King Cricket

December 19, 2013 England / Extras

Something a cricketer shouldn’t say on Twitter

2 minute readWe’ve done our usual Twitter thing for Cricinfo, but you’ll notice we haven’t mentioned Ryan Harris and his Al Swearengen style whinge about not being let into some casino. Nor have we mentioned Graeme Swann. If you don’t already know, Swann’s receiving criticism for likening England’s Ashes defeat to being

December 18, 2013 India

Virat Kohli is officially up and running

< 1 minute readNot sure what organisation or body deems a player to be ‘up and running’. We’re going to try and decree it ourself and hope that it sticks. But what do we mean by ‘up and running’? Virat Kohli’s just about the best one-day batsman in the world and he’s been

December 17, 2013 Australia / England

Ben Stokes is a large, brightly-coloured straw

< 1 minute readYou can see him a mile off. Clutch him. CLUTCH HIM! It’s not so much that he scored a hundred on what was actually a fairly even, true pitch between the cracks. It’s more that he looked unruffled. Any idiot can bat, but hardly anyone can bat in the muggy

December 16, 2013 England

The Jonathan Trott era

3 minute readCan we make this ‘a thing’? We’re pretty sure it’s a thing. The story goes like this: England pick Trott, he scores a hundred and they reclaim the Ashes. He then spends the next four years shielding the middle order so that it – and also the lower order –

December 14, 2013 Australia / England

Kevin Pietersen and caricatured batting

2 minute readKevin Pietersen can often look a caricature of a batsman. Look at his leave. When he leaves a ball, Jesus Christ it stays left. The ball really knows it hasn’t been hit following KP’s huge, flourishing, circular withdrawal of the bat. Today, Pietersen batted sensibly and in keeping with this

December 13, 2013 Australia / England

Brad Haddin is kind of shameless

2 minute readBowlers win you matches, but batsmen lose them. Is there really much point weighing up day one of the third Test when England’s batsmen might render all that preceded it almost entirely irrelevant? May as well go through the motions, just in case. Five down A growing theme of this

December 12, 2013 England

A short, to-the-point Perth preview

< 1 minute readEngland picked the ganglesome trio of Steven Finn, Boyd Rankin and Chris Tremlett for this Ashes tour specifically in order to exploit hard, bouncy Australian pitches. Perth is the hardest, bounciest pitch of all and it seems reasonably likely that none of these bowlers will play. Assuming they don’t, what

December 12, 2013 England / Extras

The state of the cricketing nation

2 minute readWe’ve a growing problem with what might be called the ‘dissection of the nation’s cricket system’ piece. More specifically, we’ve a problem with the increasing readiness to publish such articles. The state of the cricketing nation piece is when a writer draws far-reaching conclusions about the way the sport is

December 10, 2013 Match report

Ireland/England v England/Ireland match report from Malahide

2 minute readChuck writes: I have never been to a cricket match of any description, level or length, even though it is my all time favourite sport. Despite that, or maybe because of it, I had absolutely no intention of attending the Ireland/England versus England/Ireland one-day international in Malahide in person. (Old

December 8, 2013 Australia / England

England’s batting improves a bit

2 minute readLet’s not go overboard. There are two ways to look at England’s second innings. The first is to see it as indicative of an upward curve, which gives hope for the rest of the series. The second is to say that standards are now so low that it would actually