2 minute readThis week’s matches varied incredibly. We had fraught, tense, hard-fought draws; ambling draws that were obvious from a mile out; and everything in between. The 2016 County Championship is not yet proving to be a competition in which people win cricket matches. The fraught, tense, hard-fought draw Yorkshire gamely went
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.
Alastair Cook in the second division of the County Championship
2 minute readWe always say that the second division of the County Championship doesn’t count. Hopefully it’s obvious that this is rhetoric. Our exaggerated stance is not borne of a belief that the cricket played is worthless, but of a perception that some still haven’t quite accepted that it is in any
Continue readingWould you care if the Ashes included limited overs matches?
3 minute readBen Stokes would. Reacting to plans to implement a points system spanning the formats for cricket tours, he said: “I think it would be rubbish. They’ve changed a lot of things, but Ashes is Ashes, it’s a massive series for England and Australia and I don’t see why it should
Continue readingLast week’s County Championship cricket was even less consequential than the week before
< 1 minute readAt least last time around someone won. Halcyon days. Out of the three draws in the latest round of matches, the points scored ranged from Middlesex’s 10 to Warwickshire and Surrey’s 13. Surrey v Somerset was the only fixture to reach the fourth innings and Durham v Middlesex didn’t even
Continue readingTop ten single figure scores in the County Championship in 2016
< 1 minute readThe modern world is in thrall to the list. Everything has to be ranked. Everyone has this urge to say who’s better than whom, which innings was better than which, and which bowling performance was the greatest of all time. They even abbreviate ‘greatest of all time’ to GOAT these
Continue readingHow often do you get ‘snow stopped play’?
< 1 minute readWe’ve attended a County Championship match on a double trousers day before. Sitting still, steadily losing heat throughout the day, you don’t quite realise how cold you are until your bone marrow turns solid. You don’t know what that feels like? You’ll know it when it happens. Ravi Rampaul didn’t
Continue readingLord’s net practice – journey report
3 minute readDumbo the Suzuki Jimny writes: Just a few days after Ged and Daisy went to the Lord’s Ashes Test and got all confused about etiquette, Ged asked me to take him out and about for the working day, to culminate at Lord’s, The Home of Cricket, for a net with
Continue readingRob Key and the art of being selective in one’s giving of shits
< 1 minute readIf you’re wondering where we’ve been, we’ve unfortunately been too busy writing things to write things. One of these written distractions was about Rob Key. Cricinfo gave it the coveted midnight on a Friday slot at the top of the homepage, clearly of a mind that this would be perfect
Continue reading
Robert Key, the ruddy-faced southern me
5 minute readThis article was first published on Cricinfo in April 2016, but they seem to have deleted it so we’re republishing it. For a fair few years, from the early Nineties onwards, there was a phenomenon in British newspapers where Australian opinions of England cricketers were given greater weight. Seasoned cricket
Continue readingA surprisingly small proportion of this last week’s County Championship cricket actually amounted to much
< 1 minute readThe batsmen (and bowlers) of Middlesex, Warwickshire, Yorkshire and Hampshire busied themselves scoring hundreds and double hundreds. Nothing of any real consequence came about as a result of this behaviour. The players representing Lancashire and Nottinghamshire stuck to double figures and that game therefore reached some sort of meaningful conclusion.
Continue reading