King Cricket

April 11, 2024 County cricket

An update on county cricket ground names (and a couple of suggestions)

2 minute readSix years ago we handed out a bunch of awards to various county cricket grounds, in recognition of the terrible names they’d been saddled with as a result of sponsorship. Most of these names have since changed, but some of the new names are quite funny or potentially funny, so

April 9, 2024 County cricket

We’re mostly talking about Sam Cook this week

2 minute readOnly one team successfully beat both the weather and the opposition this week and Sam Cook’s 10-73 was Essex’s most significant contribution. Those figures were also a pretty handy rebuttal to anyone who suggested Cook was a bowler guaranteed to suffer at the listless hands of the slumberous Kookaburra ball.

April 8, 2024 County cricket

It’s the time of year when we write about Sam Northeast

2 minute readSam Northeast finished last season with 166 not out. He started this one with 335 not out. It wasn’t his highest score for Glamorgan. In 2022, he made 410 not out. These are hugely impressive feats; the kinds of feats that get you talked about as a possible England batter.

April 3, 2024 County cricket

The seven phases of the 2024 County Championship

5 minute readSay what you like about the County Championship, it doesn’t stay still for long. Ever-changing, never static – is it carefully calibrated to appeal to modern, smartphone-eroded attention-spans? Or is it more the kind of spoilt, overworked artwork you end up with when you just can’t stop fiddling with something?

March 27, 2024 County cricket / England

Life after Stuart Broad: What did England’s next lot of quick bowlers get up to this winter?

5 minute readJames Anderson and Stuart Broad made their debuts in their early 20s and then just carried on playing until they were middle-aged. This means the players we might ordinarily think of as constituting ‘the next generation’ are mostly now on the cusp of retirement themselves. England have however given Test

March 26, 2024 India

In praise of the IPL’s very many contrived and meaningless post-match awards

4 minute readJust for a minute there, we thought the IPL’s Fair Play Award was the only one that wasn’t sponsored. We wondered what that might say, if it were the case. However, after about two minutes of looking into it, we realised that nothing could ever be so simple as one

March 25, 2024 Regulars

A Spartan cricket bat in a UK politics documentary

< 1 minute readSend your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. It is more than okay to put the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself if you want. In fact we urge you to do precisely that. Sam writes… A Tuesday evening, BBC Two, post-watershed.

March 21, 2024 England / Features

Five times Joe Root made a Test hundred and no-one really noticed

5 minute readJoe Root has been so reliably and frequently excellent that at times it hasn’t even felt that interesting. Today is a celebration of Root’s overlooked brilliance. “Just remember what ol’ Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven

March 20, 2024 Extras

Thanks to new (and longstanding) King Cricket patrons

2 minute readThose of you who’ve been paying attention and reading to the ends of articles will know that we recently floated the possibility of switching off display advertising for a year. This was predicated on attracting a few new Patreon backers. We can’t remember the exact number. We think it was

March 18, 2024 England

Who should be England’s wicketkeeper against the West Indies in July? You have to choose NOW

4 minute readBeing a cricket fan isn’t about following players’ development, weighing their ability at different points in their career. Being a sports fan is about picking a favourite early on and sticking with them, contriving explanations why they’re actually the best, even when they’re performing terribly. There is plenty of cricket