King Cricket

January 13, 2016 South Africa

AB de Villiers wants a cake-eating window

2 minute read AB de Villiers wants to retain The Cake of International Cricket and also eat The Lucrative Cake of T20 Franchise Cricket. It doesn’t sound so ludicrous an ambition until you examine the bizarre cake-for-cake barter system that is currently in operation. Under current law, The Lucrative Cake of T20 Franchise

January 12, 2016 Australia / India

R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja want to go home

< 1 minute read Probably. We wouldn’t blame them one bit. Imagine being down the pub with your mates, talking about cricket. The company’s good, the beverages are exquisite: you’re in your element. The next day, you find yourself in an overpriced city centre drink hole along with some colleagues. They’re talking about potential

January 11, 2016 Pakistan

Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif are back

2 minute read As in ‘returned’. What else would the word ‘back’ mean in that context? It’s not like there’s an ambiguous apostrophe-S in there or anything. Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif both played for Water and Power Development Authority against Federally Administered Tribal Areas in one of those somehat fictional sounding domestic

January 8, 2016 South Africa

Is AB de Villiers captaincy material?

< 1 minute read We were going to do a half-arsed box-ticking update today, pointing you towards Cricket Badger and our latest Cricinfo Twitter round-up, but the latter seems in no hurry to appear, so we thought we’d better write summat. Let’s talk about AB de Villiers, who despite being a vehement letter-C denier

January 6, 2016 England / South Africa

Why a declaration from both teams is rarely a good sign

2 minute read To have one team declaring indicates dominance. To have two teams declaring generally indicates a poor pitch. Catching the ball helps of course – unless you’re playing a Shane Watson XI and therefore have no need of such frivolities. With nothing to bat for beyond a draw, England did at

January 5, 2016 West Indies

Chris Gayle and the fine line between stupid and clever

2 minute read If you don’t already know, Chris Gayle’s unique selling point is that he likes women. That’s how he defines and sells himself. Quite how vacuous a person has to be before they decide upon a characteristic shared by 90-odd per cent of men as being somehow self-defining is beyond us.

January 4, 2016 England / South Africa

They’re playing Hashim Amla’s song

< 1 minute read During Sunday’s play, the England and South Africa supporters did a duet, trading verses of their respective Moeen Ali/Hashim Amla songs which both employ the tune of No Limits by 2 Unlimited. It was really rather entertaining – although they persisted for so long that we can still hear it

January 3, 2016 England

Why it’s time to drop Ben Stokes

2 minute read Ben Stokes makes things happen. Against South Africa in Cape Town on the second day, he made time distort such that England appeared to make 312 runs in just 38.5 overs. At one point the TV commentators were reduced to debating whether the ball had landed on the railway line

January 2, 2016 England

Ben Stokes hits the ball hard

< 1 minute read Ben Stokes greeted the second new ball as if it were a rampaging arcade machine and he were Kung Fury. After five balls with it, he was 16 runs better off. As ever, he had hit the ball hard. The ball knows when it’s been hit by Stokes. It will

January 2, 2016 England

Alex Hales doesn’t have to live in a grey pigeonhole

2 minute read One of the worst things about Twenty20 cricket is that it’s provided a label for one particular shade of grey. We don’t know which one. Battleship grey maybe. Or gunmetal. It doesn’t matter. The point is, you label something and it becomes a ‘thing’ – something distinct, something fixed. Alex