King Cricket

January 13, 2018 India / South Africa

Ajinkya Rahane must be shit-hot at making drinks

2 minute readWe’ve always liked Ajinkya Rahane. He’s always struck us as a batsman who can adapt to different situations and different conditions. India like him too. They like him to be 12th man. Rahane’s case for inclusion in the second Test against South Africa wasn’t undeniable, we’ll admit. He had a

January 11, 2018 England

England’s worst-ever run of Test debutants?

< 1 minute read“Not so much a lack of good players, as a lack of opportunity for many good players to gain the experience needed to become very good.” Slippery and awkward as it is, we can see this becoming a new catchphrase of ours. It’s about recent efforts to select viable England

January 9, 2018 Australia / England

A guy who may or may not truly be called Bert fills us in on the latest instalment of his long-running Ashes bet with some Aussie

2 minute readBert writes: OK, hold onto your hats. I can now reveal the result of the latest Ashes Bet between me and my Aussie mate. The result is… He Won! Yeh alright, since the bet is on the outcome of the series this has been known since December, but why should

January 8, 2018 Australia / England

Shoulda, coulda, woulda – five things England got wrong ahead of the 2017-18 Ashes

4 minute readWe were originally going to present this article as being the views of Captain Hindsight, but when we started to write it we realised that half of England’s problems were actually fairly easy to see in advance. So while some of what follows comes with the benefit of knowing how

January 6, 2018 India / South Africa

Is Hardik Pandya the best all-rounder in the world?

< 1 minute readOne of the problems with asking questions such as this is what time-frame do you use to make your assessment? Performances over the last year, over the last five years, over the last ten years? We’re going make our assessment based on performances over the last 24 hours. This leads

January 6, 2018 Australia / England

Why does Mason Crane have so many aborted deliveries?

2 minute readWhite bread, brown bread, sourdough, rye or ciabatta? Faced with an unexpected question after reaching the head of a long, long queue, Mason Crane would not be rushed into a rash decision, you feel. Everyone can wait. As dozens of pairs of frustrated eyes tried to bore holes in the

January 5, 2018 Australia / England

Mason Crane: first look in Test cricket

< 1 minute readWe don’t believe you can draw meaningful conclusions from players’ debuts – but we report on them anyway. Bowling on the second day with the pitch most likely at its flattest, Mason Crane spun the ball hard enough that it drifted, landed most of his deliveries in pretty much the

January 4, 2018 Australia / England

Joe Root leaves 16 runs out there

< 1 minute readTime is meaningless. Although the sooner a cricketer can appreciate that, the better – so maybe time isn’t meaningless. The fifth Test moved forward almost as much in the last eight deliveries of the day as it had in the previous 483. England will have finished with a sense that

January 2, 2018 Extras

Scandal, the Ashes and moaning about England – looking back on 2017 on King Cricket

3 minute readWe thought it might be fun/easy to look back on some of the more popular posts on this site from last year. Sometimes it’s surprising what draws people’s attention. (Sometimes it isn’t.) The first thing to say is that far and away the most popular page on this site, other

January 1, 2018 England / Extras

James Anderson: Lord Megachief of Gold 2017

4 minute readOur annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners. From a personal perspective, one of the great tragedies of modern Test cricket is that we don’t draw the curtains, switch