King Cricket

January 14, 2021 England / Sri Lanka

Dom Bess’s terrible five-for: the not-very-highs, lows and lower-stills of one of the flukiest match-shaping bowling performances you’re ever likely to see

3 minute read Someone has to carefully document Dom Bess’s absolutely dreadful 5-30 against Sri Lanka and that person has to be us. The stats people at CricViz do a thing where they estimate how many wickets a bowler could realistically expect to have taken in a given spell based on the deliveries

January 13, 2021 England / Sri Lanka

Seven incredibly-well-researched team talking points for the Sri Lanka v England Test

2 minute read The tyre-flipping is over and the gloves are off (or on, if the player in question is batting or wicket-keeping). The first Test between Sri Lanka and England is, by the time you read this, quite possibly underway. It isn’t underway as we write though, which means we are now

January 12, 2021 Extras / Features

The worst Test bowling averages of all time

4 minute read Who has the worst Test bowling average of all time? This is, on the face of it, a very simple question. There are, however, two different answers, neither of which get to the nub of why the question is interesting in the first place. Answer 1: Bangladesh’s Naeem Islam averaged

January 11, 2021 Australia / India

The autopilot: Why Cheteshwar Pujara is unconsciously exceptional

5 minute read Please can we tell you why Cheteshwar Pujara is so special. It’s too do with how little he thinks. Most of us are waging a war against conscious thought at the moment. Holed up with the same people we’ve been cooped up with for most of the last year, good

January 8, 2021 New Zealand

For now, based on cricket that’s actually been played, New Zealand are the top-ranked Test side

4 minute read Test rankings are tricksy. Sometimes the top-ranked side isn’t much better than average. Sometimes it isn’t even the best at that specific moment. This doesn’t mean the rankings are wrong. It just means that people’s understanding of rankings is wrong. We play Test series between two sides so that we

January 7, 2021 Australia / England / Features

What Ben Stokes, Jack Leach and Headingley 2019 tell us about Test cricket

5 minute read England v Australia, third Test, day four It’s six or out… … It’s six! Jonathan Agnew, Test Match Special Have you seen No Country For Old Men? You should watch No Country For Old Men. No Country For Old Men is a striking and excellent film and while the ending

January 6, 2021 Regulars

The Ridiculous Ashes is now a podcast

< 1 minute read Do you remember the Ridiculous Ashes? It was a thing we did with Dan Liebke over at Cricket 365 for the 2019 series. It’s an alternative trophy that is awarded to the side that produces the most hilarious and absurd cricket across an Ashes series. Just to let you all

January 4, 2021 Match report

Cricket on a tea estate near Darjeeling – a match report

3 minute read Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only interested in what it was like to be at the game, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. Equally, if it’s an amateur match, please go into excruciating detail. Herbert Ackgrass (the official cricket biographer of

January 2, 2021 England / New Zealand

Lord Megachiefs on Hold

3 minute read At this time of year, we normally bestow the greatest honour in cricket by naming Lord Megachief of Gold. It’s a title that is earned through freakish cricket performance across the previous calendar year, but after much rumination we have concluded that 2020 wasn’t actually a proper year. There were

December 29, 2020 Australia / India

Ajinkya Rahane and India’s net gains

2 minute read India got past Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood bowling with the new ball and lo, they won the Test match. That’s reductive – but then so’s concluding a team can’t bat when it gets bowled out for 36. Ajinkya Rahane made the most obviously telling contribution, run out for 112

@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