< 1 minute readRegardless of how they’re performing, it’s worth taking a moment to ponder that anew. Afghanistan are playing cricket. Afghanistan. And indeed cricket. The sport hasn’t exactly gone viral. Most of the time it seems hell-bent on playing out behind some sort of paywall, yet somehow Afghanistan has barged its way
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.
Jason Roy is tinder
2 minute readNot so long ago, England were claiming that they had little regard for par scores any more. Henceforth, their only target was to be ‘as many as we can get’. Maybe this is still the case, but today’s batting against the West Indies seemed initially cautious to these sometimes blurry
Continue readingIt’s the India cricketers we feel for
2 minute readImagine you work in accounts for a biggish company that leases out some of its office space to other firms. Imagine that one of your company directors inexplicably removes the coffee machine from the shared kitchen and places it in the middle of your firm’s office. Now imagine that you
Continue readingWorld T20 begins with ‘six and out’
< 1 minute readThen a dot ball. Then another six. Post-qualifying kicked off as if it had a bit of catching up to do. It was almost as if the tournament had begun a couple of weeks ago without the majority of teams being present until now. India are playing New Zealand. Martin
Continue readingSome of you may remember Omari Banks…
< 1 minute readHe was a West Indies off-spinner. He averaged 117 against England in 2014. Here’s his Cricinfo profile page. As that record suggests, Omari wasn’t the greatest spinner of all time. However, somewhat miraculaously, he can now boast an even worse record – his godawful single Me & You, which makes
Continue readingWhat is pre-qualifying?
< 1 minute readWe’ve seen a number of people this week referring to the first phase of the World T20 as ‘pre-qualifying’. The word they are looking for is of course ‘qualifying’. Yes, it takes place before the tournament – or pre-tournament if you will – but that’s what qualifying is. It’s qualifying
Continue readingSomehow Afghanistan have qualified for the World T20
< 1 minute readThe ICC are calling this ‘the group stage’ of the World T20. Everyone else is correctly referring to it as the qualifiers. Afghanistan have qualified. Despite the best efforts of the organisers, someone had to. Afghanistan did of course have the good fortune to be in Group B. It’s not
Continue readingTurns out AB de Villiers is rubbish at T20 cricket
1 minute readThere’s only so many times you can hear how wonderful something is before you want to hit it with a hammer or push it down a flight of stairs at the luxury five-star hotel at which it’s staying ahead of its team’s first match at the World T20. However, this
Continue readingWe wouldn’t call ourself a staunch defender of Twenty20 cricket but…
< 1 minute readWe were going to draw together a bunch of our articles about the nature of Twenty20 cricket for today’s update as a kind of ‘easy win’. However, when we started searching the site to put this together, we discovered we already had such a thing. Hurray! Even easier win! Then
Continue readingA mankad prevents batsmen from taking the piss
< 1 minute readBefore the Asia Cup qualifying round, the Asian Cricket Council is said to have met with the four Associate teams and told them not to mankad. Oman’s Aamir Kaleem was having none of it. He did for Hong Kong’s Mark Chapman in precisely that manner. Oman won. There’s now been
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