Mark Wood

Yeah, I did.

Uh, along with, along with my, my good friend Mark Wood.

Um, you know, we obviously came in at two-nil down at Headingley, which, you know, I look back on that test match with some, uh, you know [electronic tone]

[upbeat music] Lemon pepper fans, I hope you're sitting down because Zaxby's just dropped a mouth-watering lemon pepper dry rub.

one of the cleanest contacts on a pull shot you'll ever see.

It was reminiscent of the Nathan Lyon at Belle Reve that I've talked about probably too many times over the last few weeks when he was cleaning up Mark Wood.

But Bavuma sends Cummins out of the ground and, you know, like Chandamal at goal.

You always love it when you see the ball rolling down the road.

Let's move on and talk a little bit about England.

So October time is when our central contracts are announced for the following season with Mark Wood retiring and Ben Stokes having a rest before the Ashes next year and disappearing off that contract list.

There's some money freed up.

um for yeah for those contracts so england have named 39 um cricketers on that men's list including a bunch of what they've called development contracted players and yeah there's a few things that caught my eye number one ray and ahmed and makes it onto the centrally contracted player list but he's off to play some lions cricket he's been left out of The main white ball squads and first, you know, real white ball squads under Marcus North, our new men's selector.

It was like a talk sport.

supposedly show but but a comedy one and uh yes they they wrote in this uh reporter called mate um who would report on improbable events including if i remember correctly um uh Mark Wood, the England fast bowler, bowling at a bunch of kids who had skiddy legs syndrome.

So the premise was that Mike Haston had been sent down to report on Mark Wood bowling fast at a charity event for these kids.

And then it, of course, descends into chaos because Mark Wood famously bowls very fast and kids with skiddy legs cannot necessarily get out of the way of these.

And so it's all just like, it was kind of just...

Just farce, a lot of it.

They were jaded, they were fed up with losing, and they needed to be reinvigorated.

I'm talking Joe Root himself, Ben Stokes himself, Johnny Bairstow, Jimmy Anderson, Stuart Broad, Chris Works, Mark Wood.

All these guys had been around the block a lot and they were fed up with losing and they were fed up with the way that things were being done.

And when McCullum and Stokes said, right, pressure's off, don't worry about your place, don't worry about your economy rate, Don't worry about getting out playing some kind of innovative shot.

It is an enabler.

So obviously we've had, um, Ben Stokes and Mark Wood retire, um, and a couple of others that have come off the central contract.

So, um, uh, a- as it's I think been well-documented, there's a, there's a, there's a pool of money that, you know, gets, um, dispersed to central contracted players.

There's no saving to be had.

But 39, 10% of professional cricketers, it does- it doesn't sit quite rightly to me that that's how we're handing out England contracts.

It also doesn't sit massively rightly to me that you go on about pay and stuff like that.

The reason they've been able to do this is because they've not got Stokes and Mark Wood to pay anymore.

But that shows that it's a slightly more evenly split, uh, dispensing of money, right? So isn't that kind of like a positive thing really, that more players are rewarded for having done well, brought into the tent, rather than, say, the top bracket taking a large percentage chunk of what that

Joffra won't go on forever.

We've lost Mark Wood.

So who are these next guys in line who can send it down at 90 miles an hour, which will add to our other seamers, sort of like Ollie Robinson and these guys who...

The way that test cricket especially seems to be going is that you have... you have those couple of paces, but then that you have the pace off and skill bowls.