51allout: The End

Posted on July 6, 2018 by Nichael Bluth in Opinion

Regular readers of 51allout (i.e. this writer) will have noticed that things have been awfully quiet recently, with just a handful of articles in the past few months. The reasons for this are many and complicated, but can be summarised thus:

1. All the other writers have fucked off
2. I’ve been busy

With life starting to get in the way of writing about cricket (i.e. it’s difficult to come up with another thousand words about how bad Australia’s ODI side is without compromising one’s progress through an almost neverending series of classic SNES RPGs from the 1990’s), the time has come to do the humane thing and put 51allout out of its misery. Like Jake Ball’s Test career. Or a deer in Alastair Cook’s back garden.

Cook continually strived to find new ways to murder the local wildlife.

When we started this website, way back in 2011, England were actually really good at Test cricket – they’d just thrashed Australia Down Under to retain the Ashes, the batting was as solid as a rock and the bowling attack was a) good and b) exceedingly handsome. Basically, all was well in the cricketing world. As we finish the site, all is far from well: Devereux is skulking around in a Canadian T20 competition in front of one man and his (recently chainsawed) dog; England are truly dismal at five-day cricket, with no solutions to the problems of three years ago while the county game rots away in front of our eyes, caught beneath the landslide of T20 competition after T20 competition.

And that’s before we even mention The Hundred or, as we like to think of it, the ECB’s very own Brexit: a truly terrible idea, in which history and laws are ripped up to give the people something that they don’t actually want. Ten ball overs? The worst idea since someone proposed giving Jimmy Savile keys to Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Although this website will be long gone by the time The Hundred starts (and it will happen, no matter how many people point out what a stupid idea it is), you can rest assured that somewhere out there will be a few angry men throwing empty gin bottles in the direction of the television and muttering something about the work experience boy.

The local proprietor reminded that 51allout crew that they were no longer welcome in his bar.

So, with the requisite anger now ticked off, there’s just the small matter of a few thankyous to round things off. So, in no particular order, thank you to:

• Editor Steve, for ensuring that we rarely, if ever, fell more than three versions of WordPress behind.
• Matts English and Aussie for writing the vast majority of the articles.
• James for doing stuff at the start before disappearing into nothing, like a journalistic Jamie Dalrymple.
• All those other writers who also did a few articles before deciding that life was too short to waste their time trying to find a way to reference Brother Beyond in an article about promising County Championship youngsters.
• Everyone who interacted with us on Twitter. Yes, even our ‘celebrity’ haters – Liam Plunkett, Adam Dibble and another one that we’ve long since forgotten the name of.
• The reader – without you this site would be, well, it’d be exactly the same, just with lower numbers on Google Analytics. But we love those numbers, especially on those rare occasions when they dragged themselves away from zero.
• Margot Robbie and Jenna Coleman – we’ll stop now, we promise.

Of course, it’s how you finish that counts. Hence we thought long and hard about how to best sum up seven years and countless thousands of words in one all-encompassing sentence. And this is what we came up with – we hope you enjoy it!

Amjad Khan was really shit.