King Cricket

May 13, 2015 County cricket

Middlesex fail to be anywhere other than top of the table

2 minute readTime for a County Championship update. The crucial piece of information is that Middlesex are now top. If Sussex defied their top order runlessness to take an early lead, Middlesex have for the most part adopted a different approach. Their strategy seems to involve spending quite a lot of time

May 12, 2015 England / Regulars

The ECB takes aim at its prosthetic foot

3 minute readWhat may eventually prove to be Kevin Pietersen’s final six scoring strokes in first-class cricket were, in order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. At that point, there was nowhere left to go. A friend of ours was referred to a heart specialist once. As he sat in the

May 11, 2015 County cricket / England

Kevin Pietersen and the lonely ends of the spectra

2 minute readThe Kevin Pietersen saga is often described as a soap opera. This is quite accurate because the defining feature of a soap opera is that IT NEVER ENDS. Okay, Crossroads and Eldorado did, but you get what we’re saying. For the most part they just rumble on, day after day,

May 9, 2015 England

Another day, another long-term plan

< 1 minute readEngland have sacked their coach; the coach they hired about a year ago with a view to rebuilding the side in time for the Ashes series which starts in about 45 minutes’ time. We’re increasingly wondering whether they should just scrap long-term plans in favour of short-termism. It seems a

May 8, 2015 Extras

Tony Cozier’s notebook

< 1 minute readClearly the highlight of this weeks’ Twitter round-up. (Yes, we do still write that.) Our other favourite bit is Tino Best’s caption to a photo of himself where he claims he was bowling ‘thunderbolts’ and suggests that everyone nearby is looking on ‘in amazement’. To be totally clear, this is

May 7, 2015 Match report

World Cup 2015 report

2 minute readSam writes: My baby was due to enter the world on February 18th, just a few days into the tournament. Not ideal timing, but at least he wasn’t interrupting The Ashes. In the end, he was late. Five days after the scheduled start of his innings, at risk of being

May 5, 2015 England

England mistakes that we too would have made

2 minute readBeing as so many people seem to have very clear ideas about what England did wrong in the West Indies, we thought it might be nice to list some of the mistakes that England made that we too would have made – a kind of wilful spurning of hindsight, if

May 5, 2015 England

Jonathan Trott: the totem who knew his mind

4 minute readThis article was first published on the All Out Cricket website in May 2015, but the All Out Cricket website no longer exists so we’re republishing it here. Jonathan Trott was never a cash-in player. He was never the guy who exploited tired bowling. He never stood on anyone else’s

May 5, 2015 England

Jonathan Trott – the king of relentlessness finally relents

< 1 minute readOur proper Jonathan Trott retirement piece is over on All Out Cricket. Other than that, here are two old posts which sum up different aspects of a top, top player. The first focuses on the sheer relentlessness of the man – surely his defining quality. If we have a happier

May 4, 2015 England / West Indies

Why wasn’t Captain Hindsight made England coach for this series?

3 minute readWe can’t understand it. It seems such an obvious solution. Captain Hindsight wouldn’t have made all the obvious mistakes that Peter Moores made. Maybe England’s loss would have been embarrassing if the opposition had been as mediocre as they were infamously branded, but this West Indies side seemed to us