King Cricket

December 6, 2023 Australia / England

That time when Ian Botham “slogged bad Australian bowling, pitched halfway down the wicket”

2 minute readIt is oddly reassuring to read the letters page in an old cricket magazine and learn that making a real point of being totally unimpressed with incredible sporting feats isn’t some new social media era affectation. In reality, it was ever thus. In November of 1981, John Drummond of Stoke

December 4, 2023 England / West Indies

One good thing about this West Indies v England series is that the free YouTube highlights are a reasonable length

3 minute readEngland are in the West Indies for three one-day internationals (ODIs) and five T20s. The main coverage is on TNT Sports, which is what BT Sports has apparently become. There are however medium-length highlights packages on the Windies Cricket YouTube channel. Fifteen minutes is a really weird duration for highlights.

December 1, 2023 Match report

Rain starts play (a 1983 ‘Thunder 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.) Herbert Ackgrass, the official cricket biographer of regular King Cricket

November 29, 2023 Australia / England

Ian Botham’s last Test as captain was remarkable for another reason too

2 minute readWe’ve written about Ian Botham’s record as England captain before and we’ve now reached his final Test in charge in our podcast looking back on the most ridiculous moments of the 1981 Ashes. Beefy’s resignation/sacking wasn’t the only significant event in that match though. We feel we must draw your

November 27, 2023 Australia / India

No offence to Tilak Varma or Nathan Ellis but these India v Australia T20s are probably even less of a big deal than the last “irrelevant” post World Cup series

3 minute readWhere were you when Ruturaj Gaikwad was run out by Nathan Ellis? You almost certainly have no idea because you almost certainly weren’t paying attention and quite possibly don’t even realise that it happened in an India v Australia match. International cricket teams aren’t guitars: in an ideal world you’d

November 23, 2023 Australia / England / Features

The 1981 Ridiculous Ashes

2 minute readAfter losing out to the BBC and The Independent after being shortlisted in two categories of the Sports Podcast Awards earlier this year, ourself and Dan Liebke have dusted ourselves down and climbed back on our (pantomime) horse for another series of the Ridiculous Ashes. This time around we’ve gone

November 22, 2023 Extras / Features

10 staggeringly indecent highlights and lowlights from the 2023 World Cup – featuring Rohit Sharma, Glenn Maxwell, Ravi Shastri + more

5 minute readThere’s been a World Cup. Some things happened in it. Here are a few that we found ourselves thinking about a fair bit for one reason or another. We’ve labelled this selection ‘indecent’ as a sort of broad, catch-all term that can be interpreted either positively or negatively. It’s essentially

November 20, 2023 Australia / India

When Glenn Maxwell went largely unseen and the Narendra Modi Stadium went anticlimactically unheard – the surprisingly good World Cup final that no-one asked for

4 minute readIf you’d asked anyone, at any point in the last year, how this ever-so-predictable World Cup would climax, they’d have all given exactly the same answer. It was always going to end with Welcome to the Jungle blaring out over the PA as Marnus Labuschagne punched the air with 58

November 16, 2023 Australia

Did you see… Steve Smith’s skyer?

2 minute readCommentators often say that a ball has gone “straight up” but few have gone up quite so straight as the one that resulted in Steve Smith’s dismissal against South Africa in today’s World Cup semi-final. It is astonishingly hard to propel a ball straight up. Hit a ball any serious

November 15, 2023 India

Did you see… Mohammed Shami refusing to cede a wicket to Jasprit Bumrah?

< 1 minute readToday Mohammed Shami’s insatiable thirst for World Cup wickets spilled over into his fielding when he utterly failed to secure an easy wicket from a delivery bowled by someone else. What happened was: Jasprit Bumrah bowled, Kane Williamson hit it straight to Shami, and Shami for some reason went all