King Cricket

March 6, 2025 India / New Zealand

It’s wrong to say India are playing the Champions Trophy final at home – because when does an international cricketer ever get to spend three consecutive weeks at home?

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 This claim was a little out of date because Dubai’s neutrality only really lasted until the

March 4, 2025 India

Hussain v Gavaskar on India’s home-from-home advantage

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

February 28, 2025 England

Harry Brook is obviously going to replace Jos Buttler as ODI captain – but do England need a third leader for T20s?

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

February 27, 2025 Afghanistan / England

Ibrahim Zadran plays shots other people can’t

3 minute readThe thing about Ibrahim Zadran is he’s done this before. Everyone forgets because his incredible World Cup hundred against Australia was only the second-best knock that day. He did however play – for our money – the finest shot of that particular match. Glenn Maxwell’s was a nonsense innings positively

February 25, 2025 England

Joe Root has set a new benchmark for ‘faintest praise’ in his backing of Jos Buttler

< 1 minute readJos Buttler hasn’t always impressed us as England’s white ball captain. But man… this was below the belt. We don’t habitually read “employee backs his boss” type articles because they don’t tend to be awash with intriguing thoughts that enrich our life. But in this case, the BBC headline sucked

February 24, 2025 Australia / England / India / Pakistan

Weekend weak ends at the Champions Trophy

2 minute readThe Champions Trophy doesn’t hang about. Hosts Pakistan are out already. So are Bangladesh. Things don’t look too spanking for England either. We’ll start with the England game for (a) chronological reasons, (b) because we’re an England focused website, and (c) to get it out of the way. They reached

February 21, 2025 England

So this is Buttler and McCullum’s England first team – more wicketkeepers than bowling options

3 minute readIn these multi-format days of infernal rotation, you don’t often get a good, clear look at a country’s various first teams. But with just three group stage games in the Champions Trophy and an incentive to win at least a couple of them, England have given us a sighter of

February 19, 2025 New Zealand / Pakistan

Pakistan park pointlessly to pass passive powerplay

< 1 minute readPakistan have looked back on the 1999 World Cup, when hosts England were famously knocked out before the official tournament song was released, and thought to themselves, “Surely we can improve on that.” Two balls into the first match of the Champions Trophy, Fakhar Zaman was injured. His subsequent time

February 18, 2025 Match report

England v New Zealand at the Oval in 1999 – a match report

2 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 had never been to a professional cricket

February 13, 2025 England

Seven questions that tell us the (somewhat dodgy) state of England’s one-day cricket right now

5 minute readJos Buttler fell back on words like ‘learning’ and ‘unit’ in his latest post-match interview, which is never a good sign. These sorts of clichés are the sign of a man who knows a few things are wrong but doesn’t really want to talk about them right now, thank you