King Cricket

January 17, 2024 Australia

“I hear you’re an opening batter now, Steven. How did you get interested in that type of thing?”

6 minute readShould we all be opening batters now? What’s the official line? Some changes of position are just too noteworthy to serve as suitable subject matter for small talk. An example from another sitcom: in Friends, when multimillionaire software genius Pete Becker outlines to Monica his plan to change direction. “Well

January 15, 2024 England / India

Hyderabad Test pitch preview with Mulder

4 minute readA Test tour of India feels like a bit of a free hit these days. England are supposed to lose… heavily. Captain and coach talk a good game and their ambitions and belief are genuine, but if the tourists emerge with anything less than a 5-0 defeat, those oh-so-familiar clichéd

January 12, 2024 Regulars

Real tennis paraphernalia in a cricket place

2 minute readSend your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. It is more than okay to put the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself if you want. In fact we urge you to do precisely that. Ged Ladd writes… In January 2023, I played

January 10, 2024 Extras

A King Cricket health check – what did our Patreon crowdfunding campaign achieve last year?

5 minute readLast January, we took a look back on our Patreon-funded output from the previous year. We did this partly to highlight what crowdfunding is doing for this website, but just as importantly to keep ourself on track. We thought we’d now repeat the exercise for the year just gone. If

January 8, 2024 Extras

The 2024 King Cricket Essentials Calendar

2 minute readThere’s too much cricket. You have to prioritise. Below is our month-by-month guide to the series and tournaments we’ll (most likely) be focusing on in the coming year. Essentials? It’s pretty widely accepted now that the cricket calendar is oversaturated. You can either sit back and take what comes each

January 6, 2024 India

Lord Megachief of Gold 2023

5 minute readOur annual Lord Megachief of Gold award is the highest honour in cricket. The title is recognition of performance over the previous calendar year. Here are all the winners. We don’t want to start all downbeat, but sometimes an exercise brings a particular situation into sharper focus. We all know

January 4, 2024 Australia

Who should replace David Warner to keep Australia sufficiently dislikeable?

3 minute readThe true greats are pretty much irreplaceable. It’s safe to say Australia aren’t going to find a pantomime villain like David Warner again any time soon. This puts them in a very difficult situation given that quite a lot of their current players are really quite agreeable people. How can

January 2, 2024 Australia / England

Only one man could have taken a 10-for in real life, bowling like Graham Thorpe in Brian Lara Cricket on the PlayStation

< 1 minute readGraham Thorpe was a dynamite bowler in Brian Lara Cricket. Graham Thorpe was not a dynamite bowler in real life. The various mechanics and failings of Brian Lara Cricket (which was apparently called Shane Warne Cricket in Australia) resulted in some innovative strategies, back in the day. Sixes were about

December 30, 2023 Features

21 of the best, worst and weirdest cricket moments of 2023

6 minute readMost of us can only accommodate so many cricket events in our heads for a given year. It’s therefore striking just how many should-be-memorable events took place before the Ashes even began – most of which we’d completely forgotten. So buckle up, everyone – this is a long one. You

December 23, 2023 Australia / India / Pakistan / South Africa

The 2023 Festivus holding page: The Boxing Day Tests

< 1 minute readIf you don’t know our approach to covering the Boxing Day Tests, it involves listing what matches are taking place, wishing everyone a happy Festivus and then buggering off. In previous years, you, the readership, have boldly stepped into the breach and highlighted all the interesting cricket in the comments

Stranger things have happened. This is English cricket after all. You might come to Rew the day you wrote this…

We keep wilfully suppressing the urge to write more equivocally on this. But yeah, that would be a corker.

To be fair to the ECB, they also haven't been averse to picking Second XI Somerset players over the first-teamers.

England now have the opportunity to do the funniest, funniest, funniest thing possible and pick Zak Crawley again.

It has to be said that those who suffer the neck-breathing are presumably the least likely to willingly open the…

Did you see… Harry Brook’s first ball in Melbourne? Unquestionably the 2025/26 Ashes’ finest moment

Sky Sports has boiled its Ashes coverage down to its purest and greatest form: Mike Atherton and Nasser Hussain standing there talking about what’s gone wrong

The 2019 Ridiculous Ashes (podcast)

The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments is definitely out now – you should buy it for someone! (Possibly yourself)

51. Michael Vaughan Declines A Crushing