Starling was a seminal example of a cricketer being named by a social media name generator: the first name being your favourite female, Canadian pop singer; the surname being the next bird that you see.

Almost on cue, as I smiled out loud in Daisy’s direction with that idea, an ostentation of peacocks showed up on the roof of the next-door villa. Alanis Peacock must be a top rate, all-round cricketer.

Next up, a small flock of bulbuls, singing beautifully. Shania Bulbul would surely be a wicketkeeper, full of chirp behind the stumps.

The bulbuls were soon chased away by a murder of crows. Sheryl Crow? Nah, she’s not Canadian. Let’s try Nelly Crow – a pinch-hitting batter at the top of the order. “Give it some welly, Nelly”.

In truth, I found this whimsy more entertaining than Daisy did. Girls, eh?

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The ECB briefly banned all players with England central contracts from speaking to the media this week. What did they think would happen? Did they honestly expect one of them to say something interesting?

The ban’s since been lifted – probably on the basis that its mere existence made the ECB look mental – but how did it come about in the first place?

The ECB is still conducting a formal review into what went wrong in the Ashes. England’s managing director of men’s cricket, Rob Key, and ECB chief executive, Richard Gould, will then report their findings to the media in a week or so. (Presumably, “We were England and we were in Australia,” or words to that effect.)

The Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda Ashes – the Choose Your Own Adventure book with no winning page

The i’s Chris Stocks reports that because they haven’t told anyone what they’ve concluded yet and Brendon McCullum’s future is still therefore theoretically in the balance, they’re nervy one of the players might say something awkward in the interim. The ECB consequently sent out a memo to counties telling them to pull all media interviews with players who were in Australia over the winter.

They didn’t want to risk anyone saying anything outlandish or headline worthy, basically. To which we’d counter: chance would be a fine thing.

Well would you spend £1m to not have Brendon McCullum as England coach?

Kudos to the UK cricket press corps for their impressive annual blood-wringing efforts when presented with the ECB-contracted stones that are made available to them at this time of year. It is a thankless task and our journalists do all that could be expected of them and more. The England players do not, in the main, want to be at county press days and they generally live in mortal fear of saying anything too interesting even at the best of times. Given how the main event went this winter, they’ll be doubly on their guard right now.

Is anyone seriously worried that an irate Shoaib Bashir might grab a microphone and start vomiting endless scoops? Is Josh Tongue really likely to give us a blow-by-blow account of a fun-packed night out in New Zealand when questioned about “off-field incidents”.

In the unlikely event one of them can’t bring the appropriate corporate-approved platitude to mind and accidentally responds to a given question by saying something interesting… good. At least there’s some vitality in that. Better a bit of colour than what the ECB feels comfortable with, which amounts to nothing more than the carefully curated laminated falseness of social influencer banality.

Yes, the players are representatives and role models, but we’re not talking 1970s rock band tales of depravity here. We’re talking someone maybe saying slightly the wrong thing or someone possibly somewhat disagreeing about some aspect of what took place? These kinds of things are not controversies in any meaningful sense. That’s the world; that’s life. Robust disagreements about how cricketers should and shouldn’t set about trying to win matches are topics worthy of conversation. That is almost literally everything we ever talk about as fans. ‘Does this thing help England win?’

We as a public are willing to pay the price of a few rough edges if that’s what it costs to see beyond the surface, right? A media brouhaha can be awkward to deal with as a governing body, but it’s also part of marketing the game. If everyone’s “on the same page” what is there really left to say? That they were better than us on the day? That we didn’t execute our skills? That we go again in a couple of days’ time?

Good luck getting a return on that crap in an attention economy where your audience can read about whatever they want, whenever they want.

No, be braver. Allow friction. Let team-mates become distinguishable through their differences.

At the absolute bare minimum, give your most significant employees permission to actually open their mouths.

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Under Matthew Mott, England were very bad at the 2023 World Cup, then made the semi-finals of the 2024 T20 World Cup, where they lost to India. Under Brendon McCullum, they were very bad at the 2025 Champions Trophy, then made the semi-finals of the 2026 T20 World Cup, where they lost to India. Mott was sacked, but England can accept a lower level of performance now they’ve committed to paying his replacement so much.

What were Brendon McCullum’s chances of survival ahead of the T20 World Cup? One way or another, the Ashes always elicits a media brouhaha. (Don’t you just love a brouhaha? We should all have more of them. Go and seek out some brouhahas. Start one if you need to. Enjoy yourself!) This year’s post-Ashes media brouhaha had a fair bit of focus on the coach, what with his having inadvertently lent his (nick)name to an attention-seeking style of play that didn’t ultimately warrant that attention when deployed Down Under.

Know your Bazball – an illustrated guide

In white ball cricket, the Champions Trophy, where England forgot to win any matches, hadn’t really added much lustre to his credentials either. This T20 World Cup therefore shaped up as… hmm, how to word this. Let’s say it shaped up as a trip where his job could be lost.

Pricing the pass mark

Winning the tournament would certainly have secured McCullum’s position and losing the final probably would have done so too. Failing to make the knock-out rounds would however have made for some interesting discussions about a man with a long and financially lucrative contract.

A semi-final defeat was entirely acceptable once you’ve priced the alternative opinion.

It would cost at least £1m to buy Brendon McCullum out of his current contract. Would you spend £1m on not having Brendon McCullum as England coach? Sometimes you do have to pay when you want to get rid of something, but that’s quite an outlay. It’s a lot more than the cost of hiring an eight yard skip for a few days.

We’d guess that for £1m, an awful lot of England fans can live with a coach who did after all deliver a host of unforgettable Test matches earlier in his tenure and just got England to a semi-final in which they performed entirely creditably.

Okay, they conceded a few runs in that match, but that can happen in T20 cricket. What you want in that situation is a team that can take a punch and throw one back and the fact is England stayed in contention for most of a 254-run chase.

The guy who kept them in it with a century was also Jacob Bethell, a man McCullum has taken a brave and conspicuous punt on; a man who hadn’t made a professional hundred until he made one for England; hadn’t made a first-class hundred until he made one in the Ashes; and hadn’t made a T20 hundred until he made this one in a World Cup semi-final.

Look at this very silly hundreds column, the like of which you will most likely never see again.

More broadly, there was little to object to in the way the World Cup team was put together. Really, the only consistent weakness was the openers, and they were the most obvious picks of all just a few short weeks ago, so no legitimate quibbles there.

Yes, there’s bubbling discontent with the captain in some quarters, but even those people must accept that Harry Brook is a better option than the limited overs captain McCullum inherited – which is also why the woeful Champions Trophy performance can be downgraded in significance.

In conclusion

Is Brendon McCullum the greatest cricket coach in history; a man who’s reinventing the entire game after striking a hitherto unimagined seam of bottomless psychological gold? No, he is not.

Is it worth paying a seven-figure sum to have him coach some other team so that you can instead recruit… who exactly? Justin Langer?

On balance, we’d say not.

Be a great citizen of the realm…

All right you primitive screwheads, listen up. We honestly aren’t all that interested in T20 cricketers who aren’t Jasprit Bumrah any more.

It’s a cliché to call bowlers cannon fodder in this format, but we’ve reached a point now where really it’s the batters who are the unchanging nondescript wallpaper. We found them beautiful once, but they got real ugly. They’re so samey, so relentless and so numerous. One after another they come, like The Army of Darkness; scores of armoured skeletons, every last one utterly bent on destruction.

Thankfully, we also have an Ash in the form of Jasprit Bumrah, a man with a good arm and an unmatched ability to dispatch these monsters in endlessly imaginative ways.

They see him standing there at the end of his mark. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” they think.

On the face of it, India’s batters shaped their 2026 T20 World Cup win, making 253 in the semi-final and 255 in the final. But for us at least, the more of them that contributed, the less interesting it became.

This feeling can happen in a T20 World Cup. Short package highlights in particular can feel a bit AI-generated: all bat swishes and shots of the sky, accompanied by commentators saying insightful things like ‘wow’. They’re broad brush pastiches shorn of distinguishing detail.

It’s numbing. Two England batters scored hundreds in this tournament; two India batters careered along at basically two runs a ball; Finn Allen did both. Some batter or other is always achieving something.

We admire it in a slightly detached way. The way previously low percentage shots have been transformed into not merely viable options but reliable ones has been revolutionary, but these are no longer unique skills. Not everyone can do these things, but an awful lot of people can – too many for it to remain entirely interesting, if we’re honest.

Bumrah, however, is still resolutely ploughing his own furrow in both stylistic and statistical returns. Just what does he think he’s doing? Everything he tries seems to work. On Sunday, he bowled Jimmy Neesham and Matt Henry with back-to-back full tosses.

In this tournament, Bumrah took 14 wickets in eight games and conceded barely a run a ball.

In a semi-final in which only one other bowler went at under 10 an over (Hardik Pandya, who went at 9.50), Bumrah condeded 8.25, and while his ludicrous return of 4-15 off four overs in the final largely only cemented a result that was already odds-on, the mere notion that there were Bumrah overs still to come had already twisted much of New Zealand’s earlier batting.

Even when he’s not doing anything, he’s the most interesting thing about a T20 game.

Hail to the king, baby.

Lord Megachief of Gold 2024 – Jasprit Bumrah

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We feel like we’ve read this sentence, or one very much like it, almost daily for the last few weeks. If you hadn’t noticed, Jos Buttler hasn’t been scoring too many runs. He’s apparently tried to correct this with more and more practice. Is this the right approach?

If you’d told us that Ahmedabad would come to routinely host world cup finals when we visited the city back in 2002, we’d have done our level best to apply the tone and emotion of the Arrested Development “Her?” to its many syllables.

Ahmedabad? Her? We all know the factors that have driven this development, but it’s nevertheless peculiar that this is where the sport now finds itself. Once again, the big match this weekend will take place at The Enormodome of Rampant Egotism.

It would be very odd if India weren’t there, but it is possible. England could theoretically win today’s semi-final against them.

What chance of that?

If people were sure of one thing before this tournament, it was that England’s opening partnership would have to perform well if they were to make it to the latter stages.

So productive had Salted Buttler been, it was billed as “an unbeatable opening recipe” in one Cricinfo headline, but they have since delivered half a slice of a small fraction of bugger all. And yet England are still in a semi-final. If nothing else, there’s encouragement in how much room for improvement there is in this area.

Jos Buttler’s been the bigger liability with scores of 21, 3, 3, 7, 2 and 0. Last week Vish reported that he had been putting in extra net hours against a combination of his own bowlers, local spinners, dog sticks and wet tennis balls. Do the results speak for themselves?

Did you see… Jos Buttler’s biggest six?

Whenever we hear of an out-of-form batter working extra hard, we can’t help but think of the philosophy of David Gower. Whenever Gower was out of form, the one thing he absolutely would not do was go to the nets and practise.

‘Why groove bad habits?’ he reasoned. Gower’s approach to dealing with a rut was to go and do anything at all that wasn’t cricket and do it for long enough that his body forgot how to play badly.

This is magnificently contrary to most people’s impulses – in particular those of his captains and coaches – but it often worked. Conversely, when he was in form, he would look to practise more to better embed that way of playing.

We can’t help but admire Gower’s conviction and independence of thought, but Buttler is no young ingenu, unquestioningly doing what’s expected of him. He is the best limited overs batter England have ever had; a self-made player who has devised his own way of working. Other form correction methods are available.

This week Buttler has apparently returned to his ‘no feet’ drill, where he tries to bat while utterly rooted to the spot. This seems an unusual move from a man whose footwork has completely gone AWOL, but he reckons it helps his balance and encourages him to play the ball later.

Maybe that’ll help. Or maybe he should have avoided the nets altogether. Who knows? But you can’t do both.

Far more often than not, Buttler has known how to get the best out of himself. The question here is whether it’s one of those rare occasions where he’s got things wrong, like when he philosophised himself down the plughole in Test cricket.

Has he made a huge mistake?

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Bosch is a simply terrible name for a T20 bowler. It does nothing but invite unflattering commentary exclamations. Today, in the T20 World Cup final against New Zealand, South Africa’s Corbin suffered an over that began 6, 4, 4, 4, 4… BOSH!

Finn Allen was the batter responsible and he actually improved on this sequence later on when he jansenned gangly left-armer Marco for 4, 4, 6, 6 and 4, before sadly running out of cricket match in which to inflict further damage.

Janssen himself had neeshammed, fergusonned, henried and ravindrad a bunch of sixes when he’d batted, but while the match finished 10-10 on ‘maximums’, New Zealand easily won the four-hitting competition 19-9.

New Zealand are scheduled to lose the final to India at the Narendra Modi Stadium on Sunday. But you never know. There’s another semi-final before that, for one thing. Not everything in life pans out how it’s supposed to.

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England T20 captain Harry Brook simply cannot do anything normally. If it isn’t batting, it’s pre-match hydration, and if it isn’t pre-match hydration, it’s pterodactyl wrangling.

We’ve previously reported on Babar Azam’s hugely impressive competence as a pterodactyl wrangler.

Here he is beckoning one down while Moeen Ali watches the beast descend.

Look how calm Babar is – almost detached. Note how calm Moeen is also: a clear indication of his complete confidence in Babar’s ability.

Most feel the Pakistani has mastered all the necessary skills for this respected but niche pursuit. Just witness this demonstration of ‘the claw’ technique and tell us he couldn’t have turned pro.

It always seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do. But here comes Harry Brook to do things differently once again.

We’d always assumed that the central premise of pterodactyl wrangling was to coax the creature down and ‘land’ it on the turf.

That’s the whole point, right? That’s what it’s all about? Everybody knows that. You’d have to be embarrassingly ignorant to be unaware that wrangling is all about getting a pterodactyl from A to B and that A is the air and B is the ground.

It therefore never once crossed our mind that while executing a descent, a wrangler might see fit to extend his arm as an inviting perch, like a falconer.

No gauntlet or anything. Think of the talons! Madness.

As ever, Brook has elicited contrasting emotions with this innovation. Mike Atherton is clearly amused by his ambition, while Mitchell Santner looks tense and concerned at how events might unfold.

Richie Richardson’s response is the easiest to interpret however. If ever a look said, “Just what do you think you’re doing?” it’s this one.

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