King Cricket

August 8, 2016 County cricket

Four wickets in the fourth innings for spinners – this week’s County Championship round-up

< 1 minute readAs you can see, Middlesex are still top. Somerset and Yorkshire aren’t a million miles away and the latter have a game in hand, as do Durham in fourth. Middlesex drew with Surrey George Bailey – remember him? He scored a hundred for Middlesex. Jason Roy, in his four-day middle-order

August 8, 2016 England / Pakistan

England’s age of all-rounders

< 1 minute readEngland fielded eight batsmen to Pakistan’s seven in this match and five bowlers to their four. That is quite an advantage to carry. It was most notable when England batted in the second innings, when the duration of a Test match was really starting to bite. Pakistan’s quartet held it

August 7, 2016 England

Will Alastair Cook deploy the carrot?

< 1 minute readHistory tells us that when it comes to declarations, Alastair Cook is not a carrot-dangler. History tells us that when the moment comes, the carrot will be unsighted for Pakistan and they will in fact be only dimly aware of its existence. The match and series situation also hint at

August 5, 2016 Australia / England / Pakistan / Sri Lanka

Pakistan play spin better than Australia

< 1 minute readDifferent matches and – to be fair to Australia – different degrees of difficulty too. All the same, it seems a fair conclusion to draw. In England, Azhar Ali and Sami Aslam seemed uncertain whether to milk Moeen Ali or just belt him for sixes. In the end, they reached

August 4, 2016 England

Steven Finn is setting them up for the full one

2 minute readThere’s a trend for talking about Steven Finn like he’s some sort of charity case at the minute; as if he’s only been selected for England as some sort of favour to his mum. All the other boys are being very polite and encouraging and everyone wants something to go

August 3, 2016 England / Pakistan

James Vince caught at slip – but he wasn’t driving

< 1 minute readJames Vince wasn’t going to be caught in the slips driving today. Oh, no, no. Today he had other ideas. He announced his intentions early on by edging a sort of half-defensive shot, half-leave. Vince was going to make damn certain that when he was caught in the slips, it

August 3, 2016 England

Steven Finn’s ‘knack’ for taking wickets

2 minute readWe’re going to repeat ourself a bit, but it’s okay because we’re repeating things we wrote ten years ago so nobody’ll remember. Actually, let’s go the whole hog and stick in a block quote. “It is often said that he has the ‘knack’ of taking wickets; that he can get

August 2, 2016 England

James Anderson expresses a sentiment we can surely all get behind

< 1 minute read“My practice over the years has gone from searching for perfection to just doing as little as possible. The bare minimum.” – James Anderson Speaking as someone who once earned the nickname ‘Bare Minimum,’ we are delighted with this revelation of the secret behind James Anderson’s success. Perhaps if you

August 1, 2016 Cricket books | reviews and recommendations

The Periodic Table of Cricket by John Stern – book review

2 minute readWe own a periodic table. Mostly it’s a footrest, but periodically – typically when we have visitors – it reverts to being a table. Apparently there’s another kind of periodic table too which lays out all the chemical elements according to atomic number and whatnot. The Periodic Table of Cricket

July 30, 2016 Australia / Sri Lanka

Kusal Mendis doesn’t think they’re gonna need a bigger boat

2 minute readOnce upon a time, a colleague of ours, who we’ll call Gill (because that’s her name), asked another colleague, who we’ll call Stefan (because that’s his name), for help with her computer. We can’t remember the specific issue. It was just one of those generic computer problems that crops up