Category: England Cricket

• Fast bowler will not play for Durham this season

• October tour of New Zealand could be earliest return date

Mark Wood is set to miss the entire home summer, with England deciding to take an ultra-cautious route with the fast bowler they deem central to their Ashes hopes this winter.

Wood, 35, underwent knee surgery in March and was initially targeting a return for the fifth Test against India in late July. Despite bowling in the intervals during that series, this target was then pushed back to a possible late season outing for Durham in the County Championship.

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Crushing victory against South Africa showed 50-over team’s potential but struggle for series wins continues

There might have been a few sore heads in England’s squad on the morning after their epic, extraordinary victory against South Africa in Southampton, if only because of dizziness. On Sunday, after all, what had been down was suddenly up, what was bad became good, what was strong appeared feeble. And so the series ended having only really proved that what fails today can flourish tomorrow, which does not necessarily help with planning for the day after that.

Clearly England have a team with great potential, but across the week it only really shone when their opponents had misplaced both motivation and quality. Brendon McCullum, the England head coach, described “an oscillating series” that concluded with “an incredible blueprint of what this team’s capable of achieving if we can get it right”, but if it is hard to argue that scoring 414 before routing your opponents for 72 is anything less than ideal it is also not hugely repeatable.

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• England head coach hails ‘box office’ Jofra Archer

• Stokes and Wood ‘progressing well’ after injuries

Brendon McCullum has ramped up the Ashes hype ahead of this winter’s trip to Australia, describing England’s pursuit of the urn they last won a decade ago – and have brought back from the Antipodes just once since 1986-87 – as “the biggest series of all of our lives”.

England returned to international action last week for the first time since a thrilling five-Test series against India concluded in early August, and though they lost to South Africa over three one-day internationals that run ended with a historic, one-sided victory in Southampton on Sunday. A spellbinding performance in that game from Jofra Archer, who took four wickets for 18 runs – “There was an ‘ooh’ or an ‘aah’ every single over,” he said afterwards – set imaginations racing with thoughts of what the injury-prone seamer might achieve in more high-profile assignments to come. The first Ashes Test starts in Perth on 21 November.

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• Updates from the match in Southampton (11am BST)

• You can email Tanya | Report: South Africa seal series

An interesting chat between Nick Knight, Shaun Pollock and Mike Atherton. Athers says that England are trying to bring the ODI and Test teams together whilst treating the T20 side as a different entity. That’s sensible on paper, he says, but brings a “real challenge because of the amount and volume of Test cricket England play. They are going to have to be quite strong about where their players play franchise cricket.”

South Africa: Aiden Markram, Ryan Rickelton (wk), Temba Bavuma (capt),Matthew Breetzke, Tristan Stubbs, Dewald Brevis, Wiann Mulder, Corbin Bosch, Keshav Maharaj, Codi Yusuf, Nandre Burger.

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Fast bowler’s surprise decision to miss Ashes is an endorsement of five-day game and its unforgiving nature

When Jamie Overton announced on Monday that he is taking an indefinite break from first-class cricket to focus on the white-ball formats, it caught the England management and supporters on the hop. A common reflex was to view it as the latest blow to Test cricket at large.

After all, Overton played in England’s most recent Test – the epic six-run defeat against India – and by all accounts was going to be selected among the pool of fast bowlers for the Ashes moonshot this winter. Aged 31, the chance to go on such a high profile tour is unlikely to come around again.

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Jimmy Anderson, Adil Rashid and West Indies’ Jediah Blades are among other bowlers to suffer notable early nightmares

On Tuesday the screen at Headingley was showing Sonny Baker’s bowling speed. They were impressive figures – 87, 86, 88mph – and you wonder if the bowler himself caught a glimpse. Probably not. Big numbers emblazoned in pixels probably felt like the runs he was leaking.

England’s newest one-day bowler bore the pummelling with good grace, even as South Africa’s Aiden Markram levered him for sixes behind square on the offside and over deep square leg in his second over. Happily, Baker is a phlegmatic sort, because the one record a box-fresh paceman doesn’t dream of achieving is his country’s worst ODI bowling figures on debut.

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All-rounder is back on form and would be an exciting addition to England’s squad, says Leicestershire’s director of cricket

As the Hundred fires into primary-coloured summer action, all free T-shirts and AI fan photos, the Spin has been putting her feet up, coffee in one hand, notebook in the other, chewing over the Championship season to date.

If the notebook has proved a bitter disappointment, scribbled with long-forgotten three for 67s, the ruminations have been fun. It’s been a season of surprises – Leicestershire! Lancashire! – and memorable moments, from Tom Banton’s 371 in the very first game to Ian Botham’s thunder and fury over Somerset’s field-of-onions pitch for the game against Durham.

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• England bowler ‘waiting to see extent of the damage’ first

• Recurrence a chance he’d be ‘willing to take’ to make tour

The England bowler Chris Woakes has not given up on playing in the Ashes this winter after he revealed rehabilitation rather than surgery on his dislocated shoulder is being considered.

Woakes produced an astonishing display of bravery in England’s six-run loss to India in the fifth Test of a thrilling series earlier this week when he decided to bat at No 11 with his arm in a sling after a dislocation of his left shoulder on day one of the match.

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• Shoulder tear likely to need seven weeks of rehab

• Ollie Pope will lead England while Jofra Archer is rested

Ben Stokes has been ruled out of the final Test match of England’s international summer with a grade-three muscle tear in his shoulder, sustained during the drawn fourth game against India at Old Trafford. Ollie Pope will captain the side in his absence as England seek to defend their 2-1 lead and complete a series victory.

Recovery from a muscle injury of such severity is estimated to take between six and 10 weeks, though England’s medical team have estimated Stokes’s likely recovery time at around seven weeks. England are due to arrive in Australia for the start of their Ashes preparations in just over 14 weeks, with their captain optimistic that he will have fully recovered in time for a potentially career-defining series.

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• Gambhir engages in angry exchange with groundman

• Fortis tells Gambhir: ‘You can’t tell us what to do’

The spicy spats that have increasingly been a feature of the action in the England-India Tests so far this summer spilled on to the training pitch on Tuesday when the tourists’ head coach, Gautam Gambhir, had a row with Surrey’s head groundsman as his team prepared for the latest clash at the Oval on Thursday.

Ben Stokes’ squad were enjoying a break, but with the series still to be decided in the final Test and India 2-1 down after their fightback at Old Trafford the visitors’ work in the nets was far from straightforward as tensions surfaced in angry exchanges between the pair at the centre of the dispute.

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Ben Stokes and his team got it wrong on graceless end to final day that showed their vulnerability and India’s unity

India spent a day with Manchester United’s squad before the fourth Test, only to then pull off the kind of collective defensive effort rarely seen at the other Old Trafford in recent seasons. But they were not alone in veering away from their pre‑match preparations.

Gilbert Enoka, the All Blacks adviser who made famous their “no dickheads” policy, did some work with England on the training days, only for them to act briefly like … well, let’s just say their adoption of something similar remains a work in progress.

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