8 minute readWe don’t know whether Graham Thorpe was underappreciated exactly, because it seems like every England supporter who watched him play in fact valued him immensely. We do feel that Thorpe has been under-written-about though… so we’ve written about him. If you want a sense of what Thorpe meant to England
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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. Balladeer writes… These are Mysie the calico and Winter the black cat. They joined the Balladeer household in June. They’re rather cute when they’re not kicking each other’s heads in or digging
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4 minute readA lot of England fans wouldn’t have stayed with Test cricket through the 90s if it hadn’t been for Graham Thorpe. He was a class above at a time when the team – and more importantly the supporters – needed it most. It is profoundly hollowing to hear that he
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4 minute readOur suspicion is that England’s white ball teams will get where they need to go sooner if Jos Buttler takes on the role of coach as well as captain. Bear with us on this. England have had both a bad World Cup and a meh World Cup inside the last
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3 minute readWhen it comes to seam bowling, speed is not everything – but it is something. Reverse swing is something too. Mark Wood delivered the best combination of somethings against the West Indies yesterday. Fast reverse swing is just such a fundamentally wonderful thing. It’s so straightforward, so obvious. Its crushing
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7 minute readWhat did you do just then? Did you just glance at a TV when some cricket was on? Did you invest 10 seconds setting the on-screen player names alongside the three-letter initialisms in the hope of working out what competition it was? That’s enough. You’re a viewer now – a
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2 minute readSend your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.) Ged Ladd writes… I was at Lord’s when Jimmy Anderson
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3 minute readBefore the English domestic season recommenced, we picked out the four quick bowlers we felt were most likely to represent ‘the next generation’ following the retirement of Stuart Broad. (We didn’t at that point know that James Anderson was also on his way out.) Precisely none of these bowlers have
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< 1 minute readOllie Pope made a jaunty hundred, so you’re supposed to talk about that. It’s just that Ollie Pope doesn’t open the batting the way Ben Duckett opens the batting. Ben Duckett at times talks such A-grade bollocks that it can be easy to forget that opening the batting like an
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3 minute readThere was a maudlin quality to the closing stages of the first Test between England and the West Indies, but the sun is out, another Test is about to begin and there is much to look forward to. 1. England absolutely pissing away the new ball This is quite unlikely
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