< 1 minute read Historically, a drawn Test series in Sri Lanka is a pretty good result for England. Set against that is the fact that Muttiah Muralitharan doesn’t play any more. Sri Lanka’s bowlers are a bit middling. Should England have done better? Well we’re pretty happy with a draw, particularly after watching
Continue readingAuthor: King Cricket
Otherwise known as Alex Bowden, a lapsed cricket journalist who has written for ESPNCricinfo, wisden.com, Cricket 365, The Cricketer and plenty of other places.
Links to some non-cricket writing and a bit more background here.
Kevin Pietersen applies a good thick layer of Polyfilla to his insecurities
2 minute read Some innings are more important that the numbers might indicate, but we always feel thankful when Kevin Pietersen reaches three figures. The resultant fist-pumping’s cheering in a laughable kind of way, but more importantly it means that detractors have to revise the ‘hasn’t scored a hundred since [insert date]’ statement
Continue readingModern technology has brought us this
< 1 minute read Kent batsman, Mike Powell, published this yesterday. For those of us who don’t take in all our information via a telephone, it’s worth rotating our monitors through 90 degrees for. However, just to be clear, we still do not approve of dancing. As a liberated physical expression of joy, it
Continue readingEngland batsmen score runs
< 1 minute read It warrants a headline. Even if Jonathan Trott got a ton in the last match, this time it’s plural. More than one England batsman has scored some runs. One of them was even Andrew Strauss. It’s remarkably easy to catch up with a match that’s going badly. Last week, we
Continue readingMahela Jayawardene v England
< 1 minute read As abysmal as England’s batsmen have been, the team would stand a pretty decent chance of beating Sri Lanka if they didn’t spend most of their time in the field attempting to dismiss just one of the two batsmen at the crease. If they’re in Sri Lanka, England are probably
Continue readingMonty got a raw deal
< 1 minute read England drop Monty Panesar readily. Whether it’s because of form, the pitch or ‘the balance of the side’, they don’t seem shy about leaving him out. Maybe the decision will be vindicated, but he seems to have been collateral damage following a line of thinking that betrays England’s lack of
Continue readingWhy was Michael Holding’s over to Geoff Boycott so special?
< 1 minute read It’s that time of the week when we link to an article at Cricinfo in which marzipan gets a mention and you all scour the comments hoping we’ve been ripped apart by a dissatisfied reader. Nothing yet, but let’s give it time. Pretty sure England’s number one ranking will get
Continue readingTim Bresnan near a pirate’s fantasy
< 1 minute read Not as exciting as it sounds, but probably a little bit funnier. Damith of The Fly Slip drew our attention to a photo of Tim Bresnan standing near a really expensive cake called Pirate’s Fantasy. We’ve always felt that Tim Bresnan isn’t as chunky as people think he is. We
Continue readingEngland haven’t become a bad Test team
< 1 minute read But there’s a fair distance between ‘bad’ and ‘good’. Even further between ‘bad’ and ‘the best’. England are in that grey netherland now and no-one really cares about shades of grey when you’ve arrived there from somewhere altogether brighter. England’s batting was a lighter shade of grey in the second
Continue readingLahiru Thirimanne makes himself big
2 minute read Brace yourself, we’re going to mention football. One thing we learned from our years watching that soap opera-cum-sport is that a goalie should ‘make himself big’ when a forward is bearing down on him. The purpose of this is not, as you might think, to ward off predators. It is
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