King Cricket

October 11, 2016 India

R Ashwin is India’s best player and we won’t hear otherwise

2 minute readThanks to India’s flat, lifeless pitches, R Ashwin averages 33.55 with the bat. Because of India’s rank turners, he averages 24.29 with the ball. Or could it be that R Ashwin is India’s best cricketer? We’ve covered this kind of thing before, but you reach our age and you no

October 10, 2016 Bangladesh / England

Jos Buttler’s feud with Bangladesh – who started it?

2 minute readJos Buttler is not an overtly angry man. Few batsmen better expose the fallacy that attacking cricket and on-field aggression are somehow symbiotically linked. As a batsman, Buttler demolishes via controlled explosions. He delivers a series of well-timed detonations and more often than not, the opposition implodes. Yet as a

October 7, 2016 England

Why Edgbaston day-night Test will be a success (and another attendance-related experiment the ECB should run)

2 minute readNovelty. That’s enough for the first match, isn’t it? We’d happily pop along to Edgbaston to see what a day-night Test in England is like. The true test (lower-case T) is whether people will keep on going, year after year. So far, day-night Test cricket has been, in the broadest

October 6, 2016 Match report

Middlesex v Warwickshire match report

2 minute readBalladeer writes: One of the few things I knew was vital was preparation. One doesn’t just take any old food to The Home of Cricket. So I pondered my options. Waitrose? M&S? Selfridges, for the extra touch of privately educated class? Alas, I also had to pick up some washing

October 5, 2016 County cricket

Durham turn to Superbeefy

< 1 minute readThere are certainly occasions when Ian Botham is the answer. If we were to ask, ‘which Eighties cricketer frequently showcased the now historic phenomenon of ‘brown armpits’?’ then his name might well come to mind. If we were to ask you to name someone whose ability to shape cricket matches

October 4, 2016 India / New Zealand

Some cricket that was scheduled to happen really is going to happen

< 1 minute readIndia are to play New Zealand in the third Test in Indore despite someone somewhere reporting that they wouldn’t. The Indian Express spoke to “a senior board official” who said the BCCI’s bank accounts had been frozen at the recommendation of a court-appointed panel set up to look into its

October 3, 2016 County cricket

Durham “agree” to jump through latest hoop

2 minute readGiven that this particular hoop is suspended directly over a barrel of excrement, one can only wonder what the alternative was. We predicted that Durham wouldn’t be relegated or penalised more than 45 points for their ongoing financial troubles. We were correct, but only on the basis of the ‘or’.

October 3, 2016 Australia

Australia’s pace bowling has weakness in depth

< 1 minute readMitchell Starc is injured, James Faulkner is injured, Nathan Coulter-Nile is injured, Pat Cummins is injured, James Pattinson is injured and Josh Hazlewood is being rested in case he gets injured. The way things are going, he’ll probably end up missing the next Test with bedsores. Australia coach Darren Lehmann

October 2, 2016 India

Is Virat Kohli really India’s best batsman?

2 minute readWere he to find himself playing in a format-spanning Super Series, it would seem highly likely that Virat Kohli could find himself named man-of-it. The guy averages over 50 in the two shorter formats with a perfectly healthy strike-rate in both. His Test record’s very good too: 12 Test hundreds

September 29, 2016 Extras

Mop-up of the day – Sweet, sour, bitter, savoury

2 minute readA bitter-sweet mop-up of the day today, like someone’s spilt a honey-and-lemon sore throat remedy. Actually, maybe that’s sweet and sour. A sour-sweet mop-up of the day today. Sour James Anderson is out of England’s tour of Bangladesh and probably won’t be back until halfway through the India tour. No