King Cricket

February 3, 2016 England

England again fail to make 400 as old-fashioned approach to one-day cricket continues to hold them back

< 1 minute read In the first one-day international against South Africa at Bloemfontein, England, batting first, again failed to pass 400. In so doing they extended a barren run which now stretches all the way back to June. On a flat pitch, they would have expected to have done better. South Africa, Australia

When should we start thinking about the World T20?

< 1 minute read Apparently things don’t ‘hove into view’. They actually heave into view – it’s just that no-one says that. One thing’s for certain though, things that demand this verb are large and cumbersome. A cat never heaves into a view, for example (although it may well heave while in view, if

February 2, 2016 Extras

How will BBC website’s Cricket World Cup highlights work?

< 1 minute read If you haven’t heard, the BBC’s secured the rights to publish video highlights of Cricket World Cups on its website. As with most things in our life, we can’t tell whether this is hugely significant or neither here nor there. The way it’s described, it sounds like short video clips

February 1, 2016 Extras

Why Test cricket is not about runs

3 minute read Pit the same two teams against each other in different places or in different weather and you’ll get a different match. This is what makes Test cricket more intriguing than the upside-down picture of a crow with human legs in our local pub. With such breadth comes varying levels of

January 29, 2016 England

Which struggling England Test batsman is currently of most interest to people?

< 1 minute read We’re not interested in anyone’s actual opinion, but we are interested in who people have opinions about. If we were a mainstream media outlet, we’d bill this as being ‘Twitter’s verdict’ as if Twitter’s a single person with a single opinion and a single voice. What we will instead say

January 28, 2016 South Africa

Why were we going to write about Roger Telemachus?

< 1 minute read Anyone? Any idea? We’ve been doing a bit of housework around the ‘back end’ of the site and while we were doing this, we spotted a draft of an article from 2011. It was entitled, simply, “Roger Telemachus”. That’s intriguing, we thought, and so we opened the page to see

January 27, 2016 England

How many Tests before you can fairly judge a batsman?

2 minute read Based on their returns in this series, many are calling for some combination of Alex Hales, Nick Compton and James Taylor to be dropped. Then again, based on their returns in this series it’s equally valid to suggest that Alastair Cook and James Anderson should be dropped. It’s almost as

January 26, 2016 England

The incompetence deception – England’s greatest ruse

< 1 minute read Truly, it is the best of times. England have hit upon a quite brilliant ploy whereby they disguise themselves as a crap team and yet still win Test series. Expectations remain low, meaning every win is a glorious and uplifting surprise for fans. After the fourth day’s play, Rob Key

January 25, 2016 South Africa

Hashim Amla – the other best batsman in the world

2 minute read Cricket loves to rank things. You’d think the whole point of a cricket match was to determine which of two teams was the better, but apparently that’s not enough. Cricket also wants to know how the teams involved compare to all other current sides and how each of the players

January 24, 2016 England

England – select patient

< 1 minute read This would be the slogan of England under Trevor Bayliss if they went to a crappy marketing company and paid them a billion pounds for branding. That’s how you do slogans these days. You make them grammatically jarring. That’s the old rope you get for your stacks of cash. Here’s