Any sign that fast bowling’s back in fashion is good, but does the victim have to be the West Indies? Dale Steyn took 5-29 and Morne Morkel took 4-19. Great stuff, but you feel bad for who’s on the receiving end.

It’s like eating lamb. It’s delicious, but it’s best to tuck in without thinking about the woolly people who have lost their lives so that you might enjoy your barbecue.

Why can’t fish be tastier? Fish are the vegetables of the sea. Eating fish doesn’t lead to much guilt despite the fact that we feel guilty for pretty much everything. Sometimes we feel guilty for nothing. We’ll just wake up with a sense of guilt hanging over us and resign ourself to enduring it for the rest of the day. Those are good days. The feeling distracts us from our default feeling of worthlessness.

Tags: Dale Steyn, Morne Morkel by King Cricket
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Stumps. Everywhere.

Shaun Tait might have notched 160kph this week, but Dale Steyn’s shown that if you add swing to the mix, you’re sorted. In fact, he didn’t even need to resort to scorching pace against India. It’s good to have scorching pace to fall back on when you aren’t swinging the ball this way and that and taking eight wickets in a day.

Not many fast bowlers take eight wickets in a day in India. That’s mostly because of the pitches, but Dale Steyn doesn’t rely on the pitch to take wickets. He swings the ball and puts it right up there where the batsman has a go at it. Later in the innings, he does exactly the same thing only with reverse swing. Bouncers are rare and lethal because of that.

Indian fans might not agree right now, but the cricket world needs Dale Steyn. Great bowlers are a rarity and Steyn’s proving himself great.

Next time someone calls you ‘a Steyn on this planet’, take it as a compliment.

Tags: Dale Steyn by King Cricket
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If you told us that we had to use a tired cliché to describe the effort that Dale Steyn puts into bowling or you’d force us to do a dance in front of other humans, we’d hang our head, sigh softly and mutter “sinew-straining”.

Dale’s certainly wholehearted. Perhaps too wholehearted. The staring eyes betray a love of caffeine the like of which we haven’t seen since everyone in the office got caught in a nasty espresso-drinking cycle last year (you needed the pick-me-up in the morning after yet another nervy, sleepless night).

Whatever it is, Steyn skitters in, looking ever-so-slightly-deranged, and whips the ball through with a bit of away swing. It’s not a bad stock ball. Only Ian Bell was really up to it, but Steyn lodged a mirror image of the delivery in amongst his stumps by way of a reprimand.

Tags: Dale Steyn by King Cricket
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Picking the bowlers was much harder than picking the batsmen and all-rounders. We’re not going to pretend that we’re 100% happy with what we’ve come up with because that would be dishonest and we save the dishonesty for getting out of social events.

Dale Steyn, South Africa, age 26

We’ve still not quite worked out how someone so spindly can be so quick. The fastest bowlers do tend to be whippy, flexible beasts, but even allowing for that, Steyn still looks a bit malnourished. Being quick AND being able to swing the ball makes him more rounded than other bowlers.

Mohammad Asif, Pakistan, 26

There are a lot of variables here. As long as Mohammad Asif can stay fit and stay out of trouble and as long as Pakistan actually get to play against other people; as long as all that happens he’ll take wickets by the big-receptacle-load.

Ajantha Mendis, Sri Lanka, 24

You have to do something a bit mental to get batsmen out on today’s pitches. Even if people work out the mental deliveries Mendis uses at present, he seems like the type who’d just invent another one. Will get lots of wickets with slow, straight deliveries that will confuse batsmen predicting sorcery.

Ishant Sharma, India, 21

Has been a bit ropey of late, but anyone who can make mincemeat out of Ricky Ponting when they’re 19 doesn’t need to improve too much. Ridiculously, he’s still only 21.

Also, just a note to say that the bowler we’re perhaps most excited about, Mohammad Aamer, is more of a bowler for the next 15 years, not the next five. We’re giving him time.

As for the Aussies, they’re all good and all about the right age, but none really stands out. It’s more that we couldn’t pick one in particular than that we couldn’t pick any.

Tags: Ajantha Mendis, Dale Steyn, India cricket news | Tests, ODIs, T20s, Ishant Sharma, Mohammad Asif, South Africa, Sri Lanka by King Cricket
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This is a guide to a few of the newer South African players. You shouldn’t cut it out, nor should you keep it. You should read it once, sigh and think to yourself: ‘I already knew all that. I remember when this site was good.’

Paul Harris

Paul Harris is a South African spin bowler. Don’t let his competent record fool you. He’s still a South African spin bowler.

Like all South African spin bowlers, he’s 29 already, even though he’s ‘new’.

Hashim Amla

You sort of remember him from when England toured South Africa in 2004, when his beard was all the more lovable for the short periods of time it was inside a batting helmet. It wasn’t a great series for Amla.

Unfortunately Hashim Amla has rather pushed on. In his last ten Tests – against New Zealand, West Indies, Bangladesh and India – he’s bearded three hundreds and averaged 58.8. It’s customary at these times to remove any scores against Bangladesh, so let’s do that.

Now he averages 64.4.

Hopefully this form won’t last and having hit a hundred in each of South Africa’s warm-up matches, Amla’s clearly frittering away his reservoir of runs at the wrong time. The hirsute fool!

Dale Steyn

Think James Anderson with another 5mph of pace and no bad days.

Morne Morkel

Morne Morkel’s one we’re looking forward to seeing. He’s fast and ludicrously oversized. Not ludicrously oversized in a lanky Steve Harmison way, more in an undue pressure on the pituitary gland kind of way.

Tags: Dale Steyn, Hashim Amla, Morne Morkel, Paul Harris, South Africa by King Cricket
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We expected England to lose. They’re an insipid outfit at the minute. We didn’t expect them to get thrashed though.

And they were thrashed. Getting bowled out for 110 is never too smart, but on this pitch it was jaw-dropping. Don’t let New Zealand’s 177-9 fool you. Runs were the only commodity they were interested in then. They didn’t care how many wickets were falling.

Kyle Mills took 4-7 with the new ball. Mills is a decent bowler – he’d have to be to take out an entire international top order for diddly – but is he THAT good? This was his tenth Test and while he now averages 25.58 with the ball, no fast-medium bowler should get figures like that unless the ball’s swinging a mile or the pitch looks like a cobbled street. Neither of those conditions applied here.

This England side reacts. It doesn’t act. Bowlers can attack with impunity if batsmen aren’t interested in runs, as was the case in both of England’s innings. And if your bowlers are content to wait for mistakes, they’ll not come – batsmen will just accumulate.

England let this match continually drift away from them from the moment they lost the toss. Sometimes you lose the toss. That’s the way it is.

New Zealand are a proper outfit, but they are one of the weaker Test nations. On their recent tour of South Africa, they failed to reach 200 in four Test innings. This was largely thanks to Dale Steyn. There’s a bowler who can inflict his will on the opposition.

Steyn’s recently been doing much the same in Bangladesh. The wickets didn’t suit pace, but he didn’t settle for figures that would be good ‘in the circumstances’. He sets his own standards. England take note. You need spectacular performances to win Tests and you also need them to give you some breathing room in case of a bad day.

If you’re almost always average, it’s only the shortest distance to ‘below average’.

New Zealand v England, first Test at Hamilton – day five
New Zealand 470 (Ross Taylor 120, Jamie How 92, Daniel Vettori 88, Brendon McCullum 51, Ryan Sidebottom 4-90)
England 348 (Paul Collingwood 66, Michael Vaughan 63, Tim Ambrose 55, Jeetan Patel 3-107)
New Zealand 177-9 declared (Stephen Fleming 66, Ryan Sidebottom 6-49, Monty Panesar 3-33)
England 110 all out (Kyle Mills 4-16, Chris Martin 3-33)
New Zealand won by 189 runs

Tags: Dale Steyn, England cricket news | Tests, ODIs, T20s, Kyle Mills, New Zealand by King Cricket
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Despite Shiv’s bat and Dwayne Bravo’s best efforts with the ball, South Africa look like getting a first innings lead. This is a shame because while the Windies might continue to put up a fight while ahead, you feel that they’re liable to crumble if they fall behind. You never know, mind.

The architect of the West Indies’ destruction was Dale Steyn. This is good, because the world needs fast bowlers, but as we said above, it’s bad for the match. He took 4-60.

We used to work with someone called Dale. He was small and ginger and was allegedly training to be a wrestler. Not that his hair colour had anything to do with it – he was going bald, you see.

On a barely-related training note, we’ve recently started ‘running’ again. ‘Running’ appears to be a form of bouncing walk from what we’ve achieved thus far. We’re pretty sure we’re doing it right.

Despite having calf muscles that are so minuscule as to be invisible to the naked eye, this ‘running’ has led to stiffness and pain in that area far in excess of what might realistically justified by the muscle mass.

We mention this only because we’re a ‘pom’ and therefore obliged to whinge. This is the first opportunity we’ve had to fulfil that remit in the last two years.

Australians can talk anyway. Who else would ever whinge about their Test side winning too often and too easily? Now that’s REALLY making an effort to whinge. At least the English have got some worthwhile whinging subject matter.

This post’s rather gone off-topic, hasn’t it?

Tags: Dale Steyn, South Africa, West Indies by King Cricket
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We remember Dale Steyn’s Test debut. For his first wicket, he arced a yorker into Marcus Trescothick’s middle stump. Not bad.

While he touched 90mph during that Test, it was rare and we sort of put him to the back of our mind in our mental draw marked ‘South African fast-medium’. It’s not a drawer we often feel like opening. As the series progressed, this seemed increasingly wise as Steyn failed to pick up more than two wickets in any of the six innings in which he bowled.

However, we’re taking Dale out of that boring drawer at the back now and moving him to one of the prime drawers – ‘fast bowlers who are good’ – it’s actually the top drawer. He’s on probation for the moment, but we want to give him a taste of this drawer in the hope that it’ll encourage him. Fast bowlers need encouragement right now.

While New Zealand’s batting line-up is currently a bit puny, Dale Steyn nevertheless managed to have consecutive ten wicket matches. Ten wicket matches are rare and even more so for fast bowlers. It was the culmination of some fairly steady improvement from Steyn.

We still had a slight concern though – is Dale Steyn actually a fast bowler or just fast-medium? We love fast bowlers, whereas fast-medium bowlers can sit in their drawer enduring Shaun Pollock’s boring stories about when he used to be filed more sympathetically for all we care.

We watched some of the highlights of Dale Steyn’s recent wicket-taking exploits and praise be, he topped 90mph. In the King Cricket book of guidelines, if you bowl over 90mph, you’re fast. 89mph and we hate you for ruining the sport; 90mph and we’ll try and steal your sweatband for a keepsake. It’s a harsh and relatively meaningless distinction, but we abide by it.

Tags: Dale Steyn, South Africa by King Cricket
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