King Cricket

June 5, 2026 England / New Zealand

So how tall does Shoaib Bashir feel right now? (Presumably not 10 feet tall)

4 minute readIt’s become one of the great, weird, modern cricket clichés that Brendon McCullum has the ability to make players feel they are an incorrect height. (Invariably taller, invariably 10 feet.) But he doesn’t always make them feel that, does he? We’d be interested to know what height Shoaib Bashir currently

June 3, 2026 England

If Brendon McCullum does get England to play ‘smart cricket’ what does that mean for Harry Brook whose superpower is very much ‘daft cricket’?

3 minute readIn the wake of England’s most successful Ashes tour for 15 years, it was widely agreed that some England players needed to play smarter and so that is what Brendon McCullum has promised to deliver henceforth. Some players didn’t need to play smarter though. One in particular has built an

June 1, 2026 Regulars

A cricket book at a castle

< 1 minute readSend your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Please consider putting the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself. We like those ones. We took The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments to Warwick Castle during October half-term. It seemed a little nonplussed by the castle

May 29, 2026 Ireland / New Zealand

Chapeau, New Zealand – not many teams come to Ireland and win a Test match

< 1 minute readAn historic day. Not many teams get the better of Ireland in Test cricket. New Zealand today inflicted only their second ever defeat in home conditions and their first by an innings. Extraordinary stuff. Even more amazingly, New Zealand had never before got the better of Ireland, home or away.

May 27, 2026 Ireland / New Zealand

Can the 1980s tell us anything about the first Test match of summer?

2 minute readNeither Ireland nor New Zealand play too many Test matches and the Irish players don’t even have a domestic red ball structure to fall back on. You may therefore conclude that there hasn’t been any recent first-class cricket from which we might weigh form ahead of this week’s Test match.

May 21, 2026 Pakistan

Can anyone get a grip on the attenuating unpredictability of the Pakistan Test team?

3 minute readPakistan play three Tests in England later this summer. You can never be entirely sure what you’re going to get from Pakistan, but it does feel like the range of unpredictability has been narrowing for a good few years now; the moments of unexpected brilliance growing ever fewer and further

May 14, 2026 England

Is Ollie Pope still in the same galaxy as the England Test team?

4 minute readThere are winners and losers with every England Test squad announcement, but the first one after an Ashes tour tends to feature bigger, clearer signposts for the years ahead. Ollie Pope looks to be one of the less immediately obvious casualties of the greater disloyalty Rob Key promised us. Looking

May 12, 2026 County cricket / England

Ben Duckett chose… wisely

3 minute readA modern international cricketer like Ben Duckett has a lot of tricky career decisions to make. Sometimes you don’t know whether you’ve made the right choice until you have or haven’t aged into dust. “This certainly is the cup of The King of Kings,” says grail-hunting, Nazi-collaborating Walter Donovan, shortly

May 8, 2026 County cricket / England

James will Rew the latest instalment of England’s weird, implicit, episodic Test squad announcement

3 minute readEngland confirmed the dropping of Kent’s Zak Crawley today when James Rew walked out to open the batting for Somerset. There are definitely more straightforward ways of announcing these things. English cricket’s rune-readers have been broadly in agreement for a while now that Zak Crawley is no longer an England

May 7, 2026 County cricket

Stone rises as Nottinghamshire lead a more familiar looking County Championship

3 minute readNow that everyone’s played four matches, the 2026 County Championship is starting to take shape. The shape it is taking is that of the 2025 County Championship. No, really. The top five currently looks like this. Which isn’t really so radically different to how things finished last year. In fact