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I read this news on Yahoo and I found two mistakes as per me, not sure if they have been mistaken or I am wrong so I need your help.

This is a paragraph on Yahoo.in:

"Throughout this series, they've played very good cricket. Their new ball pair have been very good but where they've taken the game away is in the middle overs batting which set up their charge late in the innings, picking up 80-90 runs consistently," he said.

I think, it should be like this:

"Throughout this series, they've played a very good cricket. Their new ball pair has been very good but where they've taken the game away is in the middle overs batting which set up their charge late in the innings, picking up 80-90 runs consistently," he said.

Thanks in advance.

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The first sentence is not mistaken. "Playing very good cricket" is correct English. It has to do with sports specifically. In English, we say "he plays cricket" or "she plays football" whereas with other nouns we use the article: "she plays the cello". There may be other types of nouns that are used this way, but sports are the only one that comes to mind right now.

If the article were talking about a specific cricket match, it should use the article: "they played a very good cricket match". As it's written, it describes their cricket playing in general. "Playing very good cricket" means the same thing as "playing cricket very well".

The second sentence is a common usage in British English. In America, one would usually write it the way you did (the pair has been), but the British tend to pluralize the verb for group nouns (the pair have been; the team are winning).

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  • Thanks, I agree with you, and I was thinking the same but just wanted to confirm, thank you so much for your help, it was helpful.
    – user62015
    Feb 2, 2014 at 7:42
  • Also "play music", "eat sugar", etc. Any non-count noun, in fact.
    – msh210
    Dec 17, 2014 at 18:58
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    You can say "she plays a good cello" to compliment her playing in general. That is a complement to "Playing good cricket".
    – Chenmunka
    Dec 19, 2014 at 14:24
  • @msh210 I think you mean any uncountable noun. :)
    – starsplusplus
    Dec 19, 2014 at 17:37
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    The third paragraph about using plural in BE is probably unknown to most of us Americans. It reminds me of moving to Japan for a year to teach English as a native speaker, then personally actually learning some English on the job. Namely this involved several differences in BE that I never recognized or probably even suspected before. (Pronunciation, just as one example, is actually a lot more different than many native speakers realize, but it makes a big difference when non-fluent English speakers are listening, since their ears often get trained to one version of English or another.)
    – Panzercrisis
    Dec 29, 2020 at 21:06

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