Cricket products

Stick Cricket now available on Android

Not as good as android cricket now being available on a stick.

Yes, that’s right, today’s entire King Cricket offering is a limp one line joke based around our love of robots and our luddite attitude to mobile phones.

We haven’t even explained what Stick Cricket is or included a link. That’s how lazy we are.

Choosing a cricketer to stalk

We’re not entirely sure why someone would choose to stalk a cricketer other than Rob Key, but for some reason that’s precisely what Adam Carroll-Smith decided to do.

He decided that he wanted to bowl a ball at Sachin Tendulkar, which is even more bizarre, because there are professional cricketers who go out of their way to avoid doing that.

He wrote a book about it. It’s called Chasing Sachin. Pleasingly, based on the chapter we read, it isn’t rubbish and nor is it particularly about cricket, which is a major drawback with the majority of cricket books. We aren’t even going to hold against him the fact that his first contact with cricket came AFTER the Fugees had released Killing Me Softly.

You can read a sample chapter here and then, if you like it, you can order Chasing Sachin here.

Winning the Ashes Down Under by Andrew Strauss with Simon Hughes

One of our jobs is to read all the cricket news. As a result of this, cricket books covering recent events aren’t all that appealing to us. When we’re presented with familiar information, our brain tends to drift off and do something else, leaving our eyes to do the reading unsupported.

Still, if anyone knows anything about the last Ashes series that we don’t know, it’s Andrew Strauss, so we thought we’d give this a go. It does suffer a little from the fact that he’s still playing and so can’t really lay into anyone or make any particularly jaw-dropping revelations, but it’s still a decent read.

It’s helped by the fact that it’s a good story. We don’t mean that in the one-eyed ‘go England’ sense. We mean that it’s the story of a team that goes from being bowled out for 51 by West Indies – which is where the story starts – to recording a pretty damn amazing victory in a place where most England teams have died whimpering. That’s the climax. There’s also a slightly off-kilter prolonged epilogue that covers the World Cup, which is less joyous, but equally enlightening.

However, the story’s well-known, so the extent to which you enjoy this book will probably depend on how closely you followed the goings-on leading up to and during the Ashes series. We followed that period pretty intently and we still got a fair bit out of this book. It was nothing major, just a slightly different view of a few of the players based on pretty minor anecdotes. We like that stuff though. It fleshes out the characters we see on TV.

Finally, if you don’t buy it, this book is worth finding in a book shop so that you can see the astonishing picture of a mustachioed Kevin Pietersen in the player profiles section at the end. It’s probably the best mugshot we’ve ever seen.

Buy Winning the Ashes Down Under from Amazon

Crickileaks by Alan Tyers

Do you know Alan Tyers’ work? You can probably make your own mind up about this book if you do. Crickileaks is what you would expect from him.

The fake diary is Alan Tyers’ thing. He’s done them for Cricinfo and The Wisden Cricketer (now The Cricketer) many times before and that is what this book is, a collection of fake player diaries.

It’s basically a device that allows him to make fun of some aspect of that player’s character. Our favourites are when the subject is a little unexpected, like the Nawab of Pataudi or other historical figures such as Bradman, who is portrayed as being cricket-crazed, oblivious to others and a little bit autistic.

Less good are those that target the obvious. Harmison gets homesick, Freddie likes a drink etc. It doesn’t feel like the effort’s been put into those. We were also a little disappointed that each diary is only two pages long. That’s okay for some subjects, but others seem to fade away just as they’re getting going and the book can feel a bit flimsy as a result.

Overall, it’s good. WG Grace Ate My Pedalo is better, but Crickileaks is probably worth getting, if only for the two pages detailing the extent of Douglas Jardine’s hatred of all things Australian. That poor koala will never be the same again.

Buy Crickileaks from Amazon

Ashes 2010/2011 – The Inside Story | DVD review

There are three ways you can approach this. There’s the documentary, the highlights and the box set, which is the first two sold together.

We won’t review the highlights, because they’re pretty self explanatory, suffice to say that there are five DVDs and highlights of every day of the series. The commentary is from Australia’s Channel Nine and events like Peter Siddle’s hat trick benefit from that with Mark Taylor a genuine enthusiast, not just a man doing a job.

The first thing to say about the documentary, The Inside Story, is that it isn’t an inside story. There’s a lot of talking head stuff, a tiny bit of turning-up-the-stump-microphone and some footage of players ambling about doing not a lot between matches (Michael Clarke telling some Aussie schoolchildren that Dougie Bollinger is ‘not the smartest’ being a fairly typical example).

There’s also quite a bit from the two captains, which we were quite surprised by (how do they find the time?) Other players feature too, but to be honest the pundits are better, because they don’t have to watch what they say quite so much – Mike Selvey’s near-contempt for Mitchell Johnson being a good example of this.

There’s a lot of Selvey and we always feel he’s worth listening to. His presence as well as that of the captains and the Channel Nine commentators lends some weight to the documentary and makes it feel authoritative, which is very important. There’s a certain amount of Mark Nicholas too. Not so sure about that.

Basically, it’s a review of the 2010-11 Ashes and that’s no bad thing. If you haven’t got nine and a half hours to watch the highlights, what are you going to do? The Inside Story is comprehensive and definitive and allows you to relive the whole series in one evening.

Or get both. You get to watch full highlights of day one of the Boxing Day Test if you do that.

Ashes 2011 by Gideon Haigh | book review

If you spend much time reading about cricket, you will know Gideon Haigh. He is the cricket writer whose arse is most frequently kissed by other cricket writers.

But why is this? Why is Gideon Haigh so highly regarded? Having just read Ashes 2011, the answer is fairly clear. He thinks about what to say and then he thinks about how he says it.

It’s not writing that blows you away. It’s not like a Shahid Afridi innings. It’s more like an Alastair Cook knock, even if that sounds a bit unflattering. What we mean is that good decisions are made repeatedly and there’s never any laziness.

You won’t get anything faintly resembling a cliché from Haigh, so your mind never wanders. Everything is expressed simply, but in a fresh way. This keeps you hooked, no matter what the subject. The proof of this is that while books about cricket series aren’t our bucket of chicken, we read this far quicker than most we’ve reviewed.

To prove Haigh’s consistency, we’ll pick some pages at random and we guarantee that there’ll be a decent turn of phrase on each one.

Page 21: “Above all, where is the spin to come from, the incumbent Nathan Hauritz suddenly looks like an outcumbent.”

Page 139: “Trouble proverbially comes in threes, and so it has for Ponting: batting, bowling and fielding.”

Page 201: “When he’s in the mood, he just stays and stays and stays, his objective of long-term settlement somehow expressed in the repeated furrowing of his guard, where he might be intending to plant a row of beans.”

In writing terms, it’s just doing the basics well. But that’s surprisingly rare.

As for the subject matter, you know the events, so you’re looking for insights. Haigh isn’t a full-time cricket writer, so he’s perhaps less influenced by the press box, which can only be a good thing. He has his own opinions – a belief that young Australian players such as Phil Hughes are being overhyped being one that recurs.

The book is actually a compilation of his columns and articles and it’s interesting to read them with the benefit of hindsight. As we said earlier, books about past sporting events don’t particularly appeal to us, but we still recommend this because Haigh’s writing makes subject matter far less important. He could write a book about differential pressure sensors and it would be readable. Buy it from Amazon.

A cricket iPhone ‘app’

“You want to know what time it is? There’s an app for that. You want to make a phone call? There’s an app for that. You want your iPhone to remain inactive unless someone phones or texts you? There’s an app for that.”

It seemed safe to assume that we would never, ever, in a million years, write a post about an iPhone app, but it turns out there was a loophole: iPhone apps that let you put the hair or facial hair of cricketers on pictures of yourself.

Gehan sent us this, saying “the man in the photo is not me but my significantly better looking business partner”.

It is called Cricket Booth and you can download it here.

If it wouldn’t lead to our self loathing becoming dangerously complete, we’d get an iPhone so we could put Hashim Amla’s beard on ourself.

Gehan says there will ‘probably’ be an update ‘in a bit’ with Seventies and Eighties cricketing hair/facial hair, which sounds like the kind of non-committal business plan we might come up with if we did ‘business’. Which we don’t.

Out of the Ashes | DVD review

Out of the Ashes is a documentary about the Afghanistan cricket team’s joyously ludicrous journey from war to the Twenty20 World Cup.

Have you ever watched a film and felt completely and utterly unmoved by the most spectacular action sequences because you don’t care one bit about the characters in the film?

Okay, now imagine the exact opposite of that.

Your standard Hollywood blockbuster can depict the nation, world or universe seconds away from destruction and you’ll barely flinch. Here, the outcome of a cricket match played in front of a dozen people in Jersey can pretty much reduce you to tears. The characters and background are slipped in on the sly and before you know it, you’re emotionally invested in proceedings.

This is partly the skill of the filmmakers, but the emotional impact is also a happy byproduct of what is, in essence, an unscripted fairytale. At the start, the team is quite literally being laughed at, but when they’re being greeted on the streets of Afghanistan after gaining one-day international status, they’re the ones laughing. It’s pretty clear that in this instance something particularly good has been achieved through cricket.

In the DVD extras, Matthew Fleming rather cheesily says that sport is the only language that we can all understand. It’s not his fault that’s trite. When you see Afghanistan’s cricketers swimming in the sea for the first time or deducing the purpose of the green man at a zebra crossing, they can’t help but appear lost. Next thing you know, they’re on the cricket field and they’re playing against Nepal, Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands or Canada and it doesn’t matter whether they’re in Buenos Aires or Tanzania, suddenly they don’t seem remotely out of place.

This film is very, very good. We’ve got a copy to give away next week, but if you’re not the lucky winner, you should buy this DVD. It is a disservice to call it a cricket documentary. Depicting a world you don’t know and telling a story worth telling, it’s a brilliant film that just happens to be about cricket.

WG Grace Ate My Pedalo | book review

You, King Cricket reader, will love WG Grace Ate My Pedalo. We are pretty much certain of that.

You may all be very different, but you all have one thing in common – this website. Alan Tyers’ book is not a million miles away from what you might expect to see here.

It is basically a spoof 1896 issue of The Wisden Cricketer, but better than that sounds. Imagine what the Victorians might think of modern cricket – that’s basically the vibe.

Favourite sections are many and include an advertisement for the ‘Indian Territories Pre-eminent League’; 24 hours in the life of the Reverend ML Hayden (”Pray to God for a bit, but this degenerates into a sledging contest”); and a delightfully demented work of sporting fiction about vampires at Lord’s – part bloodsucker drama, part Victorian cricket story.

WG Grace Ate My Pedalo also features our favourite ever use of the word ‘harlot’. Buy it from Amazon. It is, frankly, mint.

A Fan’s Guide to World Cricket | book review

A Fan’s Guide to World Cricket is basically a book with which you’ll idly plan holidays. It’s full colour, looks amazing and makes you wish you were overseas even more than you already do.

It covers 55 cities, all of which feature an international cricket ground. You’ll basically leaf through the book, see a picture of somewhere amazing and then think about when you might visit. Unlike other travel books, you’ll also know that you’ll be able to watch cricket on this holiday, so that saves a bit of time.

For each city, there are facts about the ground, a bit of info about the place, average weather conditions and three suggestions of non-cricket things to do. It’s not a wealth of information, but it’s a book you browse, rather than one you use for in-depth planning.

It seems well researched. We checked what we knew and sized up the Manchester page. The caption “Manchester has a rich music history and attracts top bands such as Coldplay” worried us immensely, but the main text namechecks The Buzzcocks and Joy Division among other bands, which is pretty good for a book like this.

Irrelevant Joy Division fact: We were feeding a friend’s cat in Macclesfield the other day when a tourist asked us if we knew where Ian Curtis’s street was. We did, because we’d just been feeding a cat there. “Probably going there for the same reason, eh?” he guessed. Being as we’d been feeding a cat and he’d come to ghoulishly gawp at a house where a man killed himself, you’d have to say he couldn’t have got that more wrong.

Anyway, A Fan’s Guide to World Cricket is a book you’d be happy owning, although we’re not quite sure who’d be moved to go out and buy it.

It might be a good present though. You can buy it from Amazon if you’ve someone it’ll suit.