King Cricket

Mop-up of the last couple of days – Angelo Mathews still has work to do

< 1 minute readFor a good long while you could accurately gauge Sri Lanka’s score by whether or not Angelo Mathews was walking out to bat or not. If he was, they were 22-3. If he wasn’t, it was some other score. A couple of recent batting finds had encouraged the notion that

December 23, 2016 Extras

May you enjoy a happy Festivus full of Pakistannery and Herath

2 minute readOur Festivus post seems to get earlier by the year. We make it that today is Boxing Day Test Eve Eve Eve and so not really in any way something worth acknowledging. However, we’ve realised that if we get the “hey, have a good ‘un” tradition out of the way

December 22, 2016 England

The two ways of looking at Alastair Cook’s captaincy

2 minute readThere are two ways of looking upon the England captaincy. You can see it as an important position where the incumbent can have a major positive influence on how the side performs, or you can see it as one more thing that could go horribly wrong. Rated according to the

December 21, 2016 West Indies

Video: Cricket, penguins and lasers – together at last

< 1 minute readFinally! It’s the video for the latest version of Dwayne Bravo’s Champion song, in which our man lists everyone and everything he’s ever encountered and brands them all champions. Toast is a champion, plate is a champion, floor is a champion, wall is a champion… If you don’t immediately comprehend

December 20, 2016 England / India

Virat Kohli had power tools while Alastair Cook only had rusty manual hand-me-downs

2 minute readEngland haven’t stagnated. They’re just worse at bowling and facing spin than India. And playing Test cricket in India involves bowling and facing an awful lot of spin. So rather than howling about normality, now might instead be the perfect time to revisit the monumental achievement that was England’s 2012

December 19, 2016 England / India

Zombies, ghosts and theodolites

1 minute readA pitch’s flatness extends beyond its physical characteristics. No matter what its actual nature, the fielding side is going to struggle to accept that there’s anything there to be exploited when it’s 600-5 and this mentality only smooths the surface further. By 700-6, a captain will be yearning for a

December 17, 2016 England / India

Spin bowling is all in the pelvis

< 1 minute readApparently. A forthcoming study on the biomechanics of elite finger spin bowling has found “very strong positive relationships between the orientation of the bowler’s pelvis and the rate at which the ball spins during flight.” The boffins (for that is what you are obliged to call academics when writing about

December 16, 2016 England / India

Joe Root still struggling to get out in single figures

< 1 minute readWhen Joe Root made 254 against Pakistan earlier this year, there was much talk of how he’d cracked it; how he’d responded to the move to number three by adopting a newfound merciless approach. The responsibility of batting at three had firmed Root’s desire to eradicate errors and from now

December 15, 2016 Australia

Mop-up of the day – Steve Smith is the best player in the world

< 1 minute readOkay, first up, our Twitter round-up. Yep, still doing it, so have a read. Nasser Hussain’s in it and there are two absolutely blinding selfies from opposite ends of the selfie-taking spectrum. We still can’t decide which of the two is our favourite. Second on the order of business, Cricket

December 14, 2016 England / India

Jimmy Anderson gave a lion’s view of Virat Kohli

2 minute read“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein. The point being our feline friend would probably be rambling on about how he’d happened across some other lion’s urine earlier in the day and his specific concerns about this patch of piss would mean nothing to