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Time of India
21-05-2025
- Sport
- Time of India
England prepares for India with its first test against Zimbabwe in 22 years
FILE - England's Steve Harmison, center, celebrates his dismissal of Zimbabwe's Douglas Hondo, with teammates Robert Key, left, and Michael Vaughan, to give England a victory of an innings and 69 runs, in the second cricket Test between England and Zimbabwe at Chester-le-Street, England, Saturday, June 7, 2003. England is set to face Zimbabwe in a test match at Trent Bridge. This marks their first international encounter in 18 years. For England, it is a warm-up for tougher series against India and the Ashes. Zimbabwe views this as a crucial step in their return to test cricket after years of challenges. Sam Cook will debut for England. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Debut for Cook Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads For England, it's little more than a warm-up match ahead of much sterner examinations to come. For Zimbabwe, it means Bridge in Nottingham will host a four-day test match - something of a rarity for the usual five-day format but perhaps a sign of the future - from Thursday when England and Zimbabwe meet for the first time at international level in 18 years since a Twenty20 World Cup match in Cape need to go back four more years - to Chester-le-Street in 2003 when Jimmy Anderson, a 20-year-old with highlights in his hair, was playing in his first series - for the last test match between the return to English soil continues the African nation's gradual reintegration to test cricket after two decades of political interference, poor governance and sanctions that resulted in the team being exiled from test cricket for around six Zimbabweans didn't play a test from 2005-11. From 2022-24, they played just four tests. But between December last year and August this year, they'll have played in 10 tests, with two-match series against South Africa and New Zealand to come this still isn't part of the World Test Championship but, in the bigger picture, progress is being made. Zimbabwe Cricket will receive a touring fee from the England and Wales Cricket Board for being the first test opponent of the summer, ECB chief executive Richard Gould confirmed last year while speaking about the "huge responsibility" to maintain the strength of bilateral isn't expected to offer much resistance to England, having slumped to a 138-run defeat to a Professional County Club Select XI in Leicester last week. Before that, however, it did earn a first test victory since 2021 - beating in Bangladesh on the way to sharing the series Zimbabwe's view is very much about the present, England's sights will be on the this summer is a five-test series against India and then an Ashes tour Down Under. For England, it doesn't get much bigger than that, so the match against Zimbabwe will be important preparation, especially for a bowling department at the start of a new era following the test retirements of Stuart Broad (in 2023) and Anderson (last year).For the Zimbabwe test, England will give a debut to Sam Cook, fellow pacer Josh Tongue is returning to the team after a two-year absence, and Gus Atkinson is about to start his second summer of test cricket. There are as many question marks about the only specialist spinner in the team, Shoaib Bashir, and the fitness of allrounder Ben Stokes, returning after a hamstring tear to regain the there's the batting lineup where opener Zak Crawley and No. 3 Ollie Pope have been retained despite continued speculation about their worthiness in the team. There's the welcome sight of a return for wicketkeeper Jamie Smith after missing the tour of New Zealand in November and December while on paternity is No. 2 in the test rankings but coach Brendon McCullum said "there's a lot of meat on the bone for us" in the next stage of the so-called " Bazball " era."When we took on a project like this, it was not about necessarily settling on good,'" McCullum said. "I think now's the time, working from a strong base, to be able to shoot for the stars and say, Where can we take this team? What can we achieve?'"The scheduling of a four-day test might be a blow to test purists but England home matches have rarely reached Day 5 under the leadership of McCullum and Stokes since for the Zimbabweans, they'll take whatever top-flight games they can on the long road back to cricket relevancy. (AP) AM AM AM
Daily Mirror
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Freddie Flintoff's ex team-mate 'couldn't stop crying' after seeing his horrific injuries
Freddie Flintoff's former cricket team-mate Steve Harmison was shaken by how badly injured the TV star was after an accident which took place while filming BBC's Top Gear TV star Freddie Flintoff's long-time friend and former England cricket team-mate Steve Harmison has revealed he was left in floods of tears after seeing the devastating injuries Freddie suffered in his horror Top Gear crash. A new Disney+ documentary called Flintoff, released last night, has exposed the full extent of the ex-cricketer's trauma following the 2022 smash at Dunsfold Park, Surrey — where the three-wheeled Morgan Super 3 he was driving flipped and dragged him along the track. Flintoff sustained severe facial injuries in the accident, which required multiple surgeries. Steve Harmison, who first met Freddie in 1996 and retired alongside him in 2009, said the photos he received before surgery were so harrowing that he "couldn't stop crying". Speaking on talkSPORT, Harmison recalled: "When he sent them to me, I didn't stop crying for a long, long time. He's lucky to be still with us. He's lucky he's been patched up and they've done a wonderful job. His confidence is back and it's great to see him back in cricket." He added: "It was a difficult time for him and for Rachael [Freddie's wife] and the kids. He was always image conscious." In the documentary, Freddie himself bravely opens up about the psychological toll of the crash — admitting that, in his darkest moments, part of him wished he hadn't survived. "After the accident, I didn't think I had it in me to get through," he said. "This sounds awful: part of me wishes I had been killed, part of me thinks, 'I wish I had died'. I didn't want to kill myself, don't mistake the two things, but I was thinking, 'this would have been so much easier'." He went on to reveal the fear he felt in the moments after impact, adding: "My biggest fear was I didn't think I had a face. I thought my face had come off." Surgeon Jahrad Haq, who treated Flintoff, previously described the injuries as among the most complex he had ever seen. Freddie suffered broken and lost teeth, fractured jaw bones, and lost significant portions of his upper and lower lips, including underlying muscle. The crash sent shockwaves through the Top Gear production team and viewers alike. The show has since been "rested" by the BBC, who later reached a multi-million pound settlement with Flintoff. Despite the trauma, Freddie has returned to public life — initially behind the scenes with the England Lions cricket squad but now he is back in the spotlight through his documentary. Harmison, who features in the film, said hearing Freddie express his dark thoughts was "heartbreaking", but he's proud of how far his friend has come since. Freddie's wife has admitted she had to 'pull herself together' after seeing him post-crash as she was so horrified by the extent of his injuries, but did not want the sportsman to be frightened by her reaction. She added: "I just didn't cry. I didn't, I just said, 'it's fine. You're gonna be okay. I can't believe how amazing you look'."
The Guardian
15-02-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
Big No 9s are back: high-risk playing out from the back is at the tactical crossroads
In 2021, I tried to take advantage of the October international break to go to a game as a fan. No sooner had I booked trains and hotels, though, than it emerged Sunderland had accumulated enough Northern Ireland internationals for their League One game against Oxford to be called off. So I did the only reasonable thing you can do in the circumstances, got in touch with the doyen of the non-league scene in the north-east, Harry Pearson, and invited myself along to whichever game he was going to. We ended up at Seaham Red Star v Ashington in Northern League Division One, the ninth tier of English football. I've no idea what the score was, although I know Ashington had Steve Harmison's brother Ben playing at centre-back and an Alice-banded dribbler on the wing, the Pitman Grealish. But most striking was that everybody passed out from the back. The difference from 25 years earlier, when I'd worked the turnstiles at Whitley Bay, was barely credible. I mentioned it to Harry, who explained that it had become entirely normal: the Guardiolisation of English football was universal. I asked a few coaches about it in the weeks that followed and they all essentially said the same thing: pitches at every level are much better these days. A lot of kids grow up playing on 4G surfaces and even grass pitches are often hybrids. They don't live in fear of bobbles as they would have done 20-30 years previously, first touches can be taken almost for granted, and so the game becomes far less about pouncing on miscontrols and far more about movement and the manipulation of play to try to create overloads. At the time, this just seemed a natural extension of the way the game had been going since Pep Guardiola became Barcelona manager in 2008: he emerged into a world ripe for his vision of football after improvements in technology, changes to the offside law that had stretched the effective playing area, and the crackdown on intimidatory tackling that reopened the game to diminutive technicians. Guardiola took the principles of Total Football and extended them into the new environment, changed what seemed possible to the extent that Manchester United players after the 2009 Champions League final defeat by Barcelona spoke of feeling almost humiliated by not having the ball for protracted spells, losing discipline as a result. That template has come to dominate attitudes. Football was once a game of territory, so governed by the impulse to get the ball away from your own goal and towards the opponents' that match reports were fixated on wind direction. Now it is a game of possession: rather than 'they can't hurt us if the ball is in their half', the mentality has become 'they can't hurt us if they don't have the ball'. Managers who challenged that orthodoxy were treated either as dinosaurs (Sam Allardyce), rebellious outsiders (Diego Simeone) or misguided apostates (José Mourinho). It's Mourinho, perhaps, who is the most interesting of those examples, if only because of the turn he took after being overlooked for the Barcelona job in 2008 to become the anti-Barça. If they played with the ball, he would play without, he decided, coming up with his infamous checklist that, notoriously, included the line: 'Whoever has the ball has fear.' Recently it's come to feel that a lot of players with the ball might benefit from being rather more fearful. Burnley and Southampton in the past two seasons have exemplified the danger for teams who were promoted playing out from the back trying to maintain that approach in the Premier League. Last Sunday, Tottenham had spells when they couldn't get out of their half, largely because they kept trying to pass it short and ran into the Aston Villa press. Even Manchester City, the team who popularised the approach in England, keep being caught out now. Last Saturday, it was Nico González who was overpowered as he dithered on the ball, leading to Leyton Orient opening the scoring. On Tuesday, it was a misplaced pass from Ederson that led to the second Real Madrid equaliser. Which has led to the thought that the process wasn't so inevitable as it seemed in 2021, that maybe passing out from the back has started to become counterproductive as opponents become increasingly adept at setting pressing traps. Roberto De Zerbi's Brighton demonstrated how a team can trigger the opponents' press as an attacking move, looking to generate space behind them that can be exploited, but that is a high-risk strategy. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion But what is the alternative? Go long and the risk is possession is wasted – all the more so for teams without a target man – the only benefit being that the ball is at least lost a long way from goal. There is no clear halfway house, nor even much of an option for disguise: go long with players dropping to provide a short-passing option as a decoy and the danger is that possession is not merely lost, but there is no chance to set the defensive line before an opposition attack gets within shooting range. Football is entering one of those crux periods in which it's clear something has to change but it's not obvious what. The paradigm is familiar: a team starts doing something, opponents react to stop them and then, for a while, a new consensus is reached before the next revolution. It feels as though what is happening now is that pressing structures are able to catch teams passing out from the back often enough that patient buildup from deep can no longer be an unthinking default. At the very least, teams probably need to develop an exit strategy: what do they do if they find the opposition press squeezing them? Perhaps speculative balls into the channels for runners will become a counter to the counter-strategy. Or perhaps passing out from the back, while remaining the approach for the best teams, will become less common for others. Perhaps teams will start going long more as a matter of course, although that would mean the return of big No 9s, who are perhaps already starting to make their comeback. Perhaps Chris Wood is not the throwback he had appeared but the future.
