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Some things change, but other things don’t. It’s still pretty likely that England will be able to win the one Test match Ollie Robinson is capable of playing each series. Perhaps they should schedule more two-Test series. “It’s not often you get half a ball,” said Robinson after play yesterday. This is sort of correct in that they pretty much always come in pairs. He’s right that it’s an area where people don’t often do things by halves though. Perhaps this fractional moderation is a central pillar of Joe Root’s new strategy to persuade his men to become sensible adults. “Remember: half pints only now, lads.” This particular bisection was because Robinson and Josh Tongue could both lay claim to the ball after taking five Pakistan wickets apiece. We haven’t yet heard what method the groundstaff employed though. Apparently the surgical procedure only took five minutes. Speaking of surgery, it’s been reported that England’s first-choice all-rounder, Sam Curran, is out for the season with a groin issue. This means it’s halves for Root when it comes to his spin attack too. As we laid out in our article on this earlier in the month, two half-spinners (Root and Dan Lawrence) do not actually add up to a full one. They are in fact only marginally more use than two detached halves of cricket ball. This was no real issue on a damp day in Leeds in one of the Tests when Robinson was available – although even in those circumstances there was a brief period when Pakistan were about 90-2 when you started to think, “Okay, Joe, do you have half an idea what to do when this happens?” Fortunately, on this occasion, Tongue’s idiosyncratic method of bowling from a left-arm angle despite using his right-arm again proved not half bad. You may or may not have noticed that we don’t run ads on this website. That means that until AI labs are compelled by legislation1 to recompense writers for literally just stealing their work, King Cricket has only one source of funding: our Patreon campaign. Unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, we do not need to beg for tens of billions of dollars every single year simply to survive due to how laughably unprofitable we are and always will be. All we need to pay for is a bit of server space, various tangential hosting-related outgoings that we tend to forget about until they bill us, and as much thinking/writing time as we can get. Every pound, penny and paisa is greatly appreciated and put to meaningful use. Please take a look at the campaign and marvel at the breath-taking subscription benefits we offer. Try not to pass out when exposed to these bargainous thrills. - Ha! As if! ↩︎