< 1 minute readMatthey Hoggard says nobody’s a dead cert for the England team. We’d dispute that. Matthew Hoggard’s a dead cert, surely. Today he took four top order wickets for just 29 runs and it’s like he’s never been away. We’ve missed Matthew Hoggard (he was injured over the summer) and we’ve
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.
Zimbabwe not quite so bad, West Indies still really rather bad indeed
2 minute readZimbabwe have beaten the West Indies. As the result loomed, we were asked whether we were going to paint it as a Zimbabwean improvement or ‘the usual’. ‘The usual’ is of course when we say that if you so much as lose a wicket against Zimbabwe, you’re the worst cricketers
Continue readingWasim Jaffer gets a big hundred
< 1 minute readRahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar were fairly predictable thorns in Sohail Tanvir’s side, but Wasim Jaffer was a thorn the size of a pickaxe handle. Jaffer actually made his Test debut back in 2000, when he was looked on as the latest great batsman from Mumbai, the town that brought
Continue readingSohail Tanvir is Pakistan’s ‘go to’ bowler
< 1 minute readBecause if you go to anyone else, you have to enter an isolation unit and get decontaminated afterwards. We don’t know for definite, but we imagine that Sohail Tanvir’s in a bad mood. Sohail’s one quarter of a four-man attack and one of the other quarters, Shoaib Akhtar, has got
Continue readingSourav Ganguly looking really quite pissed off
< 1 minute readWhile wearing a stupid hat. [This post used to contain a picture of Sourav wearing an East 17 hat while signing autographs at this point. Annoyingly, we can’t find it now.] No joke. We just really like this picture. Don’t make eye contact, Sourav. Write something dismissive as well. That’ll
Continue readingOpen verdict on Bob Woolmer’s death
< 1 minute readYou could have guessed, couldn’t you? Bob Woolmer’s death has veered from sad to sickening and back to merely sad again. It was to be expected that no real conclusions would be drawn. We’re going to put most weight by the part where they say that there was ‘insufficient evidence
Continue readingNo Holds Barred Cricket
< 1 minute readNo Holds Barred Cricket is a form rarely played these days. It was introduced in the mid-Nineties as a means of injecting a little bit more excitement into the one-day game. Rather frighteningly and contradictorily, the rules are ‘there are no rules’. No Holds Barred Cricket featured large amounts of
Continue readingDale Steyn’s bowling speed
2 minute readWe remember Dale Steyn’s Test debut. For his first wicket, he arced a yorker into Marcus Trescothick‘s middle stump. Not bad. While he touched 90mph during that Test, it was rare and we sort of put him to the back of our mind in our mental draw marked ‘South African
Continue readingMatthew Hoggard will be in the Test team then
< 1 minute readIf 240 Test wickets weren’t enough, there’s the fact that Stephen Harmison and James Anderson are both a bit injured to help Hoggy along. And if his 6-57 against India at Nagpur last year – a herculean bowling performance hewn from pure nous – wasn’t proof that he could bowl
Continue readingIndia get home
< 1 minute readIt may have got to 93-3 chasing 200, but with Sachin Tendulkar there, it never really felt in doubt. The man’s a pro. Shoaib Akhtar did his best, taking 4-58, but this was the right result. If India’s tailenders had managed to stick around for even a moment in their
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