3 minute readWe don’t believe you can draw meaningful conclusions from players’ debuts – but we report on them anyway. If there was a key moment for Tom Hartley on his debut, it was when Ben Stokes didn’t whip him out of the attack to ‘protect’ him after an over or two in
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5 minute readThe West Indies beat Australia and the final wicket, when Shamar Joseph bowled Josh Hazlewood, was near as damn it perfect. Perfect dismissal, perfect celebration, perfect story, perfect subtext. The ointment wasn’t entirely free of insect life, but you’ve got to expect a couple of flies when you’re Down Under,
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2 minute readDoing your cricket things slightly earlier in the match is all the rage this month. Steve Smith’s become an opening batter. Jack Leach (or Rehan Ahmed or Tom Hartley or Joe Root) has become an opening bowler. England have picked just one quick bowler, Mark Wood, for the first Test
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3 minute readSome pretty big news has broken since England (finally) touched down in India for their five-Test series. It’s not Virat Kohli missing the first two games for personal reasons. It’s not Harry Brook missing (probably, maybe) the whole series, also for personal reasons. It’s to do with Ben Stokes. We
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< 1 minute readSimple question. Regular King Cricket contributor, Sam, spotted this in a pub in Ilsington, Devon. He does not know what it is. We do not know what it is. Is The Wonky Bail purely the name of the award? Do you receive The Wonky Bail for exceptional achievement in some
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6 minute readShould we all be opening batters now? What’s the official line? Some changes of position are just too noteworthy to serve as suitable subject matter for small talk. An example from another sitcom: in Friends, when multimillionaire software genius Pete Becker outlines to Monica his plan to change direction. “Well
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4 minute readA Test tour of India feels like a bit of a free hit these days. England are supposed to lose… heavily. Captain and coach talk a good game and their ambitions and belief are genuine, but if the tourists emerge with anything less than a 5-0 defeat, those oh-so-familiar clichéd
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2 minute readSend your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. It is more than okay to put the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself if you want. In fact we urge you to do precisely that. Ged Ladd writes… In January 2023, I played
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5 minute readLast January, we took a look back on our Patreon-funded output from the previous year. We did this partly to highlight what crowdfunding is doing for this website, but just as importantly to keep ourself on track. We thought we’d now repeat the exercise for the year just gone. If
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2 minute readThere’s too much cricket. You have to prioritise. Below is our month-by-month guide to the series and tournaments we’ll (most likely) be focusing on in the coming year. Essentials? It’s pretty widely accepted now that the cricket calendar is oversaturated. You can either sit back and take what comes each
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