King Cricket

October 19, 2015 Pakistan

Shoaib Malik belatedly begins to explain the seemingly inexplicable

< 1 minute readShoaib Malik’s always been hugely popular with a certain segment of Pakistan fans and we’ve never remotely understood why. He’s always seemed so nondescript. He’s long had some sort of PR machine behind him which, as well as skewing our perception of his popularity a touch, may have won over

October 17, 2015 England / Pakistan

Adil Rashid conveys the crumble

2 minute readAs you’re all no doubt aware, pretty much all DIY tasks can be embarked upon using only a dessert spoon and a hammer. They’re adaptable devices and allow you to make a start, but after a bit you may well yearn for more specialist tools which would enable you complete

October 16, 2015 England

Alastair Cook is a complete part-timer

< 1 minute readEpic, they say. Monumental. Alastair Cook batted for 836 minutes against Pakistan. That’s almost 14 hours. Or, in other words, not even two days’ work for a normal person. So before we start lauding Cook’s extraordinary powers of concentration, let’s just stop a minute and ponder whether he could spend

October 15, 2015 England

Alastair Cook does the big shop

< 1 minute readAfter sizing up the bowling and briefly treating himself to a strange and hugely entertaining ‘mustn’t handle the ball’ dance, Alastair Cook quickly moved up through the gears. At times he got as high as third. Mostly he sat in second. When there was a break in play, he refuelled,

October 14, 2015 England / Pakistan

How costly will that dropped chance prove to be? Apparently only fate can decide

< 1 minute readLast year, Pakistan managed first innings scores in Abu Dhabi of 570-6 and 566-3 against Australia and then New Zealand. It’s not like England did especially badly in conceding 523-8. Pakistan are just good. Not that it’s impossible to take wickets there though. Those two teams’ responses were 261 and

October 13, 2015 England

Ben Stokes makes things happen

< 1 minute readTo which one can only say: who doesn’t make things happen? We just made a typo happen, for example. Shortly afterwards, we made a correction happen. A littler earlier, we made a cup of coffee happen. Jade Dernbach makes wide long hops happen. Shaun Marsh makes hard-handed edges to the

October 12, 2015 Match report

Anyone For Real Tennis? – England v New Zealand match report

2 minute readGed writes: Two days after my last-minute-dot-ticket-office, cocktail-avoiding day at the Lord’s Test with Charley the Gent Malloy, I returned for my long arranged Sunday visit with Daisy. The weather forecast had been dreadful, but we woke up and indeed arrived at the ground on a beautiful sunny Sunday. Daisy

October 9, 2015 Australia

Aggressive cricket can be all about playing really defensively

< 1 minute readWe’ve written about ‘aggressive cricket’ about a billion times, but that’s largely because – like a snipped clothing label that hasn’t quite been fully removed – it continues to irritate us. Different people mean different things by ‘aggression’ and also confuse cricketing aggression with actual aggression. The latest to say

October 8, 2015 Pakistan

Ali Asad explores new depths

2 minute readThere’s the shallow end, there’s the deep end and then there’s the Mariana Trench. Ali Asad didn’t just make a duck against England in the second warm-up match, he didn’t just make a pair – he made a pair in the same innings. Pakistan A finished the day on 192-12.

October 7, 2015 Match report

Scarborough Cricket Festival match report

2 minute readEd writes: I went to the Scarborough Cricket Festival. Here’s nearly proof. Yorkshire playing Durham in a top-of-table Div 1 encounter. Your proverbial 32-pointer. We bought our tickets at the turnstiles. At the same time, my Dad was at Trent Bridge. His ticket was more fancy. We asked where we