King Cricket

March 23, 2017 County cricket

Everyone’s going mental about Hampshire’s Mason Crane

< 1 minute readEmbed from Getty Images Despite his name, Mason Crane is not some kind of specialist stoneworking construction vehicle. No, HE IS A DESTRUCTION… person. Crane is a 20-year-old leg-spinner who boasts the customary English leg-spinner’s first-class bowling average of 39. Things have changed over the winter though and from now

March 22, 2017 Australia

Steve Smith’s shonky technique keeps him hiding in plain sight

2 minute readThe notion of a ‘best batsman in the world’ is stupid. You rate them based on what’s already happened and it counts for nothing the next time they’re pitched into competitive cricket. Cricket is not a prolonged personal odyssey, it’s a series of matches between teams. A high ranking gives

Mop-up of the day – the batsmen in and out of form

< 1 minute readAustralia drew with India, but let’s not focus on how admirably they’re performing. Who the hell wants to read about that? Let’s instead concentrate on tangentia. David Warner has said that “it will turn around” for him with regards to his recent poor form. We agree. If he keeps being

March 20, 2017 Australia / Bangladesh / India / Sri Lanka

Steve Smith’s brain fades still further, Bangladesh do the reverse

< 1 minute readBangladesh have won nine Tests and we make this their second win. The convention is to remove matches in which Bangladesh feature from all Test statistics. This seems unduly harsh at the best of times, but it seems even more so when it’s them who you’re measuring. Nevertheless, in the

March 17, 2017 Bangladesh / County cricket / Sri Lanka

The South hit the North and the great flattener

< 1 minute readOne of the few things that people agree upon about the lyrics of The Fall’s Hit the North is that one of the first lines is “my cat says eeeeee-ack”. So what can we agree upon about the South’s hitting of the North’s bowlers today? That it was more successful

March 17, 2017 Australia / India

Remember what Test cricket in India used to be like?

< 1 minute readEmbed from Getty Images Big innings, bigger innings, small innings, smaller innings. That used to the be the sequence for a Test match taking place in India. Declarations happened a lot. Australia just made 451 and it seems a good score, but it wasn’t so long ago you’d be thinking

March 16, 2017 Australia / India

Video: Steve Smith tries to counter Wriddiham Saha’s ball-delving

< 1 minute readDay one of the third Test between India and Australia. Glenn Maxwell played cricket and made runs, Steve Smith uglied yet another hundred and Wriddiham Saha went snuffling around in the Australian captain’s crotch in an attempt to pluck out a ball. Here’s a video. Wriddhiman Saha & Steve Smith

March 15, 2017 Extras

I Don’t Like Cricket, I Hate It – the North v South edition

2 minute readA semi-regular feature in which we ask Prince Prefab about cricket – even though he hates cricket. We are in bold. Prince Prefab is not. Anything you want to know about this week’s North v South cricket matches? Is this real? Is it really North versus South? Are they trying

March 14, 2017 County cricket

Them North v South matches start this week

2 minute readOr, you know, “those” North v South matches if you’ve got some weird dialect or other. Rivalries are rarely more intense than between two groups of people who are all but identical when viewed with any sense of perspective. The rest of the cricket world will look on in amused

March 13, 2017 Extras

Books to read at the cricket – A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

2 minute readGed writes: This was a first for me in the matter of reading a novel while watching county cricket. In the past, at cricket, I have always gone for: factual books (usually on economics, psychology, ethics or some mixture of those things) plays journal articles and/or my general weekly reading