< 1 minute readWriddhiman Saha is injured. India’s selectors said it was too early to hand a debut to Rishabh Pant who is still only 19 years old. They instead picked Parthiv Patel, a 31-year-old who made his Test debut against England in 2002. In seven innings this season, Pant has made four
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.
Somerset v Glamorgan, Royal London One-Day Cup match report
2 minute readSam writes: It rained on the drive from Cornwall to Somerset. We had left our 18-month old son at home, and brought along our 34-year-old friend instead. He turned out to be slightly lower maintenance. The seating rules were not clear, so we plonked ourselves behind the bowler’s arm underneath
Continue readingMop-up of the day – guilt, great promise and grey trivialities
2 minute read‘Du Plessis found guilty’ reads the Cricinfo headline. We don’t really feel it necessary to add much to your likely response to reading that. The effect of imposing black and white morality on the sport’s grey trivialities could barely be clearer. Here’s something we wrote last time Du Plessis buggered
Continue readingEngland fans: redouble your pessimism – your country needs you
< 1 minute readWhen they’re not favourites, sides will often talk about proving people wrong. This is all well and good, but it can leave them susceptible to the viewing public’s fickle mood swings. At the start of this India tour, plenty of us thought England could lose every match. In the first
Continue readingJayant Yadav seems a nice bloke
< 1 minute readThe second Test is progressing pretty much as you’d imagine, so this is what we’re passing off as insight today: India’s new off-spinner Jayant Yadav seems a decent sort. We’re basing this exclusively on one interview with Sky Sports’ Ian Ward. This may be misleading because Ward’s genial curiosity does
Continue readingSnapped stumps and pitch predictions – day two at Visakhapatnam
< 1 minute read“Cook in particular had lived dangerously in his 11-ball stay,” reports Cricinfo. You wonder how he found the time. At least he went out in style, his off stump halved by Mohammad Shami. Ben Duckett was also bowled. “Here are my stumps,” he seemed to say. “Snap one if you
Continue readingWhy England could match India in this Test and still lose
2 minute readWe were going to start this piece: “Not to be defeatist, but…” We then realised that this would be entirely misleading. Defeatism is precisely what we are about to deliver. This doesn’t mean being a naysayer. It’s just our honest ‘on the balance of probabilities’ assessment of India and England
Continue readingDog stopped play at Visakhapatnam
< 1 minute readIf you spend some time travelling round India, you are highly likely to see a fairly generic brown dog roaming around. Today, in the second Test between India and England, one such dog precipitated the tea break when attendants failed to halt its pitch invasion. Here at King Cricket, we
Continue readingMiddlesex v Yorkshire at Lord’s – day one match report
2 minute readGed writes: This was to be my last sighting of live cricket this season; even though it was a day one at Lord’s, I knew I was to be busy working or otherwise not around for the rest of the match. As tradition now has it, Charley “the Gent” Malloy
Continue readingAustralia should probably stop doctoring their own pitches
< 1 minute readPlaying Australia is like playing Jenga with a house of cards when each of the cards is drunk. Before they played Sri Lanka, David Warner spoke of batting “well into the next day” but the team repeatedly folded as if prepared by Miura. Against South Africa at the Waca, they
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