King Cricket

Mop-up of the day – Batting collapses don’t just come against spin, apparently

2 minute readA true collapse comes after a start. Throwing a load of Lego bricks over the floor is just a mess; putting them together to build some sort of tower before watching it keel over – that’s a collapse. Like England last week, Australia took the time to set the scene.

November 3, 2016 Australia / South Africa

An Australia team versus a South Africa team – this time it’s international cricket

2 minute readThe main thing we take from day one of the first Test between Australia and South Africa is that the five one-dayers they played in South Africa recently weren’t proper international matches and so they probably shouldn’t have bothered. Australia’s bowling attack for those matches was a recurring theme in

November 2, 2016 Pakistan / West Indies

The riddle of Kraigg Brathwaite’s extra G

< 1 minute readMaybe one day someone will be able to answer the riddle of Kraigg Brathwaite’s extra G. The K we can understand – it’s jarring, but not unprecedented. But the second G? What does that contribute to proceedings? Maybe his parents wrote Kraig, knew it looked wrong and added a bonus

November 1, 2016 England

Jack Leach and why you should never pick your saviours

2 minute readEngland lost to Bangladesh. There has to be a reason for it and it has to be that they picked the wrong players. One obvious area in which England were inferior was the spin department. Last season Jack Leach took more wickets than the spinners who played in the last

October 30, 2016 Bangladesh / England

Mehedi Hasan extracts turn and respect against England’s will

2 minute readWe all can’t spake. Uncertainty is the lifeblood of sport and so this series has made for compulsive viewing. As the Test Match Special Twitter account put it yesterday. Things in Dhaka have continued where they left off in Chittagong! Again, the momentum has reversed in a matter of minutes.

October 29, 2016 Bangladesh / England

England derailed by their own sickening wrong-handedness

< 1 minute readWith hindsight, maybe England should have picked more right-handers. None of their left-handed batsmen passed 20, while all of their right-handers did, bar Steven Finn. Quite why people think it’s acceptable to do things left-handed is beyond us. Bangladesh are working their way into a strong position. This is no

October 28, 2016 Bangladesh / England

Why Gary Ballance’s 2016 return to the England side was too easy for him

3 minute readEngland dropped Gary Ballance before the third Ashes Test of 2015 after a run of form that wasn’t actually all that dreadful with the benefit of hindsight. He had passed 30 once in his last 10 innings and had been bowled five times. People said he struggled against good quick

October 27, 2016 Bangladesh / England

Zafar Ansari is almost certainly batting too high

< 1 minute readEarlier today, we took issue with England’s willingness to make bold prophecies. However, we rather shot our match-previewing bolt yesterday, so we’re now going to have to commit much the same crime simply so that we have something to say. We are guessing/predicting that Zafar Ansari will be (a) playing

October 26, 2016 Bangladesh / England

Gareth Batty – the winter bike

2 minute readThere seems to be a tendency in some quarters to perceive England’s Test tours of Bangladesh and India as being one long competitive outing. They are not. They are separate. For all the talk of ‘taking a look’ at players ahead of England’s arrival in India, there is a Test

October 25, 2016 Cricket books | reviews and recommendations

Unguarded by Jonathan Trott – book review

2 minute readSam writes: My shelves are groaning under the weight of cricket autobiographies. The best – among them Coming Back To Me by Marcus Trescothick and Nasser Hussain’s Playing With Fire – are well-thumbed. The others tend to blur together. Tales of pushy parents, age group potential, Test debuts and tearful