King Cricket

April 16, 2016 England

Points mean prizes

2 minute readOr, more accurately, points “may” mean a presentation ceremony (at which something would presumably be presented). This is the barely-reported story that England are looking to implement a points system for the two tours this summer, meaning an all-formats winner could be crowned for each. The Times ran something behind

April 15, 2016 County cricket / England

Is Gary Ballance back?

2 minute readIt’s a reference to a headline pun that’s overused on this website but which isn’t itself a pun. Jokes don’t come much weaker than that. Except for all our other ones. Is Gary Ballance back? Sport is brutally cold and England won’t go into the first Test of the summer

April 14, 2016 County cricket

Let’s keep tabs on Jake Ball

< 1 minute readThere was a phenomenon in Premier Manager 2 where all of your team’s young players would improve by about 20 per cent over the summer break. If you stacked your side with teenagers and managed to avoid the sack, you were all but guaranteed promotion the following season. Has something

April 13, 2016 Cricket books | reviews and recommendations

Test Cricket by Jarrod Kimber – book review

3 minute readFull disclosure: We went to Jarrod’s wedding and were also sent a free book to review. However, we did also have to pay £3 in bail money to release said free book from a Royal Mail prison after it had been charged with insufficient postage, so we pretty much balance

April 12, 2016 England

James Taylor has a literal heart problem

2 minute readIf James Taylor’s public pronouncements betray an admirable desire to retain a sense of humour about things, his retirement from cricket at the age of just 26 due to arrhythmogenic right ventricular arrhythmia is anything but funny. It’s easy to point to his having had a job as a professional

April 11, 2016 County cricket

Cricinfo still lumps first and second division matches in together in their live scores box

< 1 minute readDrives us mental. Why do people most often visit Cricinfo? To check the scores. Yet if we look at the current live matches, there is no way of telling which match is in which division, unless you happen to have memorised the teams in each league. At the time of

April 9, 2016 County cricket

Monty Panesar’s back!

< 1 minute readAs in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got anklosing spondylitis or anything. Like many people, we have a soft spot for Monty Panesar. Firstly, he lent his name to our assistant. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, he was for a time exceptionally good at bowling spin for England. Now he’s back. Back

April 6, 2016 County cricket

Most of the County Championship starts fairly soon!

< 1 minute readThe wind is tearing the blossom from the trees and depositing it on the dirty wet earth. Men and women in thick winter coats turn their pallid faces to the skies, scrutinising the clouds for tip offs of impending rain showers. Firewood is gathered. Thermostats are turned up. It is

April 5, 2016 Extras

Four things we learned from the 2016 World T20

2 minute readWe could have done more than four, but the article was starting to look a bit long so we just arbitrarily drew a line under things. It’s not even the best four. It’s just the first four that came to mind. Darren Sammy can channel energy Marlon’s upset with Shane

April 4, 2016 England / West Indies

Everyone knows that hitting four successive sixes is hard, right?

2 minute readWe’re just checking, only a great many people seem to be holding Ben Stokes entirely responsible for England’s defeat. Sometimes the player hitting the sixes has some sort of say in things too. Think of it like this: if you were a primitive human and you sent one of your