King Cricket

September 9, 2017 England / West Indies

Stuart Broad’s batting has peaked

2 minute readStuart Broad’s batting just gets better and better. Maybe not by the traditional metric of batting average, but there are far more sensible ways of assessing a cricketer’s worth. Once upon a time, Broad was a good batsman: high left elbow, great timing and solid defence. Then he top-edged a

September 7, 2017 England / West Indies

“You don’t see Alastair Cook drop too many”

2 minute readSo said Michael Vaughan after Cook had shelled an easy one early on. Where has he been looking? We’ve always felt like he drops a fair few – although maybe not by Vaughan’s own almost criminally low catching standards. We wouldn’t go so far as to say that Cook’s a

September 6, 2017 County cricket

Haseeb Hameed might carry his bat

< 1 minute readEngland are still very much in the market for a Test opener, you feel. Mark Stoneman is making a fist of things, but they’d quite like another top order batsman or two to take to Australia. At the time of writing, Lancashire are four wickets down but Haseeb Hameed is

September 5, 2017 Australia / England / India / Pakistan

With the Ashes decided, England and Australia will look to determine which has the better ODI second XI

< 1 minute readEngland and Australia fans who enjoy answering the question “so why isn’t this the Ashes then?” will be delighted to hear that the two sides are going to do that thing where they follow the Test series with five don’t-give-a-toss one-day matches six months later in the other country. The

September 3, 2017 County cricket

2017 Twenty20 Finals Day – most of the story in scorecards

< 1 minute readWe rather love Twenty20 finals day, which has always seemed to strike a good balance between elite sport and village fete. A lot of short format competitions seem to be striving for the po-faced tribalism of football, but the annual climax of the original has always erred on the side

August 31, 2017 County cricket

Arrow stopped play at The Oval

< 1 minute readAs a rule of thumb, you shouldn’t fire arrows at people – or indeed anywhere near them. It is what is known as “very dangerous”. Someone fired an arrow into the middle of the Surrey v Middlesex match today. Here’s the arrow. @surreycricket Incredibly some **** has fired an arrow

August 31, 2017 Extras

Books to read at the cricket? Iphigenia Among The Taurians by Euripides

2 minute readGed writes: Plays are generally quite good for reading during a day of county cricket. It doesn’t take all that long to read a play. In my case, this means I get to see cricket, read a play, do some general reading (e.g. from The Economist and/or The Week) and

August 30, 2017 England / West Indies

When should a captain declare?

2 minute readThe timing of a declaration will often elicit heated discussion among commentators. However, it seems safe to assume that the actual importance of the decision rarely justifies the level of debate, which is almost certainly artificially exaggerated by the fact that such questions generally only arise when not much is

August 29, 2017 England / West Indies

The West Indies make use of some quality imports

< 1 minute readThe great thing about alternative dimensions is that every now and again you can pluck a similar-looking cricket team from one of them and deploy it in your own world. The incarnation of the West Indies seen in this Test was an unusually gritty one. Like a team-mate’s belt within

August 29, 2017 England / West Indies

The real story of the West Indies’ dropped chances is just how many England’s batsmen offered

< 1 minute readIt’s like we always say, to take 12,841 wickets, you need to create 15,516 chances. (We should stick that on a T-shirt). At the time of writing, the second Test between England and the West Indies had seen 12 drops, which is rather more than you’d expect. The Windies were