2 minute readAh, the County Championship, bastion of egalitarian sporting competition, where every county plays every other county home and away… except for four of them. An important thing to look at when previewing the County Championship is which matches won’t actually happen. Ten first division teams, each playing 14 matches –
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2 minute read“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Steve Harmison wanging his first ball straight to Andrew Flintoff at second slip. Rory Burns missing his first ball and getting bowled behind his legs. Nasser Hussain electing to bowl and spending a very long day regretting that decision. A Peter Siddle hat
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3 minute readHassan Nawaz hit Pakistan’s fastest T20 ton today – a 44-ball effort against New Zealand. It was only his third international innings, which brings to mind Shahid Afridi’s absolute nonsense of a hundred the very first time he walked out to bat for the national side. But it wasn’t like
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2 minute readEvery year, 10 to 20 bowlers take 40 wickets or more in the first division of the County Championship and every year, three or four of them are the exact same Hampshire players. This cannot go on. This will not go on. In 2021, in his first year with Hampshire,
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3 minute readThe County Championship has got a new sponsor. It’s Rothesay. Even if you have no idea who Rothesay are, you can probably make a pretty decent ballpark guess. When the ECB seek sponsorship for a domestic cricket competition, they typically end up mining quite a narrow seam. In no particular
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3 minute readSend your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.) Daisy writes… I suggested in spring that we might get
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2 minute readThe danger with the Champions Trophy has always been that people might look upon the celebration photos in years to come and think, “Wait, these guys didn’t win a World Cup, did they? What the hell was this?” Someone, somewhere, therefore came up with idea of forcing the winners to
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3 minute read“This is as neutral a venue for us as it is for any other team,” argued Gautam Gambhir after India qualified for the Champions Trophy final and in so doing moved it to Dubai. This claim was a little out of date because Dubai’s neutrality only really lasted until the
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4 minute readWe’ve got to be honest with you. We don’t believe that India has maintained a hostile relationship with Pakistan all these years so that its men’s cricket team could gain an edge in the 2025 Champions Trophy. That doesn’t mean that playing all your games at the same ground when
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5 minute readIf you want some idea of the future direction of the England one-day international (ODI) team, then look to the futuristic year of 2024 when Australia came over. That’s when Harry Brook was in charge. Sure, England lost 3-2, but he did a decent enough job and if anything the
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