Selling your brand of cricket

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We’ve done a non-satirical piece for Cricinfo. It’s about branding.

Or is it? Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it’s about propaganda. A lot of the focus is on how the Australian cricket team cherry picks facets of its game to talk up while saying very little about other, equally important elements. The inspiration for the article was the phrase ‘exciting/attacking brand of cricket’ which we hear so frequently these days. That in itself is a glittering generality – a common tool of propagandists.

If you’re still not sold, the piece also includes a Mark E Smith quote.

DON'T BE LIKE GATT!

Mike Gatting wasn't receiving the King Cricket email when he dropped that ludicrously easy chance against India in 1993.

Coincidence?

Why risk it when it's so easy to sign up?

11 comments

  1. The most attractive form of cricket is winning. Work out how to do that first, then make it pretty if you have to – chances are the two go hand in hand anyway.

  2. “Bored of tired old blogs reporting on cricket with nothing new to offer? We invite you to try King Cricket. We pride ourselves on express fast posts and guaranteed cricketainment. The site’s awash with cats, match reports that do not mention the game, and curious advertisements for a cycling site. Come here, come now, to experience a brand of blogging characterized by a hyper-aggressive lack of intent. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry calls King Cricket the “Sigmund Freud of Cricket Reporting”*. So there.”

    * This means that if you do not like us, it is because you’ve always wanted to have sex with your mother. In which case we do not want you, fucking perv.

  3. I think Mark E Smith is missing the point. The key to Spangles was that they were individually wrapped, and could be bought in single-colour packs. This meant that we could play Spanglebird in the local woods, in which two colours of Spangles were hidden in trees and under rocks and two teams had to find them, the winner being the team who could show the most Spangles at the end. Eating your opponent’s Spangles when you found them was the main tactic.

    Have I understood the point you were making properly?

    1. Yes, you have and you make some valid points. We should have used the Smith lyric: ‘Multi-coloured sweets in bottom of white sweet pack’ instead.

    2. I saw Mark E Smith in a ‘beer garden’ (well, the paved back smoking bit of a pub) recently – he is at first glance, almost literally indistinguishable from most old drunks that I have ever seen in a pub.

      No discussion of cricket or 1970s/80s sweets took place, however.

    3. balti was/is crap..?

      am i the only one prepared to take issue with such a presposterous statement? we have discussed balti on here before…

  4. Isn’t the most important “branding” point of the day the fact that Cricinfo is now branding you as part of The Cordon, rather than Page 2.

    I suspect that congratulations are in order for this new,exciting brand of KC piece.

    In other news, exciting brand Middlesex seems to be performing rather well against attacking brand Lancashire. Although I have a feeling that drippy brand rain and flatty brand Lord’s wicket might combine to have the final say in the match.

    1. We seem to get a different brand of missing the point in the comments as well.

      Regarding Middlesex v Lancashire, plenty of experts think that Eoin Morgan’s hundred is somehow significant, completely overlooking the fact that any pitch on which Lancashire pass 200 must be a right flatty – as you say yourself.

    2. It’s a better class of point-missing, KC.

      Much like sitting in the pavilion at Lord’s, where one hears plenty of nonsense spoken around one, but it is very high class nonsense.

    3. Indeed. It’s a refreshing change. Perhaps we’ll try and explore more Cricinfo sections to make further comparisons.

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