King Cricket

September 17, 2021 County cricket

It’s the final round of qualifiers for the Bob Willis Trophy

2 minute readThe most important match of the county season is just around the corner. TBC v TBC at Lord’s from September 28 to October 2. The Game of the Falling Leaves, they call it – The Bob Willis Trophy Final. Quite why they call it a final is beyond us. It’s

September 16, 2021 Regulars

“Cricket” in an unusual place

< 1 minute readSend your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Feel free to put the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself. (In fact please, please, please do. No-one sends us any of those and they’re our favourite ones.) Daisy and Ged jointly write… We

September 14, 2021 Australia / Pakistan

Pakistan’s poor batters are going to have to listen to Matthew Hayden speak

3 minute readMatthew Hayden will be working as a batting consultant for Pakistan at the T20 World Cup in the UAE next month. Matthew Hayden is a man we used to write about very often. Now, against our better judgement, we’re about to write about him again. Some time in 2006, we

September 11, 2021 England / India

You can stop short of all-out cynicism and still accept that the threshold for binning the Old Trafford Test was lower than normal

3 minute readHave you ever agreed to go to a thing and secretly not really wanted to go to the thing? Maybe it was a thing you’d ordinarily enjoy – like a meal out with a friend – only you also had a whole bunch of other stuff on that week and

September 8, 2021 England / India

Virat Kohli can pick the ‘wrong’ team for Old Trafford and it probably won’t matter

5 minute readTeam selection is a fun thing to talk about before a Test match, but sometimes it really isn’t that important. We tend to view selection decisions through a prism that refracts everything into right or wrong. But cricket doesn’t exactly work like that. In any given Player A versus Player

September 6, 2021 England

Burns, Hameed, nothing much going on – and only then ‘the good bit’

2 minute readPlaudits to India, but this match featured a really weird and memorable passage of play that was pretty much nothing to do with the tourists’ magnificent performance. On the fourth evening, England’s openers delivered some incredibly generic, low octane Test match batting and we somewhat unexpectedly discovered that this really

September 3, 2021 England / India

We heartily endorse Rory Burns’ run-out appeal body language

2 minute readYou know what they say: ain’t no run-out appeal like the run-out appeal that comes in the immediate aftermath of a drop. With all due respect to Chris Woakes’ bowling and Shardul Thakur’s batting, the highlight of day one of the fourth Test was unquestionably Rory Burns standing astride an

September 1, 2021 England / India

How far will England’s Plan A actually carry them?

2 minute readThe flipside of everything going pretty much exactly to plan is that this is a thing that almost never happens. The best laid schemes are forever ganging agley and so what are you going to do when you’re back in the real world where absolutely everything goes wrong absolutely all

August 31, 2021 South Africa

Dale Steyn was a trier

3 minute readCalling someone a trier is usually seen as damning them with faint praise, so we’re going to have to expand on that headline a little bit to ensure the praise is significantly less faint. The early days Dale Steyn’s just retired from cricket. We remember his Test debut. For his

August 30, 2021 England / India / Uncategorized

The almighty cumulative power of Joe Root’s nothing shot

2 minute read“Oh that’s a nothing shot,” they say – but only when you get out to it. We were thinking about this particular shot of Joe Root’s after watching the BBC highlights the other day. The BBC highlights are an hour long and with no ads, it’s what you might call

This paragraph casually thrown into cricinfo's WI/BD Test live text is a cracker: By the way, CWI has said that…

You'd have to check The Alternative Test World Championship. https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/but-what-about-the-alternative-test-cricket-world-championship-who-holds-that-title/2023/08/08/

NOW he's lost his edge.

WTF is going on in Perth... Still, Labuschagne got 50% more runs in much less time this innings. Good to…

Cox out. Hey everyone, I said ‘Cox out!’

Suffering centuries: Six bowlers who conceded extraordinary Test hundreds

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