5 minute readDo you know England’s first-choice XI for the upcoming 50-over World Cup? Do England? There’s a lot of job sharing in the various England teams these days. Players flit in and flit out to the extent that it’s actually pretty hard to identify the first choice XI. That’s mostly okay
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< 1 minute readIf you’ve got a picture of an animal being conspicuously indifferent to cricket, please send it to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Daisy writes… Ged and I went to a supper and talk at Lord’s about the book Being Geoffrey Boycott. Ged has written up the evening. On arrival, when we first looked out
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2 minute readAustralian pundits have been left with a lot of difficult questions after their team beat India on a Test pitch that turned from day one. Can a pitch be doctored or unfair when Australia win on it? We invited two high profile Aussie cricket personalities to try and come to
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4 minute readFew England players have deployed the long handle as delightfully as Moeen Ali. But which element is the more lovely – his backlift or his follow-through? Like all sentient humans, we make a point of devoting one day each month to appreciation of Brian Lara’s backlift. A byproduct of this
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3 minute readJimmy Anderson has played 179 Test matches and he was completely pissed off to lose this one by a single run. Jimmy Anderson is a quite majestically irritable cricketer. The penultimate ball of the second Test between New Zealand and England could, and probably technically should, have been called a
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< 1 minute read“We know that we’re being hunted,” says Australia’s Beth Mooney. Yeah, in much the same way that Moby Dick was being hunted. The harpoon that can kill this white whale is yet to be forged. After the 2023 T20 World Cup, the seas of cricket are again littered with the
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3 minute readWe once joked that England’s plan for Jonny Bairstow was to keep him guessing. It always seemed like the aim was to treat him as inconsistently as possible to keep him on his toes. After scoring four hundreds and a fifty in five innings last summer, it seemed safe to
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4 minute read“It could be really entertaining, like that 2005 series, which is what made me fall in love with cricket. The prospect of that is really exciting.” – Ollie Pope, February 2023. Bless him, he’s excited. He’s also completely wrong. The fundamental mistake that Ollie Pope has made here is a
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3 minute readA year ago, during the 50-over tournament, we headlined our semi-finals preview piece, Who will lose to Australia in the World Cup final? Even if it’s a different format, it’s tempting to take the same attitude now. But if there’s one thing we’re sure of, it’s that life isn’t an
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2 minute readWith 15 minutes to go on day two, Stuart Broad walked out to bat at number four as England’s “Nighthawk”. Second ball he skied a hook that fell to earth after bowler and keeper left it for each other. It is hard to envisage a more Broad passage of play.
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