King Cricket

July 7, 2017 England / South Africa

Moeen Ali and Stuart Broad follow by example

< 1 minute readWith their feisty batting in the morning and a pair of wickets each, Moeen Ali and Stuart Broad truly delivered non-captains’ performances. This is what good team members do. They set an example for the captain to follow. It’s like they always say: he who leads the leader slightly reduces

July 6, 2017 England / South Africa

Joe Root sinks a few and then wanders off on his own

< 1 minute readIf Joe Root’s going to try and lead by example, he might want to check whether anyone’s actually following him. If no-one does, then we’re afraid it’s just plain old ‘batting well’ – which is what he always used to do anyway. What kind of captaincy is that? If you’re

July 4, 2017 Uncategorized

Dog’s eye view of baseball-bat-wielding thug David Gower

2 minute readOkay, not strictly speaking a dog’s eye view unless (a) the dog has its eyes behind its ears or (b) there’s a tiny dog piloting the larger dog. However, that genuinely is a blurry David Gower up ahead and he really is wielding a baseball bat, the thug. Like almost

July 4, 2017 India / West Indies

Jason Holder starts to play how you always imagined he would

< 1 minute readIndia failed to chase down 190 against the West Indies and there were a couple of prominent reasons for this. Firstly, MS Dhoni hit India’s slowest half-century in 16 years – although ‘hit’ seems an entirely inappropriate word to use for an innings of 54 off 114 balls. MS Dhoni

July 2, 2017 County cricket

It rains more at night

< 1 minute readThis is the conclusion we drew from last week’s round of pink ball County Championship fixtures. Only one of four matches in the first division ended in a result – and even that one saw only 23 wickets fall. Despite the experiment only resulting in the confounding situation where Essex

June 30, 2017 County cricket / England

BBC to show “some” live cricket from 2020 as highlights move from Channel 5

2 minute readThe England and Wales Cricket Board has recently accepted that it needs to get some live cricket onto free-to-air TV. The question most of us have been asking is what constitutes “some”. From 2020 (appropriately enough) the BBC will be showing two men’s and one women’s T20 internationals each summer.

June 29, 2017 Sri Lanka

Chamari Atapattu can hit a cricket ball

< 1 minute readChamari Atapattu – full name, somewhat confusingly, Atapattumudiyanselage Chamari Jayangani, so that she appears on scorecards with the one name she doesn’t appear to use – has played an innings. If anyone else had bothered to help her, Sri Lanka would have won. At the same time, if anyone else

June 28, 2017 Extras

Sky Sports Cricket is going to be cheaper and you won’t have to subscribe

2 minute readWe were bemoaning the out-of-date way in which broadcasters sell sport to consumers a month or so ago. We said it was too expensive and you had to sign up to too much that you didn’t want. Maybe they listened. Sky Sports has announced a series of changes which will

June 26, 2017 England / South Africa

Liam Livingstone’s golden duck was one of the finest

2 minute readLiam Livingstone’s England debut was pretty spectacular. He didn’t just fail to display his talent to a wider audience, he actively concealed it. He dropped a catch; mishit everything, including the one boundary that he hit; bust his bat; and then got run out. He also found time to enrage

June 23, 2017 Extras

Henry ‘Blowers’ Blofeld to retire from TMS

2 minute readHenry Blofeld, the long-serving Test Match Special commentator with the extraordinary accent and a strong proclivity for getting players’ names wrong, is calling it a day at the end of the season. It’s safe to say we’ve always had mixed feelings about the man. If we were to try and