King Cricket

July 19, 2014 England

Gary Ballance bares his teeth

< 1 minute readA lot. It seems to be his default facial expression while batting. It’s a little disconcerting. But on the plus side, we’ve already started thinking to ourself: “At least Ballance is still in,” as if he’s the most reliable of the England batsmen. Like Jonathan Trott, you don’t really feel

July 18, 2014 India

Ajinkya Rahane v Suresh Raina

2 minute readOkay, turns out we do have something else to say. It’s to do with who’s a good batsman. We don’t want this to become a Suresh Raina bashing thing, because we’ve a certain amount of time for him. He does certain things better than almost anyone. The issue is that

July 17, 2014 England / India

Ajinkya Rahane’s overdue a proper mention

< 1 minute readFor the second time this series, we find ourself looking for an old article of ours about an Indian batsman only to find that we never actually wrote it. As far back as 2012, we were casually referring to Ajinkya Rahane in a matter of fact way, as if you

July 16, 2014 Regulars

Mop-up of the day – a rush and a push and the land is ours

2 minute readMop-up of the day was something that happened at our last office job. It involved new starters finishing each day in their first week talking with the girls in HR. The company didn’t tend to hang onto staff for more than a week or two, so mop-up of the day

July 15, 2014 County cricket

Simon Kerrigan – will they or won’t they?

< 1 minute readMost people’s knowledge of Simon Kerrigan’s bowling amounts to eight overs on his debut. That’s not a huge amount to go off and those overs too in circumstances that can be considered exceptional and therefore perhaps not properly representative of his ability. On the other hand, he still has to

July 14, 2014 England

A pitch for Cook the bowler and Anderson the batsman

< 1 minute readFor a very short while on the final day, it seemed like things could potentially maybe be sort of in the balance a little bit if a few more things went England’s way, but then it very much wasn’t in the balance and the day climaxed with Alastair Cook’s round-arm

July 12, 2014 England / India

Jimmy Anderson and the lost art of opening doors

< 1 minute readThis England team isn’t the most popular, but you can’t fault Jimmy Anderson for that. He’s waging a one-man willow-wielding war on unpopularity this summer. You wouldn’t think it possible to improve on his efforts against Sri Lanka, but at Trent Bridge, against India, he may well have managed it.

July 12, 2014 England / Extras

Great insight about Ishant Sharma gleaned from having spent a day watching him bowl

< 1 minute readWe were at the Test yesterday. It was… steady. Or at least it was until Stuart Broad came in. The main thing we gleaned from our side-on vantage point is that Ishant Sharma has two different running styles during his approach to the crease. First, he jogs normally. Then, halfway

July 10, 2014 England / India

Rhythm, timing and a diverse bowling attack

2 minute readThis starts off as a Twitter story, but stick with it because that’s merely the setting. The point we’re about to make has nothing to do with that. Firstly, let us just say that we don’t make predictions on Twitter. No-one really cares what we think and it’s too easy

July 9, 2014 England / India

Murali Vijay’s straight bat against England’s ‘worthy’ bowling

< 1 minute readThere’s been a fair amount of whinging about the slowness and lowness of the pitch – and not without cause – but it strikes us that really good bowling attacks don’t happen across dead pitches very often. England’s is not a really good bowling attack. The point of Test cricket