2 minute read Send your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Please feel free to deliberately place the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself. Bail-out writes… Difficult financial times are often accompanied by desperate pleas for government subsidy and surprise corporate mergers as old business
Continue readingMonth: March 2021
Danish Kaneria or Dane Vilas – who is most Danish?
4 minute read Danish Kaneria is a Pakistani cricketer who has been banned from the sport for life for spot-fixing. Dane Vilas is a South African cricketer who currently plays for Lancashire. Despite what their names suggest, neither player is from Denmark. So who is most Danish? Let’s measure the two men against
Continue readingWell Bhuvneshwar Kumar came out of that well | an India v England ODI series recap sorta thing
2 minute read Right-arm, average height, fast-medium: there is not, at the very surface level, a great deal to recommend Bhuvneshwar Kumar as a white ball bowler. He’ll just have to rely on his incredible ability and results if he wants to win people over. In the T20 series, England’s bowlers conceded between
Continue readingWhy your team’s late barrage of sixes is bad news for them
< 1 minute read A run doesn’t have a set value. That is a recurring theme of this website. The value of a run derives from the game in which it is scored and in all honesty can only accurately be gauged with hindsight. Up until the moment a match is finally decided, all
Continue readingEngland’s eight most surprising double hundreds since Graham Gooch’s 333
9 minute read Graham Gooch’s 333 against India at Lord’s in 1990 was the first eye-wateringly big innings we can remember. The idea that one guy could score that many runs on his own in a Test match recalibrated what we thought was possible. There have only really been a handful of oversized
Continue readingChris Jordan’s pitch and Virat Kohli’s hat – an India v England T20 series recap sorta thing
2 minute read England just played a handful of T20s in India ahead of the World T20 in India later this year. How did it go? Did anyone learn anything? The headline stat is that India won 3-2. The standfirst stat is that they managed that while testing out more players than England.
Continue readingDawid Malan, selfish gambles and why the T20 rankings don’t seem fit for purpose
3 minute read When it comes to T20 batting, the ICC’s rankings reward selfishness – but teams often benefit more from selflessness. The Dawid Malan debate is an interesting one. There’s a pretty strong case for saying T20 batting rankings aren’t worth the webspace that stores the algorithms that generate them. Because what
Continue readingPlayers (of the left) v Gentlemen (of the right) – match report + wagon wheel
2 minute read Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only interested in what it was like to be at the game, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. Equally, if it’s an amateur match, please go into excruciating detail. Herbert Ackgrass (the official cricket biographer of
Continue readingWhy Eoin Morgan got his first-choice team against India when Joe Root didn’t
5 minute read England are finally putting out their first team. And people aren’t happy. Speaking ahead of the T20 series against India, Eoin Morgan came as close as anyone has so far to articulating the principles underpinning England’s 2021 squad rotation policy. (We’re not going to call it a ‘controversial’ squad rotation
Continue readingWho is whispering to Michael Vaughan about Jofra Archer?
4 minute read We used to work with a girl who had access to a secret weather report. “It’s going to be 40 degrees on Thursday,” she would say. And she would state this as a fact. How often is it 40 degrees in the United Kingdom? The answer is never. Armed with
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