King Cricket

July 28, 2025 England / India

Can Ben Stokes really carry on doing all of the things? And what’s Shubman Gill’s lifespan as a captain?

4 minute read“Pain is just an emotion,” Ben Stokes told his men at Old Trafford – a nonsense claim just a few small steps below Dalton’s standard-setting “pain don’t hurt” in Road House. For those that don’t know, Dalton is a world famous bouncer in a world where bouncers can be world

July 21, 2025 Match report

Real ale and Schrodinger’s membership | a Lancashire v Derbyshire match report

4 minute readSend your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.) A P Webster writes… Am I a Lancashire member? Well,

July 18, 2025 Match report

Burgers, noise and handshakes | another World Test Championship final match report

2 minute readSend your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.) Who says you can’t report on the same day’s play

July 17, 2025 England / India

Jasprit Bumrah Workload Watch… 86.4 overs

2 minute readAfter the first Test, we reported how England’s batting success in that match had compelled India to ask Jasprit Bumrah to bowl 43.4 overs – quite a significant workload for a man whose appearances are being limited to three of the five matches due to fitness concerns. Fortunately, England’s batting

July 14, 2025 England / India

The bowel-churning thrill of the runs Ravindra Jadeja chose not to score and the wickets England failed to take

4 minute readHold us here, Test cricket. Hold us here in uncertainty; at the sour spot of maybe or maybe not. Leave us here a while to grow overfamiliar with the sight of Ravindra Jadeja turning down another single because it’s still quite early in the over. We all know that a

July 14, 2025 England / India

Why is the Lord’s pitch so woefully inconsistent?

2 minute readLike many Lord’s Test pitches in recent years, the one for this England v India match started off an absolute pudding. Perhaps keen to shrug off the ground’s nickname as The Home of Absolute Puddings, it’s since deteriorated into something rather more treacherous. For the first few days, Lord’s puddingly

July 10, 2025 England / India / Uncategorized

Why is Lord’s so slippy?

2 minute readZak Crawley has been doing his best to combat his longstanding but unflattering association with the word ‘slip’. On Day 1 of the Lord’s Test, he not only ensured his edge behind went to the wicketkeeper, he also essayed a rather different kind of slip in a somewhat forlorn bid

July 9, 2025 England / India

Jofra Archer’s back

2 minute readAs in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything. But is he match fit? Going into the third Test, we would argue that his greatest attribute is that he hasn’t just bowled 80 overs. You may remember Jofra Archer from Test matches such as England against Australia at Lord’s

July 7, 2025 England / India

Bazbowl: The toss doesn’t really matter if you then bowl a load of it

3 minute readAfter criticism but then victory in the first Test, England coach Brendon McCullum has conceded his team made the wrong decision at the toss at the start of the second Test. A far bigger toss issue was however the massive great load of it the bowlers served up in each

July 4, 2025 England / India

Was Josh Tongue trying to make some sort of point?

2 minute readIndia’s most newsworthy selection for this Test was their decision to bowl Deep – but it’s notable they set themselves up to bat deep too. That particular move seemed to leave tail-amputating Josh Tongue with fewer targets. How would he respond? As previously reported, in the first Test India were

Your point about petulant-handshake-gate reinforces my point about the unintended consequences of excessively playing through pain. At the very least…

And one of Matt Parkinson's seven wickets. Is the second division the only level of English cricket where leggies are…

Is it time to talk about Rehan Ahmed? I know second division doesn’t count. But flipping heck.

Sorry i just checked back on this comment. I was indeed expressing an opinion (stronger, but in the same direction…

My only enduring memory of the 4th test match was the moment when Stokes tried to offer the draw (egged…

Zimbabwe in England: six lessons from history for those not old enough to remember this kind of thing

In praise of the matter-of-fact dynamism of Travis Head

Mark’s wood: Talking joinery and timber with England’s fastest bowler

23 of the best, worst and weirdest cricket moments of 2024

Lord Megachief of Gold 2024