King Cricket

May 17, 2024 England

Jack Leach’s back, Tongue still out

3 minute readSometimes you can’t choose between awful body part puns for your headline. What can you do in that situation other than mash them together so that neither quite works? Jack Leach’s back As in ‘returned’. He hasn’t got ankylosing spondylitis or anything. It was in fact a stress fracture that

May 15, 2024 County cricket

Can Haseeb Hameed avoid diversions?

4 minute readTiming is important. Ask anyone who has sat in a long line of cars at a temporary set of traffic lights, gazing wearily at a conspicuously queue-free expanse of empty asphalt at the other end of the cones. When timing is on your side, things open up for you. When

May 13, 2024 England / Features

James Anderson’s retirement: Why England will become more watchable without their most watchable bowler

5 minute readThis too shall pass. Barring injury, James Anderson will play his final Test at Lord’s in July. “It feels like a good time,” he said – which isn’t at all how it felt when we first heard the news. Our immediate reaction was to think, “No, carry on. Just play

May 9, 2024 Extras

The diet of a professional cricketer, then and now

2 minute readSports Dietitians Australia recommends that a cricketer eats, “a nutrient-dense base of real foods including wholegrains, fruit, vegetables, dairy products, lean proteins and vegetarian alternatives.” This advice is sufficiently sound and boring that you could probably have guessed it yourself. Early in legendary 1976 Paris-Roubaix documentary, A Sunday in Hell,

May 8, 2024 Australia / Extras

Elite chips, cold toasties and oat milk – a review of series two of The Test on Amazon Prime

3 minute readRespected member of the King Cricket community, Sam Blackledge, has watched the second series of The Test – the Amazon documentary about the Australian men’s cricket team – so that you don’t have to. Here’s his review… Alex Carey and Travis Head are in a restaurant near their home, drinking

May 7, 2024 County cricket

County Championship: Essex lose their way to the top

2 minute readWhat an incredible sport. What an incredible competition. Somerset beat Essex, which somehow resulted in both teams vaulting ahead of Surrey in the County Championship. Essex started the week level on points with Surrey at the top of the table, but defeat took them three (bonus) points ahead. Somerset’s skittlesome

May 2, 2024 England

Does England’s T20 World Cup squad contain enough top-order wicketkeepers?

2 minute readJos Buttler, Jonny Bairstow, Phil Salt: what does that say to you about hard-hitting, top order wicketkeeper-batters? There’s too many of them? That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is people like them – let’s have some more of them. It’s widely acknowledged that

May 1, 2024 County cricket

We’re mostly talking about Essex and Surrey again this week – may as well get used to it

2 minute readWe have now entered Phase 3 of this year’s County Championship and after almost four rounds of matches, only three sides have so far managed a win. Durham have won one, while Essex and Surrey have won two. Durham’s efforts have only earned them fifth place in the table, but

April 29, 2024 England / Features

Raise your glasses: Jack Leach’s three silliest innings

7 minute readAs a bowler, Jack Leach is not at all silly. He is diligent, consistent and reliable, none of which are silly qualities. And because he is first and foremost a bowler, this encourages the notion that Leach is somehow not a silly cricketer, which is entirely incorrect. Give Jack Leach

April 23, 2024 Match report

The night before the 2005 Edgbaston Test (a match report)

3 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.) Ged Ladd writes… Since the end of the last century,

Given the capacity they have to exert over playing time and location and the funds at their disposal, they could've…

Re videos doing the rounds of Duckett, Bethell et al. Yes, outrageous and unprofessional. But amid the inevitable pile-on, I…

How could they have tested, developed, or challenged between them? They played them, particularly Bashir, in all conditions. I still…

Suppose they wanted to give Woakes a chance to make a case for selection and they were open to taking…

We wonder whether some of those rules were in fact in place or at least strongly suggested. You watch Joe…

Sky Sports has boiled its Ashes coverage down to its purest and greatest form: Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain standing there talking about what’s gone wrong

The 2019 Ridiculous Ashes (podcast)

The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments is definitely out now – you should buy it for someone! (Possibly yourself)

51. Michael Vaughan Declines A Crushing

14 England things that happened in the summer of 2025 – do they tell us anything?