King Cricket

October 27, 2016 Bangladesh / England

Zafar Ansari is almost certainly batting too high

< 1 minute readEarlier today, we took issue with England’s willingness to make bold prophecies. However, we rather shot our match-previewing bolt yesterday, so we’re now going to have to commit much the same crime simply so that we have something to say. We are guessing/predicting that Zafar Ansari will be (a) playing

October 26, 2016 Bangladesh / England

Gareth Batty – the winter bike

2 minute readThere seems to be a tendency in some quarters to perceive England’s Test tours of Bangladesh and India as being one long competitive outing. They are not. They are separate. For all the talk of ‘taking a look’ at players ahead of England’s arrival in India, there is a Test

October 25, 2016 Cricket books | reviews and recommendations

Unguarded by Jonathan Trott – book review

2 minute readSam writes: My shelves are groaning under the weight of cricket autobiographies. The best – among them Coming Back To Me by Marcus Trescothick and Nasser Hussain’s Playing With Fire – are well-thumbed. The others tend to blur together. Tales of pushy parents, age group potential, Test debuts and tearful

October 24, 2016 Australia

What the use of Mitchell Johnson’s head as a toilet brush says about the Australia cricket team

< 1 minute readIt’s increasingly fashionable for captains and coaches to talk about building culture within their team – shared values and working together and all that crap. Mitchell Johnson’s autobiography, Resilient, features a colourful anecdote from his time at the Cricket Academy in Adelaide which sheds light on every aspect of the

October 24, 2016 Bangladesh / England

Why Bangladesh are potentially having a reasonably well-attended party

2 minute readTwenty-two runs – England’s winning margin – is not a lot. You can splice and dice it however you want. It’s a bunch of thick edges to third man. It’s a handful of extra runs from your lower order across two innings because you’ve picked countless all-rounders. It’s less than

October 22, 2016 England

The scope of Ben Stokes

2 minute readIf you were to look at Ben Stokes purely as a batsman or purely as a bowler, you’d struggle to see what the fuss was about. Averages of 34.04 and 35.64 are still at this stage the wrong way round. Taken together, you begin to get a sense of his

October 21, 2016 Bangladesh / England

ITV4 Test highlights programme begs a few questions

2 minute readYesterday we let you all know that ITV4 are broadcasting Test highlights for this Bangladesh v England series. We suggested that if you missed the programme at 7pm then you might be able to catch it via ITV’s on-demand service. We may have misled you there. Doesn’t look like it’s

October 20, 2016 Bangladesh / England

Mehedi Hasan is no Murali

< 1 minute readMehedi Hasan is making his debut. Bangladesh saw fit to give him the Murali role. Younger readers might think that ‘the Murali role’ is all about being brilliant and freakish and baffling people with magic, but there is a more prosaic aspect to it too. For much of his career,

October 20, 2016 Bangladesh / England

ITV4 are showing highlights of the Bangladesh v England Test matches

< 1 minute readJust a quick public service post to say exactly what we’ve just said. ITV4 have got an hour-long highlights programme for each day of the two Test matches between Bangladesh and India. Tonight (Thursday) it’s at 7pm and having just scrolled through the listings, it’s also 7pm for each of

October 19, 2016 Australia / England / Pakistan

Why has no-one asked Jonathan Trott’s mum how we can stamp out match-fixing?

2 minute readWe don’t normally report on excerpts from cricket autobiographies because, you know, read the book. We have to make an exception for this majestic exchange from Jonathan Trott’s Unguarded though. (We haven’t read it, but he wrote it with George Dobell, so we’re pretty confident it’s excellent.) After Pakistan Cricket