King Cricket

March 17, 2016 Afghanistan / Associates

Just a reminder that Afghanistan are playing in this World T20

< 1 minute readRegardless of how they’re performing, it’s worth taking a moment to ponder that anew. Afghanistan are playing cricket. Afghanistan. And indeed cricket. The sport hasn’t exactly gone viral. Most of the time it seems hell-bent on playing out behind some sort of paywall, yet somehow Afghanistan has barged its way

March 16, 2016 England / West Indies

Jason Roy is tinder

2 minute readNot so long ago, England were claiming that they had little regard for par scores any more. Henceforth, their only target was to be ‘as many as we can get’. Maybe this is still the case, but today’s batting against the West Indies seemed initially cautious to these sometimes blurry

March 16, 2016 England / India / New Zealand

It’s the India cricketers we feel for

2 minute readImagine you work in accounts for a biggish company that leases out some of its office space to other firms. Imagine that one of your company directors inexplicably removes the coffee machine from the shared kitchen and places it in the middle of your firm’s office. Now imagine that you

March 15, 2016 India / New Zealand

World T20 begins with ‘six and out’

< 1 minute readThen a dot ball. Then another six. Post-qualifying kicked off as if it had a bit of catching up to do. It was almost as if the tournament had begun a couple of weeks ago without the majority of teams being present until now. India are playing New Zealand. Martin

March 15, 2016 West Indies

Some of you may remember Omari Banks…

< 1 minute readHe was a West Indies off-spinner. He averaged 117 against England in 2014. Here’s his Cricinfo profile page. As that record suggests, Omari wasn’t the greatest spinner of all time. However, somewhat miraculaously, he can now boast an even worse record – his godawful single Me & You, which makes

March 14, 2016 Extras

What is pre-qualifying?

< 1 minute readWe’ve seen a number of people this week referring to the first phase of the World T20 as ‘pre-qualifying’. The word they are looking for is of course ‘qualifying’. Yes, it takes place before the tournament – or pre-tournament if you will – but that’s what qualifying is. It’s qualifying

March 12, 2016 Afghanistan / Associates

Somehow Afghanistan have qualified for the World T20

< 1 minute readThe ICC are calling this ‘the group stage’ of the World T20. Everyone else is correctly referring to it as the qualifiers. Afghanistan have qualified. Despite the best efforts of the organisers, someone had to. Afghanistan did of course have the good fortune to be in Group B. It’s not

March 11, 2016 South Africa

Turns out AB de Villiers is rubbish at T20 cricket

1 minute readThere’s only so many times you can hear how wonderful something is before you want to hit it with a hammer or push it down a flight of stairs at the luxury five-star hotel at which it’s staying ahead of its team’s first match at the World T20. However, this

March 10, 2016 Extras

We wouldn’t call ourself a staunch defender of Twenty20 cricket but…

< 1 minute readWe were going to draw together a bunch of our articles about the nature of Twenty20 cricket for today’s update as a kind of ‘easy win’. However, when we started searching the site to put this together, we discovered we already had such a thing. Hurray! Even easier win! Then

March 9, 2016 Extras

A mankad prevents batsmen from taking the piss

< 1 minute readBefore the Asia Cup qualifying round, the Asian Cricket Council is said to have met with the four Associate teams and told them not to mankad. Oman’s Aamir Kaleem was having none of it. He did for Hong Kong’s Mark Chapman in precisely that manner. Oman won. There’s now been