King Cricket

March 21, 2025 Pakistan

Hassan Nawaz’s hundred v Shahid Afridi’s first hundred

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

March 19, 2025 County cricket

Without Mohammad Abbas Hampshire will surely slide towards mediocrity or worse… won’t they?

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,

March 17, 2025 County cricket

What does the County Championship’s new title sponsor say about you? (Yes, you)

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

March 12, 2025 Match report

Daylight Larssony at The Hundred Final – a match report

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

March 10, 2025 India

The downside to winning the Champions Trophy is that you have to wear the white jackets

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

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 This claim was a little out of date because Dubai’s neutrality only really lasted until the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