King Cricket

November 25, 2013 Australia / England

Why has Jonathan Trott gone home from the Ashes?

3 minute readFor all that we’re meant to be enlightened, modern folk who are au fait with mental health issues, there’s an odd reluctance to enter into specifics when someone is suffering ‘a stress-related illness’. Physical v mental In a sense, medical problems are nobody’s business but the sportsman in question. It

November 24, 2013 Australia / England

Daubing England’s batsmen with emulsion

2 minute readToday’s grim moment of clarity came courtesy of Mark Butcher midway through the highlights which show immediately after the day’s play. “Michael Clarke made good decisions throughout this match,” he said. Note ‘made’ not ‘has made’. Australia had won then? The rest of the highlights were a joy, particularly when

November 23, 2013 Australia / England

Jonathan Trott and the short ball

2 minute readWe’re wondering whether we just saw the most unforgiveable dismissal of all time. There have been worse shots, certainly, but IJL Trott c Lyon b Johnson 9 ticks a lot of boxes. First, there’s the backdrop. For months, the opposition have told you that you can’t play the short ball

November 22, 2013 Australia / England

Batting badly as a unit – and as individuals

2 minute readThere are times when you simply do not want to see James Anderson’s face. Switching on the TV at 6am was therefore a bleak moment. Upon noticing that he wasn’t wearing a helmet, the mental calculations were rapid, even at that hour. There was, quite simply, no way that this

November 21, 2013 Australia / England

The 27-year-old English medium pace bowler is far too much for Australia’s batsmen

< 1 minute readBrisbane’s Courier Mail floated the possibility of not mentioning Stuart Broad by name at all during this Test. Does anyone know if they did actually go with this front page in the end or was it just a canny publicity stunt? The newspaper suggested that they were only going to

November 20, 2013 Extras

Ashes Test highlights are on what channel?

< 1 minute readThey’re on Pick. You know… Pick! Yeah, you do. It’s the one you always skip past on your way to Eden when you think that maybe, just maybe, you’ll fancy watching something informative if exactly the right sort of programme just happens to be on. But it isn’t, so you

November 19, 2013 Match report

England v Australia, fourth Test match report from Chester-le-Street

3 minute readGed writes: A change of venue for the Heavy Rollers Test match jaunt this year; in the absence of a Test match at Edgbaston, we opted for the first three days at Chester-Le-Street. Nigel “Father Barry” White, Charley “The Gent” Malloy and I were the three regular rollers on display.

November 18, 2013 England

And now back to the cricket

< 1 minute readBecause time waits for no-one. You might think you can dawdle around, taking things in, but you can’t. Time is ravaging you. It’s a slow process, but it’s happening all the time. Your pancreas is getting wrinkly; your spleen is going grey; your brain is starting to ache in cold

November 16, 2013 India

Continuing to miss Sachin Tendulkar

3 minute readConsidering he’s been the highest profile player for pretty much the whole time we’ve been following cricket, we’ve missed an awful lot of Sachin Tendulkar’s career. We went to the match in which he scored his first Test century, but we didn’t see him bat. Then, for a long time

November 15, 2013 West Indies

Darren Sammy’s surely on the way out, right?

2 minute readWe’ve got a Sachin Tendulkar post saved as a draft, but let’s look elsewhere today. Let’s look at the West Indies captain, Darren Sammy, who’s currently having a ‘mare. We rather like Sammy. Not just because his initials make him DJ Sammy, not just because he purveys genuine medium-pace and