We know we're coming back from a break, but recent updates from the cricket world make us wonder if we should have stayed off the air entirely. Seems like these days every time we record an episode, Virat Kohli resigns (or rather, "resigns") or gets removed from Indian captaincy from one format.

It's the end of an era for Indian cricket, and though we'd always like to see these things end on a high, it seems quite apt for India that the end has come amidst drama and politics with no one truly knowing what's going on. It also seems, in a weird way, perfectly Kohli that the last abiding memory of his captaincy will be angrily yelling...into a stump mic...at the broadcasters...insinuating that they're cheating him and India out of a chance to win. 

Virat Kohli, you crazy, flawed genius. No Balls Cricket salutes you. 

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Remember the time when Indian men's cricket was having a glorious moment? A miraculous series win in Australia, winning series across all three formats against England at home, reaching the World Test Championship final, winning (technically) a series in England...how long ago was that? What? Just this year?

Hard to believe, when it seems like at the moment it's just going from crisis to crisis. Well, one prolonged crisis over the captaincy, with a tangentially related crisis, the crash and burn at the T20 World Cup, thrown in for good measure. Because since September, the men's team captaincy has become a huge source of controversy, with two icons of Indian cricket taking center stage: Sourav Ganguly, a former captain himself and current BCCI president, and Virat Kohli, current captain – of, now, only the Test team, as opposed to three months ago, when he was skipper across all formats. And that change in the state of affairs has led to Indian cricket becoming more of a rumor-based drama than Gossip Girl (or so we think, given that we haven't actually watched the show and we're just guessing what it was about based on the title). 

Sid and Aditya break down the colossal clusterfuck that has erupted thanks to the BCCI forgetting a basic skill – communication! – in our latest episode. 

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THE COWARD IS BACK! That's right, our resident Guyanese dentist, Dr. Ian Jagan, has finally decided to show up, after multiple efforts to get him back on were rebuffed because, we can only presume, he was too scared to talk about West Indies cricket. (He says he's been busy, but we know better.)

Now that he is back, we can get stuck into the post-mortem of West Indies' disastrous T20 World Cup showing, and then even more into where it went wrong for India and what needs to change. At some point, we may have talked about the team that actually won it all, but Aditya's longstanding hate for the Australian senior men's cricket team and especially the man who won player of the tournament meant we felt perfectly justified in glossing over that particular detail. 

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Does anyone know the difference between Himesh and Kamlesh? Two classic Gujarati names, so quintessentially Gujju that our supposedly "respected" journalist got the name wrong of someone fairly significant: Lord KAMLESH Patel, who is, as that title suggests, a lord, not of the Shardul Thakur variety but one of those actual English lords, but who also got misnamed by Aditya as Himesh. Also, he's from Uganda. But definitely still Gujju.   

On that hilarious/embarrassing note, welcome to Episode 26, where we summarize the two upsets from the semi-finals of the T20 World Cup and make our pick for the winner. Also, in other news, our club cricketer has had an up and down week: on the one hand, Sid got covid, thankfully a relatively mild version; on the other, he's made an interesting discovery on Bumble that now has him hopeful of, er, having a good time. On which hilarious/embarrassing note, we leave you with the actual episode.

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The curse of the podcast production turnaround time strikes again: we bring you an episode recorded before India were officially knocked out, but could only be released after. Good thing we didn't make any bold predictions about India winning the tournament in this one. (That's not sarcasm/self-deprecating humor, we were actually that dejected about India's slim chances.) There's also a post-mortem of some of the other disappointing teams (our good friend Ian Jagan's was with us in spirit for the West Indies review, if only because he was too cowardly to be there in person) for whom it matters not a jot that we are releasing a few days after recording. 

We also get into the shocking racism scandal coming out of Yorkshire Cricket, whose treatment of Azeem Rafiq has been appalling, and whose response to the investigation into their treatment of Azeem Rafiq has somehow been even worse. Racism has no place in cricket, or society, yet it exists, and now all eyes are on how the cricketing establishment in England responds to this latest display of discrimination and shockingly incompetent administration. 

As always, listen and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Anchor, and Podcast Addict, and watch us and subscribe on YouTube.

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After a brief hiatus as we recovered from the disappointment of the last Test of the England-India series being cancelled, we are back! (It was especially disappointing for Sid, as he was going to dress up as Mario one last time for that match, and now Manchester has been deprived of that Test as the ridiculous rescheduled Test has been handed to Edgbaston. We're also still pissed off in solidarity with our Pakistani friends after their series against New Zealand and England got called off in controversial circumstances.

It takes a long time to process these emotions, and we promise this break had everything to do with that, and nothing to do with CSK completely showing us up about our preseason IPL predictions. Who cares about the IPL, anyway.

Episode 24 sees us talk about THAT T20 World Cup match, whether or not we want a repeat, and who we think is winning it all, along with our thoughts on Quinton de Kock, Mohammed Shami, and...Lendl Simmons? Also dear friend of the pod Ravi Shastri gets an award. (We think he's a friend of the pod, on the basis that we joke about him like we would with our actual friends. For example, spot the joke about our man in Guyana, Ian Jagan, in this particular episode.)

As always, listen and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Anchor, and Podcast Addict, and watch us and subscribe on YouTube.

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Well, it only took one Test to get us back into gloating mode. In the midst of selection controversies, covid scares, and the specter of batting collapses, India produced a stunning turnaround from the third Test – and even within the fourth Test itself – to take a 2-1 series lead heading into the final Test. 

Siddhant is guaranteeing rain in Manchester for that final Test, which of course means we're getting five days of sun – though that never happens in Manchester. (Now that we've said that, we've made sure it's going to happen.) In the meantime, here's our recap of the Oval Test, as well as some shenanigans from Bangladesh and Pakistan. 

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So, uh, that'll teach us to gloat too much. India's batting collapses left some egg on their players' faces, and some more on ours – which is a particularly bad look if you're dressed up as Mario. As Siddhant was while in attendance at Headingley. 

If you want to see how that looks, check out our Instagram...and Mario was back for a brief encore on the pod. Which was back down to its pared down, 20-minute limit, because when we can't gloat we tend to talk a little less.

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We've ditched our 20-minute format this week, because 20 minutes is not enough time for the amount of gloating we want to do. Not after the way  India beat England in the second Test. Plus, if Jasprit Bumrah can take what is supposed to be a 6-ball over, turn it into a 10-ball over, and that extra time is what ends up defining the match, we think that's a template we can follow too.

We might go back to 20 minutes for the next episode, who knows. The future is as unpredictable as England's squad selection. In the meantime, here's an extended episode recapping + celebrating the result at the home of English cricket. 

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We are back! After a hiatus due to...well, life, as well as avoiding talking about that one Test match that happened in June that might have been somewhat important, we decided to jump back into action just in time for the India-England Test series. And by in time, we mean after one Test and Day 1 of the 2nd Test is already done. That makes sense, right?

While you ponder that question, you can check out how quickly we managed to do a round-up of a month-and-a-half's worth of cricket. And then how long we could talk about one Test, and the rest of the England series. 

As always, listen and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Anchor, and Podcast Addict, and watch us and subscribe on YouTube!

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