King Cricket

October 6, 2013 England

Steve Harmison retires – a tribute to the lolloping ganglatron of mental fragility

3 minute readOdd that it should be Simon Jones who’s last man standing from that 2005 Ashes-winning bowling attack. Ashley Giles retired so long ago we wrote about it on a different web domain, Matthew Hoggard retired last month and while we saw Andrew Flintoff in Didsbury yesterday looking fitter than he

October 3, 2013 India / South Africa

Apparently, the BCCI are waiting

2 minute readHave you been following this India-South Africa brouhaha over the last few weeks? Just because something’s reported as if it’s not massively childish, doesn’t mean it isn’t massively childish. Basically, there’s a whole load of politics going on, which is sod all to do with cricket and everything to do

October 3, 2013 Australia / England

Weather forecast for the first Ashes Test at Brisbane

< 1 minute readCricinfo is meteorologically ahead of the game. “Clarke under cloud for Brisbane Test” Clearly England should do away with Tremlett, Finn and Rankin and replace them with Mark Ealham, Mike Watkinson and Alan Igglesden to take advantage of overhead conditions. Yes, we have been reduced to this. What of it?

October 2, 2013 County cricket / England

County Championship 2013 – statistical epilogue

< 1 minute readCricket fans adore statistics. For most of you, the sport itself is just a convenient means of generating data. Numbers are your true love. Here are some. Most runs Gary Ballance (Yorkshire) – 1,251 Wayne Madsen (Derbyshire) – 1,221 Sam Robson (Middlesex) – 1,180 Best batting averages (at least 10

October 1, 2013 Extras

If you were Samuel Beckett, who would you want to talk cricket with?

< 1 minute readFor those who don’t know, Samuel Beckett was a playwright. There is also a fictional character called Sam Beckett who was played by Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap, but this story isn’t about him. It’s about the guy who wrote Waiting For Godot. The playwright Samuel Beckett also played two

October 1, 2013 County cricket

2013 County Championship – the final chapter

2 minute readLet’s wrap things up. As ever, all fixtures and team names may be incorrect. The writer accepts no responsibility for factual accuracy. 1st – Durham Having won the County Championship, Durham promptly lost to Sussex. 2nd – Yorkshire Yorkshire beat Middlesex with a young scamp by the name of Ryan

September 30, 2013 England

We wait on the Buttler

< 1 minute readIf you report on player transfers before they’ve been confirmed, you’re starting out on a slippery slope. Next thing you know, you’ve got a section of your website called ‘transfer gossip’ which wastes people’s time telling them about things which won’t happen. We’re not sure exactly where we’re up to

September 27, 2013 County cricket

Derbyshire are down

< 1 minute readWorcestershire Northamptonshire are up. Surrey have an 18-year-old who can score double hundreds and may finally stop dicking about hoovering up ageing stars from other counties. We’re thinking of rebranding King Cricket ‘the home of in-depth inaccurate county cricket coverage’.

September 25, 2013 Match report

England v Australia Champions’ Trophy match report

2 minute readSam writes: Birmingham gets a lot of stick. I’ve never been sure why. I think it’s because nobody really knows what it is. Is it north or south? Is it Britain’s second city or just a collection of old car factories? The comedy accent doesn’t help, nor does the list

September 23, 2013 England

England include a man called Gary Ballance in their Ashes squad

2 minute readThat’s what we think of you, punsome headlines. No way. No effing way. We might indulge in an opaque vertigo reference should Gary Ballance later get dropped, but that’s as much as you’re getting. So, the England squad then? You knew most of it anyway. These are the other bits.