< 1 minute readIf Joe Root’s going to try and lead by example, he might want to check whether anyone’s actually following him. If no-one does, then we’re afraid it’s just plain old ‘batting well’ – which is what he always used to do anyway. What kind of captaincy is that? If you’re
Continue readingAuthor: King Cricket
Otherwise known as Alex Bowden, a lapsed cricket journalist who has written for ESPNCricinfo, wisden.com, Cricket 365, The Cricketer and plenty of other places.
Links to some non-cricket writing and a bit more background here.
Dog’s eye view of baseball-bat-wielding thug David Gower
2 minute readOkay, not strictly speaking a dog’s eye view unless (a) the dog has its eyes behind its ears or (b) there’s a tiny dog piloting the larger dog. However, that genuinely is a blurry David Gower up ahead and he really is wielding a baseball bat, the thug. Like almost
Continue readingJason Holder starts to play how you always imagined he would
< 1 minute readIndia failed to chase down 190 against the West Indies and there were a couple of prominent reasons for this. Firstly, MS Dhoni hit India’s slowest half-century in 16 years – although ‘hit’ seems an entirely inappropriate word to use for an innings of 54 off 114 balls. MS Dhoni
Continue readingIt rains more at night
< 1 minute readThis is the conclusion we drew from last week’s round of pink ball County Championship fixtures. Only one of four matches in the first division ended in a result – and even that one saw only 23 wickets fall. Despite the experiment only resulting in the confounding situation where Essex
Continue readingBBC to show “some” live cricket from 2020 as highlights move from Channel 5
2 minute readThe England and Wales Cricket Board has recently accepted that it needs to get some live cricket onto free-to-air TV. The question most of us have been asking is what constitutes “some”. From 2020 (appropriately enough) the BBC will be showing two men’s and one women’s T20 internationals each summer.
Continue readingChamari Atapattu can hit a cricket ball
< 1 minute readChamari Atapattu – full name, somewhat confusingly, Atapattumudiyanselage Chamari Jayangani, so that she appears on scorecards with the one name she doesn’t appear to use – has played an innings. If anyone else had bothered to help her, Sri Lanka would have won. At the same time, if anyone else
Continue readingSky Sports Cricket is going to be cheaper and you won’t have to subscribe
2 minute readWe were bemoaning the out-of-date way in which broadcasters sell sport to consumers a month or so ago. We said it was too expensive and you had to sign up to too much that you didn’t want. Maybe they listened. Sky Sports has announced a series of changes which will
Continue readingLiam Livingstone’s golden duck was one of the finest
2 minute readLiam Livingstone’s England debut was pretty spectacular. He didn’t just fail to display his talent to a wider audience, he actively concealed it. He dropped a catch; mishit everything, including the one boundary that he hit; bust his bat; and then got run out. He also found time to enrage
Continue readingHenry ‘Blowers’ Blofeld to retire from TMS
2 minute readHenry Blofeld, the long-serving Test Match Special commentator with the extraordinary accent and a strong proclivity for getting players’ names wrong, is calling it a day at the end of the season. It’s safe to say we’ve always had mixed feelings about the man. If we were to try and
Continue readingAB de Villiers plays decisive innings to win first T20 for England
2 minute readA real man of the match performance from AB de Villiers won England the first T20 international against South Africa. The greatest sportsman who ever lived ate up 58 balls in making an unbeaten 65. If the innings hinted at a two-paced pitch, England’s batsmen only noticed one of them
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