King Cricket

April 19, 2012 Extras

I no longer write The Cricketer’s weekly newsletter

2 minute readForgive the detour into first-person singular, but this is personal, so I thought I’d write normally for once. I’ve just found out that I will no longer be writing the newsletter for The Cricketer. Today’s edition was my last. What newsletter? On the 18th July, 2008, I wrote my first

April 18, 2012 Australia

Regrouping between Ashes series

< 1 minute readLet’s get an early moan in about the five-match one-day series that’s taking place between England and Australia this summer. It’s not just the fact that it’s pointless and elbows aside the build-up to a Test series against South Africa. It also sabotages the experience of watching next year’s Ashes

April 17, 2012 County cricket

County cricket – let’s at least try and stay on top of things for a bit

2 minute readFollowing county cricket is not easy. Sooner or later it’ll get away from you and you won’t have a clue what’s going on. It might happen when all your attention is on a Test match or it might happen when they squeeze in two rounds of the County Championship while

April 15, 2012 County cricket / England

King Cricket’s county players to watch in 2012

3 minute readRight, let’s get this over with. First, let’s restate the qualification criteria: Qualified to play for England No established internationals Youngish Playing in the first division of the County Championship Think that’s it. There might be other things. Who knows? Presumably us, but we don’t like to scrutinise the workings

April 12, 2012 County cricket

Lancashire are making a proper balls of their first match

< 1 minute readAt the start of this sentence, Lancashire were 39-4 in their first innings of the season against Sussex. We fully expect five wickets to have fallen before we click publish. We are not unduly concerned by this. Lancashire won the Championship in an odd way. They didn’t generally look like

April 11, 2012 West Indies

West Indies crack as the gradient steepens

2 minute readTest cricket is famously hard. Some can’t quite comprehend what that means, thinking a reverse-swinging 90mph yorker is the same no matter what the format. It’s not all about the details though. Sometimes it’s the sheer relentlessness. Test cricket is like cycling uphill. It’s possible to cope with a small

April 9, 2012 West Indies

Shivnarine Chanderpaul is still gloriously risk averse

< 1 minute readAustralia celebrated when they dismissed the West Indies’ Kraigg Brathwaite for 57 off 199 balls. As an achievement, it was like flouncing over a stile before tackling the mountain. Shivnarine Chanderpaul promptly walked to the crease and only departed when Darren Sammy declared. Shiv simply cannot be bothered being dismissed.

April 7, 2012 England / Sri Lanka

Is a draw in Sri Lanka a good result?

< 1 minute readHistorically, a drawn Test series in Sri Lanka is a pretty good result for England. Set against that is the fact that Muttiah Muralitharan doesn’t play any more. Sri Lanka’s bowlers are a bit middling. Should England have done better? Well we’re pretty happy with a draw, particularly after watching

April 5, 2012 England

Kevin Pietersen applies a good thick layer of Polyfilla to his insecurities

2 minute readSome innings are more important that the numbers might indicate, but we always feel thankful when Kevin Pietersen reaches three figures. The resultant fist-pumping’s cheering in a laughable kind of way, but more importantly it means that detractors have to revise the ‘hasn’t scored a hundred since [insert date]’ statement

April 5, 2012 County cricket

Modern technology has brought us this

< 1 minute readKent batsman, Mike Powell, published this yesterday. For those of us who don’t take in all our information via a telephone, it’s worth rotating our monitors through 90 degrees for. However, just to be clear, we still do not approve of dancing. As a liberated physical expression of joy, it