Category: Cricket

Alex Carey didn’t have the gloves on during Australia’s Champions Trophy opener against England in Lahore, but that didn’t prevent him from grabbing an absolute blinder in the outfield.

Josh Inglis and Alex Carey have spent most of their ODI careers fighting over the same spot, but during Saturday’s Champions Trophy against England in Lahore, the duo combined for a match-winning partnership to steer Australia towards a tense five-wicket victory.

Opener Ryan Rickelton struck a maiden one-day international hundred as South Africa routed Afghanistan by 107 runs in the Champions Trophy in Karachi on Friday.

It has been 12 years since Australia played a match in an ICC men’s 50-over tournament without one of Mitchell Starc, Pat Cummins or Josh Hazlewood in the starting XI.

A captaincy in peril and an ideology in question.

Their attack has a distinctly Sheffield Shield flavour to it but the main thing in the two-times winners’ favour is the relative weakness of their group

For a long time, a strange situation continued in Australian cricket. Through a one-day World Cup in 2023, through a T20 World Cup in 2024, through a Test summer that sat between them, and through the lead-ups and warm-ups before all of the above, the same three fast bowlers showed up almost all of the time. Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Patrick Cummins, in aeternum.

Things don’t work that way. Fast bowling is a horrifically taxing art, and the mad operators who pursue it across any level of the game share a gruesome delight in cataloguing their lifetime’s injuries, discarding sneakers and peeling back socks and rolling up trouser legs to show you toes bent sideways or lurid half-moons of scars around ankles or knees. At the top level, fitness and availability are sporadic, and that’s before you come to the changes driven by each format requiring different skills. Australia’s big three have been men for all seasons, all styles, all conditions, in a remarkable show of consistency and adaptability.

England has recalled wicketkeeper Jamie Smith for the opening game of their Champions Trophy campaign against Australia in Lahore, which gets underway on Saturday at 8pm AEDT.

Steve Smith is reportedly a chance of playing this year’s Hundred competition in the United Kingdom as the Australian superstar closes in on a deal with the Welsh Fire.

In-form Shubman Gill made an unbeaten 101 to anchor India’s chase in a six-wicket win over Bangladesh as the two teams began their Champions Trophy campaign on Thursday in Dubai.

Rising Australian cricket star Jake Fraser-McGurk has lost one of his most vocal backers in Ricky Ponting.

Western Australian opener Cameron Bancroft is eyeing a potential Sheffield Shield return next month as he continues recovering from a shoulder injury he sustained during the Big Bash League.

Scott Boland has further pressed his claims for selection in the World Test Championship final by snaring a six-wicket haul during Victoria’s Sheffield Shield clash against New South Wales in Sydney.

Australian Meg Lanning and Annabel Sutherland led the Delhi Capitals towards a tense seven-wicket victory over the UP Warriorz at Vadodara’s Kotambi Stadium on Wednesday.