King Cricket

Could everyone please just calm down a bit

There’s too much emotion in cricket these days. We need to get back to a world where wickets are celebrated with a handshake, team spirit is expressed with a warm handshake and contempt for the opposition is conveyed via a firm handshake.

We’ve written about how everyone’s far too het up about the first Test over at Cricinfo.

A shameless advertisement for our cycling site

Shut up. We don’t do it often.

For the next three weeks (crashes permitting), Bradley Wiggins will be attempting to win the Giro d’Italia, the second-biggest race in cycling. You can follow his progress over at our other site. Like cricket, the Giro isn’t on ‘normal telly’ – not even the highlights – so our website could almost be considered to be serving a purpose.

If you’re interested, you should sign up for email updates. That is all. Sorry to have taken up so much of your time.

IPL teams’ official Twitter accounts

We don’t normally link to our Cricinfo Twitter round-up because, you know, we can’t really be bothered. However, we thought we’d make the effort this week because the subject matter might be slightly more of interest to you.

As you know, we’re ‘down’ with all the modern trends (it’s presumably one of the main reasons why Cricinfo hired us to monitor cutting edge social media on their behalf). As such, we know exactly what the cool kids are into and we’re pretty sure they’re currently all talking about the correct use of punctuation. That’s why we devoted over half of this week’s Twitter round-up to an examination of how the IPL teams are using exclamation marks on their official accounts.

It’s important to channel one’s energy. If you spread your irritation too thinly, you’ll find you have nothing left for important issues such as these.

Next week on King Cricket

On the radio, they call this ‘throwing forward’. That’s a good thing on the radio, but it’s a crime in rugby. You can decide for yourselves what it is on a cricket blog.

Monday to Wednesday will see something we’re really excited about. It is a short, three-part feature looking at cricket’s greatest dot balls, so brace yourselves for some real thrills. It’s not strictly speaking a top three, but Wednesday’s dot ball surely has a case for being considered the greatest of them all.

Unless we can come up with something better, Thursday will see a humourless, rambling post about how to go about selecting a Test team. We apologise in advance if this is what actually does appear, but we’ll make up for it on Friday by having a picture of a cat looking conspicuously indifferent to something cricket-related.

So there we go. If we need you, we now know where to find you: RIGHT ON THE EDGE OF YOUR SEAT.

On this site five years ago

The great thing about making no discernible progress in life is that when there isn’t anything you want to write about, you know where to look to find what you wrote five years ago.

On the 16th January, 2008, this website was updated not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES.

1. Something about Virender Sehwag and Rahul Dravid

Bit long, pretty much no insight and hard to understand what’s going on because we didn’t really provide much context.

2. Shaun Pollock retirement post

This one’s actually quite good. We were clearly very irritated with Shaun Pollock on the 16th of January, 2008 and didn’t want to honour him with a respectful retirement post. Good on us.

3. An early moan about not picking a spinner

Which would go on to become part of our manifesto (see sidebar). We always suspected that we’d been saying the same thing over and over again for the last five years. It’s pleasing to see that this is actually the case.

King Cricket 2008 v King Cricket 2013

We suppose that the lesson here is that if we write three times a day, one of those three posts might turn out okay, so writing once a day and having nothing better to do than to link to posts from five years ago clearly isn’t the way forward.

Despite that, we can’t promise that this won’t be the way forward.

Who’s your favourite cricketer?

And why?

We think we might be interested, but we reserve the right to change our opinion should you write 3,000 words without any line breaks.

Our favourite cricketer was Waqar Younis, as you’ll know if you used to read what was then The Wisden Cricketer. We don’t think the article in question appears on The Cricketer’s site any more, but it did feature on Cricinfo this week. Newer readers will hopefully enjoy it, while long-standing readers can bloody well force themselves to enjoy it again.

The site is back and hopefully faster

The site has been offline for a day. We were moving it to new hosting. Thank you to Prince Stickball for his assistance in this. Hopefully the site will run a bit more quickly and reliably now.

Apologies to those of you who’ve been repeatedly checking the site for updates this week, only to be greeted by various web hosting company pages. To avoid this scenario in the future, why not subscribe to our daily email? It goes out after we’ve updated, so you never miss anything. We’ll never share our mailing list with anyone, so you’ll only receive articles from the site and you can unsubscribe whenever you like by clicking a link which appears at the bottom of every email.

Don’t think it means that you get out of leaving comments though. That’s a duty. We rely on the comments to keep us from having to read the cricket news.

If you buy one cricket magazine this month…

Buy The Cricketer. We’ve a thing in it.

“Was Don Bradman really the greatest batsman? Is Test cricket the pinnacle? Was it definitely better in your day? It’s time to bust some myths, says Alex Bowden.”

Only we didn’t say that. That’s not the kind of thing we say. We just tried it out now and it sounded very odd – a bit confrontational almost.

What we actually said was something about maybe, possibly writing something about various bits of received wisdom and if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, would The Cricketer please take a quick look, but that it would be absolutely fine if they didn’t want to use it and we wouldn’t be at all offended.

Oddly, some of the comments on our recent Cricinfo piece appeared to quote our Cricketer piece. We can’t work out whether this is coincidence or whether we have CHANGED THE WAY PEOPLE THINK. It’s probably the former.

Forming opinions about batsmen

Sometimes we’ve watched a batsman for the first time and thought he looked okay without reaching any conclusion beyond that. When other people have then waxed lyrical about the same player, this has left us feeling like a fraud for writing about cricket. How have we not seen the talent so obvious to others?

Then we realised that we were right and everyone else was wrong. It takes time to build an accurate picture of a batsman and there are no shortcuts. Anyone falling over themselves to brand some young batsman a future great is simply hedging their bets in a bid to be the first person to be “right”.

If there’s one thing people love, it’s being right and if there’s another thing people love, it’s being right before anyone else. This is one of the reasons why we aren’t on Facebook. We’re not going to give everyone else on earth the satisfaction of being ‘right’ before us.

You can see a lot of a batsman’s obvious qualities early on, but few people dwell on the boring attributes which are equally (and often more) important, while there will be other things you simply haven’t seen yet. There are a billion challenges in cricket. That’s half the frigging point.

Anyway, we’ll not go into this here, because we’ve written a brew-length article on the subject for Cricinfo. A brew-length article is one where you can justify boiling the kettle because you’ll have time to take more than one sip while reading it.

Disclaimer: It’s kind of like a proper article, so it’s not funny. We don’t shoe-horn in even a single mention of Ian Austin.

ICC World Twenty20 post-match analysis

When each match finishes, you can simply switch off the TV. We’ve saved you from post-match analysis with our team guide for Cricinfo. It explains why your team lost.

When Bumble says “start the car” – that’s your cue to switch off the box. You can go and do something more productive with your time, like hammering old, rusty nails into a plank of wood so that they’re easier to carry when you take them to the tip.

The Lazy Pundit’s Guide To Why Your Team Lost – New Zealand is our favourite.