India | King Cricket

September 11, 2021 England / India

You can stop short of all-out cynicism and still accept that the threshold for binning the Old Trafford Test was lower than normal

Have you ever agreed to go to a thing and secretly not really wanted to go to the thing? Maybe it was a thing you’d ordinarily enjoy – like a meal out with a friend – only you also had a whole bunch of other stuff on that week and

September 8, 2021 England / India

Virat Kohli can pick the ‘wrong’ team for Old Trafford and it probably won’t matter

Team selection is a fun thing to talk about before a Test match, but sometimes it really isn’t that important. We tend to view selection decisions through a prism that refracts everything into right or wrong. But cricket doesn’t exactly work like that. In any given Player A versus Player

September 3, 2021 England / India

We heartily endorse Rory Burns’ run-out appeal body language

You know what they say: ain’t no run-out appeal like the run-out appeal that comes in the immediate aftermath of a drop. With all due respect to Chris Woakes’ bowling and Shardul Thakur’s batting, the highlight of day one of the fourth Test was unquestionably Rory Burns standing astride an

September 1, 2021 England / India

How far will England’s Plan A actually carry them?

The flipside of everything going pretty much exactly to plan is that this is a thing that almost never happens. The best laid schemes are forever ganging agley and so what are you going to do when you’re back in the real world where absolutely everything goes wrong absolutely all

August 30, 2021 England / India / Uncategorized

The almighty cumulative power of Joe Root’s nothing shot

“Oh that’s a nothing shot,” they say – but only when you get out to it. We were thinking about this particular shot of Joe Root’s after watching the BBC highlights the other day. The BBC highlights are an hour long and with no ads, it’s what you might call

August 25, 2021 England / India

Who will provoke whom into provoking them in the third Test

We’re not saying either England or India goes out there looking for a fight. We are however saying that quite a few of the players have a keen eye for provocation and could probably uncover a bit of it even if they were sentenced to solitary confinement. “It just showed

August 18, 2021 England / India

Will Sam Curran ever get the chance to prove himself not good enough?

Sam Curran is a weird one. You’d be unlikely to pick him purely as a batsman. You’d be unlikely to pick him purely as a bowler. You wouldn’t pick him he were a right-armer. You wouldn’t pick him if he were a few years older. But there he is –

August 16, 2021 England / India

Beware the melatonin coursing through England’s veins

There is a very good chance this article about England’s day five capitulation is not biologically sound. We’re pretty sure it’s cricketally accurate however. The second Test was won and lost at some point during a morning of pointlessly bouncing Jasprit Bumrah. It’s a hard moment to pin down precisely,

August 16, 2021 England / India

It didn’t rain, it was just Cheteshwar Pujara

Much is said about Cheteshwar Pujara – we’ve written a lot ourself – but we’re not sure anyone’s ever talked about his ability to persuade you that it rained when it didn’t. The way it went down was like this. Late afternoon we got a message from King Cricket reader

August 14, 2021 England / India

Bairstow and Moeen remind us how hard it is to resist a yo-yo trick

Last week we suggested that the adaptability of Jonny Bairstow and Moeen Ali was a key reason why they had become yo-yos for England. There are two sides to this. Firstly, the fact that the two men can each perform so many ‘roles’ means that Test openings materialise more frequently