King Cricket

With less than a year to go, let’s look at who’s finding form for the T20 World Cup

2 minute read It’s now less than a year until the final of the 2022 T20 World Cup. Let’s take a look at how some of the teams are shaping up with just a handful of matches left for fine-tuning. The world is unanimously agreed that the 2022 edition will be the first

November 11, 2021 England / New Zealand

Jimmy Neesham’s activity and inactivity

2 minute read Jimmy Neesham made two excellent and contrasting contributions to New Zealand’s T20 World Cup semi-final win over England. Firstly, he successfully steered the match round the sharpest of corners late in his team’s run-chase. Secondly, he totally neglected to move a muscle come the winning moment. It’s hard to pick

November 9, 2021 England / New Zealand

Which cracks will England’s Polyfilla Moeen Ali be asked to fill in the T20 World Cup semi-final

< 1 minute read England could shuffle their team in all sorts of different ways to cover for the absence of Jason Roy. The only thing we can be certain of is that no matter who opens, it will mean Moeen Ali being asked to do something different. This is, in fact, not strictly

November 8, 2021 Australia / Pakistan

Matthew Hayden v Justin Langer – what will it be like?

2 minute read “It will be like two balls of mercury on the one plate,” according to Matthew Hayden. Regular readers of this website will know that Hayden is currently serving as Pakistan’s batting coach and principle guff-talker. Justin Langer is of course Australia’s current head coach and principle guff-talker. Way back when,

November 4, 2021 Associates / England / Features

Let’s revisit the Netherlands’ win over England at the 2009 T20 World Cup and in particular the insanely chaotic final over from Stuart Broad

7 minute read Our main memory of the Netherlands’ win over England at the 2009 T20 World Cup is that the final over was utter madness. Let’s take a look back and see whether that was really the case. (Spoiler: It absolutely was.) 2009 is a funny old time when it comes to

November 2, 2021 England

England’s two key match-ups for any T20 match: Jos Buttler v Anyone and Adil Rashid v Anyone

2 minute read You’re no longer allowed to write about T20 without referencing “match-ups” so that is what we’re going to do. Brace yourselves for some IN DEPTH ANALYSIS. In the unlikely event you’re not au fait with the concept of the match-up, it’s a tactical thing where you try and pit a

November 1, 2021 Australia / England

The real out-and-out highlight of England’s trouncing of Australia over the weekend

3 minute read Sometimes it’s Monday morning and the latest cricket news is… not excellent. So let’s busy ourselves with some good old-fashioned gloating instead. You may have noticed that England beat Australia on Saturday. And then carried on beating them. There were many highlights, several of which did not involve the camera

October 27, 2021 Bangladesh / England

Moeen Ali’s got a new job

2 minute read “Hey, Moeen. You’re not going to believe this. We’ve found another one. We’ve been digging and digging and digging to try and find one and we’d pretty much given up hope. We didn’t think there was anything left. But there was. And we’ve found it. We’ve found another one. We’ve

October 26, 2021 Afghanistan

Are we watching peak Afghanistan?

2 minute read Here’s an ostensibly exciting but actually very depressing thought: are we currently watching the greatest Afghanistan cricket team? If you enjoy hearing Alan Wilkins saying “goodness me, that’s gone a long way” then watch the highlights of Afghanistan’s innings against Scotland. There are some fairly amazing shots in there. It’s

October 24, 2021 Australia / Pakistan

Matthew Hayden’s extra words

2 minute read One of the defining qualities of Matthew Hayden’s guff-talking is his habit of throwing in a load of additional words that add precisely nothing to what he is trying to say. We’re going to talk to you about three recent examples. Last time around – back when Hayden first took

@Lev the imposter (maybe). What we do in private stays private ;-) ...and apologies for taking credit for being the…

@KC. Ahh, bu**er. Yes, confused by the birding reference.

It was a classic of the genre. Not sure we've ever seen one go further.

bat, obviously, not bar. They already tried the latter in the bad old days

Sides are often said to 'throw the bar' in an effort to score quickly, but it seems today Ben Stokes…

Hats off to Harry Brook’s very particular ‘steamrollered pancake pitch’ set of skills

Let’s pick the All-Time Greatest Middle-Aged XI

Less than the sum of their parts: Six Test batting partnerships that invariably disappointed

Five Graham Thorpe innings that were equal parts silly, brilliant and vital

Show me the money. Inattention and monetisation in Major League Cricket, The Hundred and Test cricket