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England had previously struggled for early wickets under Buttler’s captaincy, but they have been prolific with the new ball in the Caribbean this time

Cameron Ponsonby15-Nov-2024England are being good at something they were bad at.Powerplay wickets had become a rare breed for Jos Buttler’s men. During the T20 World Cup 2024 group stage, they were the only team to go wicketless in the first six overs in multiple matches. In their last six T20Is against Test nations before this series, they had taken six powerplay wickets in total. But in three outings against the West Indies, Saqib Mahmood alone has taken eight. It is the most by an England bowler in any series in T20I history.It is hard to gauge fully whether England have fallen on this by luck or judgement. Hop the other side of the fence and West Indies are lamenting their biggest weakness are the same top-order collapses England are claiming credit for. In six of their last seven matches, West Indies have lost two or more wickets in the first six overs.Related

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If the old wives tale of T20 cricket remains true, losing three wickets in the powerplay leads to a loss, then West Indies have ticked that box in all three matches across this series. On Thursday in Gros Islet, just to make sure, they lost five.”We know we are stroke players and come out aggressively,” said West Indies skipper Rovman Powell after the game. “But that little element of being smart was missing.”What England have settled on, however, is a method of all out attack in the first six overs. Only when Reece Topley was forced off the field by an injury, with Jamie Overton subbing in for two balls, have England made a bowling change in the powerplay this series. Other than that, either Mahmood and Topley or Mahmood and Archer have bowled through the powerplay unchanged as England seek to eke out any and all movement that they can find with the white ball. T20 might be a batters’ game, but it’s bowlers who win you matches.

“You always have that fear of failure a little bit more. Whereas with this series I’ve [felt] like it’s my own spot, and I can express myself and always look to take the aggressive option instead of trying to play it safe … It’s probably the best I’ve felt in an England shirt”Saqib Mahmood

Mahmood’s partnership with either Topley or Archer has seen two bowlers of contrasting styles complement each other. Coming into this series, Mahmood had been working on his away swing, knowing that if he could get the ball moving away from the right-hander, he would be in pole position to take the new ball alongside either Topley or Archer who both naturally move the bowl into the right-hander.”It was nice to show that I can also swing the ball,” Mahmood said earlier in the week. “I always hear people saying that I am just a seam bowler.”Three beneficial tosses have fallen their way and they have capitalised, but England have been presented with different challenges. The second T20 was plug and play. The ball was moving around corners, so England hunted for wickets and found them.In St Lucia, however, the same wasn’t true. There wasn’t prodigious movement and despite the low scores mustered by either side, the consensus was that the wicket was playing true.”I know I got man-of-the-match,” Mahmood said sheepishly, “but I thought it was a pretty good wicket.”Forced to mix things up, England combined data and feel to reduce West Indies to a heap before the match had even begun.Bowling to Evin Lewis, Mahmood asked Buttler to bring deep third into the ring, but was rebuffed. “One more ball,” Buttler said, before Lewis was duly caught top edging a pull the very next delivery.Then, while bowling to Shimron Hetymer and attacking the stumps, Buttler suggested a short-ball following a conversation he’d had with the analyst. Next ball, he was caught at deep square leg. On each occasion, Mahmood gestured to Buttler in his celebrations.”I told him he might as well tell me where to bowl every ball,” Mahmood joked.As an individual, Mahmood is benefitting from the feeling of belonging in an XI where he had otherwise always felt he was just keeping a seat warm. His performances in the Caribbean have been so definitive it’s hard to imagine him being dislodged in the T20 set-up even when players like Gus Atkinson and Brydon Carse are available again.Saqib Mahmood took nine wickets in the first three matches of the series•AFP/Getty Images”You always have that fear of failure a little bit more,” he explains. “Whereas with this series I’ve [felt] like it’s my own spot, and I can express myself and always look to take the aggressive option instead of trying to play it safe … It’s probably the best I’ve felt in an England shirt.”Mahmood has taken nine wickets this series compared to Archer’s two, but they come as a pair. The two are close friends who have both suffered from serious injuries in recent years. Often rehabbing together, a goal they shared was to one day open the bowling together for England. It’s four years ago they were first in an international squad together, but it was only this summer when they walked out in the same match together.Their success means England have been able to play on showboat mode. Today, England employed a short leg, two slips and left cover open during the powerplay. Buttler, captaining with a smile and under the lid at bat pad, has been embracing his new era of captaincy. And while winning undoubtedly makes the smile easier to come by, it’s rubbing off on the rest of the team.”His captaincy has been amazing,” Mahmood said of his skipper. “I’ve really enjoyed it.”Even at the death the other day, he kind of just left me to it. And I quite like that, you just get left to what you want to do, and you think clearly. He’s one of the best players in the world and to have him back in your XI and lead from the front, he’s been great.”Earlier this year, the Caribbean had been the scene of arguably Buttler’s lowest point as captain, but between Mahmood and Archer, his two quicks may have solved one of his problems and kickstarted the new era.

The year 2025 was a good one for Kansas City Royals pitcher Kris Bubic—but it appears to have come to a close.

Bubic has strained his left rotator cuff and will be shut down for the rest of the 2025 season, Royals manager Matt Quatraro told reporters Monday afternoon. The news follows an uneven Saturday start where Bubic allowed three earned runs in 2 2/3 innings in a loss to the Cleveland Guardians.

That loss was unrepresentative of a career year for Bubic, an All-Star who will end '25 with an 8-7 record, 2.55 ERA and 116 strikeouts in 116 1/3 innings.

"It's an opportunity to get physically better, mentally better," Bubic told Vahe Gregorian of the . "That's how I approach it. The early part of rehab is usually always the worst. … but once you get through that phase, at least in my head, you get to have a normal offseason."

Bubic previously underwent Tommy John surgery in April 2023.

His Kansas City squad is currently 52-54—four games back of the American League's final wild-card playoff berth.

One of the greats of Indian cricket played the game his own way and left lasting memories

Karthik Krishnaswamy24-Aug-2025January 2019. Earlier that month, Cheteshwar Pujara had been the toast of the nation, scoring centuries in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney as India won a Test series in Australia for the very first time. Now he was the villain of all of Karnataka, or at least the few hundred despondent diehards at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium who watched him seal their team’s fate with an unbeaten fourth-innings hundred that steered Saurashtra into the final of the 2018-19 Ranji Trophy.The bulk of Pujara’s innings came against the backdrop of chants from these diehards. “Cheater! Cheater! Cheater!” Once in each innings, he had been reprieved by the umpire when he seemed to have edged behind. Both times, he stood his ground and batted on.If you watched this match, you may have remembered it when you read Pujara’s retirement announcement on Sunday. One word in particular.”As a little boy from the small town of Rajkot, along with my parents, I set out to aim for the stars; and dreamt to be a part of the Indian cricket team,” he wrote on his social media feeds. “Little did I know then that this game would give me so much – invaluable opportunities, experiences, purpose, love, and above all a chance to represent my state and this great nation.”Related

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State and nation. Pujara belonged equally to both. He played nearly as many first-class matches for his state team (90) as he did Test matches (103), and more than half his Saurashtra games (58) came after his international debut. And this is before we count white-ball cricket, of which he only had a fleeting international taste. Pujara’s father Arvind and uncle Bipin played for Saurashtra too, 43 times between them.Australia’s scourge, Karnataka’s cheater. The competitor in Pujara may have enjoyed both roles equally.In being as much of Saurashtra as of India, Pujara was almost unique for an Indian cricketer of his generation. This, of course, was a matter largely of circumstance. He was a red-ball cricketer of the highest rank, and a red-ball cricketer almost to the exclusion of anything else. The gaps this left in his international schedule allowed him to build a significant body of work in domestic cricket.And as he did this, he became a reminder of a bygone age when batters dreamed of scoring 100 first-class hundreds. For Geoffrey Boycott, getting to that landmark – in an Ashes Test, no less, and in front of his home crowd – was “the most magical moment of my life”.ESPNcricinfo LtdPujara, the most Boycottian batter of his age, didn’t get quite as far, but he went two-thirds of the way, scoring 66, ten of them during a productive late-career county stint at Sussex. In the span of his career, only one batter, Alastair Cook (68), made more first-class hundreds. It’s a momentous achievement, and one, appropriately enough, entirely out of step with the zeitgeist.But as out of step as he may have seemed, Pujara was a formidable cricketer who at his peak ranked just below the four great Test batters of his age. Quite a peak it was too; at the end of that 2018-19 Australia tour, he averaged 51.18 and had scored 18 hundreds in 68 TestsHis numbers declined in the pandemic and post-pandemic years, but he was hardly alone in suffering that fate, with Virat Kohli and Ajinkya Rahane going through similarly prolonged slumps as India played Test match after Test match, home and away, in treacherous batting conditions.And all of that, and perhaps the effects of age on his game, have left many of us with a somewhat diminished image of Pujara the batter. In the tributes from team-mates and former players that have flowed since his retirement announcement, the most frequently used word, by far, is “grit”, and the most frequently evoked image is of the body blows he took during his 211-ball, fourth-innings 56 in the Gabba fairytale of 2021.Cheteshwar Pujara cops a blow from Josh Hazlewood•AFPPujara had plenty of grit, of course, but you need a whole lot more than that to play 103 Test matches. You need those magic, uncoachable qualities that are commonly clubbed together under the banner of talent.One common definition of batting talent prizes the ability to hit a wide range of attacking shots, with bonus points for hitting good balls and/or in unusual directions. Pujara’s gifts didn’t lean in this direction, but he nonetheless gave a sense that he was born to bat.”Every great batsman,” CLR James suggested in his chapter on George Headley in , “is a special organism.” Whether Pujara was a great batter is a debate for elsewhere, but he was undoubtedly a special organism, a batter who could go on and on and score prodigious quantities of runs. In October 2008, for instance, he scored 386 and 309 for Saurashtra’s Under-22s, and in November he followed up with a 302* in the Ranji Trophy.This appetite for runs was well-known long before Pujara played for India, so while it was remarkable that he scored six hundreds – two of them doubles – in his first 16 Tests, with his average hovering in the 60s, it wasn’t that much of a surprise. It takes an uncommonly good eye and technique to be able to score like that, and also the mind of a special organism, capable of an uncommon level of focus. In the first half of his career, Pujara often seemed to bat in a state of trance-like absorption that was palpable to the viewer.He would start watchfully, even glacially, and you’d wonder if his low, choking grip was inhibiting his power and range of strokes, but if he batted long enough he would flick a switch and start hitting shots to all parts, leaping off his toes to cut the fast bowlers without needing width, sashaying out of his crease to drive spinners inside-out or whip them outside-in.ESPNcricinfo LtdThis way of batting came with a remarkably high ceiling, of course, but also a high floor. He often looked in control even when he wasn’t making a lot of runs, as in England in 2014, and by the end of that 2018-19 Australia tour, he had faced at least 50 balls in 73 of his 114 Test innings, and carried on to the 100-ball mark and beyond on 42 occasions.The limits of Pujara’s game only really became evident on extreme pitches, particularly against bowling attacks of uncommon depth, where the proverbial ball with the batter’s name on it was always around the corner. India just happened to play a lot of their cricket on those kinds of pitches, against those kinds of attacks, during the second half of his career. Other batters may have tried to bat differently; Pujara’s faith in his way never wavered.And while this meant he stopped scoring hundreds – he only made one in his last 35 Tests – he still made significant contributions to India’s results: two half-centuries spanning 381 balls in the 2021 SCG draw, that aforementioned 56 at the Gabba, a 206-ball 45 in a slow-burning, match-turning century stand with Rahane at Lord’s in 2021, and a second-innings 61 at The Oval in the same series.None of this was enough to ward off time, of course, and the surge of batting talent pounding at India’s door. But let’s put the job Pujara did in perspective. Since his last Test match, the six batters India have tried at No. 3 have collectively averaged 31.95 across 24 Tests. A fading Pujara, over his last 24 Tests, averaged 31.51.The end came with a second defeat in a second World Test Championship final in 2023, but it wasn’t really the end. The Pujara of Saurashtra, Sussex and West Zone would score a further 2057 first-class runs, at an average of 51.42, with seven hundreds. A fitting finish, on Pujara’s own terms, leaving you wondering if he couldn’t have gone on just a little longer.

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