King Cricket

January 11, 2016 Pakistan

Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif are back

2 minute readAs in ‘returned’. What else would the word ‘back’ mean in that context? It’s not like there’s an ambiguous apostrophe-S in there or anything. Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif both played for Water and Power Development Authority against Federally Administered Tribal Areas in one of those somehat fictional sounding domestic

January 8, 2016 South Africa

Is AB de Villiers captaincy material?

< 1 minute readWe were going to do a half-arsed box-ticking update today, pointing you towards Cricket Badger and our latest Cricinfo Twitter round-up, but the latter seems in no hurry to appear, so we thought we’d better write summat. Let’s talk about AB de Villiers, who despite being a vehement letter-C denier

January 6, 2016 England / South Africa

Why a declaration from both teams is rarely a good sign

2 minute readTo have one team declaring indicates dominance. To have two teams declaring generally indicates a poor pitch. Catching the ball helps of course – unless you’re playing a Shane Watson XI and therefore have no need of such frivolities. With nothing to bat for beyond a draw, England did at

January 5, 2016 West Indies

Chris Gayle and the fine line between stupid and clever

2 minute readIf you don’t already know, Chris Gayle’s unique selling point is that he likes women. That’s how he defines and sells himself. Quite how vacuous a person has to be before they decide upon a characteristic shared by 90-odd per cent of men as being somehow self-defining is beyond us.

January 4, 2016 England / South Africa

They’re playing Hashim Amla’s song

< 1 minute readDuring Sunday’s play, the England and South Africa supporters did a duet, trading verses of their respective Moeen Ali/Hashim Amla songs which both employ the tune of No Limits by 2 Unlimited. It was really rather entertaining – although they persisted for so long that we can still hear it

January 3, 2016 England

Why it’s time to drop Ben Stokes

2 minute readBen Stokes makes things happen. Against South Africa in Cape Town on the second day, he made time distort such that England appeared to make 312 runs in just 38.5 overs. At one point the TV commentators were reduced to debating whether the ball had landed on the railway line

January 2, 2016 England

Ben Stokes hits the ball hard

< 1 minute readBen Stokes greeted the second new ball as if it were a rampaging arcade machine and he were Kung Fury. After five balls with it, he was 16 runs better off. As ever, he had hit the ball hard. The ball knows when it’s been hit by Stokes. It will

January 2, 2016 England

Alex Hales doesn’t have to live in a grey pigeonhole

2 minute readOne of the worst things about Twenty20 cricket is that it’s provided a label for one particular shade of grey. We don’t know which one. Battleship grey maybe. Or gunmetal. It doesn’t matter. The point is, you label something and it becomes a ‘thing’ – something distinct, something fixed. Alex

December 31, 2015 New Zealand

Kane Williamson: Lord Megachief of Gold 2015

2 minute readOur annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the previous winners. Last year, the Lord Megachief of Gold award was split with both Brendon McCullum and Angelo Mathews honoured. This year,

December 30, 2015 England

Joe Root chips in

< 1 minute readAfter England had beaten South Africa in the first Test, several pundits remarked that in a weird way Alastair Cook might be quite happy that the win had been achieved without any major contribution from either himself or Joe Root. Root made 97 runs. In a relatively low-scoring game by