2 minute read While we’re coming clean about these things, we might as well ‘fess up on this one as well. South Africa are probably the least popular Test team other than England (sorry people, but we have a richly questionable history as a nation, largely at the expense of other cricketing countries).
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.
We don’t hate Kevin Pietersen
2 minute read There you go. We’ve nailed our colours to the mast and those assorted greys and beiges that you can see fluttering in the breeze indicate our lack of hatred for Kevin Peter Pietersen (yes, that’s his real middle name). More than that, we don’t quite get why so many people
Continue readingDon’t totally discard Michael Vaughan
2 minute read “The best thing for me is to try and get back to being best batsmen I can be.” Fair point. If they didn’t have to drop you, you wouldn’t be losing the captaincy and if you scored more runs, maybe the series would have gone better. Michael Vaughan now knows
Continue readingPaul Collingwood a gritty fighter full of character
< 1 minute read Paul Collingwood is made entirely out of balls. It must be downright murder to walk, eat or do pretty much anything. To get a hundred in what seemed likely to be your last Test innings is one thing. To do it with a six is quite another. Kevin Pietersen was
Continue readingVirender Sehwag defies pretty much everyone and everything
< 1 minute read Murali. Vaas. Mendis. A pitch with one wet end and one cracked end. Rain. Reason. Virender Sehwag defied them all. Dravid, Tendulkar and Ganguly mustered seven between them. Gautam Gambhir had a lot of luck to edge his way to 56. VVS Laxman hung around for a bit. The tail
Continue readingFlintoff to Kallis
< 1 minute read We don’t know about you, but we’re glad Aleem Dar turned down that blatantly out lbw appeal against Kallis. What followed was as electric as that innocuous-looking, ankle-high, three-holed square of plastic in the corner there. It was proper fast bowling; the kind you just don’t get in the shorter
Continue readingSurrey v Middlesex Twenty20 match report
2 minute read Long-serving King Cricket contributor, SimonC, writes: Twenty20 being the all new whizzbang format that appeals to even the most curmudgeonly of non-cricket fans, we rounded up twelve grumbling malcontents to see this completely dead rubber at the Oval. Many were the piercing questions we were forced to field from our
Continue readingCome in number six – your time is up
2 minute read Shove Michael Vaughan down to number six – that’s where England keep their worst batsman. Paul Collingwood seems likely to lose his place. He has another innings, but does he honestly look like a man who’ll make use of it? It’s the latest chapter in England’s number six saga and
Continue readingBack to the important stuff
< 1 minute read We’re generally in favour of Twenty20, but one downside is that it seems to necessitate the reading of one too many articles about cricket politics. Cricket politics is dull and it eats into time that could better be spent keeping abreast of developments in the monkey kingdom. Hopefully someone’s on
Continue readingCricket’s Champions Leagues
2 minute read The Board of Control for Cricket in India, the BCCI, wishes to run a Champions League featuring Twenty20 sides from around the world. The BCCI backs the IPL Twenty20 league and says sides featuring players from the rival ICL can’t appear in its Champions League. Various county cricketers have played
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