Dom Sibley’s emergence at the top of England’s batting order has brought the old question of scoring rates back into focus
By James Wallace for Wisden
Cricket Monthly
One sort-of-quaint-but-largely-hollow response to the rampant charge of the human race towards mass-everything-ness has been to embrace the artisanal – the handpicked, the handcrafted, the handwoven. For the dopamine-demanding generation whose working week is all hustle and bustle, when the weekend lands they make sure to “‘grab” their coffee in a place where the bricks are self-consciously exposed, there’s a penny farthing strung up on the wall like a deposed dictator and the bloke lovingly grinding the beans looks like Wyatt Earp. Now, slow is desirable, slow is profitable, slow is cool. But not in cricket.
Wenceslasaire, spangladasha… shnamistoflopp’n − the Inuits are said to have 500 words for
SNOW. Cricket has almost as many for its own increasingly rare sight. In the modern game they are lesser spotted than the Yeti, and almost as abominable. Blockers. Limpets. Dawdlers. Plodders. The belligerent. The unbudgeable. The dull. The Stonewallers.