ICC consider three new member applications from Africa
USA remain 'on notice' with ICC
The ICC said after their AGM that USA Cricket will "remain on notice" amid ongoing membership compliance concerns.USA Cricket was at serious risk of being suspended by the ICC, which would have resulted in a cut to central funding and the United States' men's and women's sides barred from ICC events.BBC Sport has seen evidence that USA Cricket has addressed five of the eight issues flagged by the ICC relating to governance, finance and administration.Rather than an outright suspension the ICC have opted to give USA Cricket more time to resolve remaining issues with the caveat that the global governing body's board "reserve the right to take such actions as it deems appropriate".One key area Cricket USA are under pressure to address is satisfying the criteria laid out by the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee for National Governing Body (NGB) status.NGB status is required for a sport to take place at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games were cricket is due to return after an absence of 128 years."USA Cricket is required to undertake comprehensive governance reforms, including but not limited to completing free and fair elections within a three-month period," said an ICC statement.USA Cricket were originally placed on notice at the ICC's 2024 AGM in Sri Lanka for "non-compliance with ICC membership criteria".Cricket Chile were placed on notice at the same time but have addressed issues relating to its governance structure to the ICC's satisfaction.
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The Independent
33 minutes ago
- The Independent
England pegged back despite Ben Stokes' brilliance as fourth Test hangs in the balance
After the fireworks, the frustration for England. Their ideal morning session was followed by an unrewarding slog in the afternoon and evening. A series that might have been over on Saturday extends to Sunday, perhaps to The Oval and, if India's powers of recovery continue there, may not be won at all. They must confront the twin obstacles of the Manchester weather, with rain forecast for the morning, and India's defiance. Obdurate batting from Shubman Gill and KL Rahul roused India from the depths of 0-2, a century partnership giving men on 78 and 87 chances to record hundreds of their own. But in a series when every game has gone to the final day, when England's two victories have been hard-fought, perhaps it is fitting that, once again, they go to a fifth morning with no easy task. In a game shaped by injuries, two have the potential to be decisive. Ben Stokes had left his imprint on the game with bat and ball but is yet to bowl in the second innings, though the series' leading wicket-taker could do with more rest and treatment. 'We are hoping so,' said assistant coach Marcus Trescothick. 'He is a bit stiff and sore. He has had a big workload in the last few weeks. I think it is just a build-up.' For India, it remains to be seen when and how Rishabh Pant will bat, though they confirmed he will. The question lingered unanswered during the vigils of Rahul and Gill. The two Indian batsman best equipped to bat for long periods of time did so, seeing out two sessions, reducing India's deficit to 137. Gill, after what was shaping up as his toughest Test as captain, put three low scores behind him to approach 700 runs for the series. The opener passed 500 to extend his streak of recording at least a half-century in each Test, a touch player showing touches of class. Without Stokes, England toiled. Chris Woakes was the best of the bowlers, the attack leader beginning with a double-wicket maiden. Jofra Archer 's menace came in his opening spell; thereafter he was below his best. Brydon Carse is still awaiting his first wicket of the match. Liam Dawson was the stock bowler, an almost permanent presence in the attack. He was economical during a game of patience. The barnstorming excitement came in the morning. England scored runs at speed and claimed wickets in consecutive balls. First Stokes then Woakes gave them rhyme and reason. Stokes' first Test century in two years was brought up to huge cheers and led to a blaze of boundaries. The England captain was at his most ambitious and entertaining as he powered on to 141. At the other end, Dawson made a decent 26, indicating that England's stock of all-rounders extends beyond the captain, before being bowled by Jasprit Bumrah with a ball that kept low. Carse showed the depth of their batting, putting plenty of muscle into his 47 before perishing looking for a half-century in a second successive Test. Ravindra Jadeja, who had only taken three wickets in the series, added four more, the last couple when Stokes and Carse were caught on boundary aiming for sixes. England's 669 was the highest Test total ever made at Old Trafford. It gave them a huge lead of 311 and the possibility of an innings victory. Especially when Woakes, after only one wicket with the first new ball all series, had two in as many deliveries. Yashavi Jaiswal was caught at the second attempt by Joe Root, Sai Sudharsan held at second slip by Harry Brook. A leave became a shot for the India No 3. For India, the tiredness from fielding for 157 overs may have told but Gill and Rahul's stand was unbroken in a further 62.1. Gill, after three low scores, counter-attacked at the start of his innings. Rahul was more watchful but benefited from two near-misses. He was dropped by Dawson in the gully on 23 and then almost diverted a ball from the spinner via his pads on to the leg stump. Otherwise, he looked unruffled. England lacked their best partnership-breaker. Stokes had bowled around 45 minutes before the start of play but not during it. Gill was dismissed by him in the first innings but the India captain was spared a rematch with his England counterpart. Gill and Rahul blunted the rest of the bowling. On a ground with a 100 percent record in the County Championship – Lancashire's five home matches have all ended in draws – England propelled themselves into a position as favourites before India illustrated the difficulties of getting 20 wickets in a game here with their resistance. Even if England do, they may face a run chase. It could be an exhilarating finish, a great rearguard action or an anticlimax. Part of the intrigue lies in determining which.
The Guardian
33 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Harry Brook drops the devilry but takes catch before India keep eye on the ball
The talk coming into this game was of needle, niggle and spite, of raising hackles and diminishing the spirit of the game, and beyond that of balls that lost their shape and days that lost too many overs. Somehow, 15 days of high-quality and largely compelling cricket had been distilled to the dominant themes of bad sportsmanship, bad workmanship and bad value. Then, in the fourth Test of a series whose narrative had apparently been established, none of it. Not a single ball change. Entire days when every scheduled over was bowled. When Shubman Gill pulled out at the last possible moment as Chris Woakes ran in to bowl late on Saturday afternoon and the two briefly exchanged words it was as close as the game had got to an outbreak of bad temper. It amounted to little more than a scowl and came right at the end of its 304th over. With an extended break between games it is no surprise the heightened emotion that characterised the second half of the last match had faded. But Gill's response on Tuesday to a question about his part in the flaring of tensions at Lord's suggested something of it lingered still. Several England players spoke with apparent pride of their in-your-face fielding in the last innings there, about how it had got people off their seats and glued them to their sets, and pledged that while they would not seek to manufacture malice, they would welcome and reciprocate any that sprouted organically. Perhaps confusingly, England's discovery of devilry coincided with the arrival of the former All Blacks mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka, most famous for instigating a 'no dickheads' policy with New Zealand's rugby union side. Happily there was no contradiction there. 'A dickhead,' Enoka once explained, 'makes everything about them.' Still, such behaviour has been entirely absent. 'You don't always have to be nice,' Harry Brook said pre-match, but it is pretty hard to stop some people and Brook is one of those. Which is probably why, even in a ground that contains a 6,353-seater temporary structure known as the Party Stand, whose residents are often fancy-dressed and by mid-afternoon largely inebriated, the people who seem to be having most fun are standing in England's slip cordon. Brook is an excellent close fielder – the catch to dismiss Sai Sudharsan, straightforward as it was, was his 40th in Test cricket, not bad for a player yet to play his 30th game (in the past 50 years four Englishmen, of those to have played at least 20 Tests, have taken more catches per innings – one of whom, Joe Root, is normally standing beside him). But he brings much more to the side than that, much of it when there is no TV camera trained upon him, and not even any cricket taking place. In breaks between overs in this match he has demonstrated his ability to throw his cap in the air and catch it on his head – a genuinely impressive skill – and persuaded Zak Crawley to try to emulate him (with somewhat embarrassing results); he has challenged other members of the cordon to sprint races; on Saturday he and Ben Duckett, positioned at gully, engaged in an extended period of broad-grinned bantering that ended with them hugging each other. He and Root were constantly chatting, joking and smiling, at least until the obduracy of Gill and KL Rahul scattered England's fields and they found themselves too far apart to exchange small talk. Sign up to The Spin Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week's action after newsletter promotion Gill has demonstrated many faults over the past four days though, as he showed during his narrative-reshaping and potentially game-saving partnership with Rahul, there are few to be found in his batting technique. His is the team that most needed a bit of spark across their 157 (and a bit) overs in the field, but if there was something of the mongrel about them at Lord's, here the only spirit animal they managed to summon was a sloth. Having had all night to ponder their passivity on Friday they returned for the end of England's innings with approach completely unchanged. There were times, as an evidently unfit Ben Stokes added another 95 runs to his team's total alongside the No 10, Brydon Carse, when India's fields seemed to be deliberately set to allow easy scoring, to make their opponents as comfortable as possible. They had somehow gone from red rags to red carpets. The balls may no longer be going soft and out of shape, but instead it seems to be happening to entire teams. There is still time, at least, for yet another narrative to be reversed.
Telegraph
33 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Kevin Pietersen is wrong to say batting was harder 20 years ago
Kevin Pietersen did not often bowl, although he first came to English attention when he represented KwaZulu Natal as an off-spinner on England's 1999-2000 tour of South Africa, but he has delivered some bouncers at Joe Root. Root in the course of his 150 at Old Trafford rose to second place in the all-time list of Test run-scorers. But this was not enough to impress Pietersen. Far from it. He declared, like a real old-timer, that batting was twice as hard back in his day. 'Don't shout at me but batting these days is way easier than 20/25 years ago!' Pietersen posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. 'Probably twice as hard back then.' Pietersen names 22 bowlers of his time and dares the cricket follower of today to name 10 bowlers to compare with them. Of his contemporaries, he nominates four Australians: Glenn McGrath, Brett Lee, Jason Gillespie and Shane Warne; four Pakistanis in Waqar Younis, Shoaib Akhtar, Wasim Akram and Mushtaq Ahmed; three Indians in Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath and Harbhajan Singh; three New Zealanders in Shane Bond, Chris Cairns and Daniel Vettori; three South Africans in Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock and, bizarrely, Lance Klusener but not Dale Steyn; two Sri Lankans in Chaminda Vaas and Muttiah Muralitharan; and two West Indians in Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. A single England bowler was nominated by Pietersen in Darren Gough. His colleagues in the Ashes-winning attack of 2005 seem not to have impressed him. Most of the variable factors in Test cricket have changed little in this century: balls, pitches, DRS and so forth. The biggest change has been the impact of T20 – the first professional T20 tournament was started in England in 2003, by when Pietersen was starting out for Nottinghamshire. My interpretation, therefore, would be that Pietersen is wrong to say that the standard of pace bowling has gone down. The finest seamers today are a match for their equivalents of '20/25 years ago'. Don't shout at me but batting these days is way easier than 20/25 years ago! Probably twice as hard back then! Waqar, Shoaib, Akram, Mushtaq, Kumble, Srinath, Harbhajan, Donald, Pollock, Klusener, Gough, McGrath, Lee, Warne, Gillespie, Bond, Vettori, Cairns, Vaas, Murali,… — Kevin Pietersen🦏 (@KP24) July 26, 2025 'Please name me ten modern bowlers that can compare to the names above,' Pietersen goes on to say. Well, in that case, Australia's Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon can all compare; South Africa's Kagiso Rabada is up with his forebears, not bowling so fast but moving the ball more; Mark Wood and Jofra Archer have been timed as England's quickest ever; New Zealand's Will O'Rourke is a serious customer, as is Jayden Seales, even if West Indies are nowhere near what they were; while a case for Jasprit Bumrah being rated the best of all time has been made, although he has been down on pace in the Old Trafford Test. Where Pietersen is right, although he does not spell it out, is that the standard of finger-spin bowling in Test cricket has decreased, while that of wrist-spin has plummeted. And this is where T20 must have had its impact: spinners bowl a higher percentage of the overs in a T20 game than they do in a red-ball or Test match, but it is a different sort of spin: fired in, flat, at the batsman's legs, denying him room. It is a distant relation of flight and dip and turn and defeating the batsman past either inside or outside edge. The presence of finger-spinners in international cricket has faded. If the Test match is in Asia, they will have their say all right, but elsewhere? New Zealand and West Indies might not select one at home. Pakistan, to defeat England last autumn, had to dust down a couple of veterans. It is Lyon and South Africa's Keshav Maharaj who keep this show on the road outside Asia. Of wrist-spinners, Pietersen had to face Warne, Kumble and Mushtaq, and he might have added Yasir Shah who took five wickets per Test for Pakistan. Their successors are not visible, in England or anywhere else: India do not select Kuldeep Yadav, and while Afghanistan have Rashid Khan, they have been able to play only 11 Tests. England have been as culpable as any country in allowing spin to decline, whether in the county championship or the national side, and especially wrist-spin. In almost 150 years of Test cricket only one wrist-spinner has taken a hundred Test wickets for England, Doug Wright, and only one other has managed 50 wickets, Adil Rashid.
