Australia | King Cricket

February 13, 2023 Australia / India

Ashwin and Jadeja. Again.

2 minute readIt must be getting on for 10 years now that touring Test teams have been arriving in India expecting to have to combat R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja on pitches that will more than likely turn a bit. No-one’s really worked it out yet. 10 years, man! 10 years! And

February 8, 2023 Australia / India

R Ashwin is vulnerable to actual chess

3 minute readMarnus Labuschagne recently described facing R Ashwin as being “like a chess game”. It was an interesting choice of words as actual chess could prove to be the off-spinner’s greatest weakness. Labuschagne was alluding to that to and fro of decision-making between himself and a thoughtful bowler like Ashwin who

February 7, 2023 Australia / India

Steve Smith’s mountain-toppling attempt and Rohit Sharma’s potential landslide | an India v Australia preview

2 minute readMountains crop up a lot in metaphors. They’re forever being scaled, climbed or conquered. Steve Smith has come up with his own way to reach the summit of the mountain that is a Test tour of India though. “If we are able to topple that mountain, that’d be huge,” he

January 23, 2023 Australia

Steve Smith’s number one priority on a Test tour

2 minute read“Cricket Australia basically said to us, ‘Okay, what can we kinda do to make your time in hotels for the next month better? So the boys just took it to the next level” – Pat Cummins The latest series of The Test outlines all the various toys and gizmos the

January 20, 2023 Australia / England / India

Steve Smith’s Sussex stint and podcast proxies – mop-up of the day

2 minute readMop-up of the day is a thing we do when we can’t really be bothered writing more than a sentence or two about a bunch of different things. Sometimes we end up writing extra sentences though because it looks weird if the opening sentence, in bold, is immediately followed by

January 9, 2023 Australia

Having David Warner play Nathan Lyon at the Test Match board game seems a perfectly reasonable way to promote series two of The Test on Amazon Prime

3 minute readSay what you like about tax-dodging symbol of the horrors of modern global commerce, Amazon, it knows how to promote a documentary series about the Australia Test cricket team. Series one of Amazon Prime’s The Test was notable for footage of Justin Langer kicking a bin over, among other things.

December 31, 2022 Australia / Bangladesh / India / New Zealand / Pakistan / South Africa

Ashwin, Warner and run-rates – a recap of the 2022 Boxing Day Tests

2 minute readWe previewed the Boxing Day Tests. We may as well take a look at what happened in them. Australia v South Africa Signs of an upturn for South Africa, who finally passed 200 for the first time in many attempts. Their second innings 204 all out was enough to secure

December 16, 2022 Australia

Sydney Thunder were cut by the thunder

< 1 minute readSeam bowler Brendan Doggett top scored for Sydney Thunder today after hitting the only ball he faced which didn’t dismiss him for four runs. The Thunder didn’t even bat long enough for extras to outscore him. All out for 15. Not a great effort. Bad enough, surely, to warrant use

November 22, 2022 Australia / England

When Jos Buttler says an Australia v England series is irrelevant, is that enough?

4 minute readEngland have just finished playing Australia in a one-day series. The first match came three days after the T20 World Cup final and the man who went on to captain England in the second game called that scheduling “horrible”. With the bare minimum diplomacy, England’s coach said the series was

November 16, 2022 Australia / England

The Test match that Simon Kerrigan and James Faulkner played

< 1 minute readNow that we’re in one of those occasional narrow windows when a World Cup isn’t taking place, it seems a good time to point you all towards the final episode of our podcast series about the 2013 Ashes. The 2013 Ridiculous Ashes comes to a climax with what will, for