King Cricket

January 18, 2016 County cricket / South Africa

Faf du Plessis at Lancashire – a window into South Africa’s present?

3 minute readIt’s almost two years since Graeme Smith played his last Test. More than that since Jacques Kallis retired. Their departures left Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers as South Africa’s senior batsman and all this time later, Amla and de Villiers remain the senior batsmen. Things haven’t moved on. Two

January 16, 2016 England / South Africa

When South Africa were Stued

2 minute readBack in August, Stuart Broad tore Australia a new one. But that was last year. How many new ones had he torn in 2016? Not a single one. Disgraceful. He doubtless wanted to address this grave situation in South Africa’s first innings, but was apparently struck down by the wild

January 15, 2016 England

Root and Stokes – a certain chemistry

2 minute readAlchemy was when they used to try and turn base metals into gold. It was a load of cobblers. Tell you what isn’t a load of cobblers though – Joe Root and Ben Stokes batting together. Quite often when these two substances are combined, true magic happens. In this year’s

January 14, 2016 England

Steven Finn bowls well a lot

2 minute readWay back when, there was an advert for Lancashire theme park Camelot in which they made great play of the second half of the name. We can’t remember exactly how it went, but it was something like: “Laugh a lot. Scare a lot. Fun a lot. CAMELOT!” Fun a lot?

January 13, 2016 South Africa

AB de Villiers wants a cake-eating window

2 minute readAB 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 readProbably. 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 readAs 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 readWe 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 readTo 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 readIf 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.