King Cricket

July 18, 2024 England / West Indies

Did you see… Ben Duckett digging in?

< 1 minute readOllie Pope made a jaunty hundred, so you’re supposed to talk about that. It’s just that Ollie Pope doesn’t open the batting the way Ben Duckett opens the batting. Ben Duckett at times talks such A-grade bollocks that it can be easy to forget that opening the batting like an

July 17, 2024 England / West Indies

Spraying, inactivity, bouncebackability + more – 5 things to watch out for when England play the West Indies this week

3 minute readThere was a maudlin quality to the closing stages of the first Test between England and the West Indies, but the sun is out, another Test is about to begin and there is much to look forward to. 1. England absolutely pissing away the new ball This is quite unlikely

July 16, 2024 England

Jimmy Week: a recap

2 minute readHow do you cope with loss? You take it one step at a time, of course. What does that mean in practical terms? Why not pretend that James Anderson’s got a bit of a niggle this week? And then for the next Test, just do the same again. Jimmy’s not

July 12, 2024 England

James Anderson: A graphical tribute to an almost spotless career of tailendery

3 minute readToday it seems fitting to run this magnificent graphical tribute to James Anderson’s batting, which was sent in by longstanding-but-intermittent King Cricket contributor, Bert, who writes…. Days like this don’t come along very often. We are witnessing the end of one of the greatest eras of sport this country has

July 10, 2024 England / West Indies

Gus Atkinson: first look in Test cricket

2 minute readWe don’t believe you can draw meaningful conclusions from players’ debuts – but we report on them anyway. Much to admire, but can Gus Atkinson play the reverse sweep? And how grumpy will he be when England’s fielders revert to shelling one chance in three, rather than velcroing-in everything remotely within

July 9, 2024 England

All we ask of James Anderson in his final Test match is that he loses his temper at some point

3 minute readWe’ve written about James Anderson a lot over the years. He has a lot of qualities, but one of his finest – to our mind – is his irritability. We named James Anderson in an England XI that comprised the players we have invested in the most and we also

July 8, 2024 England / Features

The James Anderson Rubbish Team-Mates XI

4 minute readLoads of people have been picked for England since James Anderson made his Test debut against Zimbabwe in May 2003. This XI comprises some of the least successful – plus Jimmy himself. Just imagine the exasperated head shaking! 1. Adam Lyth – 265 Test runs at 20.38 Surprisingly few of

July 4, 2024 England

How many ‘big’ England Test careers can you cram into the span of James Anderson’s?

3 minute readJames Anderson plays his final Test next week, having made his Test debut in 2003. There was a bit of a fallow ‘bowling at a single stump during the lunch interval’ period early on, but even then he did play at least one Test match every year. It struck us

July 1, 2024 India

‘Enough’ runs from Virat Kohli for India, Jasprit Bumrah the ventriloquist, South Africa’s theoretical snowball + more from the T20 World Cup final

4 minute readDon’t know if you saw, but India beat South African in the T20 World Cup final at the weekend. Numb Virat Kohli makes ‘enough’ runs T20 strategy is shaped by statistics, but if there’s one thing they don’t measure too well, it’s the likelihood a player’s entire muscle memory will

June 28, 2024 Afghanistan / England / India / South Africa

Is Virat Kohli “due”? Jos Buttler misplaces Bowling Ali, a naughty pitch + more in our T20 World Cup semi-finals round-up

4 minute readIn a colossal miscarriage of justice, England (one win from four versus Test-playing nations) were knocked out of the T20 World Cup by unbeaten India after not playing anywhere near as well as them in the semi-final. India will meet the similarly-unbeaten South Africa, who triumphed over both Afghanistan and