2 minute readAndrew Strauss retires from cricket. If Nasser Hussain was ‘do as I say’ and Michael Vaughan was ‘relax and play how you want’ then Strauss was ‘for Christ’s sake, don’t do anything silly’. He was a bit establishment for our tastes and his interviews were even more bland and predictable
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Why we liked Brett Lee
2 minute readTest bowling average v England: 40.61 – what’s not to like? Yes, it’s one of those weird statistics, but Brett Lee actually wasn’t all that destructive in the Ashes. There was theatre and tension every time he came onto bowl, but all that happened was that the batsman thought: “Ooh,
Continue readingHow we’ll remember Mark Boucher
< 1 minute readWhen someone retires, people are generally supposed to focus on that person’s attributes and this has been particularly true for Mark Boucher after his career was ended by a horrendous incident where a bail cut his eyeball. However, here at King Cricket we don’t have all that much lyrical waxation
Continue readingRating Mark Ramprakash’s career
< 1 minute readWe long ago had our say about whether Mark Ramprakash could have been an England great if he’d been treated differently. Our stance is: ‘Well maybe, but that don’t change owt’. Today, for once, we’d like to focus on what he DID achieve, because that was pretty extraordinary. Scoring 2,000
Continue readingRahul Dravid: the barometer of class
3 minute readLooking through the archives, we’ve written surprisingly little about Rahul Dravid. Many of his best innings predate the site and also – partly as a result of that – we’ve always just assumed that everyone knew how good he was. Forward defensives They call him The Wall. It’s meant as
Continue readingRemembering Dominic Cork
< 1 minute readRetiring from cricket at the age of 40 is a bit like dying at a grand old age. People naturally focus on what’s fresh in the memory. People remember your interests as being duck-feeding and ailment comparison with your peers, even though you were once a fighter pilot and later
Continue readingSanath Jayasuriya’s last match
< 1 minute readSanath Jayasuriya has finally bowed out of cricket just three days short of his 70th birthday. He departed how he had thrived, with a ferocious cut shot. Asked to reflect on his career, Jayasuriya may or may not have said: “Eh? What? Speak up. Why does everybody mumble these days?
Continue readingPaul Collingwood – an England professional
3 minute readThe days of Gentlemen and Players are long gone, but Paul Collingwood would have been the latter – a man who never lost sight of the fact that it was all about scoring runs; taking wickets and catches; and occasionally missing the ball often enough that your team salvaged a
Continue readingWhat Ryan Sidebottom should do next
< 1 minute readGenerally likeable, weirdly tetchy and a world-beater for an oddly unexpected and brief period of time. We’ll miss Ryan Sidebottom now that he’s retired from international cricket. On the plus side, he’s one step closer to that BRILLIANT sitcom we came up with. We’re open to offers.
Continue readingWhy Andrew Flintoff was a great cricketer
< 1 minute readAndrew Flintoff’s only going to retire the once, so we’ve written about him again. A lot of people have picked apart his career with the recent past at the forefront of their minds, but we’re choosing to look at why he became such a significant figure in the first place.
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