King Cricket

June 17, 2014 England

England are South Africa

< 1 minute readThey don’t really have a spinner, most of their bowlers can bat, their batsmen are stodgy and they’re conservative when it comes to declarations. It’s clear that England’s new era is merely South Africa’s old one – and this despite fielding far fewer South Africans than usual. Honestly, they’re this

June 16, 2014 England / Sri Lanka

One pole needed but no cherries left

2 minute readThat’s a reference to something Shane Warne said late on day five. “59 cherries left. Four poles to get.” Okay, you’re Australian, we get it. Just speak normally, okay. The cherry shortfall Following the nine wickets down draw between England and Sri Lanka, it’s hard to avoid pointing to the

June 15, 2014 England / Sri Lanka

Ballance, Jordan and the power of unarsedness

< 1 minute readWe spend about 40 per cent of our waking hours trying to work out which attributes we’d include were we to develop a stats-based cricket management computer game. For batsmen, there’d be things like patience and shot selection; for bowlers, there’d be fitness and accuracy. We’d also include ‘unarsedness’. The

June 14, 2014 England / Sri Lanka

A stumpy trying to apply pressure

< 1 minute readThis latest England team is a stumpy. It’s not completely without tail – there’s an Anderson-shaped nub there – but there really isn’t much. Presumably, should he return, Ben Stokes would replace Liam Plunkett, which would only strengthen the main spine further. Lower order batsmen rarely contribute on tougher days

June 13, 2014 England

England’s batting’s completely fixed and everything’s absolutely fine again

< 1 minute readLet’s just go with that, eh? Let’s just go with ‘everything’s rosy’. They’ve even addressed our concern that Gary Ballance bats too low for Yorkshire by making him go in first drop for England. Speaking of the batting order, Joe Root clearly benefited from getting one innings in a row

June 10, 2014 England

England’s reactive batting

< 1 minute readTwice last May, we wrote about England’s overwhelmingly reactive batting approach. First we described Kevin Pietersen as being England’s only proactive top order batsman; the only one prone to trying to set the field while at the crease. A week later, Pietersen wasn’t playing and Jonny Bairstow took on the

June 7, 2014 England

England will play a fairly fast bowler

2 minute readWe all knew that Sam Robson was going to get picked. He’ll play sensibly and probably quite well. If so, we’ll be quite happy about that while simultaneously wishing that we didn’t have to endure hilarious Australian ‘banter’ about his place of birth every time he gets a half-decent score.

June 4, 2014 Match report

Middlesex v Yorkshire day four – match report

2 minute readGed writes: It was a beautiful sunny day, the London Underground was on strike and I had arranged to work from home. I thought it would be a good idea to head over to Lord’s, catch some of the cricket and catch up with an increasingly large pile of background

June 2, 2014 England

The opposition are allowed to play well

< 1 minute readIs anyone else starting to find this kind of thing grating? “Sometimes you just have to put your hands up and say the opposition were better than us with the bat.” So said Alastair Cook after the fourth one-day international. There’s been an awful lot of ‘accepting that the opposition

June 2, 2014 Extras

At least two theories and several collapses

< 1 minute readThat’s what you can expect from our latest knock for All Out Cricket. In the preamble, All Out Cricket have accused us of having a ‘beady eye’ which is pretty much libel – we have two beady eyes and we make use of both of them. We’ve decided not to