Dan Liebke

@liebcricket.com

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funny cricket > good cricket (non-cricket stuff at @danliebke.com)

it seems perfectly fitting for Stokes to retire in the middle of the Australian night so we’d all wake up with a sense of being overwhelmed by an unrelenting barrage that we never expected and to which we have no counter, just blinking in confusion and going ‘wait, what did he just do?’
Harry Brook going at 200s
Stuart Broad is a giant
Mark Wood hiding in a fort of cricket kits
Too many screens
When Green first dropped Duckett, many Australian fans were muttering to themselves ‘Bet he’ll make a century now.’ This was an obvious distraction. Because what England fans were instead saying was ‘Bethell! Make a century! Now!’ (Note: wordplay)
Because Steve Smith was in and full of all his most distractible and irritating nonsense. He asked everybody to stop moving. He made people sit down, stand up, hide things, show things, turn things around, face things the other way. He signalled wides and boundaries and good balls and where his shot should have gone and where the field should have been. He fell on his bottom, and jumped in the sky. He ducked and he turned and he drove and he pulled.
A terrible and fearsome day then, day two, for fans of England cricket. Not coincidentally, also the best day for listening to the endless swathe of English cricket podcasts for fans of Australian cricket. Schadenfreudcasts!
Anthems followed, with Australia shamefully stealing some of England’s material, positioning Jake Weatherald in between Beau Webster and Cameron Green for comical height difference effect.
4-1 or 5-0? Who gives a shit. What matters is England staying committed to a philosophy that doesn’t work. And Melbourne guaranteed that.
Trevor Chappell securing another great Australian victory
What happened at Melbourne proves ‘Bazball’™ is something rather different: a bona fide religion, complete with genuine miracles. Resurrection, for instance. Which, in the true spirit of ‘Bazball’™’s fast- forward nature took a mere two days, rather than the three Scripture reports.
Ultimately, enough runs were clobbered before enough wickets could fall for England to close out the chase, six wickets down, securing their first victory in Australia in recorded CricViz history.
Captain Smith simply ordered Boland to throw that fucken skittle away, for goodness sake, and pad up to open the batting alongside Travis Head. Yet another new opening partnership for the Australians.
If you stacked two hundred of these MCG pitches on top of one another, you’d have grass as tall as Cameron Green! Talk about a green top!
Because the Poms have stuffed this up yet again, giving up the ghost in just eleven days of Test cricket. This is Nasser Hussain type shit.
Jamie Smith has so far on this tour been less the drummer of the band, and more the drum machine sample in the band. Offering little, a soulless simulation of the real thing. And yet, here he was on the final day of this Test, combining with Will Jacks in a partnership that saw England reduce the runs required to win the match to below 200, barely offering a chance.
In one blow, Lyon - who, after his infamous interview about being overlooked for the previous Test, now goes by the nickname ‘Filthy’ - had not only put an end to the dream of Harry Brook craziness, but also Cummins’ ten-fer. Awful stuff from the veteran offie. In a very Spartacus way, all true cricket fans were now filthy.
A tremendous delivery that elicited an even more tremendous reaction from the England captain, who went Full Yosemite Sam, hopping up and down in fury at his wicket having fallen. “What in tarnation?” Stokes could be lip-read shouting as he departed the middle, moustache a-droopin’, ten-gallon hat on his head, and firing angry six-shooters into the ground. “Dagnabbit.”
Y’know, I quite like Starc batting below Pat Cummins. It really drives home the Australians’ theory that batting orders don’t matter. (See also: Starc batting below Marnus Labuschagne, Cameron Green, Josh Inglis, et al.) The half-century also meant that this series swung back to being Starc’s Ashes. Alex Carey must now take a seven-fer to regain the ascendancy
Carey’s century was not without luck, the keeper reprieved by DRS at one point when the Snicko operator apparently used the wrong stump microphone to align the sound waves with the video footage. Good stuff. Good, maddening stuff. The kind of thing that definitely wouldn’t infuriate a team asked to field in scorching Adelaide heat for an entire day.
Zak Crawley: How about this, Zak? Maybe have a look at one before wafting away like a dickhead. Ben Duckett: Has a 3% leave rate or some shit. Mate, you’re not a 14- year-old hormone-riddled teenage boy. You can leave balls alone. It won’t kill you. I promise. Ollie Pope: Stop skittering about like a crab with its arse on fire. The ball’s coming at you. Stand still and play it properly.
Harry Brook propelling Pat Cummins' defensive prod over the boundary to give Australia victory in the first Ashes Test of 2023. Zak Crawley is in the vicinity.
The pair went back and forth with some mindless banter, with Archer questioning why Smith was scoring runs so quickly and Smith returning serve by questioning why Archer was bowling so quickly. Neither line of argument seemed to stand up to too much scrutiny
I was tempted to say I didn’t think I’d ever seen a caught and bowled specialist before but then I remembered the great Peter Taylor, Australia’s superb one day bowler who in every single ODI he played took a one-handed catch from a ball chipped back to him. Astonishing, if true.
The first day of this Test was most notable for Alex Carey and Marnus Labuschagne’s co-invention of tackle catching, the most exciting innovation in cricket since the much-missed Three-Team Cricket.
The clatter of wickets briefly opened the possibility of Root being stranded on 99*, with the rest of the team bowled out. We were, however, denied this delicious dark comic moment, with Root instead finding his way to a memorable first century on Australian soil scant seconds before the tail really got serious about throwing their wickets away.
This two-day rubbish doesn’t test anything except who can hit the ball hardest before they get out. It’s not a test. It’s a lottery. Sure, it’s a lottery in which Australia hold most of the tickets, because the Poms couldn’t play bounce if you gave them a trampoline and an instruction manual. But it’s still a lottery. And I have no interest in watching Test cricketers buy scratchies.
Jofra Archer returned and Head pulled him for a straight six down the ground, as the run rate moved towards seven. Too sane. Accelerate further. Gus Atkinson returned. Consecutive fours from Head to move into the nineties. Too sane. Accelerate further. A century off 69 balls, the second fastest in Ashes history behind Adam Gilchrist’s throat-crushing display in 2006/07. Too sane. Accelerate further.
Brilliant stuff from Australia to trick Stokes into bowling a six-over spell. Yes, five wickets. But how much wear and tear on the notoriously injury-prone England captain? Steve Smith’s men playing the long game. England reeling. All in all, this first day of the 2025/26 Ashes was a great three days of Test cricket.
Like any good game of whispers, this build-up had devolved in every retelling until the final piece of pre-series banter was, inexplicably, Steve Smith and Monty Panesar squabbling over the relative infamy of Smith’s Sandpapergate vs Panesar’s appearance on Mastermind (a tour de force trivia effort in which, among a myriad of wild answers, he’d asserted that Germany’s main soccer stadium was in ‘Athens’, and identified verses from Keats as belonging to the poem ‘Oliver Twist’).
Now, one suspects, given his northern England upbringing, that he grasps this knowledge instinctively, rather than as the result of any higher-level study. He has, presumably, never read Einstein, nor spent a tedious term attempting to explain Minkowski spacetime to an entirely bewildered set of undergraduates. It is exceedingly unlikely that the England captain can talk an educated fan through the differences between the special and general theories of relativity. He would not, one imagines, know his Hessian from his Jacobian, if I may indulge in a little tensor calculus humour.
But you’re not playing babies, you moaning bloody Poms. Although you’d like that, wouldn’t you? An opposition that drools as much as your selectors do whenever they spot another county player with an average of 32? Honestly, I wouldn’t let Zak Crawley near a baby for fear he’d edge it straight to second slip.
I’m pleased to report that Kohli could be seen in the field during Australia’s innings, furiously shadow-batting. More importantly, after his twin ducks in the first two ODIs, the shadow-batting had yet to result in his dismissal. Good signs for the great man.
Almost fifty years of relationships between the two countries built on the solid foundation of the Australians being willing to bend the rules at every possible opportunity, and the New Zealanders looking down their noses at their West Island brothers for such mischief. And here’s Tim David undermining all that good work by volunteering that he’s not held a catch.
A thesis India held to be true, then Was to defeat the Aussies you had to crash through them And to ensure they were beat Required an incredible feat Of batting from Rodrigues - a true Jem
Australia got home, obviously. Because, despite already having the silliest batting depth in the history of the game, they somehow found a way to be even more ridiculous about it, cleverly having Ellyse Perry bat twice - once at first drop, and a second time at the death while wearing a fake moustache.
Batman the black toy poodle with the Ridiculous Ashes book in the background
Rabbit with a tongue
Glenn Maxwell in Red Melbourne garb
Get ready everyone, he’s about to do something stupid
Should Usman Khawaja be permitted to hover above the pitch, sneering down at the bowlers? No. The ICC must stamp out Khawaja's refusal to abide by gravity.
In form Usman Khawaja is possibly my favourite batter. He makes me think that even I could bat. You just wait for the ball to get to you then calmly play the most appropriate shot to it. Easy.
My brother with several Australian batters
Ernie the fucking anthropomorphic urn
The MCG, 35 minutes before play.
Stuart Broad reacting to Ben Stokes’ ridiculous catch
Yosemite Sam
Super Over?!
Smith slower than Head
Travis Head, lowest strike rate
Michael Vaughan with Ernie the Urn
A wooden archer
Cameron Green in the field reminds me of one of those massive dogs who just loves to gallop around joyously at the dog park, knocking things over with his outsized body, having a great time.
Ashes Screenplay 2025/26 - Page 1
Top six sellers in Amazon Australia's Sports and Recreation Humour list. The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments is fourth
The Lord’s members behaving with admirable decorum after a stumping
A wonderful page from the brilliant book The Instant Cricket Library by Dan Liebke
Multiple copies of The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments