2 minute read Send your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Feel free to put the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself. Jayne with a Y spotted this cricket bat in the Pearl’s Peril hidden object game. “The ridiculous English language description is ‘fungo bat’
Continue readingMonth: September 2021
Moeen Ali was a magnificent malleable peg who filled countless holes in the England Test team
2 minute read We’ve often joked about Moeen Ali’s willingness to take on any pretty much any job for England. Any format, any role, bat or ball, Moeen would give it a go. This means there’s quite a lot of ‘what might have been’ in response to his retirement from Test cricket. But
Continue readingLancashire have qualified for the 2021 Bob Willis Trophy
2 minute read The groups-then-divisions format of this year’s County Championship achieves a couple of significant things. (1) It creates a magnificent climax where the top teams are all pitted against each other and vying for overall glory. (2) It creates a great morass of meaningless fixtures where everyone else is vying for
Continue readingEasy-to-cancel tours and the mindless narrowing of cricket’s horizons
3 minute read It’s always been the case that some tours have been easier to cancel than others. Assorted pressures mean cancellations are coming thicker and faster at the minute. What are the implications of this? Earlier this month, we wrote that the threshold for binning the Old Trafford Test was lower than
Continue readingWe have slowly and unexpectedly come to like Ravi Shastri very much
2 minute read Once upon a time, we didn’t much care for Ravi Shastri. Now we do. And it isn’t just his habit of wearing the worst sunglasses in the entire galaxy. As a commentator, Shastri was terrible. A relentless purveyor of booming cliché, he’d have been easy to ignore if he hadn’t
Continue readingIt’s the final round of qualifiers for the Bob Willis Trophy
2 minute read The most important match of the county season is just around the corner. TBC v TBC at Lord’s from September 28 to October 2. The Game of the Falling Leaves, they call it – The Bob Willis Trophy Final. Quite why they call it a final is beyond us. It’s
Continue reading“Cricket” in an unusual place
< 1 minute read Send your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Feel free to put the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself. (In fact please, please, please do. No-one sends us any of those and they’re our favourite ones.) Daisy and Ged jointly write… We
Continue readingPakistan’s poor batters are going to have to listen to Matthew Hayden speak
3 minute read Matthew Hayden will be working as a batting consultant for Pakistan at the T20 World Cup in the UAE next month. Matthew Hayden is a man we used to write about very often. Now, against our better judgement, we’re about to write about him again. Some time in 2006, we
Continue readingYou can stop short of all-out cynicism and still accept that the threshold for binning the Old Trafford Test was lower than normal
3 minute read Have you ever agreed to go to a thing and secretly not really wanted to go to the thing? Maybe it was a thing you’d ordinarily enjoy – like a meal out with a friend – only you also had a whole bunch of other stuff on that week and
Continue readingVirat Kohli can pick the ‘wrong’ team for Old Trafford and it probably won’t matter
5 minute read Team selection is a fun thing to talk about before a Test match, but sometimes it really isn’t that important. We tend to view selection decisions through a prism that refracts everything into right or wrong. But cricket doesn’t exactly work like that. In any given Player A versus Player
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