King Cricket

December 1, 2015 England / Pakistan

When is an omission a rotation and when is it a good old-fashioned drop?

2 minute readThere’s a subtlety to England’s current approach to one-day cricket which may have passed some by. It’s not about ball-wallopery or -whangery, it’s to do with that other key aspect of international cricket – man management. Everyone’s agreed that one of the keys to one-day success is a no-blame culture

November 30, 2015 Australia / New Zealand

Day-night cricket and the fire in the bin

< 1 minute readAs a rule, if people aren’t moaning about the thing you feared they’d moan about and are instead moaning about something completely different, you’ve succeeded. The elimination of moaning is of course not a possibility. It’s like a pocket of air under wallpaper. The best you can do is displace

November 27, 2015 Australia / New Zealand

Night-day cricket should be the next innovation

< 1 minute readThose watching the first day of the inaugural day-night Test between Australia and New Zealand will have been sorely disappointed. We were promised slapstick and catastrophe, but got neither. If you asked us to describe it, we’d say it looked very much like Test cricket, only with a pink ball.

November 26, 2015 England

When did Eoin Morgan become England’s short format ‘anchor’?

2 minute readRemember when Eoin Morgan was the exciting one. Remember how you used to shout “Morgan’s in!” when he came to the crease and how the person you were shouting to used to respond: “I don’t care. I don’t like cricket.” Remember how you used to flaunt your knowledge by telling

November 25, 2015 India / South Africa

Who says Tests are supposed to last five days?

< 1 minute readWe’ve always been of the opinion that a Test can last up to five days and that if all of that allotted time is required, things haven’t really panned out correctly. Others see it differently. We often see comments of the oeuvre ‘a Test is supposed to last five days’

November 24, 2015 England

Liam Plunkett gets a fractionally undercooked deal

2 minute readNot a raw deal, like Chris Read got, but pretty rare – bloodier than he asked for in the middle. Plunkett was picked to go on the tour to the UAE and then somehow found himself three places down the pecking order for the South Africa tour despite not having

November 23, 2015 Cricket books | reviews and recommendations / Regulars

Last in the Tin Bath – a review of David Lloyd’s autobiography

3 minute readBack when we reviewed Start the Car: The World According to Bumble, we suggested that rather than majoring on Lloyd’s zaniness, they might have been better off writing a traditional autobiography. Well this is what they’ve done. The result is indeed a better book. For those that don’t know, before

November 21, 2015 England

Jos Buttler and the myth of a batsman’s ‘natural game’

3 minute readAfter watching Jos Buttler hit over a third of the deliveries he faced for boundaries against Pakistan, it’s tempting to wonder whether maybe, just maybe, he might do well to shelve his watchful, deliberate approach to Test batting. It seems to us that he’s much, much safer at the crease,

November 20, 2015 England

England retrieve Nick Compton from the freezer

2 minute readBack in 2013, we suggested that England couldn’t refreeze Nick Compton having already defrosted him (this makes fractionally more sense if you read the article). Turns out they did. They stuck him back and now they’re defrosting him for a second time. Nick Compton’s back in the fridge! At least

November 19, 2015 England

Ian Bell will not bat like a prince before inexplicably spooning one to cover against South Africa

< 1 minute readThey’ve only gone and dropped him. Dropped him as if he were a cricket ball and they were him standing in the slips at some point in the last 12 months. There’s a hideous video on the ECB Twitter feed where selector James Whitaker mouths the usual platitudes about Bell