2 minute readMichael Clarke has launched an astonishing broadside against his team-mate Steven Smith ahead of this summer’s Ashes series. The Australian captain claims that Smith will struggle to make any sort of impact this summer despite now being ranked the best Test batsman in the world. Responding to Graeme Swann’s assertion
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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.
Was this the greatest ever one-day series decider?
< 1 minute readAnd is ‘number of wicketkeepers in squad’ the key metric when predicting the likelihood of success nowadays? Sod net practice, let’s get everyone squatting down with Bruce French for hours at a time. Who’s got a spare room? We’re starting to think we should invite New Zealand to move in.
Continue readingLangoustines? From England?
2 minute readWe kept an eye on this one-day series between England and New Zealand while we were away, but we were rather too preoccupied eating squid to read as much about it as we normally would. It was therefore slightly odd to return to lots of articles of the oeuvre ‘is
Continue readingIreland v England at Malahide – match report
3 minute readChuck writes: The last time Ireland played England in a one-day international in Malahide, Dublin, in 2013, I injured my back whilst emptying the dishwasher (at home, not in Malahide). This year, to avoid any such health and safety issues, I took myself along to the rematch instead, with a
Continue readingCricket gold amid the everyday silt
< 1 minute readAll Out Cricket have a regular feature where a writer celebrates an especially glorious summer and all the great memories it brings back. We had to rewrite ours because the first draft was too depressing. Our Golden Summer was 2000. Obviously it’s not. Obviously it’s 2005. But they can’t have
Continue readingHow New Zealand kept their distance from ‘the line’
< 1 minute readNew Zealand’s performance against England in the recently-completed Test series was the most relentlessly aggressive we can remember. There have been examples of individual players adopting a persistent attacking approach before now, but look back on those series and you’ll tend to find obdurate batting and dry bowling from a
Continue readingMiddlesex v Nottinghamshire – match preview
4 minute readGed writes: It was a strange, bittersweet day, 10 April 2015. I woke up looking forward to buying in provisions ahead of Monday, which was to be my first day of cricket of the year – a traditional early season visit to Lord’s with Charley The Gent Malloy. Indeed, this
Continue readingNext week on King Cricket
< 1 minute readBrace yourselves. We’re taking a week off. Apparently it’s not just fast bowlers who need to recharge from time to time. As ever, we’ve got stuff lined up for next week: match reports, summat about New Zealand and stuff we’ve done for other people that you may have missed. Those
Continue readingWhat do you want from your spinner? Control? Magic balls?
2 minute readShortly before Adil Rashid bowled his ninth over in the first one-day international, the 28th of the innings, one of the Sky commentators said that captain Eoin Morgan would be delighted that he had ‘got through his overs’ by this early point. That’s the kind of banality you’ll often hear
Continue readingJos Buttler and Joe Root get the message
2 minute readWhy, England, why? Why do you only now bat with no fear of consequences in this inconsequential one-day game? Why couldn’t you bat with no fear of consequences in the World Cup, back when there were consequences? That’s only partly jaded cynicism It’s mainly just our way of saying that
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