The Spanish tailor who defrauded derby

🚨 If you’re an RCB fan, I’d love if you could fill out this survey on how you feel about the franchise this year. I plan to create a graphic story of your answers soon! 🚨

✍️ Giles Wilcock remembers the ex-Derby wicketkeeper who helped build their football arm, worked as a tailor for a Spanish king, & was suspected to have stolen giant sums from his old County club.

“The uninitiated might have wondered how Richardson “died in Madrid”, at a time when the Spanish Civil War was raging. The reason was an open secret in certain parts of Derby; it encompassed fraud, an Australian Test bowler and Spanish royalty.

But the story of Sam Richardson — once the court tailor to King Alfonso XIII and who died during the Siege of Madrid, just over a year before it fell to the forces of Francisco Franco — really began with the formation of Derbyshire County Cricket Club.”

📊 ChimpThought breaks down some of the half-arsed criticisms of dual handed partnerships in white ball cricket.

“The paper evaluates handedness entirely through the lens of partnership output, implicitly assuming that any advantage must be realised within the partnership itself. This is a much stronger assumption than it appears.

It rules out the possibility that the primary effect of maintaining a left-right balance operates through the behaviour of the bowling side rather than through immediate scoring within the partnership.”

📊 Atharv Tambade & Aadityan Ganesh attempt to define different kinds of anchors in the IPL – defined as batters who play more balls than expected for their position – by how they score their runs.

“Venky Iyer is the cleaner puzzle. He has always been a batter we have found difficult to place, and his dot-to-six profile may explain why. When a batter has one standout scoring trait, it is usually clear how to optimize his usage. But a batter who is roughly par at avoiding dots, rotating strike, and finding boundaries is harder to pin down, because the profile points to no obvious role.”

• “Instil belief in the guys’”
  ✍️ Ahsan Nagi talked to Labuschagne before the final on his leadership style

• “Dream11 and county cricket”
  🔒 Melinda Farrell & James Coyne report on how the Indian gambling ban has affected County cricket’s revenues.

• “Cricket in North America”
  ✍️ Edward Fitzgibbon attends a sports investor conference in USA; cricket is part of the American investor discourse, but they’re not sure how to reliably make money from the sport yet.

• “21 Up”
  🔒 Philip Brown has beautiful modern-day portraits of the 2005 Ashes team.

• “Prince topples the King”
  📊 Tarun Pratap on how LSG’s Prince Yadav became the first right arm pacer to castle Virat Kohli early in the game since 2017.

• “Different day, same problems”
  📊 Tarutr Malhotra on RCB’s Groundhog Day batting tactics.

• “World Cup, Queensland and Coaching”
  📽️ Damien Fleming, Michael Kasprowicz & Jason Gillespie talk to Andy Bichel to discuss his own career, and how he’s shaping the next gen of pacers. [YouTube]

• “The pressure of playing at highest level”
  📽️ BBC host Mark Wood to talk about the IPL and his experiences – including a pretty worrying anecdote about being asked to play while injured. [YouTube]

• “An EPIC women’s cricket summer”
  📽️ Sky Sports preview the English Women’s summer starting this weekend with stand-in captain Charlie Dean. [YouTube]

• “The theoretical limit of scoring”
  📽️ Jarrod Kimber looks at a weird statistical anomaly of free hits – despite the freedom of scoring, the improvement in batter techniques, the better bats and flatter pitches – the balls are being hit at the same SR as a decade ago. [YouTube]