playnext.fm

The No Balls Cricket Podcast · No Balls Cricket Podcast

No Balls Cricket Unfiltered Episode 58: BazBall Turns Into BegBall

·1 hr 1 min·4 clips
Ben Stokes offers the handshake, then England get accused of hypocrisy over milestones.
The episode opens with the show’s usual intro before quickly tipping into a rant about England. The hosts call the Test boring in cricketing terms but entertaining for everything happening around it, and they keep coming back to the pitch being awful. It is the kind of surface where even Ben Stokes could score a century, and that fact becomes one of the episode’s main jokes. Ben Duckett’s near miss on a hundred gets folded into the same messy stretch, while Zak Crawley and Ollie Pope’s fifties add to the noise rather than fixing anything. Joe Root’s climb to second on the all-time Test run list is noted, but the show treats even that milestone as part of the running punchline. The discussion then shifts to India’s bowling, where Jadeja is said to be unable to stop the runs and Siraj is compared to a 2013 Mitchell Johnson-style nightmare. Anshul Kambod’s debut gets especially heavy attention. The hosts note that he usually bowls around 135 and never really got close here, with his pace sliding into the low 130s and then under 130 as the innings wore on. That turns into a broader joke about debut pressure, travel, and how fast a bowler can look out of rhythm when everything is going wrong. The episode keeps snapping back to actual cricket detail even as the sarcasm ramps up, which is the point of the show. It ends in the same noisy, dismissive, affectionate tone it started with: plenty of irritation, plenty of cricket memory, and no interest in being polite about England or the match.

As heard by us

A loud cricket rant about a chaotic Test, a terrible pitch, and a few sharp turning points.

This episode is all over the place in a way that mostly works. The hosts react fast to a nasty pitch, a messy Test, Ben Stokes' century, India’s bowlers losing their shape, Anshul Kamboj’s debut pace fading as the spell went on, and Joe Root moving into second on the Test…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want a Test-match roast from people who know the scorecard, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
Listen to the show on
Apple PodcastsSpotify
Play clips from this episodeMore from The No Balls Cricket Podcast