King Cricket

August 26, 2011 Extras

Why is cricket popular with women?

< 1 minute readA comment on this post deserves wider exposure. Viagogo appeared to conclude that they were only selling more cricket tickets to women because some England players are good looking. We asked our female readers whether they were buying tickets in order to ogle Jimmy Anderson while he stands at fine

August 26, 2011 Extras

Liz Hurley, Pippa Middleton and “the Barbie Army”

< 1 minute readWe’d be interested to know what our female readers make of Viagogo’s latest press release, entitled: ‘Make way for the Barbie Army’. Apparently, they have seen a 240 per cent increase in females purchasing cricket tickets. Why might this be? “Possibly inspired by Liz Hurley’s ‘passion’ for the game and

August 25, 2011 Australia / Extras

This has to be the last Matthew Hayden post

< 1 minute readIn 2006, we started writing about how Matthew Hayden spoke bollocks. At that point, his batting drew most people’s attention and it hadn’t been widely acknowledged that the man was sucking all meaning out of words and then piling them together arbitrarily. Now everyone has noticed. Even Michael Atherton’s slagging

August 24, 2011 England

What’s the mace up to today?

< 1 minute readIt’s just chilling out, having a couple of beers with its mates.

August 22, 2011 England

Has someone in England been given a giant mace for being good at summat?

< 1 minute readYou bet your boots they have. The rest of us are just going to have to accept that we probably aren’t going to be given giant maces for implementing efficiency measures that led to a reduction in overall losses in the second financial quarter when compared to the same period

August 22, 2011 India

When Dravid is better than Tendulkar and Sehwag

2 minute readWe went overboard with the Tour de France references last month, so we’ll avoid making one here, even though we want to. Just as you can win the Vuelta a Espana without winning a single stage, so you can be considered the best batsman without being the best in every

August 21, 2011 India

Gautam Gambhir isn’t earning much praise

< 1 minute readBanging his head two days earlier compelled Gautam Gambhir to send out a morningwatchman. The consensus seems to be that he’s a bit soft. Maybe he is still concussed, maybe he’s genuinely not fit to bat, but he might have stood a better chance of people believing that if he

August 19, 2011 Extras

Posh Strauss and the Yorkshire stereotype in cricket

< 1 minute readWe did two things wrong in this piece for Cricinfo. We depicted Andrew Strauss as a socially disconnected toff, which is unfair and also something of a cliché. There are two dissatisfied Yorkshiremen in it and having once lived in God’s own county, we hate cricket’s Yorkshire stereotype and fear

August 18, 2011 India

Fast bowlers from India are still falling away

2 minute readIt seems a long time ago that we wrote about India’s young fast bowlers, nodding sagely and approvingly at what was on offer. That’s because it actually was a long time ago and the 26-and-under promise we saw four years ago should be something rather more than that by now.

August 17, 2011 India

Praveen Kumar’s third dimension

2 minute readEmbed from Getty Images One of Test cricket’s greatest strengths over the other formats is how you get to know the players better. We’d seen a great deal of Praveen Kumar before this series, but had no particular opinion about him. This has changed in the last few weeks. First