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No Balls Cricket Unfiltered Episode 53: Day-Night Debacle, Awards Galore, and...Sex Tapes?

·1 hr 17 min·5 clips

Rohit Sharma left a long-on in place for Marnus Labuschagne against Ravichandran Ashwin.

The episode opens in chaos. Zoom gets in the way of the podcast mojo, the hosts riff on Gavaskar as the real master, and the conversation quickly drifts into the kind of cricket memory that lands half as a joke and half as a point. They compare the men’s and women’s India results. The men’s game gets the nod as the more entertaining slaughter because it was shorter, while the women’s match is called tragic and, frankly, brutal. Episode 53 gets a brief welcome of its own. The hosts note the show’s progress, plug episodes 51 and 52, and admit the clips and uploads are running a bit late, which is apparently just how things go. The focus then shifts to India getting battered in Australia. They say it happened five ways to Sunday, which feels like the right amount of respect for that kind of beating. Day-night Tests come next. The panel starts comparing venues, pitch behaviour, and why a game under the lights on a proper wicket is not the same beast as the familiar day-night setups elsewhere. Adelaide becomes the obvious reference point. Australia are described as having settled on it as their standard day-night venue, while India keep spreading their experiments across different grounds and making the whole thing more awkward than it needs to be. The wicket talk gets properly nerdy. They run through past bowler-friendly pitches, including the Bangladesh game in 2019, the Axar Patel match against England, and the Sri Lanka Test in Bangalore, then use those examples to argue that not every short Test is automatically an outrage. Even so, they are not giving bad surfaces a pass. The Bangalore wicket is called abominable, the sort of surface that still deserves its share of contempt even after the context is laid out. Venue policy gets blamed. The conversation lands on the BCCI’s rest-and-rotation approach to Test centres, and the hosts float the idea that a smaller, more traditional rota might make more sense for day-night cricket. The back end turns to awards and moaning. Ben Stokes gets singled out in the moaner-of-the-year chatter, the panel escalates that into moaner-of-a-lifetime territory, and the whole thing ends with the claim that England’s national pastime is moaning, with losing as the supporting act.

As heard by us

Sharp cricket discussion that turns a heavy loss into lively debate about pitches, day-night venues, and awards.

Episode 53 frames India getting battered in Australia with a dry, observant eye, then widens out to day-night Test venues, pitch sanity, and an awards segment the panel treats with uncommon seriousness.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want cricket analysis that also roasts England, Australia, and the pitch.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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