King Cricket

February 1, 2023 Bangladesh / England

Why England’s March tour of Bangladesh doesn’t count… but also does

3 minute readWho’s up for the contest then? No? Got somewhere else to be, have you? We don’t know if you’ve ever seen the highly violent Indonesian martial arts ballet, The Raid, but there’s a character in that who’s really, really, very much up for a fight. He’s called Mad Dog, so

January 30, 2023 Extras

The 2023 King Cricket Essentials Calendar

2 minute readIf those who run cricket can’t make the cricket calendar comprehensible, we’ll just have to do it ourself. Below you’ll find a month-by-month guide to the series and tournaments we’ll most likely be focusing on throughout this year. Setting it out in writing is as much for us as it

January 27, 2023 England

The definition of “Bazball” is following a very familiar path

2 minute read“Bazball” is an ill-defined woolly-yet-squidgy concept that you can smush around to mean pretty much anything you want. We’ve been here before. Speaking ahead of South Africa’s home one-day series against England, captain Temba Bavuma spoke about his team’s way of going about things and how they might look to

January 25, 2023 Extras

But what has the Patreon crowdfunding campaign ever done for King Cricket?

6 minute readWe’re pretty happy with the last year’s Patreon-funded output. Hopefully our crowdfunding campaign doesn’t completely implode in 2023. A very quick recap. We run a Patreon campaign where readers can, if they want, pledge a monthly sum to help support the site. You can pretty much pledge whatever you want

January 23, 2023 Australia

Steve Smith’s number one priority on a Test tour

2 minute read“Cricket Australia basically said to us, ‘Okay, what can we kinda do to make your time in hotels for the next month better? So the boys just took it to the next level” – Pat Cummins The latest series of The Test outlines all the various toys and gizmos the

January 20, 2023 Australia / England / India

Steve Smith’s Sussex stint and podcast proxies – mop-up of the day

2 minute readMop-up of the day is a thing we do when we can’t really be bothered writing more than a sentence or two about a bunch of different things. Sometimes we end up writing extra sentences though because it looks weird if the opening sentence, in bold, is immediately followed by

January 18, 2023 Features

Best of the blobs: Eight of Test cricket’s finest duck-makers

6 minute readThere aren’t many things in cricket more entertaining than a duck. A batter slowly walks out to try and make some runs and then slowly walks back again having failed to do so. It’s a miniature tragedy. Great ducks come in many different flavours. There’s the duck you were expecting

January 16, 2023 Extras

In search of a T20 shallowness metric: Is there a quick and easy way to judge the quality of a franchise match?

5 minute readThere are an awful lot of T20 franchise leagues these days. It’s hard to keep up. If you want to work out whether a new one is worth following, the absolute last thing you’d want to do is actually watch a match. So is there a quicker and easier way

January 13, 2023 Match report

The government pilot post-social-distancing 2021 Edgbaston Test – a match report

3 minute readSend your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.) Ged Ladd submitted this match report what might be termed

January 11, 2023 England

Jofra Archer’s back

2 minute readAs in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything. So what does this mean? It’s almost two years since he last played for England. Where does he fit in these days? Yesterday, Jofra Archer made his return for Mumbai Indians Cape Town – almost literally a franchise within a