…of a lengthy duration.

We’re not the kind of cricket site that’s ashamed when we completely overlook an England one-day international and the nineteenth match in a row between England and New Zealand was no time to adopt professionalism.

When England were in New Zealand, they won the Tests and lost the one-dayers. When New Zealand came to England the results were the same.

It’s almost as if the two sides didn’t use their two-week, between-series break to massively improve themselves.

Boo to back-to-back series. Boo.

And boo to back-to-back Tests as well, while we’re at it. A silent boo, in fact.

Tags: England, New Zealand by King Cricket
5 Comments »

We like a bit of ruthlessness, but there’s a fairly clear line between ‘ruthlessness’ and ‘being a dick’. We call it the ‘being a dick line’ and we always try and stay the right side of it. England didn’t.

Ryan Sidebottom went after the ball and inadvertently decked Grant Elliott who was in the process of taking a quick single. While Elliott writhed around with a suspected broken spine, England ran him out.

At this point, everyone felt a bit uncomfortable, so the umpires rather generously said to Paul Collingwood: “Er, are you sure?” Paul Collingwood said ‘yes’.

Then the umpires said: “No, no, Paul, you’re not getting us. Are you… sure?” while raising their eyebrows and looking him straight in the eye.

Paul Collingwood said ‘yes’.

Then, later on, once England had lost and New Zealand were a bit calmer, Paul Collingwood went into the Kiwi dressing room and apologised. Then Daniel Vettori told some lies about how they’d forgiven Collingwood because he’d had the decency to apologise.

Then everyone pretended nothing had happened. Of course in the fifth one-day international New Zealand will appeal after every ball Collingwood faces.

Tags: England, New Zealand, Paul Collingwood by King Cricket
12 Comments »

What a great match. What a fantastic finish. One-day cricket’s an idiot - how can it not know that it’s dead?

Twenty20 waited for one-day cricket in an Indian backstreet and when one-day cricket arrived, Twenty20 beat it senseless with a black cricket bat. One-day cricket’s bloodied and barely conscious, but for some reason it’s waving a flag and trying to do a dance.

Don’t dance, one-day cricket. Don’t dance. Just rest. Wait for the emergency services. They’ll cryogenically freeze you and maybe you’ll get thawed out at some indeterminate point in the future.

England v New Zealand fourth one-day international at the Oval
England 245 all out (Owais Shah 63, Ravi Bopara 58, Tim Southee 3-47)
New Zealand 246-9 (Scott Styris 69)

Tags: England, New Zealand by King Cricket
7 Comments »

This is how you write a match report: a week early.

England put on a staggering/staggeringly inept performance against New Zealand yesterday, after a topsy-turvy/one-sided contest in which English cricket/New Zealand cricket/cricket/the weather was the only winner.

James Anderson opened the bowling and delivered a virtuoso performance/a never-ending supply of juicy half-volleys.

England’s top order once again failed woefully/scored far too slowly.

Brendon McCullum hit five sixes before holing out/two sixes before holing out/a six before holing out.

Dimitri Mascarenhas hit four sixes/Jacob Oram with a brutish lifter/the dressing room wall in frustration/Ian Bell in frustration.

Paul Collingwood said after the match: “We’re a developing side and I’m confident we’re still moving forward. Some players are still settling into their roles and when that happens I’m sure we’ll be a difficult team to beat.”

Weird that there’s no options for that last one.

Tags: England, New Zealand by King Cricket
2 Comments »

We’d be very irritated if we were a New Zealand cricket supporter. We’re very irritated anyway. Admittedly, we get irritated by all of humanity on an hourly basis, but this is different. This is with reason.

Bowling

Shane Bond would add fire to any attack and the sooner this ICL banning bollocks dies down, the better. The ICL haven’t banned bollocks, you understand. It’s not the female and eunuchs version of the IPL. We mean that it’s bollocks that Shane Bond isn’t being selected for his country because he played in the ICL.

Bond asked permission of the New Zealand board. They said yes, it was fine. India disagreed, so the New Zealand board did an about face and told Bond he should cancel the ICL contract he’d legitimately signed. Bond, quite reasonably didn’t. Voila. No-one’s a winner.

New Zealand’s remaining bowlers are dependable and we reckon the very same players would test opposing batting line-ups a great deal more given more runs to work with. There’s swing, bounce, turn and parsimony. They only lack pace.

Batting

Gah. It’s too ugly to contemplate. Brendon McCullum’s great in his own way, but is better kept down the order. Oram’s peculiarly schizophrenic, veering from thumping, front-foot solidity to quivering, back-foot terror. Daniel Vettori’s the best number eight batsman you could ever hope for.

Of the specialists, Jamie How’s worth persevering with at the top of the order and Ross Taylor’s going to be a terrifying prospect one day, when someone’s lent him some sense. Ross Taylor is Ross Taylor’s bunny. No-one else gets him out quite so much. You want to grab him by the shoulders and ask him just what the hell he thinks he’s doing half the time.

And there’s the problem. Who’s going to do that? Those two batsmen should be surrounded by some older, more experienced players. They should be learning from the non-striker’s end.

Stephen Fleming, Scott Styris and Craig McMillan are pretty much in their prime and are the last New Zealand batsmen with notable Test experience. New Zealand are playing less and less Test cricket. Three Test series are becoming two Test series. Those players need to be around - not only for the runs they’d bring.

Tags: New Zealand by King Cricket
9 Comments »

Winning a Test by an innings is not to be sniffed at. What exactly would you expect to smell? England didn’t exactly dominate the series like they dominated this last match though.

Overall, the team looks okay, but there are quite a few flaws, the most glaring of which is the middle order batting of Bell and Collingwood.

Ian Bell looked like England’s best batsman in Sri Lanka but didn’t really influence proceedings. In New Zealand he hit a hundred when it was least needed. In this series he’s been virtually absent.

Bell will stay, but Paul Collingwood is currently Mark Knopfler (he’s in Dire Straits). Like Bell he’s rather prone to the ineffectual fifty. He’s not been dreadful until this series and if he does get dropped it’ll be for a lack of hundreds.

We can’t escape the feeling that Tim Ambrose isn’t ‘the answer’ either.

England v New Zealand, third Test at Trent Bridge, day four
England 364 (Kevin Pietersen 115, Tim Ambrose 67, Stuart Broad 64, Iain O’Brien 4-74, Kyle Mills 3-76)
New Zealand 123 (James Anderson 7-43)
New Zealand 232 (Brendon McCullum 71, Jacob Oram 50, Ryan Sidebottom 6-67)
England win and take the series 2-0

Tags: England, Ian Bell, New Zealand, Paul Collingwood by King Cricket
15 Comments »

And batsman. Who knew?

Well, we all knew about the swing bowling. Trent Bridge might be the home ground of Ryan Sidebottom and Stuart Broad, but Jimmy Anderson’s the best swing bowler in this England side and he duly played a blinder, taking all six of the New Zealand wickets to fall.

Swing bowling dismissals don’t come more satisfying than Aaron Redmond’s and Brendon McCullum’s. It’s all well and good trying to work a straight ball into the onside, but when your off stump goes racing towards the sightscreen like it’s a solitary spoke in an invisible wheel, you know you’ve made a bad choice - a swig of aged milk kind of a choice.

Jimmy Anderson has the sense to bowl his full outswinger again and again when things are happening with the ball. There’s no point getting too clever. Crucially, he bowls an inswinger about once every four overs. It’s not really his wicket-taker, but it means the batsman tends to play at wider outswingers ‘just in case’. Wickets ensue.

Jimmy says himself that his bowling can go either way though. If his first over goes well, he feels confident and all’s dandy. If it goes badly, he tries to work out what’s going wrong and from there what’s usually going wrong is that he’s trying to work out what’s going wrong and getting all awkward as a consequence. It’s like when someone watches you walk and you suddenly turn into a robot with too few joints that’s being controlled by a ZX Spectrum.

It’s like that bit in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum explains chaos theory by dropping a spot of water onto the back of a peaked hand, only instead of there being a multitude of potential outcomes, in Anderson’s case there are only two. Either the droplet goes down one side, marked ‘conceding seven an over’ or it goes down the other side marked ‘6-42′.

England v New Zealand, third Test at Trent Bridge, day two
England 364 (Kevin Pietersen 115, Tim Ambrose 67, Stuart Broad 64, Iain O’Brien 4-74, Kyle Mills 3-76)
New Zealand 96-6 (James Anderson 6-42)

Tags: England, James Anderson, New Zealand by King Cricket
10 Comments »

We said that due to the swing-friendly conditions Kevin Pietersen’s hundred might prove handy. For similar reasons we picked James Anderson as England’s top wicket-taker and Kyle Mills to bowl most overs in this match. In the last Test, we picked Daniel Vettori and Monty Panesar to be the top wicket-takers.

It’s almost - ALMOST - like we know what we’re talking about. We’re not happy about it at all. If you wanted sense, reason and insight you wouldn’t be here.

We need to break this curse. Maybe we’ll start listening to Ian Botham and give his opinions some serious consideration. That should do the trick.

Tags: England, New Zealand by King Cricket
5 Comments »

Are we right in thinking that James Anderson came in as a nightwatchman in order to protect Ryan Sidebottom? This is beyond reason.

Our feelings about nightwatchmen are perfectly clear, but this warrants further comment. If James Anderson is functioning as the nightwatchman, it’s been his job to protect Ryan Sidebottom from the horrendous peril that is batting in the evening.

Ryan Sidebottom, lest we forget, was the man entrusted with protecting Ian Bell from that horrendous fate during the last Test - a job he singularly failed to do.

James Anderson’s protecting the man who usually protects the batsmen from playing at a certain time of day. Got it. It’s totally justified.

Tags: England, James Anderson, New Zealand by King Cricket
13 Comments »

That’s what Simon Hughes said on Channel 5’s highlights programme, so that’s what happened.

It’s probably wrong to mock commentators’ slips of the tongue when you yourself forget 98 percent of your vocabulary whenever you have to talk in front of more than one person, or to a stranger, or on the phone, or in public, or when you’re tired.

Kevin Pietersen managed to squeeze in a hundred before he slightly fatiguely waved at a wide one. He was at the crease when England were 86-5 and while there are any number of articles stating just how many matches it’s been since England scored 400 plus in their first innings, we’re not sure this was ever going to be the match where they put that right.

They say it’s the new stand that’s helping the swing, but the ball’s been swinging at Trent Bridge for ages. We were there in 2005 on the day that Matthew Hoggard and Simon Jones, England’s biggest swingers (in a good way), reduced Australia to 58-4.

So Kevin Pietersen’s hundred might prove pretty handy. We’ll have to wait and see how New Zealand’s innings goes.

England v New Zealand, third Test at Trent Bridge
England 273-7 (Kevin Pietersen 115, Tim Ambrose 67, Iain O’Brien 4-61, Kyle Mills 3-58)

Tags: England, Kevin Pietersen, New Zealand by King Cricket
3 Comments »