King Cricket

September 20, 2024 County cricket

Dan Worrall unfazed by Durham’s ‘night of the watchers’

2 minute readAs Somerset showed last week, there are ways to beat Surrey. But if you can’t muster the same quality of spin bowling and you aren’t in charge of the pitch, what are your options? This week at the Oval, Durham tried something different. Durham tried reversing into their second innings,

September 18, 2024 County cricket

Worrall, Burns, Jennings, Gregory – the Not-Quite-England players shaping the County Championship run-in

2 minute readIf you’re in charge of a county cricket club and you want to deliver on-field success, the last thing you want to do is produce England players. If you want to do well in the County Championship, your goal should be to develop (or hire) as many Not-Quite-England-Players as you

September 16, 2024 Match report

Edgbaston Cricket Ground’s spectator code of conduct (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.) Sam Blackledge attended day two of this year’s England v

September 13, 2024 County cricket

A surprisingly easy effort to catch up with the County Championship after several months with our eyes elsewhere

3 minute readOur calendar says it’s time to check back in on the County Championship. When we last reported on the first division, all the way back in May, Surrey were top, Kent were bottom and Jordan Cox was the hot topic of conversation. As we return to it now, Surrey are

September 11, 2024 England

How harshly should we judge Dan Lawrence for his fairly terrible performance as a Test opener?

3 minute readEngland have named their Test squad for the upcoming trip to Pakistan. It’s one of those tours where appetite for spin bowling all-rounders is sufficiently great that even difficult choices between specialist batters will often result in the guy who bowls a bit of finger spin getting the nod. Dan

September 9, 2024 England / Sri Lanka

Pathum Nissanka (Silva), Jamie Smith’s briefs and arse evasion | an England v Sri Lanka 3rd Test recap

4 minute readBefore this third Test, Sri Lanka had already lost the series. They hadn’t had much of a warm-up; hadn’t played first-class cricket on these shores since 2016; and England were increasingly hell-bent on imposing themselves. It had been a tough shift, in short, and they could be forgiven for imploding

September 6, 2024 England

England rate Josh Hull – but does he yet rate himself?

2 minute readJosh Hull is only the second left-arm seamer to play a Test for England since Ryan Sidebottom in 2010. At 6ft 7in, he’s tall too. These are very attractive qualities which Hull has had to make zero effort to develop. Confidence is a funny thing. A lot of intelligent, pragmatic,

September 4, 2024 England

But will Brendon McCullum get a literal new hat?

3 minute readBrendon McCullum has been given a new hat – the England white ball coach hat. What we want to know is whether this new role comes with a literal, physical new hat, because we’re kind of sick of that Cinch one. This is the Cinch hat. This is what Brendon

September 2, 2024 England / Sri Lanka

Root’s runs, Gus Botham, Ollie Pope’s ‘leadership potential’ and Top Fernando Watch – an England v Sri Lanka second Test recap

3 minute readYou may have guessed that we didn’t see much of this one. But that’s okay – we can read a scorecard with the best of them. England won. It is 2-0. Here are some things that apparently happened… Joe Root one-ups himself Has Joe Root finally hit upon a way

August 27, 2024 Features

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

7 minute readThe most successful Test partnerships of all time are easy enough to identify. For one thing, they’ll regularly crop up in conversation-fuelling TV graphics whenever a wicket is hard to come by. For another thing, if they happened during your lifetime, you’ll no doubt have lots of memories of the