King Cricket

November 1, 2023 Extras

Other than one brief flicker from Adrian Holdstock we’ve been massively unimpressed with the standard of umpiring at this World Cup

3 minute readWhen most people talk about the standard of umpiring in a cricket match, they tend to mean the quality of the decision-making. But we don’t mean that… we don’t mean that at all. Other than when there’s a stinker of a decision or a marginal call at a crucial time,

October 30, 2023 England

The chaotic way England dropped Jason Roy gave a powerful message to the rest of the team

7 minute readSometimes it’s not about the logic of dropping one player in favour of another; it’s about the message you send to everyone else who hasn’t (yet) been dropped. England talk about playing with conviction, yet coach Matthew Mott and captain Jos Buttler have demonstrated little but uncertainty with this 2023

October 26, 2023 England

It’s a particular type of recent ODI experience Jos Buttler’s England lacked – the experience of playing together, winning games

4 minute readEngland haven’t played this format much recently, so you can forgive them for looking at bit rusty against a guy who hasn’t bowled in an ODI for almost four years. “It’s raining cats and dogs in Sri Lanka so I’ve not been able to play much,” said Angelo Mathews after

October 25, 2023 Australia

Glenn Maxwell’s complete commitment to hitting from mad positions

3 minute readToday Glenn Maxwell spent one ball in the 90s and it was a no-ball. There’s not much cause to be nervous in the 90s when it’s so vanishingly unlikely you’ll be dismissed in them. When weird looking batters score a lot of runs, there are two main things people tend

October 23, 2023 India / Match report

Affinity, attendance and attire at India’s greatest food ground – what it was like to watch Australia v Pakistan in Bangalore (shame about the DJ)

7 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.) Ritesh writes… The moment the World Cup schedule was (finally)

October 22, 2023 England

The Tupperware freshness of Jos Buttler’s England World Cup team

4 minute readEngland’s 2019 World Cup team was just about good enough to win. The hypothesis for 2023 seems to have been, “Maybe if we don’t expose the team to any air or light, it’ll keep.” If you’re almost exactly our age, you may remember the children’s TV series Eerie Indiana and

October 19, 2023 England / South Africa

Buttler, Bavuma and the big pain of big losses to big teams – with or without Ben

3 minute readSometimes it feels like every time you switch on Sky Sports, India are playing a game at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai. We’ve no idea where this feeling comes from because since 2017 the ground’s only hosted one Test match and two one-day internationals. There’s a big match on the

October 18, 2023 Netherlands

Let’s take a look at the many powerful emotions conveyed during a Roelof van der Merwe wicket celebration

4 minute read2023 World Cup, Game 15, Netherlands v South Africa Roelof van der Merwe very visibly experiences feelings whenever he takes a wicket for the Netherlands. When he took a couple against his former team, South Africa, en route to a famous victory, he arguably experienced a few more than normal.

October 15, 2023 Afghanistan / England

Rahmanullah Gurbaz has a point to make and a point boundary to pepper

2 minute read2023 World Cup, Game 13, Afghanistan v England England are still 2-1 up on Afghanistan in 50-over World Cup matches. Expand the head to head to include all one-day internationals and England are… 2-1 up. You wonder what sort of damage Rahmanullah Gurbaz and Mujeeb Ur Rahman would have done

October 12, 2023 Australia

Innings of the day: Marnus Labuschagne nrrdling 46 off 74 balls

< 1 minute read2023 World Cup, Game 10, Australia v South Africa A familiar, weird and, in its own peculiar way, quite wonderful feature of World Cup group stage games is when a fundamentally beaten team sets itself the unambitious goal of making things slightly less awful. So it was that Marnus Labuschagne’s