Mushtaq Ahmed may not quite have been THE BALLS, but he was most definitely ‘the county balls’.

Every match he’d stumble in and take as many wickets as there are atoms in the universe (about nine) and every season he’d decide The County Championship.

It is very, very bad that he’s having to retire. Anyone who disagrees has to tell an old schoolfriend who’s better than them just what they’ve been doing with their life these last ten years.

Tags: Mushtaq Ahmed, Retirement, county cricket by King Cricket
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Paul Horton.

That is all.

Put it this way, Iain Sutcliffe has been keeping Mark Chilton out of the side and Sutcliffe’s been batting so unbelievably wretchedly that he’s actually gone so far as to retire from cricket. His season average of 14 is superior to Chilton’s 12.

However, both can look down on the man we’d have said was Lancashire’s best batsman at the start of the season. Mal Loye has hit 103 runs in 12 innings.

Overseas locum, Lou Vincent, averages 25 this year. Francois du Plessis has done well enough to be awarded a contract extension - he’s averaging 26.5 (although he does seem pretty good).

Stuart Law has somehow found a way of conquering statistics. He’s managing to average 40, even though he’s only hit one hundred and three fifties in 16 innings.

Lancashire have been heading this way since 2003 and they’ve done sod all about it. There’s nobody to replace these non-achievers. When Lancashire drop a batsman all that happens is everyone below moves up a spot and the new player comes in at eight.

How they were in with the faintest chance of winning the title after being 100-4 or worse in every single match is beyond comprehension.

Tags: Paul Horton, county cricket by King Cricket
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Three hundreds in as many innings for Mark Ramprakash now - the middle one a double and he hasn’t been dismissed in any of them. He’s 133 not out overnight against Sussex.

Mark Ramprakash must be the only batsman in history who can cause people to mull on his mental frailties by hitting three successive hundreds.

There are a lot of batsmen out there who’d bat without a box for a chance to have their mental frailties dwelt over after three successive hundreds.

Not Graham Thorpe though. There was a man for whom the ball was magnetically attracted to the groin. He wouldn’t have risked genital liberation for a dozen hundreds in a row.

Tags: Mark Ramprakash, county cricket by King Cricket
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Bit disappointing that lots of southern Africans hit runs and pretty much nobody English did. Bit disappointing that Rob Key didn’t get to celebrate.

Rob’s had a lot of near-misses this season, what with this, the Twenty20 Cup and his being mentioned regarding the England captaincy. Near misses are still misses though and Rob needs some hits.

Perhaps he should talk up his winters in Perth. England’s selectors are suckers for an exotic cricketing education. Tell them you were born abroad and they think you know some secret that will make you good at cricket. Tell them you were born in East Dulwich and they sigh and think: ‘He’s one of us. He doesn’t have the secret knowledge.’

Rob does have the secret knowledge. He has so much secret knowledge. He knows how to levitate, he knows where the Holy Grail is and he knows how to repel slugs in the garden without recourse to chemicals.

Tags: Rob Key, county cricket by King Cricket
18 Comments »

Even by our knee-high standards Rikki Clarke’s selection as ‘one to watch’ has been ill-judged.

He has been worth watching in a faintly soap opera kind of way, we suppose. It’s one thing to play badly (in the second division), it’s another to resign the captaincy, but it’s really going some to drop yourself - which is what Rikki did at one point this season.

We’ll discard him for next season and he’ll turn into Don Bradman and Waqar Younis’s bastard offspring, just you watch.

Tags: Rikki Clarke, county cricket by King Cricket
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This is perhaps a more interesting development than you might think.

You might not have heard of Simon Marshall. He’s a leg-spinning all-rounder whose particular brand of non-spinning spin gave him great success in this year’s Twenty20 Cup: 14 wickets at 13.57 at 7.26 an over. He’s a snappy fielder too, so that’s a full set of strings to his bow (bows have three strings it would seem).

We’re told that all the money’s in Twenty20 and that counties will build their squads according to ability in this format from now on, but that clearly isn’t the case here in the North-West.

Of course we don’t necessarily run organisations according to ‘reason’ in these parts.

Tags: Simon Marshall, county cricket by King Cricket
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A slightly callous post title that we’re not that proud of, but what are we going to do? Rewrite it? As if.

Lancashire have finally decided that they have too many ageing fast-medium all-rounders in their side and Dominic Cork, as the elder of the two, is the man to go.

It’s a bit sad for Cork who was a great cricketer and is still a very good one. But his presence was always a bit infuriating at a county with a youth academy that seems to churn out fast-medium all-rounders almost exclusively. Tom Smith, Kyle Hogg and Steven Croft have all waited unreasonably patiently for the last few seasons.

So now we’ve got the answer to the question we asked back in March: How will the ageing all-rounders of tomorrow get enough experience to keep the ageing all-rounders of the day-after-tomorrow out of the side?

Tags: Dominic Cork, county cricket by King Cricket
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Rejoice poverty-stricken victims of Sky. Cricket’s going to be free again. Top Welsh terrestrial station S4C have bought the rights to five Glamorgan matches. All the other stuff’s still on Sky, mind.

A spokeswoman for the BBC explained their decision not to bid for any of the 35 packages available:

“We have always said that any bid for live Test cricket is subject to value for money and ability to schedule. In our view neither of these criteria were met.”

We’re not entirely sure what the ECB could have done to help the BBC fit Test matches into their schedule. Tests are played in the daytime in summer and last for five days. If the BBC’s bid’s always going to be subject to that, then they’re out aren’t they?

We’re massively disappointed that none of the terrestrial channels made an effort to get the Friday night Twenty20 tournament. We really believe that having live Twenty20 on the telly on a Friday night could do wonders for the sport.

Tags: England, county cricket by King Cricket
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The Board of Control for Cricket in India, the BCCI, wishes to run a Champions League featuring Twenty20 sides from around the world. The BCCI backs the IPL Twenty20 league and says sides featuring players from the rival ICL can’t appear in its Champions League.

Various county cricketers have played in the ICL, so the England and Wales Cricket Board, the ECB, is unhappy. They’re also unhappy because the BCCI want half the money from this Champions League.

The BCCI are sick of the ECB now and have told them to piss off. The ECB have said, ‘fine, we’ll go - but we’re starting our own Champions League and it’s going to be better than yours’. The BCCI said: ‘Do it. We’ll see whose is best,’ and then they’ve each taken it in turns to say ‘fine’ as the ECB have stormed out of the building in a huff.

The question is, have the ECB irritated the BCCI so much that the BCCI will crush the ECB’s Champions League or have the ECB pissed off the BCCI so royally that the BCCI will crush the ECB’s Champions League and the EPL and whatever else takes their fancy.

Because they can. India brings in three quarters of the money in the game and that fact wins pretty much every argument.

In a way it’d be best if there were two Champions Leagues, because then they’d both fit the Champions League template, which of course dictates that there should be as few champion teams as possible.

Champions leagues should really be stocked with ‘big’ teams who owe their status to repeated appearances in the Champions League, not sides who’ve ever actually won anything.

Tags: England, IPL, India, county cricket by King Cricket
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Some of you are doubtless under the impression that we like Rob Key because he’s a ruddy-faced barrel of a man, but that’s not why at all. That’s just a bonus.

The real reason why we like Rob Key is because we think he’s a fantastic batsman. One of his biggest strengths is a real, genuine sense of perspective. Steve Waugh once said of him: “He doesn’t give a shit about much”.

Waugh meant this as a compliment, going on to say that it meant he wouldn’t get overawed by anything, which is invaluable in top-level sport.

Rob pretty much just likes playing cricket and doesn’t really worry about things that are out of his hands. He was asked about qualifying for the multi-million pound Twenty20 Champions’ League. Kent’s appearance is in doubt due to their fielding ICL players during the Twenty20 Cup.

Here’s his answer: “How do I feel about qualifying? I’m not too bothered.”

Update: He also said about the Champions’ League: “Until I get some plane tickets and they say this is it, I could not care.”
 

Tags: Rob Key, county cricket by King Cricket
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