Skip to content
King Cricket

King Cricket

Independent and irreverent cricket writing

  • Home
  • News
  • Features
  • Extras
  • About us
  • Contact us
  • The 2025 King Cricket Essentials Calendar

Author: 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.
April 5, 2022 Australia / England / Features / India

Separate teams? What might a world of cricket format specialists actually look like?

9 minute readWay, way back in 2006, in our first year of writing this website, we described the international fixture list as being fatter than a TV-loving, chip-munching hippo with an abnormally slow metabolism. We probably should have left ourself with more room for manoeuvre because where does that leave us now?

Continue reading
April 4, 2022 Australia / England

Lesson from the World Cup final: the team that wins absolutely every single game is a good team

2 minute readWell that wasn’t precisely how we expected England to lose the World Cup final to Australia. Nat Sciver played one of the finest World Cup final innings you’re ever likely to see in England’s forlorn chase of 357, making 148 not out off 121 balls. The only issue was that

Continue reading
April 1, 2022 Extras

The Hundred v Test cricket reading experiment

2 minute readHere at King Cricket, we have a strong history of EXPERIMENTS. Here, a mere 15 years after the last one, is another EXPERIMENT. Regular King Cricket correspondent Ged writes… Abstract The null hypothesis was that reading at the Hundred would be hampered by distractions whereas reading at the Test Match

Continue reading
March 30, 2022 Australia / England / South Africa

Who will lose to Australia in the World Cup final?

2 minute readWhen we put together our Essentials Calendar last month, we figured we’d turn our attention to the World Cup at this point. We thought our gaze would shift from the West Indies v England Test series at the perfect time and we’d catch a big, exciting finish to the tournament.

Continue reading
March 28, 2022 England / West Indies

Pretty soon someone is going to prise the brush out of Joe Root’s automaton fingers

3 minute readIf you needed to sum up England’s latest series defeat in a single quote, you could do a lot worse than Joe Root’s pre-tour comment: “I don’t want this to sound like a development tour at all but…” A friend of ours tells a story about when he did a

Continue reading
March 25, 2022 England / West Indies

That day when a third of the highlights were a 10th wicket partnership

2 minute readIt’s probably best to avoid extrapolating from that England innings in a bid to predict the course of this Test match. England went to Grenada and were at various points 53-3, 53-6, 114-9 and 204-9. This all added up to one of the weirdest-arsed scorecards you are ever likely to

Continue reading
March 23, 2022 Australia / England / Features

Shane Warne: The greatest foe

6 minute readNo man is an island and no team is either. The team you support is only part of the equation. Opponents elevate a match. Opponents like Shane Warne. Many words have been spoken and written about Shane Warne in recent weeks; about why he was such an incredible leg-spinner; about

Continue reading
March 21, 2022 England / West Indies

Kraigg Brathwaite does not plan to get out

2 minute read“I had my plan,” said Kraigg Brathwaite after batting for five minutes short of 16 hours against England in the second Test in Bridgetown. “They bowled well, but I stuck with my plan and it paid off.” Whatever Brathwaite’s plan is, getting out doesn’t seem to be a major component.

Continue reading
March 17, 2022 England

The three best parts of Dan Lawrence’s bowling action in escalating order of greatness

3 minute readEvery bowler has their own bowling action, but Dan Lawrence’s is more obviously his own than most. These are the three best moments in it. (3) The flail-and-drag Not wishing the batter to be under any illusions that he might be about to see a normal bowling action, Lawrence commences

Continue reading
March 16, 2022 Australia / Pakistan

Babar Azam and the distribution of superheroes

2 minute readWe believe every international cricket team should be issued with at least one superhero. It keeps things interesting. In the years leading up to the creation of this website, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the standard of Test cricket was pretty variable. There were – as there always are

Continue reading

Posts pagination

«Previous Posts 1 … 49 50 51 52 53 … 486 Next Posts»

About King Cricket

  • Home
  • About us
  • Contact us
  • Get our articles by email
  • Follow us on Bluesky

Support King Cricket

  • Our Patreon crowdfunder

Search King Cricket

Latest features

  • Zimbabwe in England: six lessons from history for those not old enough to remember this kind of thingMay 20, 2025
  • In praise of the matter-of-fact dynamism of Travis HeadJanuary 30, 2025
  • Mark’s wood: Talking joinery and timber with England’s fastest bowlerJanuary 16, 2025
  • 23 of the best, worst and weirdest cricket moments of 2024January 10, 2025
  • Lord Megachief of Gold 2024January 8, 2025

Read one of these next…

  • It’s time to talk about John Emburey inhaling an entire creme caramel in one go like some kind of pudding hoover

    It’s time to talk about John Emburey inhaling an entire creme caramel in one go like some kind of pudding hoover

  • The worst Test bowling averages of all time

    The worst Test bowling averages of all time

  • What Jonny Bairstow’s Kingsman church scene innings tells us about the ‘throwing off the shackles’ cliché

    What Jonny Bairstow’s Kingsman church scene innings tells us about the ‘throwing off the shackles’ cliché

  • From the 2019 Ashes to two World Cup finals – which of Ben Stokes’ big three high pressure run-chase innings was the most ridiculous?

    From the 2019 Ashes to two World Cup finals – which of Ben Stokes’ big three high pressure run-chase innings was the most ridiculous?

  • Australia were far and away the funniest cricket team in 2018 – but who was their MVP?

    Australia were far and away the funniest cricket team in 2018 – but who was their MVP?

Archives

Cricket history

  • Ancient history

King Cricket T-shirts

t_shirt_ad.jpg

What we mostly seem to write about

  • England
  • Australia
  • India
  • Other nations
  • County cricket
  • IPL

Latest comments

  1. King Cricket on Why is the Lord’s pitch so woefully inconsistent?July 14, 2025

    You are well aware, Sam Blackledge. Well aware.

  2. sam on Why is the Lord’s pitch so woefully inconsistent?July 14, 2025

    You could do a 'cartwheeling stumps' round-up of this Test. Do you take requests?

  3. King Cricket on Why is the Lord’s pitch so woefully inconsistent?July 14, 2025

    Actually we were complaining that it was too slippy before. Seems solid enough today for the off stump to perform…

  4. Ged Ladd on Why is the Lord’s pitch so woefully inconsistent?July 14, 2025

    I told Daisy last night that people would switch from complaining that the pitch is too benign to complaining that…

  5. PaulFrame85 on Why is the Lord’s pitch so woefully inconsistent?July 14, 2025

    At least the pitch isn't killing people, like it used to: https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/not-out-dead-135627

RSS Animals being conspicuously indifferent to cricket

RSS Match reports

RSS Cricket bats in unusual places

About King Cricket

  • Home
  • About us
  • Contact us
  • Get our articles by email
  • Follow us on Bluesky

Support King Cricket

  • Our Patreon crowdfunder

Recent Posts

  • Why is the Lord’s pitch so woefully inconsistent?
  • Why is Lord’s so slippy?
  • Jofra Archer’s back
  • Bazbowl: The toss doesn’t really matter if you then bowl a load of it
  • Was Josh Tongue trying to make some sort of point?

Tags

Adil Rashid Alastair Cook Andrew Flintoff Andrew Strauss Animals being conspicuously indifferent to cricket Ashes Ben Stokes Brendon McCullum Chris Gayle Cricket bats in unusual places Cricket media David Warner Did you see Eoin Morgan Ian Bell IPL James Anderson Joe Root Jonathan Trott Jonny Bairstow Jos Buttler Kevin Pietersen King Cricket Laurence Elderbrook Lies about pictures Matthew Hayden Michael Clarke Mitchell Johnson Moeen Ali Monty Panesar Mop-up of the day MS Dhoni Ones to watch Paul Collingwood Photos Retirement Ricky Ponting Rob Key Sachin Tendulkar Shivnarine Chanderpaul Sim Series Steve Smith Stuart Broad Tim Bresnan Virat Kohli
WordPress Theme: Maxwell by ThemeZee.
Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Cookies may be used for personalisation of ads. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}