The No Balls Cricket Podcast · No Balls Cricket Podcast

No Balls Cricket Unfiltered Episode 51: The Return

·1 hr 25 min·5 clips

Gautam Gambhir’s insistence on three spinners gets called pure obstinacy.

The episode opens with the hosts admitting they have been away too long. They are back in the same room, and they treat that as both a win and a small disaster. There are WhatsApp notifications, background interruptions, and the sort of energy that suggests nobody has fully got back into recording mode. They settle into cricket quickly, because that is the one thing either of them can argue about for long enough. The India-England Test series is the first major reference point. The hosts place it against a wider look at where Indian Test cricket sits and how fast the mood changes when home results stop looking automatic. From there, they move into the fallout from the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. That becomes the spine of the discussion. A major thread is the job description of the modern spinner in Test cricket. They push back on the idea that a spinner can just be a strike option anymore. The bowler has to take wickets and still keep the innings pinned down. They treat that as a real tactical standard, not a slogan. Ashwin comes up repeatedly as the clearest example. They talk through how he has figured out specific batters, especially Steve Smith, by working angles and attack plans rather than hoping for a loose shot. Jadeja is presented as the different but equally useful version of that skill. The hosts also compare both of them with Nathan Lyon. The point is that their methods differ, but the underlying demand is the same. A top spinner has to build pressure and still threaten dismissal. Warne, Murali, and Kumble are used as reference points for what that balance can look like at the highest level. The discussion keeps circling back to Australia as the place where that balance gets tested hardest. Along the way, they throw in their usual mockery of Bazball and England's marketing-heavy self-mythology. The tone stays rude, quick, and knowledgeable. Even when they are joking, they keep coming back to how Test cricket actually works. The result is a conversation that is part banter and part serious cricket memory, with no interest in sounding tidy.

As heard by us

Sharp, combative Test cricket talk that turns spin bowling into a real argument.

No Pulse Cricket Podcast comes back after a long break, recorded for the first time since the end of the India-England Test series. It spends much of its time on the wider BGT fallout and on a brisk argument about what spin bowling really asks for, with Ashwin, Jadeja, Lyon,…

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Why you'd press play

Press play for BGT fallout and spin-bowling arguments that get properly nerdy.

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