England to seek better warmup preparations before 2029-30 Ashes series
The England & Wales Cricket Board is ready to offer Australia their pick of warm-up facilities before the next Ashes series in 2027, in an attempt to secure similar treatment when England return in 2029-30 and avoid being forced into the kind of buildup that preceded the current series and has become the focus of intense criticism.England’s preparations are under the microscope given their dismal start to this series, with the first Test lost inside two days and the second lost in four, with Australia’s winning margins eight wickets both times.“If I was an England supporter and had paid the money to come here, I’d be asking the ECB for a refund,” Ian Botham said on Sunday.“Because this team, for me, is not prepared.”Though much of the travelling squad was in Perth, venue of the first Ashes Test, by 2 November, 19 days before the commencement of hostilities, and the remainder had arrived by the 9th, their only cricket that could even be loosely defined as competitive before the series got under way was a two-day game against the Lions, a collection of their own reserves and promising youngsters.
That match was played at Lilac Hill, a public park on the outskirts of the city where the low, slow pitch was a complete contrast to the pace and bounce they were forced to deal with against Australia a few days later.“Everyone is pretty aware conditions are very different … Perth Stadium isn’t going to be like that,” Ollie Pope admitted at the end of that match, in which England’s No 3 scored 100 and 90 in his two innings; he has 105 runs in four during the Ashes campaign so far.But now the ECB and Cricket Australia are discussing the possibility of entering into a memorandum of understanding to cover the teams’ preparations for the next two Ashes series, guaranteeing each other high-class facilities, on similar surfaces and in similar weather to those they will face in Tests, and matches against high-quality opposition if desired.Sign up to The SpinSubscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week’s actionafter newsletter promotionWhen India visited Australia a year ago they were given sole access to the Waca, Western Australia’s traditional home, on the opposite bank of the Swan River from Perth Stadium and prepared by the same ground staff.Cricket Australia might have been put off from repeating such generosity when India proceeded to win the opening game of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy by 295 runs, though Australia then won three of the remaining four.
While England have consistently defended their series preparations in public – “Preparation is not the question for me at all,” said Marcus Trescothick, the assistant coach, on Saturday,“We’re very happy with the preparation that we’ve used and what we’ve had” – their preference would have been to also use the Waca,But a Sheffield Shield game between Western Australia and Queensland was scheduled for precisely the period when they were playing their warmup, which meant the only Ashes combatants who benefited from honing their skills there before the start of the series were the Australians Marnus Labuschagne, Cameron Green, Michael Neser and Josh Inglis (though only the first two played in the series opener),Instead they were initially offered the chance to play a warmup game on a club ground 1,500 miles away in Adelaide,When they requested to be moved to Perth they were informed that they would only have access to a ground of similar quality.
They were then offered a two-day pink-ball warm-up for this week’s day-night Test in Brisbane, but 600 miles away in Canberra where even the former Australia seamer Peter Siddell said the conditions would be “totally different” and that “there’s not going to be a lot they can get out of it”.They sent the Lions, augmented by three members of the Ashes squad who had not played the opening game.Australia warmed up for the 2023 Ashes by playing the World Test Championship final against India at the Oval, and for that by training at the County Ground in Beckenham, south London, where the facilities were impressive enough for them to return before this year’s WTC final.“It feels like this is becoming the norm for Test tours,” said George Bailey, their chief selector, in 2023.“It feels like there’s more tours that you don’t have a tour match than when you do.
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Cloudflare admits ‘we have let the Internet down again’ after outage hits major web services – as it happened
Technical problems at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare today have taken a host of websites offline this morning.Cloudflare said shortly after 9am UK time that it “is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs [application programming interfaces – used when apps exchange data with each other].Cloudflare has also reported it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is monitoring the results.But the outage has affected a number of websites and platforms, with reports of problems accessing LinkedIn, X, Canva – and even the DownDetector site used to monitor online service issues.Last month, an outage at Cloudflare made many websites inaccessible for about three hours
BP to scrap paid rest breaks and most bank holiday bonuses for forecourt staff
BP is ditching paid rest breaks and most bank holiday bonuses for 5,400 workers in its petrol forecourts as it attempts to offset a planned rise in the independent living wage.The company has told workers in its 310 company-run forecourts that it will be changing their benefits in February. Workers at a further 850 BP-branded forecourts run by partners are on different pay deals.BP is an accredited member of the Living Wage Foundation’s fair pay scheme, under which employers commit to pay staff an annually set wage to meet living costs.Hourly pay for BP’s affected workers will rise to a minimum of £13
Cloudflare apologises after latest outage takes down LinkedIn and Zoom
Cloudflare has apologised after an outage on Friday morning hit websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector, the company’s second outage in less than a month.“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the internet down again,” it said in a blogpost, adding that it would release more information next week on how it aims to prevent these failures.The outage on Friday came after Cloudflare adjusted its firewall to protect customers from a widespread software vulnerability revealed earlier this week, and was not an attack, it said. Earlier, it said a separate issue had been reported with its application programming interfaces.The issue, which affected 28% of its traffic, lasted for half an hour and was resolved shortly after 9am GMT, it said
‘Urgent clarity’ sought over racial bias in UK police facial recognition technology
The UK’s data protection watchdog has asked the Home Office for “urgent clarity” over racial bias in police facial recognition technology before considering its next steps.The Home Office has admitted that the technology was “more likely to incorrectly include some demographic groups in its search results”, after testing by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) of its application within the police national database.The report revealed that the technology, which is intended to be used to catch serious offenders, is more likely to incorrectly match black and Asian people than their white counterparts.In a statement responding to the report, Emily Keaney, the deputy commissioner for the Information Commissioner’s Office, said the ICO had asked the Home Office “for urgent clarity on this matter” in order for the watchdog to “assess the situation and consider our next steps”.The next steps could include enforcement action, including issuing a legally binding order to stop using the technology or fines, as well as working with the Home Office and police to make improvements
Lando Norris wins F1 world title in Abu Dhabi despite Verstappen’s GP win
Lando Norris has won his first Formula One world championship with a gutsy, nerveless drive of no little bravery to seal it with third place at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. A podium was enough for the 26-year-old British driver despite Red Bull’s Max Verstappen winning and his McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri taking second.Norris did exactly what was required of him in an enormously intense and high-pressure contest at the Yas Marina Circuit, including making a series of bold overtakes, with a flawless execution by himself and by his McLaren team.In taking his first world championship he becomes the 11th British driver to do so and it brings to an end McLaren’s drivers’ championship drought, which stretched back to 2008, when Lewis Hamilton last won it for the team. It had been 27 years since McLaren last secured the drivers’ and constructors’ double in 1998, with Mika Häkkinen
Ben Stokes says England have been ‘letting the pressure get to us’ in Ashes
Ben Stokes has admitted that the way England have folded in key moments during the first two Ashes Tests has led him to question the character of his players, and insisted: “A dressing room that I am captain of isn’t a place for weak men”.After Australia won the second Test in Brisbane by the same eight-wicket margin with which they secured the first, Stokes suggested the telling difference was that the home side had been superior in the “moments in the game where the heat is on and the pressure is really, really cooking” whereas his players “have all been guilty at moments [of] letting the pressure, the occasion, the circumstances, get to us”.“Over and over again, Australia have managed to get through those periods and outdo us,” Stokes said. “I know it’s not a skill thing, because they’re all incredibly talented players. But if you can’t put it down to skill then you start to wonder, what is it? Do we need to start thinking about what mentality we’re taking into those pressure moments?“Because when we’re on top we’re great, but when the game is neck and neck we’re not coming out on top on enough occasions to be able to challenge Australia
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England to seek better warmup preparations before 2029-30 Ashes series
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