King Cricket

June 1, 2026 Regulars

A cricket book at a castle

< 1 minute readSend your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Please consider putting the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself. We like those ones. We took The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments to Warwick Castle during October half-term. It seemed a little nonplussed by the castle

May 29, 2026 Ireland / New Zealand

Chapeau, New Zealand – not many teams come to Ireland and win a Test match

< 1 minute readAn historic day. Not many teams get the better of Ireland in Test cricket. New Zealand today inflicted only their second ever defeat in home conditions and their first by an innings. Extraordinary stuff. Even more amazingly, New Zealand had never before got the better of Ireland, home or away.

May 27, 2026 Ireland / New Zealand

Can the 1980s tell us anything about the first Test match of summer?

2 minute readNeither Ireland nor New Zealand play too many Test matches and the Irish players don’t even have a domestic red ball structure to fall back on. You may therefore conclude that there hasn’t been any recent first-class cricket from which we might weigh form ahead of this week’s Test match.

May 21, 2026 Pakistan

Can anyone get a grip on the attenuating unpredictability of the Pakistan Test team?

3 minute readPakistan play three Tests in England later this summer. You can never be entirely sure what you’re going to get from Pakistan, but it does feel like the range of unpredictability has been narrowing for a good few years now; the moments of unexpected brilliance growing ever fewer and further

May 14, 2026 England

Is Ollie Pope still in the same galaxy as the England Test team?

4 minute readThere are winners and losers with every England Test squad announcement, but the first one after an Ashes tour tends to feature bigger, clearer signposts for the years ahead. Ollie Pope looks to be one of the less immediately obvious casualties of the greater disloyalty Rob Key promised us. Looking

May 12, 2026 County cricket / England

Ben Duckett chose… wisely

3 minute readA modern international cricketer like Ben Duckett has a lot of tricky career decisions to make. Sometimes you don’t know whether you’ve made the right choice until you have or haven’t aged into dust. “This certainly is the cup of The King of Kings,” says grail-hunting, Nazi-collaborating Walter Donovan, shortly

May 8, 2026 County cricket / England

James will Rew the latest instalment of England’s weird, implicit, episodic Test squad announcement

3 minute readEngland confirmed the dropping of Kent’s Zak Crawley today when James Rew walked out to open the batting for Somerset. There are definitely more straightforward ways of announcing these things. English cricket’s rune-readers have been broadly in agreement for a while now that Zak Crawley is no longer an England

May 7, 2026 County cricket

Stone rises as Nottinghamshire lead a more familiar looking County Championship

3 minute readNow that everyone’s played four matches, the 2026 County Championship is starting to take shape. The shape it is taking is that of the 2025 County Championship. No, really. The top five currently looks like this. Which isn’t really so radically different to how things finished last year. In fact

May 1, 2026 County cricket / England

Has Ollie Robinson uncovered a back way into the England Test team?

2 minute readOllie Robinson hasn’t always seemed fully aware of what he needs to do (or not do) if he wants to play for England again. Our favourite recent quote was about how he hasn’t played for the national side since the 2024 Ranchi Test: “Apparently I fell out with the England

April 29, 2026 County cricket

Ralphies, Surrey spin and why winning a game is either the best or worst thing you can do in the County Championship

2 minute readFour weeks into the County Championship and most teams have only played three times. It’s therefore no surprise that four-match Warwickshire find themselves top of the table. They have achieved this after notching one win – exactly the same number as Hampshire, who are bottom. That isn’t to say that

Bat first it is then. Thanks for pointing that out. A classic case of a sentence rewritten so many times…

I read the following summary blurb passage in the above article three times, before realising why it made no sense…

Made perfect sense from the outset. Ireland need Tests, teams touring England need meaningful tour matches to acclimatise, yet this…

Well, New Zealand were 85/4 so I am not convinced we have seen this quite yet. Touring ireland as a…

What we can tell so far is that New Zealand are quite good. In one of the linked articles, APW…

Did you see… Harry Brook’s first ball in Melbourne? Unquestionably the 2025/26 Ashes’ finest moment

Sky Sports has boiled its Ashes coverage down to its purest and greatest form: Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain standing there talking about what’s gone wrong

The 2019 Ridiculous Ashes (podcast)

The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments is definitely out now – you should buy it for someone! (Possibly yourself)

51. Michael Vaughan Declines A Crushing