King Cricket

August 19, 2015 Australia / England

Duke balls, five-day pitches and the final Test of the summer

2 minute readMike Selvey has written a nice piece about balls. The word ‘caresser’ is used at one point. He is, of course, writing about Dukes balls, the cricket ball used in England which swings for way longer than the crappy, inferior Kookaburra ball. It has a bigger seam too. It’s a

August 18, 2015 Australia

Shane Warne and friends – the painting

< 1 minute readShane Warne left an important part of his brain somewhere on a cricket field in Hampshire. It’s the part that stops you doing things that your 11-year-old self would have thought a good idea. Here he is describing a painting he had commissioned. Here’s the painting itself. We’d love to

August 17, 2015 Match report

Day three of the 2015 Edgbaston Ashes Test – match report

4 minute readBert writes: The final day of the Edgbaston Test wasn’t supposed to be that. In fact, at tea on day two, there was considerable doubt as to whether the final day would actually happen at all. Not that there wouldn’t have been a final day, of course, that doesn’t make

August 15, 2015 Australia / Sri Lanka

Rangana Herath is embraced by a grateful planet

< 1 minute readYou’ve got to hand it to us, we can call matches incorrectly with the worst of them. Almost as if they were goaded into it, Sri Lanka have done everything in their power to make our assessment of them the day before yesterday seem almost criminally inaccurate. We called them

August 13, 2015 India / Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka and India are also playing cricket

< 1 minute readFor those who don’t know what Sri Lanka v India is, it’s kind of like the Ashes, only they don’t make the losing team play a fifth Test. Or a fourth one. Sri Lanka seem to have turned a little bit insipid. They coped with Muttiah Muralitharan’s retirement surprisingly well

August 12, 2015 Australia / England

Why has no-one made fun of Darren Lehmann for that ‘hiccup’ comment?

< 1 minute readThe thing about hiccups is that they almost always come as a plural. You might cough once, you can get away with a single sneeze, but hiccups arrive en masse. As such, Darren Lehmann’s description of the Cardiff Test as ‘a minor hiccup’ seems entirely fitting. Far from being symptomatic

August 11, 2015 Match report

The rump ire strikes back – Middlesex v Durham match report

2 minute readGed writes: “How did Charley the Gent Malloy get on, sitting on these infernal pavilion benches with his sore back when you came here with him the other week?” asked Daisy. “We didn’t stay here long,” I replied. “Although his main beef was less the pain, more the fact that

August 10, 2015 England

Ben Stokes can swing a cricket ball and also a bat, but we don’t need to be told that he isn’t Botham or Flintoff

2 minute read“We don’t want to say he’s going to be the next Botham, or the next Flintoff,” said Trevor Bayliss. England’s coach then veered away from an already painfully familiar statement somewhat by adding: “He’ll be the next Ben Stokes” – as if we’ve had one already. Every time anyone says

August 8, 2015 Australia / England

Did England just win the 2015 Ashes?

< 1 minute readThey completely did. They fully did. What do you make of that? And as a bonus talking point, Michael Clarke seems likely to retire at the end of the series. We presume he’s only waiting that long lest Steven Smith feel the pressure to follow suit immediately after leading the

August 8, 2015 Australia

David Warner’s short-armed jab

2 minute readNot the one from Walkabout, but the weird, pathetic quasi-pull shot he plays when he gets a short ball with two men on the fence. The one that’s twice cost him his wicket in this series and which near enough got him out on the two or three other occasions