King Cricket

April 23, 2025 County cricket / Uncategorized

What in Blazes? English women’s domestic game restarts in (yet) another user-friendly format

2 minute readIn England the men’s domestic game tends to flail around incorrigibly, endlessly adding formats and complexity to make itself ever more impenetrable. The women’s game, in contrast, tends to move from one reasoned, accessible structure to another. The sheer frequency of overhauls seems to us the only meaningful attempt to

April 17, 2025 County cricket / Extras

Easter weekenders, Quote of the Week + Olympic Fairground attraction | Mop-up of the day

3 minute readLots of shreds of cricket news about today. Let’s weave them into a single thing – say, half an underpant. Weekender In the UK, weekends don’t come much bigger than Easter for the simple reason that it’s twice as long. It’s therefore a big one in county cricket too because

April 15, 2025 County cricket

Are the 2025 County Championship pacemakers going to drop out after a few laps?

2 minute readTwo games in, the first division of the County Championship has taken on a blobby, amorphous shape with three counties on the same number of points at the top. Will any of them still be in the running at the competition’s autumnal climax? We may as well start with the

April 10, 2025 England

Succession: Who becomes England Test captain when Ben Stokes inevitably suffers his next major injury?

3 minute read“Yes, if it is to be said, so it be, so it is,” as Greg Hirsch would say. Harry Brook has been named England’s T20 and one-day international captain, as we all assumed he would be. So what happens when Ben Stokes gets injured and can’t lead the Test team

April 9, 2025 County cricket / England

What’s more? Tom Banton ups the volume

5 minute readThere’s a fundamental tension these days between specialising in one particular format and striving to become a more rounded cricketer. It’s pretty much impossible to walk both paths, but right now Tom Banton appears to have put a good few footprints on each. In the parallel worlds of strength and

April 4, 2025 County cricket

This is the way the county cricket season begins… with yet another structural review

3 minute readWe’re about 10 minutes into the county season as we type this sentence and already they’re talking about changing things next year. This is, paradoxically, one of the things that never changes about county cricket: they will forever be talking about changing it. Yesterday we reposted our 2022 article about

April 3, 2025 County cricket

Long term rentals: the overseas pros who return to county cricket with interest

3 minute readAll eyes on the Ambassador Cruise Line Ground from tomorrow. Is this funnier or less funny than the previous sponsorship which made it sound like Essex’s nickname was Cloud County? Overseas professionalism is a jaunty, unpredictable thing in the current County Championship era. Remember last year when Surrey went down

April 1, 2025 England

Charlotte Edwards eyes remaining unconquered worlds, Ben Duckett eyes a duck

2 minute readCharlotte Edwards is England’s all-time leading run-scorer. She played 309 games for the national side, 220 of them as captain. She won five Ashes series and both World Cups. She’s won plenty as a domestic coach as well and at one point they even named a trophy after her. Realistically,

March 28, 2025 India

Mr Gloverman: is MS Dhoni belatedly legitimising the role of specialist keeper in T20?

4 minute readIf there’s one thing you can count on with IPL tactical trends, it’s that by the time you’ve written about one, it’s gone back the other way. We can’t really remember any particular period when the perceived value of a wicketkeeper largely hinged on his wicketkeeping though, which is where

March 27, 2025 County cricket

Which County Championship games will title-holders Surrey not bother playing this year?

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 –

The most frustrating aspect of this whole series, I now reflect, is that so little of the last few weeks…

Sydney was awful last year

Pitch was a bit too paced but it's a bit of a stretch to say it forced international test cricketers…

Yeah, well, that was that I suppose. Was so unimpressed that it's taken me to what would have been the…

I hope you’re not suggesting that Geoffrey’s mum could do better than that with a stick of rhubarb, Tim.

Sky Sports has boiled its Ashes coverage down to its purest and greatest form: Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain standing there talking about what’s gone wrong

The 2019 Ridiculous Ashes (podcast)

The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments is definitely out now – you should buy it for someone! (Possibly yourself)

51. Michael Vaughan Declines A Crushing

14 England things that happened in the summer of 2025 – do they tell us anything?