King Cricket

February 9, 2016 England / South Africa

Hashim Amla in ODIs – a brief but unwelcome detour into stats

2 minute readThe human brain isn’t wired for statistics. In fact it isn’t wired at all. Perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe in the distant future when we’re all mechanically enhanced cyberfolk we’ll be able to make logical decisions based on data rather than being influenced by our demented emotional responses to stories

February 9, 2016 Australia

Better wicketkeeping is one of the components rattling around in Australia’s World Cup bag o’ bits

< 1 minute readAustralia have gone a bit England with their T20 World Cup preparations. Their long-term planning has climaxed with a 15-man squad where a third of the players haven’t even played a T20 international. Impressive stuff. They’re clearly of a mind that having the right components is of more importance than

February 6, 2016 England / South Africa

England ODI team triggers outlandish pronouncement

< 1 minute readWe once overheard one man say to another man: “I gave you the money and you ate the money.” True story. The background is that we were in a restaurant in Goa on Christmas Day. It was early evening and the proprietor was already absolutely shit-faced. A customer was buying

February 4, 2016 Australia / England / India

Analysis of ICC’s decision to review 2014 restructuring

< 1 minute readThe ICC has realised that the ‘Big Three’ changes pushed through in 2014 were… (a) taking the piss a bit; and (b) liable to lead to the complete implosion of the sport in the long-term They have therefore resolved to do something different instead; something a bit less shit.

February 3, 2016 England

England again fail to make 400 as old-fashioned approach to one-day cricket continues to hold them back

< 1 minute readIn the first one-day international against South Africa at Bloemfontein, England, batting first, again failed to pass 400. In so doing they extended a barren run which now stretches all the way back to June. On a flat pitch, they would have expected to have done better. South Africa, Australia

February 3, 2016 Australia / England / New Zealand / South Africa

When should we start thinking about the World T20?

< 1 minute readApparently things don’t ‘hove into view’. They actually heave into view – it’s just that no-one says that. One thing’s for certain though, things that demand this verb are large and cumbersome. A cat never heaves into a view, for example (although it may well heave while in view, if

February 2, 2016 Extras

How will BBC website’s Cricket World Cup highlights work?

< 1 minute readIf you haven’t heard, the BBC’s secured the rights to publish video highlights of Cricket World Cups on its website. As with most things in our life, we can’t tell whether this is hugely significant or neither here nor there. The way it’s described, it sounds like short video clips

February 1, 2016 Extras

Why Test cricket is not about runs

3 minute readPit the same two teams against each other in different places or in different weather and you’ll get a different match. This is what makes Test cricket more intriguing than the upside-down picture of a crow with human legs in our local pub. With such breadth comes varying levels of

January 29, 2016 England

Which struggling England Test batsman is currently of most interest to people?

< 1 minute readWe’re not interested in anyone’s actual opinion, but we are interested in who people have opinions about. If we were a mainstream media outlet, we’d bill this as being ‘Twitter’s verdict’ as if Twitter’s a single person with a single opinion and a single voice. What we will instead say

January 28, 2016 South Africa

Why were we going to write about Roger Telemachus?

< 1 minute readAnyone? Any idea? We’ve been doing a bit of housework around the ‘back end’ of the site and while we were doing this, we spotted a draft of an article from 2011. It was entitled, simply, “Roger Telemachus”. That’s intriguing, we thought, and so we opened the page to see