King Cricket

August 8, 2024 England / Features

Five Graham Thorpe innings that were equal parts silly, brilliant and vital

8 minute readWe don’t know whether Graham Thorpe was underappreciated exactly, because it seems like every England supporter who watched him play in fact valued him immensely. We do feel that Thorpe has been under-written-about though… so we’ve written about him. If you want a sense of what Thorpe meant to England

August 7, 2024 Regulars

Is Winter (the cat) truly indifferent to cricket?

< 1 minute readIf you’ve got a picture of an animal being conspicuously indifferent to cricket, please send it to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Balladeer writes… These are Mysie the calico and Winter the black cat. They joined the Balladeer household in June. They’re rather cute when they’re not kicking each other’s heads in or digging

August 5, 2024 England

Graham Thorpe was the one batter who transcended England’s 1990s (and also helped belatedly end them)

4 minute readA lot of England fans wouldn’t have stayed with Test cricket through the 90s if it hadn’t been for Graham Thorpe. He was a class above at a time when the team – and more importantly the supporters – needed it most. It is profoundly hollowing to hear that he

July 31, 2024 England

Why Jos Buttler should be England’s next white ball coach

4 minute readOur suspicion is that England’s white ball teams will get where they need to go sooner if Jos Buttler takes on the role of coach as well as captain. Bear with us on this. England have had both a bad World Cup and a meh World Cup inside the last

July 29, 2024 England / West Indies

Did you see… Mark Wood bowling reverse swing?

3 minute readWhen it comes to seam bowling, speed is not everything – but it is something. Reverse swing is something too. Mark Wood delivered the best combination of somethings against the West Indies yesterday. Fast reverse swing is just such a fundamentally wonderful thing. It’s so straightforward, so obvious. Its crushing

July 26, 2024 England / Features / West Indies

Show me the money. Inattention and monetisation in Major League Cricket, The Hundred and Test cricket

7 minute readWhat did you do just then? Did you just glance at a TV when some cricket was on? Did you invest 10 seconds setting the on-screen player names alongside the three-letter initialisms in the hope of working out what competition it was? That’s enough. You’re a viewer now – a

July 24, 2024 Match report

James Anderson’s final Test warm-up and the all-important sourcing of provisions for that game (a match report)

2 minute readSend your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.) Ged Ladd writes… I was at Lord’s when Jimmy Anderson

July 23, 2024 England

Gus Atkinson, Chris Woakes and Mark Wood – an early update on England’s post Broad and Anderson pace bowling situation

3 minute readBefore the English domestic season recommenced, we picked out the four quick bowlers we felt were most likely to represent ‘the next generation’ following the retirement of Stuart Broad. (We didn’t at that point know that James Anderson was also on his way out.) Precisely none of these bowlers have

July 18, 2024 England / West Indies

Did you see… Ben Duckett digging in?

< 1 minute readOllie Pope made a jaunty hundred, so you’re supposed to talk about that. It’s just that Ollie Pope doesn’t open the batting the way Ben Duckett opens the batting. Ben Duckett at times talks such A-grade bollocks that it can be easy to forget that opening the batting like an

July 17, 2024 England / West Indies

Spraying, inactivity, bouncebackability + more – 5 things to watch out for when England play the West Indies this week

3 minute readThere was a maudlin quality to the closing stages of the first Test between England and the West Indies, but the sun is out, another Test is about to begin and there is much to look forward to. 1. England absolutely pissing away the new ball This is quite unlikely

We don't mind a two-day collapse-off every now and again, but only as a noteworthy aberration. Two in one series…

The most frustrating aspect of this whole series, I now reflect, is that so little of the last few weeks…

Sydney was awful last year

Pitch was a bit too paced but it's a bit of a stretch to say it forced international test cricketers…

Yeah, well, that was that I suppose. Was so unimpressed that it's taken me to what would have been the…

Sky Sports has boiled its Ashes coverage down to its purest and greatest form: Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain standing there talking about what’s gone wrong

The 2019 Ridiculous Ashes (podcast)

The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments is definitely out now – you should buy it for someone! (Possibly yourself)

51. Michael Vaughan Declines A Crushing

14 England things that happened in the summer of 2025 – do they tell us anything?