King Cricket

August 7, 2016 England

Will Alastair Cook deploy the carrot?

< 1 minute readHistory tells us that when it comes to declarations, Alastair Cook is not a carrot-dangler. History tells us that when the moment comes, the carrot will be unsighted for Pakistan and they will in fact be only dimly aware of its existence. The match and series situation also hint at

Pakistan play spin better than Australia

< 1 minute readDifferent matches and – to be fair to Australia – different degrees of difficulty too. All the same, it seems a fair conclusion to draw. In England, Azhar Ali and Sami Aslam seemed uncertain whether to milk Moeen Ali or just belt him for sixes. In the end, they reached

August 4, 2016 England

Steven Finn is setting them up for the full one

2 minute readThere’s a trend for talking about Steven Finn like he’s some sort of charity case at the minute; as if he’s only been selected for England as some sort of favour to his mum. All the other boys are being very polite and encouraging and everyone wants something to go

August 3, 2016 England / Pakistan

James Vince caught at slip – but he wasn’t driving

< 1 minute readJames Vince wasn’t going to be caught in the slips driving today. Oh, no, no. Today he had other ideas. He announced his intentions early on by edging a sort of half-defensive shot, half-leave. Vince was going to make damn certain that when he was caught in the slips, it

August 3, 2016 England

Steven Finn’s ‘knack’ for taking wickets

2 minute readWe’re going to repeat ourself a bit, but it’s okay because we’re repeating things we wrote ten years ago so nobody’ll remember. Actually, let’s go the whole hog and stick in a block quote. “It is often said that he has the ‘knack’ of taking wickets; that he can get

August 2, 2016 England

James Anderson expresses a sentiment we can surely all get behind

< 1 minute read“My practice over the years has gone from searching for perfection to just doing as little as possible. The bare minimum.” – James Anderson Speaking as someone who once earned the nickname ‘Bare Minimum,’ we are delighted with this revelation of the secret behind James Anderson’s success. Perhaps if you

August 1, 2016 Cricket books | reviews and recommendations

The Periodic Table of Cricket by John Stern – book review

2 minute readWe own a periodic table. Mostly it’s a footrest, but periodically – typically when we have visitors – it reverts to being a table. Apparently there’s another kind of periodic table too which lays out all the chemical elements according to atomic number and whatnot. The Periodic Table of Cricket

July 30, 2016 Australia / Sri Lanka

Kusal Mendis doesn’t think they’re gonna need a bigger boat

2 minute readOnce upon a time, a colleague of ours, who we’ll call Gill (because that’s her name), asked another colleague, who we’ll call Stefan (because that’s his name), for help with her computer. We can’t remember the specific issue. It was just one of those generic computer problems that crops up

July 29, 2016 Uncategorized

Mop-up of the day – syllables, spin, short-pitched bowling and size

< 1 minute readFirst to Kandy, where the five minutes when it was both dry and bright enough to play cricket saw Sri Lanka set Australia 268 to win. David Warner’s recently-discovered inability to make runs outside Australia persisted as he was bowled for one, and the tourists also lost Joe Burns and

July 28, 2016 Australia / Sri Lanka

Kusal Mendis has played an innings

< 1 minute readWe haven’t seen any of this Sri Lanka v Australia Test. It’s on Eurosport 2 which stopped working a couple of months ago. The prospect of speaking to BT to try and get the channel working again led us to conclude that it is best left unfixed. We have apparently