King Cricket

September 10, 2009 Bangladesh / England

Day night Test cricket

< 1 minute readOur knee jerk-reaction to suggestions that day-night Test cricket be played was that it was a shocker of an idea. We’ve always thought of knee-jerk reactions as being worth clinging to in the face of subsequent strong evidence against your point of view, but on this occasion we’re softening our

September 9, 2009 Australia

Tim Paine, Australia’s wicketkeeper

< 1 minute readName of a professional wrestler. Face of a junior tennis player from the Home Counties.

September 9, 2009 England

Are you sick of 50 over cricket?

< 1 minute readThe conventional one-day game is probably the least popular format in England right now. Seven 50 over matches have been tacked onto the end of a summer that’s already seen a Test and one-day series against the West Indies, the Twenty20 World Cup, the Ashes and what would have been

September 8, 2009 England

England’s one-day cricket and life

< 1 minute readWe’re warming to the idea that England’s one-day cricket is like life – all crushing disappointments and anticlimax. You want to be a winner. You want to succeed. You try so very hard to become competent at something, but everything you learn seems to be immediately rendered irrelevant by some

September 7, 2009 England

It’s a time of pessimism and things dying

< 1 minute readAutumn. The cricket season ends. The plants die. Every sunny day is tainted with the thought that it might be the last. On the field there’s the Pro40 and one-day internationals and all there is to look forward to is the Champions’ Trophy. If a cricket tournament could be a

September 7, 2009 Australia

How old is Brett Lee?

< 1 minute readBrett Lee is nearly 33, but he’s tried to obscure this fact by getting a spiky haircut. Unfortunately, spikiness is only considered a youthful hair quality among the middle-aged, so Lee’s made an error here. It’s the kind of hair that looks like it should have a Global Hypercolour T-shirt

September 6, 2009 England

Ashes or one-day cricket?

< 1 minute readAs an England supporter, it’s tempting to think that you’d take the Ashes over a one-day series win. No other nationality would think like this. Most people would at least entertain the idea that their side could win both and might even be persuaded into thinking that they were in

September 4, 2009 England

England cricketers playing football

< 1 minute readWe know that many of you spent your childhoods betting how many quail eggs your servants could find in half an hour, but we went to a normal school. We played football pretty much every day for five years and never once got injured. When England’s cricketers get a football

September 3, 2009 County cricket / England

Adil Rashid makes a case to be England’s new number seven

< 1 minute readA week or so ago, Adil Rashid hit two hundreds in successive innings. In Yorkshire’s two innings in the field adjacent to those hundreds, Rashid took five wickets in each of them. England will naturally be looking for a seam bowling all-rounder to replace Andrew Flintoff – perhaps Rashid’s team

September 2, 2009 England

Paul Collingwood has to go

< 1 minute readThis is the vibe we’re getting at the minute, but prior to the Ashes, Paul Collingwood averaged 58, 43, 61 and 68 in successive series. Paul Collingwood never gets much slack. It strikes us that if you say someone’s got no talent often enough, it colours people’s views in itself.