People often say that having Ben Stokes in the team gives England a fourth seamer. That’s not right. Having Ben Stokes in the team gives England a spinner, because apparently they still pick four seamers even when he’s not playing. This was the first Test cricket at Lord’s for a
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Test cricket is back. Even if it’s a last minute two-Test series that even the boards who arranged it seem a bit nonplussed about, Test cricket is a wonderful and important thing – and never more so than to those who are making their debuts. The general astonishment that England
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Everything unravelled for Haseeb Hameed at Lancashire. You got the sense that the unravelling momentum was so great towards the end that the county were switching between management strategies every other day in a desperate bid to stumble on something that worked. In contrast, Hameed’s new county, Nottinghamshire, have settled
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England have reportedly declined India’s ‘informal’ invitation to cancel the fifth Test at Old Trafford. The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will therefore do what cricket boards always do in these situations: it will schedule exactly the same number of matches within a shorter span of time.
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Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only interested in what it was like to be at the game, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. Equally, if it’s an amateur match, please go into excruciating detail. Regular King Cricket contributor Ged Ladd writes…
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Kent’s Darren Stevens has been making some incredible things happen in recent years. This season in particular. In fact he’s now reached a point where he is making bonkers things happen even when he’s no longer in the middle. If you don’t already know what happened today, 45-year-old Darren Stevens
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We’re intrigued by the formality of cricket board requests. India have asked England if the whole of the upcoming Test series can be shunted forwards a week or alternatively whether the fifth Test, at Old Trafford, could be cancelled. But they’ve apparently only done this “informally”. So it’s not an
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“With all due respect…” people say, or “No offence but…” What follows these phrases is somehow never respectful or inoffensive. England coach and selector Chris Silverwood (we warned you he’d try and become a ‘supremo’) didn’t actually plump for either of those options when speaking about the summer ahead earlier
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So some of the bowlers did know? “Uh … yeah, look, I think, yeah, I think it’s pretty probably self-explanatory.” It’s hard to say whether Cameron Bancroft finally grew weary of pretending that it was only he, Steve Smith and David Warner who knew about the sandpapering or whether he
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International cricket’s longest-serving stand-in Test captain, Tim Paine (oh come on, he is), has been talking about whether Steve Smith could one day replace him. Paine told Cricinfo that when he first came into the Australia Test team, Smith was, “growing into that role and getting better and better. Then
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