King Cricket

December 11, 2023 England

Shoaib Bashir and Tom Hartley have the bendable fingers England are looking for when they tour India next month

2 minute readIt’s not a great time for English spin bowling, but it is a great time to be an English spin bowler. That’s “the market” for you, we suppose. It’s hard to think of a more unexpected England Test selection than Shoaib Bashir – not so much out of left field

December 11, 2023 Match report

French cricket match report (no, not like that)

2 minute readPhoto by Alain Bonnardeaux on Unsplash Send your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.) Chuck writes… After my

December 7, 2023 England

Is Liam Livingstone’s white ball diet really doing him any favours?

4 minute readSome players are better in white ball cricket and some players just look like they are. Liam Livingstone is a good red ball batter. Or at least he was. Who knows any more? Perhaps not coincidentally, his limited overs batting form ain’t what it was. White ball cricket is the

December 6, 2023 Australia / England

That time when Ian Botham “slogged bad Australian bowling, pitched halfway down the wicket”

2 minute readIt is oddly reassuring to read the letters page in an old cricket magazine and learn that making a real point of being totally unimpressed with incredible sporting feats isn’t some new social media era affectation. In reality, it was ever thus. In November of 1981, John Drummond of Stoke

December 4, 2023 England / West Indies

One good thing about this West Indies v England series is that the free YouTube highlights are a reasonable length

3 minute readEngland are in the West Indies for three one-day internationals (ODIs) and five T20s. The main coverage is on TNT Sports, which is what BT Sports has apparently become. There are however medium-length highlights packages on the Windies Cricket YouTube channel. Fifteen minutes is a really weird duration for highlights.

December 1, 2023 Match report

Rain starts play (a 1983 ‘Thunder Match’ report)

2 minute readSend your match reports to king@kingcricket.co.uk. We’re only really interested in your own experience, so if it’s a professional match, on no account mention the cricket itself. (But if it’s an amateur match, feel free to go into excruciating detail.) Herbert Ackgrass, the official cricket biographer of regular King Cricket

November 29, 2023 Australia / England

Ian Botham’s last Test as captain was remarkable for another reason too

2 minute readWe’ve written about Ian Botham’s record as England captain before and we’ve now reached his final Test in charge in our podcast looking back on the most ridiculous moments of the 1981 Ashes. Beefy’s resignation/sacking wasn’t the only significant event in that match though. We feel we must draw your

November 27, 2023 Australia / India

No offence to Tilak Varma or Nathan Ellis but these India v Australia T20s are probably even less of a big deal than the last “irrelevant” post World Cup series

3 minute readWhere were you when Ruturaj Gaikwad was run out by Nathan Ellis? You almost certainly have no idea because you almost certainly weren’t paying attention and quite possibly don’t even realise that it happened in an India v Australia match. International cricket teams aren’t guitars: in an ideal world you’d

November 23, 2023 Australia / England / Features

The 1981 Ridiculous Ashes

2 minute readAfter losing out to the BBC and The Independent after being shortlisted in two categories of the Sports Podcast Awards earlier this year, ourself and Dan Liebke have dusted ourselves down and climbed back on our (pantomime) horse for another series of the Ridiculous Ashes. This time around we’ve gone

November 22, 2023 Extras / Features

10 staggeringly indecent highlights and lowlights from the 2023 World Cup – featuring Rohit Sharma, Glenn Maxwell, Ravi Shastri + more

5 minute readThere’s been a World Cup. Some things happened in it. Here are a few that we found ourselves thinking about a fair bit for one reason or another. We’ve labelled this selection ‘indecent’ as a sort of broad, catch-all term that can be interpreted either positively or negatively. It’s essentially

It's a Start Of The Season miracle!

Fortunately, my friends in high places have put my mind at ease on this potentially existential crisis in the matter…

"ECB short of balls" the headlines write themselves But major implications like they say. Umpires will refuse to change the…

"If you’ve suddenly got rockets flying around, you’ve got a major problem" Hegseth-esque analysis, there.

Wonder if they could get their hands on a load of Kookaburras instead. That went down well last year, right?

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