King Cricket

Mop-up of the day – stealth, Siddle, celebrations and social media

2 minute readFirst up, Pakistan v Australia where the ‘home’ side appear to be doing a reasonable job of putting a score on the board. It’s always hard to tell what’s a decent first innings total, but with Pakistan’s flaky batting, you reckon they’d be pretty happy already. Stealth The major contributor

October 22, 2014 Australia

Steve O’Keefe and Imran Khan

< 1 minute readSteve O’Keefe’s finally been picked to play a Test match for Australia. We mentioned him as far back as 2010 as being a spinner who wasn’t completely rubbish, but who was somehow being overlooked in favour of any number of slow bowlers who were. O’Keefe’s the second spinner, so Australia

October 21, 2014 South Africa

South Africa’s 2015 World Cup strategy

2 minute readIs it a sign of a good side that they can get away with working to a fairly predictable strategy? Innovation is often a way of making up for shortcomings. South Africa’s approach to one-day cricket is what comes up by default in cricket strategy software. You’re meant to tweak

October 19, 2014 India / West Indies

Abandoned West Indies tour is not in the spirit of cricket

2 minute readWe consider the Spirit of Cricket – the branded, upper-case initial letter creation of the MCC – to be a nebulous pile of bollocks. You can quote us on that. However, that isn’t to say that there is no such thing as the spirit of cricket. The Spirit of Cricket

October 17, 2014 Extras

Embracing the perpendicular

< 1 minute readThe Shire Horse will be holed up inside the stables for the winter months and so we’re doing a series called King Cricket’s Kings of Cricket in its place. The first cricketer to be so honoured is Brian Lara. There’s also a bit of a preamble relating to the King

October 16, 2014 Extras

Graham Gooch and some terrible puns

< 1 minute readIt’s our latest piece for Cricinfo. Here’s what the critics are saying about it: “Ultimate 🙂 ROFL… Next in line is Misbah?” – The Sunday Times Now, if you’ll excuse us, we appear to have one million things to write today and very few hours in which to do it.

October 15, 2014 Match report

England v Sri Lanka at Lord’s, day two match report

3 minute readGed writes “I’ve been a complete idiot,” said Big Al DeLarge when he phoned me on the Monday before the Test match. “I wrote the date down in the diary but not on the wall chart. My assistant has booked a holiday and I simply cannot take that day off

October 14, 2014 Extras

If you could invite three cricketers to the pub on a Tuesday night…

< 1 minute readWho would they be? And before you ask, yes of course Fantasy Tuesday Night in the Pub is a thing. It’s like ‘who would you invite to your dream dinner party?’ – only why do we have to have a dinner party? Why can’t we just go to the pub

October 13, 2014 Pakistan

Pakistan’s 2015 World Cup strategy

< 1 minute readSame as ever really. Just sort of hope that everything magically works itself out. Shahid Afridi is a tremendously good one-day bowler, but you’d hope to see a stronger attack alongside him. Seven foot Mohammad Irfan is the novelty, while Junaid Khan is perhaps the class. But it’s the batting

October 9, 2014 England

KP v ECB on Twitter – a medieval battle with an invisible audience

3 minute readOur latest Twitter round-up’s just appeared on Cricinfo. It was an unusually tough assignment. We’d sign into Twitter, get distracted by the latest developments arising from Kevin Pietersen’s autobiography and then find that we’d lost an hour or more. We’d then force ourself to close down Twitter so that we