< 1 minute readIt strikes us that New Zealand are a side who can benefit from a good old-fashioned batting line-up with a trio of blockers at the top of the order followed by the strokemakers. Kiwi batsmen do tend to be one or the other and an early stultathon will set the
Continue readingAuthor: King Cricket
Otherwise known as Alex Bowden, a lapsed cricket journalist who has written for ESPNCricinfo, wisden.com, Cricket 365, The Cricketer and plenty of other places.
Links to some non-cricket writing and a bit more background here.
Zaheer Khan – average record belies his class
< 1 minute readZaheer Khan deserves better than 2-36 and we won’t begrudge him if he gets more wickets. There are talented bowlers out there who have unflattering career records and Zaheer’s one of them. It seems wrong to watch a bowler unveil such a range of skills and then see that he’s
Continue readingGraham or Graeme Swann?
< 1 minute readGraeme Swann’s selection for England has opened up an old, rancid can of worms. Worms of spelling. Spelling worms. To rid the world of these vile spelling worms once and for all, Graeme Swann is a Graeme, not a Graham. Here are some more famous cricketing Grahams/Graemes: Graham Gooch Graeme
Continue readingDisturbingly smooth men of cricket
< 1 minute readJust when you think you can’t possibly vomit any more, you remember that the year doesn’t end with January. Witness the Men Of Cricket 2009 calendar, made to raise funds for the McGrath Foundation, an organisation set up by Glenn and his late wife to provide funding for breast cancer
Continue readingChris Lewis forgets to discard his 4kg of cocaine before boarding the aircraft
< 1 minute readChris Lewis may or may not have said: “4kg of cocaine? They told me it was a sandwich and a banana for the flight.” Actually, they told him it was a load of tinned fruit. Or maybe they told him it was 4kg of cocaine disguised as tinned fruit. The
Continue readingChris Martin – not the best bowler in New Zealand
< 1 minute readThe angular-elbowed, overly springy-running, Kiwi namesake of Dorset-raised, middle-class Coldplay singer, Chris Martin, has been dropped by New Zealand. What do you make of this? (Assuming you can work out what ‘this’ is from that sentence.) We partly think ‘who for?’ being as New Zealand don’t exactly have heaps of
Continue readingNever mention Harry Potter when attempting a joke
< 1 minute readWe got a text message yesterday. It said: “Giles Coren has written a shit piece in The Times about Wisden being owned by a new publisher. It’s really, really awful.” We had to take a look and it doesn’t disappoint. As you perhaps know, The Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack has been
Continue readingAmjad Khan of Kent, Denmark and now England
< 1 minute readThere haven’t been a great many Danish cricketers. We’re not sure Amjad Khan’s exactly a great – but by Danish standards he can’t be far off. Amjad Khan’s what we’d deem a solid practitioner, which smacks of faint praise, but isn’t meant to. It’s actually more an acknowledgement that England
Continue readingSafety concerns when touring India or Pakistan
2 minute readWe didn’t want to say anything on this subject, because we feel fairly certain it will show up our ignorance and that’s something we can comfortably highlight without remotely stretching ourself. This issue is monopolising the cricket news though, so it deserves comment. Feel free to put us straight on
Continue readingSurrey v Leicestershire Pro40 match report
2 minute readSam writes: Having blagged two free press tickets to the last Pro40 game of the season at The Oval, we met outside the Alec Stewart gates on a rare day of bright sunshine in an otherwise dreary English summer. With the Vauxhall End half of the ground closed off for
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